Tycoon's One-Night Revenge (11 page)

When she closed her eyes, her heartbeat scurried like a frightened rabbit and her only solace was the strong, sure beat of Donovan’s heart. One of her hands still clutched at his shirt and she unfurled her fingers to smooth the fabric aside, so she could rest her palm closer to that reassuring pulse.

For a second or two it worked. The other fear faded under the sweet pressure of his lips against her crown, the heat radiating from his body, the stroke of his hands over her back and the thick heartbeat anchoring her in the moment. Then her fingers shifted infinitesimally and she felt the raised scar tissue and everything went completely still.

Him, her, the moment.

No wonder he’d looked so shell-shocked in the bathroom. No wonder he’d needed reassurance of her safety. It wasn’t only because he’d brought her here and felt responsible for her safety.

The big hands at her back had stilled and Susannah eased herself up onto her elbow. Enough light bled through the half-open bathroom door for her to see his profile and guarded expression. “Are
you
okay?” she asked.

His jaw tightened. “You’re in my bed. I’m very okay.”

“You know why I’m asking.”

Yes, he knew. That’s why he’d made that incendiary comment—to distract her. To stop her asking about something he would see as a vulnerability.

In the shadowy light she caught the glint of dangerous purpose in his eyes. Felt the shift of pressure in the hand at the base of her spine, felt it like an electric surge of awareness in every female cell.

“I have scars, Susannah,” he said, low and dark. “I had cuts, stitches, multiple surgeries. We can play show-and-tell, if that’s what you want, but if you put your hand on my body—anywhere—I’ll take that as a sign of different intent.”

Susannah looked into his eyes and became lost in an agony of wanting. She ached for those lost weeks, for thinking the worst of him, for not trusting how her heart had first judged him. She knew it was wrong, she knew she would regret it, but she couldn’t turn away. She looked at him lying there—white shirt, dark trousers, quicksilver eyes—and her whole being yearned.

She lifted a hand to touch his face and he intercepted its path, held her fingers tight and trembling in his.

“Be very sure, Susannah.”

Throat tight with emotion, she nodded. She wanted to say the words, to let him know she’d made this choice, but the affirmation got lost in the flash of his eyes as he took her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm.

Her eyelids drifted closed for that intensely erotic second and then came open again as his hands shifted to her shoulders and turned her onto her back. As he covered her with his body and his kiss.

The completeness of that contact—eyes, lips, bodies—engulfed her in a sweet gulp of heat. She became acutely aware of everywhere they touched. The slow seeking pressure of his lips, the penetrating heat of his hands through the thin fabric of her shirt, the texture of his trousers against her bare thighs.

The slow sweep of his tongue elicited a shudder of response deep in her flesh and she opened her mouth in silent invitation, welcoming him to fill the hollow of her mouth, to drive the last cold fragments of shock from her heart, to reaffirm that he was here and she was safe, that neither of them lay broken and bleeding amid a mountain of splintered glass.

Oh, yes, he was here.

Trailing his mouth along her jawline, nuzzling her neck, gently nipping her earlobe and sucking the pearl stud between his teeth. Her back arched from the mattress, and he whispered something in her ear, a teasing erotic promise that was lost in the elevated rasp of her breath and the swift race of her pulse.

It didn’t matter—the words did not matter. It was enough that this was Donovan. The skim of his breath on her sensitive skin, the rough edge to his whisper, the knowing that he—and only he—could bring her body to life and fill the lonely ache of her heart.

And then he was kissing her again, kissing her and sliding his hands down to her hips, melding their bodies as closely as possible without removing the barrier of clothing. For a long moment, she savoured the sensation. Then, with mouths still fused, he rolled to his back and pulled her on top.

This kiss was new again, a wild explosion that fed their greedy passion. His hands on her thighs, on her buttocks, pushing her hard against him—her hands at his shirt, frantic in their haste to bare his chest to the sweet heat of her touch. He relinquished her mouth to nuzzle the fragrant warmth of her throat, to bite the tender skin at the juncture between shoulder and neck.

To absorb the deep-seated quiver of response that wracked her body from fingertips to toes.

“My special spot,” she whispered, palming his face. “How did you know? Did you remember?”

Van had acted on raw instinct. He couldn’t have known this intensity, this driving need to please her, to spend the rest of his life inside her.

It was completely, terrifyingly new.

To rescue himself from the unknown, he applied himself to what he recognised. Hot swamping desire. He undid the one remaining button on her shirt, exposing her breasts to his eyes. With a long, slow sweep of his tongue he lathed each nipple and then tugged with gentle teeth until she cried out his name.

“Donovan.”

He loved his name on her lips, and when she repeated it, her down-under accent penetrated the wall in his mind and echoed through his memory, again and again and again, the breathless cry of a woman’s climax.

Driven by a desperate need to hear that same sound now, he flipped her to her back and slid down to stroke the silken skin of her inner thigh. His fingers slipped inside her pants and found her wet and indescribably hot. Beside her hips her fingers clutched at the sheet as if she needed to anchor herself and that sight was powerfully erotic.

Beneath his fingers her body vibrated with the same need that smouldered in her eyes. He didn’t need any further explanation or invitation. With quick efficiency he stripped the underwear from her body and then he sat back on his heels to drink in the sight.

Everything from the curve of her elbow to the dip of her waist was a picture of feminine beauty.

His earlier frustration returned with a vicious streak that made him want to howl at the moon. Because for all the glimpses, the flashes, the snaps of sound and image and scent, he couldn’t remember this most alluring, transfixing, knock-back-on-his-heels sight.

