A Sicilian Husband - Kate Walker [17]
He could only pray that she would take the unevenness of his voice as evidence that he shared her amusement and not as what it really was.
Which was what?
If he was honest, then he knew he couldn’t actually put a name to the way he was feeling. His emotions were all to pieces, seeming to be on a violent roller coaster plunging down, down, down one moment, only to swing right up again the next.
And all because of one kiss.
Just one kiss.
No. Not ‘just’ a kiss. Not ‘just’ anything. It was the first time he had kissed a woman in passion other than his wife.
Dio, the first kiss he had ever known hadn’t affected him like this. In fact, the experience had been so long ago, when he was barely in his teens, that the memory had blurred and become so vague that he could hardly remember the girl’s name now. But the first time he had kissed Lucia was etched onto his brain, never to be erased. It had felt like coming home; as if all his dreams had finally materialised, centring in the small, delicate shape of the woman he had loved from that moment on.
But this. This was so very different. Light-years away from the youthful, innocent experience of the first kiss he had shared with Lucia. It had been a kiss like no other he had ever experienced. And, although he had refused to let it show, it had been a kiss of the fiercest passion he had ever known.
At that first touch of her lips on his, a violent response had seared through him, singeing his nerves, exploding in his brain, making his head swim shockingly. He had known what she wanted, how she had tried to draw his head down to hers, and had set himself to fight against it. And in that first split-second when their mouths had touched the shock had frozen him, held him still. Another heartbeat later and it had all been completely different. Then the fuse that had been lighted at that first contact had burned away, detonating the powder keg of his physical reaction, and blasting his thoughts away with it.
Only the realisation that the lift had come to a halt and Terrie’s hasty warning that someone might come had stopped him from making a complete and utter fool of himself.
‘The coffee!’
‘What?’
He really couldn’t take in what Terrie was talking about. If the sight of himself in the mirror, shirt pulled out, tie askew, hair distinctly ruffled, wasn’t bad enough, then the sensations throbbing through his body were only aggravating the situation. He still had the taste of her on his lips. The tang of red wine mixed intoxicatingly with the intimate flavour of Terrie herself. He pressed his fingers hard against his mouth, not knowing whether he wanted to rub the back of his hand against his lips to wipe away the taste or hold it, keep it there, lingering, tantalising, arousing, nagging at him with the memory of how he had felt.
And the thought of how very much he wanted to experience it again.
‘The coffee?’ He shook his dark head slightly, trying to pull himself back into functioning in the present. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘We ordered coffee,’ Terrie reminded him. ‘They were bringing it up to our room. They’ll be here any minute. We’d better make ourselves respectable.’
Already she had straightened her top, was reaching for the brush on the dressing table to smooth down her tangled hair. Restoring order and calm where he wanted turmoil and the upheaval of passion, loss of control and the total oblivion of losing his mind to the sensation of ecstasy.
‘No.’
It stunned Terrie, stopped her dead, the brush stilling in mid-stroke. Her eyes were wide and startled, clouded with confusion, as she looked up at him.
‘What…?’ she began but had to swallow the words hastily as she was grabbed, hauled up against him, and they were crushed back down her throat by the sudden violent pressure of his mouth on hers.
And in the blink of an eye her thoughts were swirling again, whirling off into the sensual kaleidoscope of colour and sensation that had assailed her in the lift. She was incapable of thought, wouldn’t have cared if a whole army of waiters, laden down with trays