Читать книгу Penny Jordan Tribute Collection - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 24

PAINFULLY Petra stared into the emptiness surrounding her. It was barely twenty minutes or so since Blaize had left her, but to Petra each one of those minutes had felt like an hour as she fought to come to terms with the shock of her own uncharacteristic behaviour. She was being tormented—not just by her unwanted love for Blaize, but by her guilt at the way she had behaved as well.

No matter how righteous her cause or how much provocation she believed she had been made to suffer, she still could not excuse or forgive herself for what she had done. To have been so driven by her own demons that she had resorted to physical violence! A shudder of self-loathing and moral outrage gripped her body.

According to the code by which she had been brought up by her parents, she owed Blaize an apology. Never mind that his own behaviour was open to question—his behaviour was something she was not responsible for. Her own was a different matter.

Apologise to him? After what he had said? After what he had done? After the way he had inflamed her senses, her body, until she had ached so feverishly for him that her longing overwhelmed everything else and then rejected her! Never, never. Never, not even on pain of torture, Petra swore dramatically to herself.

But five minutes later, with her conscience digging into her painfully, refusing to be ignored no matter how tightly she cocooned herself in her righteous indignation and tried to smother its nagging little voice, Petra finally gave in. If she waited too much longer she would be disturbing Blaize in the middle of his night’s sleep!

Nervously, she reached for her robe and took a deep breath.

In the outer room the oil lamps had burned low, casting soft long shadows against the darkness.

Surely her apology could wait until morning? a craven little voice urged her. Blaize might well already be asleep. But Petra refused to allow herself to listen to it. She had done something wrong and now she must make amends!

Taking a deep breath, Petra lifted back the entrance fabric to Blaize’s bedroom. In the few seconds it took her eyes to adjust to the darkness she could hear the noisy, anxious slam of her own heart against her ribs, and instinctively she placed one hand against it, as though trying to silence it.

The full moon outside lifted the darkness just enough for her to be able to make out Blaize’s sleeping form beneath the bedcovers. He was lying on his side, with his face towards her, but turned into the pillow so that she could not tell whether he was awake or not. Tentatively she whispered his name, but there was no response. Was he asleep?

If she left now he would never even know she had been here. Longingly she looked back towards the exit, but the stubborn pride her father had always teased her about, that she had inherited from her grandfather, refused to allow her to make a craven escape without first checking that he was actually sleeping.

Head held high, she walked over to the bed. Like her own it was easily wide enough for two people. Uncertainly she looked at Blaize. Was he asleep? He certainly wasn’t moving. Quietly she crept a little closer, automatically balancing one knee on the bed as she did so in order to get a closer look at him.

Tentatively she whispered his name. If he didn’t respond and was asleep then she could return to her own bed with a clear conscience and save her apology until the morning, knowing that she had at least tried to deliver it!

He hadn’t uttered a sound. Exhaling softly in relief, Petra started to back away—and then froze as with shocking speed he reached out and gripped her wrist, demanding tauntingly, ‘Sleepwalking Petra?’

His fingers burned against her skin, and as though he had guessed his thumb probed the uncoordinated thud of her pulse as though he was monitoring her reaction to him.

‘Your blood is racing through your body like a gazelle fleeing from the hunter.’

‘You… you startled me. I thought you were asleep!’

She winced a little as he released her, gritting a soft expletive under his breath. Moving with the swift stealth of a panther, throwing back the bedclothes, he reached out to relight the oil lamp on the table beside the bed, taunting her softly, ‘If you thought I was asleep then what exactly are you doing here?’

Far from being asleep, he sounded dangerously alert, Petra recognised.

As she gave a small nervous shudder his expression changed abruptly. Frowningly he questioned her, ‘What is it? What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well? The desert air can sometimes…’

‘I’m fine,’ Petra assured him quickly. ‘It isn’t…’ Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she struggled to drag her distracted… besotted gaze away from his naked torso. Like her, he obviously did not favour pyjamas. But unlike her, she suspected, from the brief glimpse she had just had of one lean muscular hip and the telltale dark shadowing of hair running down over his taut flat stomach, Blaize did not even adopt the modesty of wearing briefs to sleep in!

‘Fine?’ he repeated. ‘Then what…?’

He looked fully awake now. And fully alert too, Petra recognised with a sinking, almost queasy sensation gripping her stomach. Thinking about delivering a short but noble speech of apology in the privacy of her own bed was one thing: actually doing it whilst she was poised semi-crouched on the edge of Blaize’s bed, with her mind more on the fact that he was undoubtedly naked beneath the silky throw than on what she was supposed to be doing, was very much another! And if she wasn’t careful… if she wasn’t very, very careful indeed… she might just be in grave danger of totally ignoring what she had come here to do…

The scratches on Blaize’s upper arm caught her attention. They had stopped bleeding but they still looked raw, and even slightly inflamed.

