Penny Jordan Tribute Collection

‘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.