Australian Outback Kings / The Cattle King's Mistress / The Playboy King's Wife / The Pleasure King's Bride (17 page)

Her mouth dried up under the searing look of hunger that burned with all the urgent heat of her own. He lifted his other hand and with featherlight fingertips stroked a few wayward strands of hair from her brow, then the soft skin at the corner of her eye, her cheek, her lips, a fine tingling tracery that stirred every nerve-ending into exquisite anticipation and caught the breath in her throat.

But he didn't kiss her. His eyes didn't move from hers. Only his hands moved, a sensual caress of her neck, shoulders, softly hooking the supporting straps of her dress with his thumbs and slowly pulling them down her arms, the cross-over pattern of the bodice parting, opening wide, sliding down the slopes of her breasts, caught briefly on peaks that had hardened with tremulous excitement before dropping to her waist, baring her breasts.

Yet still his gaze held hers, the naked hunger simmering into a lustful challenge that demanded her consent to the charged desire driving his fingertips to savour every tactile sensation, the silky texture of her skin, the curve of her spine, swirling patterns of touch all over her back, her arms, arousing erogenous zones she never knew she had, the side swells of her breasts, the hollow below her rib-cage, then upwards, circling her aureoles, outwards and inwards, building a delicate web of sensual intensity that was utterly captivating.

Then his palms, softly rotating nipples that were begging for attention, and a flare of exultant pleasure in his eyes as he saw the sweetly relieving pleasure of it in hers. No rush to passion tonight. The wanting had been mounting all day, and the desire to satisfy every bit of it was a consensual current neither of them could deny now.

She undid the tie at her waist and the soft fabric of her dress slithered to the floor. The stretch lace briefs she wore provided the smallest barrier to complete nakedness yet she felt no self-consciousness about her body. Nathan wasn't even looking at it. He was touching her mind, wordlessly telling her he had craved feeling her like this, revelling in the full sensation of her femininity, determined on missing nothing, wanting her to feel him wanting all of her.

The need to reach out to him in like manner drove her hands to feel for the lowest button on his shirt. A wild glitter leapt into his eyes, then was forcibly tamed. “Later if you want,” he said gruffly, “but this I must have first.”

Miranda found herself swept off her feet before she could begin to read his intention. In a few breathless seconds he carried her from the office by way of a connecting door to a bedroom she had to assume was his. The bed he laid her on was wide and long, king-size, the head of it piled with thick pillows, the rest of it covered with a softly padded quilt. The only light was from the opened doorway so there was no seeing any detail even if she'd been interested in looking. At this heart-pounding moment anything beyond Nathan was irrelevant.

He removed her briefs and sandals, his hands caressing her legs, her feet, sensitising every area he touched, leaving her flesh humming with excitement. Then he stood back and undressed himself, but not once did his gaze leave her, his clothes being discarded with methodical purpose while he spoke in a low, thrumming voice that wound around her and held her tied to him.

“Countless times have I envisaged this…you lying here on my bed, waiting for me, wanting me, nothing between us but the time it takes to come together. I don't know why it's so. It just is. Like a compelling need I cannot put aside.”

“Yes,” she whispered, her throat tightening at the sight of his nakedness emerging, what it meant to her, what it could mean if he shared what she felt. Need…yes…but did it go beyond what he'd known with any other woman?

Please let it be so
, she fiercely prayed.

He spoke again, seeming to answer her prayer. “That first evening, when you walked into my life…it was like…this woman was made for me…no sense to it…sheer instinct beating it out. And every time I see you, the same message clamours through me, regardless…”

Regardless of what?
she wanted to ask, but he leaned over and claimed her mouth in a long ravishing kiss that splintered any coherent thought. She felt him stretch out beside her, one tautly muscled thigh inserting itself between hers, a hand cupping her breast, gently kneading it as his mouth devoured hers with more and more erotic passion.

“Made for me,” he breathed against her lips, a husky claim, reinforced by his hand gliding down over her stomach, fingers weaving through the silky curls at the apex of her thighs, stroking intimately, making her gasp as he aroused an explosion of exquisite yearning.