As she dragged her gaze away it met Blaize’s, and was held there trapped… hypnotised…

‘For your information, they were not caused by Shara… the dancer,’ he told her quietly. ‘The falconer had a new young bird he was training and it became over-excited. I offered to help him.’ He gave a small shrug. ‘As I told him, once she matures she will make an enviably loyal bird. She resented being handled by someone who was not her master and she let me know it.’

‘A falcon scratched you?’ Petra breathed, her face flooding with guilty colour. Now she owed him not one but two apologies.

Helplessly she looked back to his arm, and then, unable to stop herself, she leaned forward and gently caressed the broken skin with her lips, tenderly kissing the line of each scratch.

As she kissed the last one she felt Blaize’s body quiver. Sombrely she turned her head and looked into his eyes.

‘I came to apologise,’ she told him quietly. ‘I should not have… have done what I did.’

There was a small tense pause through which she could feel her own emotions pulsing, as though they possessed a life force of their own, whilst she waited for him to speak, and once again she found that she was having to wet her dry lips.

His thickly groaned, ‘Don’t do that, Petra!’ followed by an even thicker, ‘Why… why did you have to come in here?’ drove the colour from her face, redefining the delicacy of her bone structure and highlighting her fragility. She started to move away, her eyes widening as Blaize followed her, grasping hold of her wrists and holding them against his bare chest as he looked deep into her eyes, before his gaze dropped, heavy-lidded with sensuality, to her mouth.

In the thick, taut silence that enveloped them while Blaize lit the lamp next to the bed Petra made the interesting scientific discovery that it was possible to find that one could not breathe even with open airways, parted lips, and an ample supply of oxygen!

‘You know that you shouldn’t really be here, don’t you, my little virgin?’

His little virgin? Petra’s heart jumped like a hooked fish throwing itself against her ribcage.

‘I…’

I can go, Petra had been about to say. But speech had suddenly become impossible because Blaize was kissing her… kissing her with a mind-drugging, slow, sweet simplicity that was nothing more than the merest touch of his lips against hers, over and over again, and then again, until all she wanted to do was live off their touch, to feel it for ever.

Somehow she was now kneeling upright on the bed, and so too was Blaize, so that they were body to body. His naked body next to her very scantily clad one!

Petra could feel the heavy, fierce thud of his heart beneath her hands as he held them against his chest.

He was kissing the tip of her nose, her closed eyelids, with tiny butterfly kisses that brushed the taut planes of her cheekbones whilst the hands pinning her own set them free, lifted to cup her face, to push the hair back from it so that his lips and then his tongue could investigate the delicate and oh, so sensually sensitive whorls of her ears.

Petra heard herself whimpering, an unfamiliar distant sound that was a needy plea for even more of the pleasure he was inflicting on her. Blindly she turned her head, seeking the warmth of his mouth.

His hands shaped her throat, holding it, his thumb measuring the frantic leaping pulse at its base. Her small curled fists still lay against his chest, the rasp of his body hair against her skin disturbingly sexual.

His hands were on her shoulders, beneath her wrap, stroking her skin, sliding the fabric away.

In the soft light of the lamp he had lit Petra could see their reflection in a mirror. Her skin looked milky pale against the warm tan of his, her breasts surely swollen, its taut peak surely a deeper, hotter colour as it pressed against him, flushed and pulsing with the desire that ached right through her.

If he were to touch her there now, cup her breast, roll his fingertip around her nipple… Her whole body stiffened in response to her own thoughts and it was as though somehow he had read her mind and felt her desires. His hand cupped her breast and his mouth returned to hers, his lips brushing over it with tantalising and then tormenting delicacy, making her lips part with hungry longing and her body press into his.

Wantonly she ran her tongue-tip over his lips, until he captured it and drew it between his teeth, caressing it with his own before his tongue slid deeper and deeper into the moist sweetness of her mouth.

As she moaned her pleasure deep in her throat, Petra felt him jerk away from her.

‘Petra, no!’ he told her thickly. ‘This isn’t—’

Not wanting to hear what he was obviously going to say, Petra put her fingertips to his lips, silencing him, kissing his face wildly, with fierce, impassioned little kisses as she breathed in his ear, ‘Yes… Yes, it is!’

Removing her fingers, she pressed her mouth to his, her body to his, rubbing herself sensuously against him. Virgin she might be, but that did not mean she didn’t understand what passion was… what wanting him was!

As she slid her hands over his body, helpless to stop herself, she felt him tense and then shudder. His skin felt like hot oiled satin, and Petra knew she could never, ever get enough of the feel of it beneath her hands. She kissed his throat, lingering over the place where his Adam’s apple pressed hard against his skin, stroking it with her tongue, nibbling at his skin, taunting him with her desire and daring him to refuse to share it.

