The Christmas Baby's Gift

His hands against her breasts and the touch of his mouth on her skin was turning her blood molten, making it pound fiercely in her veins. All the fears, all the doubts of the day, of only moments before, had evaporated, burned up in the blaze of heat inside her.

‘Want me?’

It was a low, husky whisper against the curve of her ear, his breath feathering against her skin. And as he spoke his hands were working a wicked, tormenting magic, thumbs describing tiny, erotic circles over the delicate surface, moving closer and closer to the tight pink nipple, making her shiver in convulsive delight.

‘Want me?’ he said again. And when she didn’t answer he punished her by closing a finger and thumb over each straining bud, tugging softly until she moaned aloud in a conflict of rebellion and abandonment.

‘Peta?’

‘What do you think?’

She was incapable of answering in any other way. Incapable of hiding her feelings from him. Incapable of pretending she felt anything more than the yearning, demanding hunger that had uncoiled deep inside her and was throbbing uncontrollably, low down in her body.

‘I think…’

There was a tremor in his voice that revealed the struggle he too was having to keep control over his powerful physical feelings.

‘I think that I’m wearing rather too many clothes for this. Why don’t you help me out of some, hmm?’

And when she turned faintly confused, passion-blurred eyes on him, frowning in an effort to drag her thoughts back from the erotic paths they were following, he grinned and then kissed her again, tugging his tie free at his throat as he did so. Discarding the sliver of silk somewhere over his shoulder, he lifted Peta’s hands, laid them on his chest, just on the button band of his shirt.

‘Help me…’ he whispered again.

But this time Peta needed no further urging. As soon as her fingers touched the soft linen of his shirt, felt the heat of his skin, the hardness of bone, the power of muscle, she was suddenly in the grip of a desperate hunger. She knew she couldn’t rest until she could touch him, really touch him. Until she could feel his body without the barrier of any form of clothing between them at all.

And so she fumbled and wrenched at the small, pearly buttons, snatching them open, tugging, until one finally spun away to land with a small clatter somewhere on the nearby dressing table.

But neither Peta nor Liam saw it go. Or cared where it fell. They were both intent on getting rid of as many clothes as possible, as quickly as possible, no thought for anything else.

Liam had already kicked off his shoes, yanked open his belt. He paused only for a moment as Peta slid down his zip, peeled the elegant trousers over his hips and down the muscular length of his legs. Even as he freed himself from their clinging coils round his ankles she had made her way back up his body, hooking her thumbs into the sides of the black shorts, easing them away from the heat and pressure of his fierce erection.

Liam’s breath hissed in again sharply and he froze instinctively. The instant reaction made Peta bold, erasing all the insecurity and the uncertainty that his earlier negative response had created. Pausing mid-movement, she looked up at him, blue eyes gleaming, a provocative smile tilting the corners of her mouth.

‘No?’ she teased, making as if to undo her action and let the fine cotton fall back into place.

‘You dare!’

Liam’s voice was low and rough, thick with the hunger that had scored two streaks of colour along his broad, slanting cheekbones.

‘You witch!’ he added even more rawly as she still hesitated, delighting in the power she had to reduce this big, strong, and normally totally self-contained man to this state of yearning need.

‘So now I’m a witch, am I?’ She laughed, never taking her eyes from the darkness of his. ‘Well, if that’s the case, then perhaps I should put you under a spell.’

‘You already have, and you know it! Peta…’

His control was slipping fast. And, if he only knew it, so was hers. Her pulse was pounding so hard that her head felt light, her thoughts swimming. She wanted to take his mouth again, to taste him on her lips, on her tongue. She wanted him to enfold her in his arms, to take her down onto the bed with him, cover her with the hard weight of his body, fill her, take her—take her with him to the fulfilment they both knew was the inevitable, the only end of this shivering excitement.

And yet, at the same moment, she wanted to delay. Wanted to hold onto this thrill of anticipation for as long as she could, so that that fulfilment, when it came, would be beyond anything she had ever known before.

But, even as she hesitated, Liam took matters out of her control. Capturing her wrists in his hard grip, he held both of them prisoner easily in one hand while his other arm scooped her up off her feet and swung her over onto the bed, dropping her down onto the softness of the covers. While she was still recovering from having her breath snatched away by the suddenness of his response, he dispensed with what little remained of his clothing and came down beside her, pulling her roughly towards him.

‘Tease me, would you, you little witch?’ he muttered, imprisoning her beneath him and pushing strong fingers into her hair, dragging the dark silk back from her flushed face. ‘Make me wait?’

His mouth crushed hers fiercely then danced away again, tongue and teeth tantalising her skin, stroking, tasting, nipping at the softness of her earlobes.

‘Well, I’ll show you what teasing’s really like. How it feels to want someone so much that you feel you’ll die if you don’t have them. That your head will burst, that your heart will stop beating. I’ll make you ache with needing me, bring you to the point where you won’t care if the world ends—because you won’t even notice it happening. All you’ll care about is that I’m here, with you—in you! You won’t want to know about anything else. Oh yes, I’ll show you, lady!’

Deep inside, Peta shivered, her whole being seeming to turn to jelly. She had no doubt at all that he could do everything he had promised. All that and more. And she could only lie there, waiting, wanting everything he could give.

