Private Dancer (16 page)

Looking at him, she waited, and when he opened his eyes, there was something incredulous there, something touched by wonder. She squeezed her hand and watched the lights flare in his irises. The blue turned a deep, roaring indigo, an inferno of carnal urges and animal desires. She’d never seen anything so beautiful.

Without a thought to the consequences, she knelt and brought him to her lips, tasting the wetness, the hardness. Her mouth softened against burning steel, and a current of electricity stroked her feminine parts, so powerful she could hardly move. Her legs felt weak and useless, stunned by the force. Her heart was a deep throb that pulsed in her swollen lips. She closed her eyes, surrendering to the pulse for several seconds. The urges clamoring inside her were too frenetic to understand or satisfy, except one. She felt an overpowering impulse to take him into her mouth, deeply, completely. She wanted to consume him, but she was too weak with paralyzing excitement.

“Help me,” she whimpered.

“Help you?” A profanity shook on his lips. He caught hold of her arm and tore her hand away from him, dragging her up to his mouth. His hands bit into the flesh of her arms as he brought her to her tiptoes, nearly lifting her off the floor. His kiss was harsh and brutal and consuming. It punished her for the sweet pain she brought him. It promised her savage pleasure.

Sam had no conscious thought of punishing her. The forces inside him were too primal for conscious control. He was mindless with need. He had to get inside her, to know how deep she could take him, to feel her squeezing him the way her hand had. There was no other way to survive the maelstrom his body had become.

“I’m going to help you, babe,” he said, lodging her up against the shower wall. “I’m going to help us both.”

She breathed an anguished plea as he stripped off her soaked panties and brought up her leg. The urge to enter her immediately slammed through him like a fist. He wanted to take her right then, rough and quick, no preliminaries, but he controlled the impulse.

He tasted her mouth, drinking the beads of warm water that caught on her upper lip. She was soft and hot and open to him. And she was hungry, he could tell by the way she dug her nails into his biceps when he stroked the inner silk of her raised thigh. Her soft gasps of pleasure nearly drove him crazy, but he held back, stroking nearer and nearer the source of her excitement.

“Like this?” he said, swirling his fingers up to the place where her soft brown hair curled wildly. “Do you like being touched like this?” He combed his fingers into the vibrant thatch.

Her head fell back helplessly, and then she stiffened, arching against him as he cupped the mound between her legs with his palm. “Yes,” she breathed, hardly able to speak. “Yes, there ... touch me there, please ... harder.”

“Harder?” He knew exactly what she wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to give it to her so quickly. He was in the throes of a sensation so sweet it made him want to groan. He had to make it last. “And here too?” he said, delving into her warm folds with his fingers and using his thumb to encircle the part of her that was swollen with desire.

She couldn’t speak. She could only nod her head.

He stroked her gently, mercilessly, letting her move against his hand until the mounting pain of his own desire forced him to act. He probed deeper, slipping a finger inside her as she cried out with choked rapture. She was hot and wet, muscles as taut as her demon fingers had been. Her throbbing warmth told him everything he needed to know. She wanted him inside her as much as he wanted to be there.

He withdrew and pressed her to the wall, straining to hold her still.

“Easy, Lace,” he said, unable to subdue her frantic movements long enough to enter her. The aching throb between his legs became unbearable, and he gripped her by the arms, lifting her over him, bringing her down. A knifelike sensation pierced his groin as he found what he was seeking. Her lush warmth yielded to his muscular thrusts, and he entered her with a passion that was primal.

Once he was truly, deeply inside her, once that barrier of flesh and will had been crossed, he lost control to the urgent demands of his body. He kissed her ravenously, running his hands over her nakedness, cupping her breasts and buttocks roughly, tenderly. She clung to him, gasping as he impaled her, nailing her sweet, undulating body to the wall.

Bev felt as though she were being rocked and jolted with ecstasy. A deep, radiating pleasure gripped her, pulling irresistibly at her muscles. It seemed to peak with his thrusts, to caress every shimmering nerve. She locked her arms around his powerful neck, vowing never to let him go. There was an urgent need flowering inside her. She wanted to be crushed in his arms, pinned by his weight. She wanted him to open her legs and mount her in the way that men and women had been making love since the beginning of time.