“Do you know how much I want to make you mine?” he murmured, trailing hot kisses down her throat. “To taste you, to take you inside me, to be inside you…”

How could she think…answer…the questions were being swamped by feeling.

His mouth closed over her breast, drawing it into a wild rhythmic threshing that was suddenly echoed by a more invasive stroking, a circling of her vagina, an internal caress, a teasing tantalising slide and glide that had her arching for more.

He moved his mouth to her other breast, sucking harder, tugging in a crescendo of possession given and taken as she writhed to the intense pleasure of his knowing touch, mindless to anything but the fantastic sensations arcing through her. She cried out an anguished protest when he withdrew from her, heaving himself down to the foot of the bed, but almost instantly he forged an even more intimate connection, kissing her as deeply there as he had her mouth, his lips covering other pleasure-swollen lips, his tongue seeking a sweeter cavern.

A fiercer pleasure screamed through her, driving her frantic as she felt the tension of it build towards the flood of climax. “No…no… I want you…you…” she sobbed, hands grabbing his hair, pulling hard.

He rose like a dark force of shimmering energy and surged into her, filling the need and rocketing her into the first convulsive wave of ecstatic satisfaction. Her legs whipped around him, holding him deep within, exulting in the sweet tidal flow he had set in motion.

But he didn't drive it on as she expected. He maintained the full union with her, letting the awareness of it throb acutely through both of them as he propped his body over hers, his chest brushing the extended peaks of her breasts, his eyes blazing into hers with a furnace of feeling.

“Does this feel special to you, Miranda? More special than anything you've ever known?”

The question seized her mind, focused it, forced a deeply primitive retaliation. “Is it to you?”

“Would I ask if it wasn't? I want to know if what I feel is echoed in you and I need the truth.”

In a sudden flash, she realised it was Bobby disturbing Nathan's trust in her response to him, Bobby who had stirred too many bad feelings for either of them to dismiss easily. Yet he didn't belong in this precious moment. He might have been the catalyst that had driven them to this acknowledgement of each other, but the truth was…Bobby Hewson was nothing and Nathan was everything.

Her eyes met the fire in his with all the open honesty he was now giving her, the answers she'd craved…and the rightness of it poured a blissful conviction into her voice as she answered him.

“It's been the same for me…all you said…from when I first saw you.” She lifted her hands to his face, cupping it, pressing her need for possession of him as she added, “I don't care if it makes sense or not. If I could have a man made for me, it would be you.”

“No ifs, Miranda. I'm here with you, in you
now
. Am I the man for you?”

“Yes.” The answer came unequivocally. “All that you are, Nathan.”

“Then show me.”

His arms burrowed under her and he rolled, turning onto his back and carrying her so she straddled him, still with the hard fullness of him inside her, waiting for her to go beyond passive acceptance, to be as positive in action as her words had been. He was giving her the freedom to express her desire, her need for him, and the surprise spurred by his challenge of mutuality swiftly zoomed into elation.

It wasn't a matter of showing him anything. She wanted to touch him, to caress and excite and tantalise and arouse him to the same incredible pitch of pleasure that would rip all control apart and plunge them both into the same beautiful sea of ecstatic release.

She tasted, licked, kissed, stroked, wherever desire took her, all the time consciously keeping him inside her, voluptuously rolling around him, sliding forward and backwards, feeling every inch of him enveloped and squeezed, released and teased. It was a glorious, glorious feeling…Nathan, all hers.

She exulted when she heard him catch his breath, when she felt the flesh under his skin quiver, when a husky growl escaped from his throat. Her own pleasure continued to come in delicious waves with the movement she manipulated herself, but the best of it came when he could stand no more of being
taken
.

He erupted into action, heaving her back onto the pillows, gathering her to him, plunging himself hard and fast as though his survival depended upon it, a violent, primitive mating, his energy pouring into her in bursts of need—
compelling
need—no other woman made for him—not like her—none like her—and she was drawing this from him, climbing with him until they both reached a peak of fierce jubilation in their ultimate togetherness.