It wasn’t as if they had never made love before. A year together had given them knowledge of each other’s bodies and all the secret pleasure spots that each of them possessed. It had created an understanding of how they both felt, how they reacted, what they liked and what they wanted. When to touch lightly, softly, gently and when to increase the pressure of a caress or the urgency of a movement until it was not just a stroke but more a demand without words.

But this time it was as if everything Liam did had a new skill, a new sensuality. Within seconds of his whispered threat Peta was quivering under his hands, reduced to a shameless, abandoned wreck of hunger, only able to express her need through moans of delirious abandon. Several times she moved her restless body against his, yearning, pleading, seeking the ultimate fulfilment of his possession, only to have him shake his dark head in refusal and subject her to even more erotic torture. Only at last, when she was sure that she would die if he didn’t take her now, did he move over her and consummate their lovemaking with one wild, fierce thrust of his body.

It seemed to Peta that the world splintered around her even in those first few seconds of possession. There couldn’t be any more pleasure, her whirling mind told her. Or if there could, then she couldn’t cope with it.

It only took a few seconds to learn that she was wrong on both counts. There was more, and in spite of feeling that she would split apart if she experienced it she now realised that it had only just started. Her blood singing in her veins, her pulse throbbing, she met and matched every forceful movement Liam made, gave back kiss for kiss, caress for caress, demand for demand. Between them they rode the wild, blazing waves of passion, each time going higher, higher, higher, until at last there was nowhere else to go. The summit had been reached, the peak of passion scaled, and, with each other’s name escaping in a hoarse, shaken cry, they tumbled over it and down the far slope into oblivion.

CHAPTER THREE

PASSION was what their marriage was built on, Peta told herself as she watched Liam dancing with one of her friends later that night.

The spectacular ballroom of Hewland Hall was brilliantly lit by a dozen glorious crystal chandeliers. In the far corner of the huge room, an enormous Christmas tree reached almost to the ornate ceiling, and red, gold and green garlands festooned the walls. It was a gorgeous, wonderful scene, but all she was conscious of was the tall, powerful figure of her husband.

A smile curved her mouth, her eyes becoming darkly dreamy as she recalled how it had felt to be in his arms just a few minutes before, the way he had held her close to the heat and strength of his body, his cheek pressed against hers.

Passion was what had pushed them into the marriage of convenience that had suited them, and pleased both their families. The sort of passion that had consumed the two of them in its fires earlier, so wild, so all-powerful that even now she could still feel her blood heat and her skin tingle just to think of it. The sort of passion that was so overwhelming that it couldn’t be denied. It had brought them together, held them in thrall for the past year, and had seemed so overpowering that, in the absence of any other, stronger feeling, it had seemed enough to hold them together for as long as they wanted.

Passion and the longing for children.

The smile left her mouth abruptly, leaving her face looking bleak and pale. All her life she had dreamed of becoming a mother She had enjoyed her work as a PA, knew she’d been good at it, but a child—children—of her own had always been at the centre of her thoughts. So it had come as something of a shock to her to find that, at twenty-six, almost twenty-seven, she was not only not yet a mother but also still single, without even a fiancе, or yet a boyfriend on the horizon. The fact that her brother, three years younger, was already the father of a two-year-old boy, with another child on the way, had only added to her feeling of emptiness, the yearning to have a family of her own.

And it had to be a family. She didn’t want to be a single mother. A child had the right to two parents who loved and cared for it, and she was determined that her baby would have the best she could give it. So when Liam had told her how much he wanted children too, it had seemed like the perfect answer.

But then she had had to go and ruin things completely by falling in love.

Her hands closed over the long skirts of her midnight-blue dress, crushing the fine velvet dreadfully. This hadn’t been on the cards. Hadn’t been part of the bargain they had agreed between them.

‘But what happens if this isn’t enough?’ she remembered asking Liam when he had first made the suggestion that they marry for lust rather than for love. ‘What if one of us meets someone else? Falls for them…?’

‘Falls in love?’ Liam had finished for her, when she’d hesitated. ‘You said you didn’t believe in it.’

‘I said I didn’t know what it meant! And I don’t. I’ve never known that sort of devastating, irresistible feeling for anyone. Never felt that without a certain someone in my life I would want to die, that my existence wouldn’t be worth having. I’ve never experienced it and I’m not sure that I ever will.’

She had now, Peta thought wretchedly as her clouded blue eyes followed Liam around the dance floor, hungrily absorbing the lean, powerful lines of his body in the superbly cut dinner jacket and gleaming white shirt. She knew that feeling all too well, and didn’t know how to handle it.

She couldn’t drag her gaze away from this man who had been her husband for the past twelve months, and yet, in many ways, was still a total stranger to her. The subdued elegance of the classic black and white suited his tall frame to perfection. The fit of his jacket emphasised the broad, straight shoulders, the width of his chest and long, long legs under the fine fabric of his trousers.

In the light of the huge glittering chandeliers that hung from the high ceilings of the ballroom, the rich chestnut of his hair gleamed and shone, the copper lights in it seeming to catch fire and burn spectacularly. And the dark green of his eyes had the glimmer of polished jade, deep and impenetrable.