Captive in His Castle(15)

Driven purely by instinct, he threaded his fingers through her hair and drew her head towards him. He was still sitting on the edge of the bath, and her petite stature meant that her face was level with his and her lips were tantalisingly close. She did not resist or pull away, but he could hear the catch of her breath and see the pulse at the base of her throat beating frantically. For a few seconds they remained poised while anticipation built to an intolerable level. Their eyes locked and held, until with a harsh groan Drago slanted his mouth over hers and kissed her with slow deliberation that quickly flared into a firestorm of passion.

Drago’s tongue probed expertly between Jess’s lips to coax them apart—although in truth he did not need to do much coaxing, she acknowledged ruefully. From the moment he had captured her mouth she had been lost, and with no thought in her head to deny him she parted her lips and heard him give a low groan as he explored her inner sweetness.

He was the man of her fantasies. The only man she had ever allowed to breach her defences since Seb. The memory of that disastrous relationship made her stiffen and question what she was doing. Drago had openly stated that he mistrusted her. Why, then, was she allowing him to kiss her? And why was she responding to him?

Because she could not help herself, whispered a little voice inside her head. Because the very first time she had seen him she had felt that she belonged in some deep and fundamental way to him. Her sensible self knew it was ridiculous; she did not need to belong to anyone, and she knew how dangerous it was to want to be cared for. She had fallen for Seb because she had been lonely and desperate to be loved. But he had abused her trust and she had vowed never to risk her heart again.

Drago finally broke the kiss and Jess knew she should pull out of his arms and end the madness. She knew it, but she could not do it. He trailed his lips over her cheek, her throat, and she shivered with pleasure when he found the sensitive place behind her ear.

‘Cara, you are so beautiful,’ he said raggedly, and his deeply sensual voice made her shiver again with a fierce, sharp need that started low in her belly and radiated through her so that every nerve-ending on her body felt acutely sensitive.

He captured the pulse throbbing at the base of her throat and then brushed his mouth along her collarbone. Her heart stopped when he slid the strap of her nightgown over her shoulder. Her breasts ached with a sweet heaviness, and when he brushed his fingers over the swollen peaks of her nipples, straining beneath the silk, she jerked as if an electrical current had shot through her.

He gave a husky laugh, but there was no amusement in eyes that were as black as jet and glittering with predatory intent. ‘I know. It’s the same for me too. The wanting. The hunger clawing in my gut.’

His jaw tightened and Jess sensed he was fighting an internal battle with himself, as if he resented his desire for her.

‘When you opened the door of your flat in London I took one look at you and knew I had to have you,’ he admitted in a driven tone.

‘Drago…’ Jess gave a keening cry when he tugged her nightgown lower and bared one of her breasts.

He stared at her, tension in every sculpted line of his face, his skin stretched tight over his sharp cheekbones. ‘No games,’ he said harshly. ‘If you don’t want this then go—now.’

He did not try to persuade her to stay with words and promises that they both knew would be false, and Jess was glad of that. She had been fooled by promises once before and her heart had been broken as a consequence. She was not a vulnerable seventeen-year-old any more, she reminded herself. She had grown up and discarded her silly dreams. Sexual desire was a perfectly natural feeling, and there was nothing wrong with wanting to give in to its demands. As long as she remembered to keep her head screwed on her heart would be in no danger.





CHAPTER SIX



‘WE BARELY KNOW each other.’ An instinct for self-protection made Jess cling to the last shreds of her sanity and offer a valid reason why she should walk away from Drago. ‘And what you think you know about me isn’t the truth,’ she added, unable to hide the bitterness in her voice.

‘Maybe it isn’t.’ As he uttered the words, Drago accepted that he did not know what to think about her.

He had evidence that she had been convicted of fraud, but it had happened a long time ago, when she had been a teenager. A mistake in her past did not mean she was inherently untrustworthy, his mind argued. Madonna, was he making excuses for her because he needed to justify his desire for her? He still did not understand what her true involvement with his cousin was, but she had fiercely denied knowing anything about Angelo’s missing inheritance fund.