How could he not remember?

One last time his eyes moved over her, learning that sight, committing every detail to memory, before he rose to his feet and strode to the bathroom to turn out the light.

It was very, very dark.

Last July, they had made love in the dark and in the full light of day. There’d been no cause for modesty at Stranger’s Bay and there was definitely no cause here on Charlotte Island. Lying in bed, listening to the sounds of him undressing, Susannah’s heart constricted.

Did he really think she would be turned off by his scars?

Did he think her that shallow?

Then she realised that the scars themselves were not the problem, but her reaction to them. With her emotions teetering grimly on the edge of this day’s overload, she couldn’t guarantee her response. She might go over the top imagining the initial injuries, his pain, his mortality.

She shivered slightly and perhaps she inhaled a gust of air because she sensed his sudden stillness beside the bed. “Does the dark bother you?”

“Only if you can’t find me,” she said softly.

The mattress dipped under his weight and he was there, causing her heart to skip and her temperature to spike. With one hot hand on her hip, he turned her onto her side, facing him on the big bed.

“I found you.”

The simple statement deserved a teasing answer, but Susannah had nothing to offer. He was here, naked,
hers,
and the enormity of that knowledge seeped into every part of her body until she quavered with the intensity of wanting. All she could do was show him, touch him. She skimmed her hands slowly up his arms, over his shoulders, down the long contours of his back.

When she slipped lower, he trapped one of her legs between his and held her firmly in place. Their eyes sought and held despite the darkness, their bodies so close she felt the surge of his response against her belly. Their thighs slid together in a restless dance, and in the beat of a second, the mood had changed, sliced by the edgy hunger in his eyes, in her body, by the growl of his voice.

“I need to be inside you.”

Darkness and desire had robbed Susannah of any shyness, and she watched him take care of protection with steady eyes and very unsteady emotions. Then his hand was on her face, touching her lips, asking for her guidance as he settled between her thighs. Their gazes linked as he nudged the entrance to her body, as he started to slide inside, and Susannah forgot everything as longing and loving overlapped in a wave of yearning that claimed her body, mind and her soul.

She welcomed him, hard and strong and vital. There had only been this man; there could be no other who fit her body, who matched her desire.

His nostrils flared, his gaze gleamed with satisfaction as he filled her to the hilt. He went still and a long, low, pleasured groan escaped his lips and suffused her with the purest bliss.
This is what I lost,
she thought, as they kissed with their eyes open and their bodies joined. They kissed in a rhythm that mimicked the rolling give-and-take of their lower bodies, they kissed until their lungs required sustenance and the sounds of their choppy breathing filled the air.

And just when she thought the exquisite pleasure of his touch could take her no higher, he caught her lower lip between his teeth and stilled. Held rigid over her body, poised on the brink of release, he looked into her eyes and she knew he recognised something in the moment.

She lifted a trembling hand and touched his face, stroked his jaw, and he began to move again, thrusting deep and strong. Susannah hovered, not wanting this over, greedily wanting him there in her body, soaring in this perfect moment forever.

After there would be words, guilt, confessions, and everything would change again.

She wrapped her legs more tightly around him, and that new angle broke both their control. The climax came quickly, catching her in its sweet, savage grip and flinging her high and wild. As she spun out, she chanted his name, a low breathless ache that resounded in her blood and her mind and her heart.

He drove deep one last time and held himself rigid, straining with the intensity of his own release. With arms and legs and thundering heart, she clung to him, stroking the slick heat of his back and nuzzling her face into his neck, dragging the masculine scent of his body into her lungs and her senses.

Afterward, too, their sated bodies fit together in a perfect melding of hard lines and giving curves. Donovon’s arm held her close to his side. His elevated breath on her temple lifted a fine frizz of hair into her vision.

If she had the energy Susannah would have brushed it aside. But she was happily spent, unable to move anything beyond the fingers that traced an indolent pattern across his chest. “Did that trigger your memory?” she asked softly, remembering what she’d seen in his face, what she’d felt in his intensity.

“No.”

He sounded relaxed, completely unperturbed, and Susannah’s hand stilled. “Doesn’t that bug you?”

“Not anymore.”

She didn’t know what to make of that. Back at Stranger’s Bay the frustration of not knowing had reverberated around him like a force field. Beneath her hand she felt the ridged edge of one of the scars that crisscrossed his abdomen. Earlier he’d warned her off asking, but now he was at ease. Now she could ask. “And the attack…does it bother you not remembering how that happened?”

“It bugs me that I was caught out and the bastards got the better of me.” The arm at her waist tightened momentarily and Susannah held her breath until he relaxed again. “At least now I see why I might have been distracted.”

“By me?”

“By a whole weekend of you. Yeah.”

The low rumble of his answer rippled through her, a sweet antithesis to her chilling thoughts about his injuries. “I like the idea that you were thinking of me in your hometown, but I hate what happened because of it.”

“The scars?”

“The wounds that caused the scars,” she corrected. “What you went through because of them, and everything that happened afterward.”

“We can fix that,” he said after a moment.

“Can we?”

“Tomorrow.”

“And now?”

She felt a change in the mood. The hand at her waist applied a different pressure, a renewed heat, as his fingers splayed wide over her belly. The weight of his legs shifted, pinning her to the bed. “Now—” his voice deepened to a thick growl as he nuzzled her hair from her throat “—I have more memories to replace.”