When he didn’t move she curled her fingers in the soft thick hair on his body, tugging wantonly on it and flicking her tongue against the tiny peak of his flat male nipple.

‘Petra, you are a virgin,’ she heard him protesting rawly. ‘I can’t…’

As she abandoned her torment of his throat, and her lips moved down along the line of hair toward his stomach, she could almost hear him grinding his teeth. Her tongue rimmed his flat belly button, her love for him filling her with a sensual bravado that normally would have shocked her. She had never dreamed that the first time she made love she would be the one taking the initiative, making moves so bold and provocative that they shocked her almost as much as they excited her.

‘I don’t want—’ she heard Blaize groan thickly.

But her fingertips were already exploring the taut strength of his arousal, lending her the confidence to whisper daringly, ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ before returning to her task of laving the maleness of his flat belly with her inquisitive tongue.

There was a muscle pulsing there that fascinated and compelled her. Wickedly she traced it with lingering appreciation, so raptly lost in the pleasure of what she was doing that it caught her completely off guard when Blaize suddenly took hold of her, depositing her on the bed and holding her there whilst he looked down at her, his gaze skimming her face and then her body, her breasts, her narrow waist. She saw him frown and looked down at her own flesh, realising that he was staring at the tiny diamond glinting in her belly.

‘Who gave you that?’ she heard him demanding fiercely.

For a few seconds Petra was bemused, and her fingertip touched the diamond in confusion.

‘Who was he, Petra?’ she heard Blaize reiterating savagely—so savagely, in fact, that she was unable to prevent the entirely female thrill of excited pleasure rippling through her. He was jealous! She could tell. For a heartbeat she fantasised about pretending that he had a rival, that another man had looked at her body and laid claim to it, put his badge of possession on it. But her natural honesty reasserted itself.

‘I bought it myself—for myself!’ she told him truthfully. ‘I heard a couple of girls discussing me at a party, saying that I was the type of person who was too pure and naïve to wear anything like this, and so…’ She gave a small dismissive shrug.

‘This is a gift that only a man would give a woman,’ Blaize was insisting, his eyes smokily charcoal, hot with male possession and desire.

‘Not these days,’ Petra contradicted him wryly.

‘Then where else have you adorned yourself?’ Blaize was demanding softly, and his hand moved lower down her body, his head bent over her.

Now it was his turn to torment her, to kiss her with surely far more expertise and deliberate enticement and sensuality than she had done him as he traced a line of kisses from her breastbone right down to her quivering belly.

As she had done to him he rimmed her navel with tiny kisses, and then the tip of his tongue, but then, before Petra could stop him, he tugged delicately on the diamond whilst his hand covered her sex, his thumb slowly probing an entrance between its tightly furled outer covering in a way that made her heart turn over inside her chest whilst the whole of her body turned molten and fluid with arousal.

‘Nowhere else,’ she heard herself whisper, but even as she said them she knew that the words were not needed, that Blaize had discovered for himself that her body possessed no other form of adornment!

Withdrawing slightly, he looked down at her whilst she quivered from head to foot—but not with apprehension or regret.

‘I want you,’ she told him huskily. ‘I want you now, Blaize.’

But as she reached for him he shook his head.

‘Wait!’ he told her, reaching out to open a small cupboard beside the bed.

‘I just hope that whoever planned this as a lovers’ retreat did some proper forward planning,’ Petra heard him mutter.

Bewildered, she waited, trying to peer past his shoulder, and then when she did see what he had been searching for her face coloured self-consciously.

Until now all ‘safe sex’ had meant to her was an expression that applied to other people!

But of course Blaize was more experienced, far more worldly than she was herself, and shakily she admitted that she was thankful that he was being so conscientious!

She even felt a tiny little thrill of excitement, knowing what he was doing, what it was leading up to! And when he was ready and he turned back to her, wrapping her in his arms and kissing her slowly and thoroughly before caressing her body, she shivered in passionate urgency.

She had thought that she knew what wanting him, aching for him felt like! But she had been wrong!

Enshrined in the street lore of her girlhood, the received wisdom of a hundred magazine articles and books, she had carried a certain protective wisdom that ‘first times were not good times’—but she had been wrong about that too!

She hadn’t known just how proactive her own role would be, how proactive she would want it to be as she reached and touched, stretched and invited, as she shuddered in the exquisite indescribable sensation of having him slowly enter her, slowly fill her…

But she knew now.

She hadn’t known either how easily she would find the words she could hear echoing the pace of his deepening thrusts, which told him all that she was feeling and wanting.

But she knew that now too.

Every breath he took as he filled and completed her—against her skin, in her ear, in the thud of his heartbeat against her own, deep inside her body, where it radiated out in golden waves—was the breath of life itself.

And then, just as she thought she had accustomed herself totally to the feel of him, he changed the pace, increasing its intensity, deepening it, letting her feel the strength of its power, letting her see that her body was ready for such intimacy.