She wanted to feel like a woman again. She needed that so desperately. But when she tried to tell him, the words were breathless and nearly incomprehensible. “Please ... carry me to the bed,” was all she could say.

She refused to let him pull out. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his neck and curled herself to him as he shouldered open the shower door. A billowy cloud of steam escaped with them as he carried her to the bed. Bev felt him plunging even more deeply with every step, and then they fell onto the flowered bedspread, still joined, rolling and flashing and thrusting until somehow they ended up with him on his back.

Bev gave out a cry of shocked satisfaction and arched above him. “Wait a minute,” he rasped, cupping her breasts as she began to flex slowly, throwing her head back, moving up and down on him, heedless of the utter wantonness of her movements. “How did we end up like this?”

“Just lucky—” She barely got the words out before new and sharper heights of sensation took her. Every minute move she made, even the tiniest twitch of her muscles, brought the most unbearable ecstasy. “No, it’s too much,” she said, her voice choked with startled disbelief. “I won’t survive this.”

She shuddered and stopped, unable to move, her legs weighted and throbbing.

Sam’s body screamed in protest. Muscles seized in his gut and his thighs. “We’re not stopping now, babe.” He hauled her into his arms and rolled her onto her back. “Not now.” He was racked with the need to hold her, to make love to her—rough, tender, whatever she wanted. He’d never felt anything so powerful before.

“No, don’t ever stop, Sam,” she said, a strange, sweet urgency in her voice. “Make love to me. Do it all to me. Everything. Every sexy, incredible thing a man and woman can do.”

Her eyes glittered and danced like stars reflected on water. There was a wildness in them that blew Sam’s mind. Was it the wine talking? Or the woman? His conscience tried to tell him that she might not know what she was doing, but he was too bewitched by her sensuality, too crazy with desire to pay it any heed. If she wanted him to romp naked through the cruise ship and swing on chandeliers with her, he would do it.

B
EV WOKE UP
to a frantic tapping on the cabin door. At first she thought she was in her small Encino bedroom and Southern California was having another earthquake. Why else would the house be rumbling and vibrating? As she rolled her head and saw the naked man sprawled on his stomach, his arms thrown wide, his head partially covered by a pillow, she knew she was a very long way from Encino.

She sat up gingerly, trying to remember why she was in bed with a naked man, but her forehead was throbbing just above her left eye, and she couldn’t concentrate on details. Also, someone was calling her name.

“Bev! Are you in there?”

“Who is it?” she asked, wincing at the sound of her own voice.

“ It’s me, Arthur,” the voice called. “Are you all right?”

Arthur? She touched her forehead. Who did she know named Arthur?

“Bev, it’s me,” he said again. “Everything happened so fast, I didn’t know what hit me. By the time they got me out of the wine vat, you were gone.”

Wine vat, Arthur ... Arthur, wine vat. What was happening to her memory? She vaguely recalled a warning about memory disturbances on the box her seasick patches came in. She’d removed the patch, but if the drug was still in her system—

“The way you disappeared, I was afraid you were angry with me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to touch your breast, Bev. That was an accident.”

Touch her breast? Oh, of course, Arthur. It was coming back to her now, in little bits and pieces of detail, in large chunks. She’d been at a party with Arthur, crushing passion plums with her bare feet and—

She glanced down at her own undeniably nude body, at the wet shambles of a bed where she and Sam were sprawled, at the room with its soggy, plum-stained clothes thrown every which way, and let out a tiny moan of despair. Was that water dripping off the ceiling? It looked as though they’d had an orgy. Her moan degenerated into a husky groan. It looked as though they’d turned her tiny cabin into the Roman baths.

“Bev! Are you in there! Are you all right?”

She struggled off the bed, dragging a blanket with her as far as it would go, which wasn’t far enough. An edge of the material caught beneath Sam’s dead weight, and she couldn’t budge it.

“Bev?”