They hugged each other tightly, wanting the oneness to go on and on…the reality of it, the sense of it, the flow of feeling…and for a long, long time they shared the blissful harmony. Miranda was drifting into drowsiness when Nathan spoke, his voice humming softly in her ear.

“Is it too soon to hope you will be my mistress, Miranda?”

Her heart instantly contracted at his use of a word that had so many painful memories attached to it. She could barely bring herself to speak, but reason insisted he had to be thinking in more than sexual terms. Or was her own need for more than a sexual relationship colouring reason?

“What do you mean?” she asked flatly, trying to keep her emotions in check.

He wound a long tress of her hair around his hand, then let the silky strands of it slide through his fingers. “Is this ephemeral, or something we can keep?” His chest rose and fell as he expelled a long sigh. “I'm asking if there's any chance you want to be the mistress of my heart, the mistress of my bed and home, the mistress of King's Eden…for all the years ahead of us.”

Relief and joy erased the tension of wretched doubt.

“I'm not asking for a decision,” he went on. “I know it's too soon. But I think you understand how it is, that this land is another kind of mistress and you'd have to tolerate its call on me. If you don't see any possibility of sharing what I'd need you to share…”

“I'd share anything with you,” she cut in fervently. “Anything!” She felt him hold his breath and into her mind slipped the words Elizabeth King had spoken of her husband, Lachan, words that held the truth of her feeling for the man holding her in his arms. She hitched herself up, sliding her arms around his neck, speaking directly to the eyes questioning hers. “
You
are where I want to be. Whatever that entails, Nathan.”

His sigh whispered out through a smile that warmed her entire being. “So we have a beginning,” he said, a husky contentment in his voice.

“And no end in sight,” Miranda answered exultantly.

He laughed and rolled her onto her back, looming over her in a pose of wonderfully dominant maleness. “I gave you a choice,” he said teasingly.

“There was no choice,” she retorted. “Only you.”

“No one but you,” he answered softly.

And there was respect for the truths they had spoken this night in the love-making that followed. It was a good beginning, an open and honest communication of where they stood with each other, and Miranda ardently hoped that all the tomorrows would prove they were right in feeling what they did.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

N
ATHAN WAITED IN
his office for the call he was expecting from Tommy. The weekend was over and he was content he'd made the most of it with Miranda, but he wanted to be sure there would be no comeback from the man who'd driven her into his life in the first place. He was certain now that Hewson was out of her heart, but he wanted her mind clear of him, as well—the past completely past.

It appalled him that he himself had briefly cast Miranda in the role Hewson had maliciously painted—a woman on the make, uncaring whom she hurt. Lies…yet that morning at Cathedral Gorge, he had let his own frustration and her choice of words weave such a false picture.

Completely false.

And he'd hated Hewson for coming up with the same sexual scenario out of spite. All too easy to target a woman who had no back-up. But, by God! there would be no lack of backup in this instance.

The telephone rang.

He snatched up the receiver, automatically noting the time—8:41—which more or less placed the proposed Monday morning departure on schedule.

“Nathan?”

“Here.”

“The Hewson charter flight is lifting off as I speak,” Tommy announced smugly. “The birds have flown.”

“You saw them onto the plane yourself?”

“No. I sent Sam to do that. I'm watching it from the homestead verandah.”

“Dammit, Tommy, I asked you.”

“Calm it, brother. No love lost between Sam and the Hewsons. She would have hog-tied them and hauled them into their seats if they'd so much as hesitated. And quite frankly, I'd had enough of them.”

“Is the problem cleared?”

“Oh, I think we established a pertinent understanding and Jared will make it stick during their stay in Broome.” He chuckled. “By the time Bobby-boy pays out there, I rather fancy he'll want to forget he ever came to King's Eden.”

“What payment are we talking about, Tommy?”

“Now, Nathan, you got the kudos for whizzing Miranda out of harm's way. I deserve the kudos for clearing the decks. Bring her back now and I'll tell you all.”