And it was!

Mindlessly Petra clung to him, lifting herself against him so that he could go deeper, fuller, stronger, so that the intimacy they were sharing was so intense, so sweetly, savagely unbearable that it had to shatter, hurling them both through paroxysm after paroxysm of pleasure and into the beautiful golden peace that lay beyond it.

‘Mmm.’ Sleepily, Petra drew a small heart on the smooth skin of Blaize’s bare shoulder with her fingertip. He was asleep and she could see the dark fans his eyelashes made against the warmth of his tanned skin in the soft light of the lamp. She had been asleep herself until a couple of minutes ago, but it seemed that her body didn’t want to waste a moment of the time it could have with Blaize in sleep when she could be awake, watching him, touching him… loving him.

There—she had acknowledged her love! Admitted it! Accepted it?

She closed her eyes, testing the words inside her head. I love him. I love Blaize.

Yes, it was true. She could tell that from the way her whole being responded to the inner vibration of the words. She loved him! She loved Blaize.

She moved closer to him, bending her head to replace her fingertip with her lips, slowly retracing her heart with tiny whisper-light kisses.

His skin felt so warm, his body so excitingly different from her own and yet now so wonderfully, preciously familiar.

From now until the very end of her life she would remember tonight. Until the day she died she would be able to close her eyes and recreate his image inside her head. Her hands would never forget what it had felt like to touch him; her lips would never forget the taste of his, the heat of his mouth, the way he had kissed her.

Her eyes soft and dark with her own emotions, Petra traced the shape of his arm and then the length of his back, the curve of his buttock.

‘Two can play at this game.’

Petra gasped as Blaize’s hand suddenly slid over her, down to her waist and then up again to cup her breast, whilst his voice echoed in her ear.

‘You wouldn’t be trying to take advantage of a sleeping man, would you?’ he teased her.

‘I just wanted to see if you felt as good as I remembered,’ Petra told him honestly.

She felt him move, tensing a little, as though her words had somehow touched a raw nerve, or were something he didn’t really want to hear. But she decided that she must be wrong when he demanded, ‘And do I?’

As he spoke his thumb was deliberately teasing the unexpectedly taut and excited peak of her breast.

The shock of discovering how easily and quickly he could make her feel so hungry for him distracted her. Her hands were already curling, weaving rhythmically against his skin as her body started to pulse and ache.

Eagerly she kissed his throat and then his mouth, making a soft, taut sound of need deep in her throat as she pulled his head down towards her breast.

The sensation of his lips covering her nipple, caressing it, drawing it deeper into his mouth, made her dig her fingers into the hard muscles of his back. Already she was imagining the feel of him inside her, aching for it and for him, so much that she reached out and ran her fingertips down his body, touching him with a knowing intimacy that would have shocked her twenty-four hours ago.

Against her breast he made a sound she couldn’t decipher, smothered by the urgency of her compelling need as she arched against him and gloried in the swelling hardness of the male flesh beneath her touch.

Blaize had released her breast and rolled onto his back. She felt his hands on her waist. To lift her away? Swiftly she bent her head towards his body, her lips touching the hard shaft of flesh that compelled her, that she knew would complete her!

‘Petra… Petra…’

Her name was a raw, tormented sound of broken male control that filled her with sweetly savage pleasure.

His hands were still on her waist, but this time as he lifted her it was not away from him but towards him.

As he positioned her Petra shuddered, her eyes huge and dark with the realisation of how quickly and wantonly her body had adjusted to its newly dominant role.

Slickly they moved together, deeper, stronger, faster, whilst she stared into the mask of agonised pleasure that was Blaize’s face, his need openly revealed to her as he cried out and his body jerked in fierce spasms just as the pleasure exploded inside her.

She was trembling so much that she couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything other than lie against him whilst he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her.

‘That shouldn’t have happened,’ she heard him telling her in a voice that was raw with emotions she didn’t have the energy to analyse as a fog of exhaustion enveloped her.

‘That should not have happened,’ he repeated.

‘Yuck, camel’s milk! How totally disgusting!’

Petra forced herself to try and smile as the girl next to her, sharing the communal breakfast they had been served at the tourist village, turned towards her, waiting for her to respond to her friendly comment.

Ordinarily Petra knew that she would have enjoyed joining in the good-natured atmosphere of the alfresco breakfast they had been served. But when she had woken up this morning she had woken up alone and in her own bed!

Blaize must have carried her there whilst she was asleep. Why hadn’t he wanted her to stay with him? Why hadn’t he wanted to keep her with him?

Now last night’s euphoria had disappeared, leaving her feeling frighteningly hollow and cold inside.

What she needed right now more than anything else was Blaize’s presence, Blaize’s reassurance—and most of all Blaize’s love!