“I’m fine, Arthur,” she whispered, darting to the door, naked and shivering. “I was feeling a little lightheaded, so I came back to the ship.”

“What did you say, Bev? I can hardly hear you.”

She cupped her hand to the door and whispered louder. “It’s very late, Arthur, and I’m a little under the weather at the moment.” Somehow she had to get rid of him without waking up Sam. She needed some time to figure out what had gone on in this dripping room.

“How about breakfast in the morning?” she suggested. “No, make that lunch. Does lunch sound good?”

It took a little more whispering and wheedling, but she finally got Arthur to leave. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned around to find Sam propped up on his elbow, looking like an indolent Greek god as he surveyed the situation. A smile tugged at his handsome mouth, and Bev came face-to-face with one of life’s immutable truths: There wasn’t any way to adequately cover the naked female body with only two hands.

“Stop staring at me,” she said sharply. “I’m naked.”

“I noticed.” His voice was wry, husky, a man mightily pleased with his circumstances. “You were naked the last time I looked too.”

“Either turn the other way, or close your eyes.”

“You’re no fun.”

The bedspread was in a heap on the floor, and Bev made a dash for it as he averted his eyes. “What do you mean, the last time you looked?” she said, wrapping herself like a mummy in the fabric’s jungle motif.

“Well, you weren’t naked the entire time,” he conceded. “You had your panties on in the shower—for a while.”

“Shower?” More details were creeping back into Bev’s head, strange and lurid flashes she would have preferred not to remember. Perhaps she’d had a terrible dream while she was asleep. “I took a shower? Why did I do that?”

“You were a mess, babe, plum wine head to toe, but we got you cleaned up pretty good.”

“We?” Bev felt an immediate clutch of anxiety. She searched through her memory as though she were in a darkroom processing negatives—until she came to a slide show that astonished her. She saw herself naked and arched over a man as if they were doing something unbelievably sensual. She saw herself moving above him, touching and caressing him as if she were the aggressor. No ... impossible!

But her mind flashed slide after slide, as though determined to convince her that she’d made wild, abandoned love with him, that she’d flung herself on top of his beautiful, battle-scarred body and ravished him.

“Did something happen in this room?” she asked Sam breathlessly. “Besides the shower?”

“Something?” The smile that glowed through his dark features made his eyes smoky and dangerously intimate. “You’re not even close, Lace. It was more like everything.”

“I don’t believe you.” She clutched the towel to her breasts and shook her head, alarmed by his raffish grin. “All right, then,” she demanded. “Just what did we do? Tell me.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

She stepped back, refusing to commit herself. She remembered some things, all right, she just didn’t want to believe what she remembered. The details were still sketchy. Damn that seasick patch anyway. She ought to have paid more attention to the warning label. The plum wine hadn’t helped either. “We took a shower, right? I remember that, and then—”

His smile widened, implying the worst.

“What are you saying?” she bristled. “That we did something wrong? Something ... indecent?”

“I thought it was damn decent. You don’t remember? Not even being on top?” He sighed. “It was your idea, Lace.”

“Me? On top? Of you? No, I didn’t do that, I wasn’t—” She stopped babbling, caught her breath, and glared at him. She hadn’t been dreaming. No such luck. “You’re saying we made love, I was on top, and it was
my
idea?”

“Hey, that was just the first time.”

Her voice dropped off. “The first time?”

“Oh, babe—” He broke off, laughing softly, as though he could hardly contain the images crowding his brain.

Bev caught at her upper lip with her teeth. What
had
they done? She could see that he fully intended to leave her with the impression that they had committed myriad and unspeakable acts. She did sort of remember the being-on-top part. Actually, she was beginning to recall some astonishing things ... arching over him, bouncing up and down, throwing her head back and laughing like some pagan priestess during spring fertility rites.

She pressed two fingers to her throbbing eyebrow.

This was looking very bad. If she’d done those things, what else had she done? A hint of desperation sneaked into her voice as she glanced at Sam. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said.

“Me?”

“Yes, I was high on those damn fermented plums. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Oh, right, likely excuse.”

“Can’t you even be a gentleman about it?”