He did not know what to believe, and right now—shocking though it was to admit it—he did not care about his cousin, or the money, or anything that had happened in Jess’s past. All he cared about was that she was half-naked and so exquisitely lovely that simply looking at her made him harder than he had ever been in his life. His hand actually shook as he reached out and slid the other strap of her nightgown down her arm, until her small, firm breasts with their dusky pink nipples were revealed to his hungry gaze.

‘It’s true we don’t know many details about each other, but from the moment we met we were both aware of the chemistry that exists between us. No other woman has ever made me feel this out of control,’ Drago admitted roughly. ‘Say something, damn it,’ he growled, feeling his blood pound through his veins when she simply stared at him with her stunning green eyes. Witch’s eyes, trapping him in her spell.

He didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the feel of her silken skin as he clasped her shoulders and pulled her to him. Nothing mattered but the honeyed taste of her as he lowered his head and captured her mouth in a potent kiss that demanded a response she gave so willingly that he could not restrain a husky groan when he felt her lips part obediently, allowing him to thrust his tongue between them.

Jess’s heart thudded hard against her ribs when Drago suddenly stood up from the edge of the bath and scooped her into his arms as if she was a rag doll. She felt as boneless as one, she thought ruefully. One kiss was all it had taken to turn the sharp-tongued firebrand Jess Harper she prided herself on being into a trembling mass of nervous excitement. Drago was going to make love to her, and she was not going to stop him.

He carried her through to his bedroom. As her gaze fell on the four-poster bed, with its opulent gold silk drapes and sheets, the dull ache in the pit of her stomach became an insistent throb and she was conscious of molten warmth between her thighs. He placed her on the bed and stared down at her with a brooding intensity in his black eyes that was just as arousing as if he had touched her.

‘I want to make love to you slowly—indulge in leisurely foreplay and prolong the pleasure until one of us begs for release,’ he bit out. ‘But I am so turned on that there isn’t a chance in hell of that happening, mia bella.’

His taut voice revealed that he was hanging onto his self-control with supreme effort. Amazed that she could have such an effect on him, Jess touched the nerve jumping in his cheek. Her heart leapt when he turned his head so that his mouth grazed her fingers.

‘I want you too,’ she whispered.

It was what Drago wanted to hear, and his body reacted predictably. But the faint hesitancy he heard in her voice made him hold back from ripping off her nightgown and pushing her legs apart so that he could take her hard and fast, as the blood pounding in his veins urged him to do. She was not behaving as he had expected her to. His previous sexual encounters had always been with experienced women, who knew how to please him and were not shy about stating what pleased them. But Jess was clearly waiting for him to take the lead.

She looked incredibly sexy, stretched out on the bed with her fiery hair spread over the pillows, her small, pale breasts with their tightly puckered pink nipples practically begging for the ministrations of his tongue. And yet at the same time he sensed an innocence about her that made him think that she had not had many lovers.

Why the idea should make him want to grin he did not know, but as he smiled at her and watched her lips curve in a tentative response he felt a curious tug on his insides, and he forced himself to relax and slow the pace a little.

‘Show me how much you want me,’ he murmured as he bent his head and slanted his mouth over hers. Her immediate response stoked his desire, and he groaned and deepened the kiss until he felt tremors run through her body and realised that he was shaking too.

He heard the faint catch of her breath when he stroked her breasts, and the soft moan she gave as he flicked his thumb-pads across her nipples made him want to drag her beneath him and seek the release he craved. She was so sweetly responsive, and yet he sensed she was surprised by his caresses, as if the sensations she felt when he kissed her and touched her body were new to her.

From then on Drago forgot his own needs and concentrated on arousing Jess. He breathed in the delicate fragrance of her skin as he kissed her throat, the creamy slopes of her breasts, and finally closed his lips around one taut, dusky peak and then its twin. Her nightgown was bunched up around her waist, and he pushed it over her hips and placed his hand over the slight mound of her womanhood, hidden from his gaze beneath the fragile barrier of white lace knickers. She gave an involuntary movement and tried to clamp her legs together, but released her breath on a shivery sigh when he gently eased her thighs apart and slid his fingers beneath her panties. With delicate precision he dipped a finger into her moist opening and felt her buck her hips as he probed deeper into her honeyed sweetness.