by Lynne Graham
He walked her through an airy salon, with an ancient stone carved fireplace and sleek blue sofas, out on to a tiled terrace where a candlelit table awaited them.
‘I’m really hungry,’ Lilah confessed as a manservant moved forward to pull out a chair and lingered to whisk a napkin across her lap.
‘You should enjoy the meal. Stefan’s wife, Marie, is my cook, and she was a chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris before they came to work for me,’ Bastien remarked while the wine was poured.
‘You have a huge staff here...you live like a king,’ Lilah commented helplessly as soon as they were alone.
‘I do when I have the time to enjoy the chateau—which is rarely,’ Bastien qualified drily. ‘When I’m travelling on business I eat out or cook for myself.’
‘You can cook?’ Lilah said in surprise.
‘Of course I can. I’m not spoilt. I’ve never been spoilt. But I do appreciate the best things in life.’
‘Is your mother still alive?’ she asked abruptly as the first course was served.
Bastien studied her in silence, black brows drawing together in a frown. ‘You’re very curious about my life.’
Lilah shrugged her lightly clad shoulder. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
Bastien set down his glass. ‘My mother died in a car accident when I was a child and I had to go and live with my father.’
Lilah toyed with the artfully presented courgette flowers topping the tiny onion tart on her plate. ‘And how was that?’
‘Hideous,’ Bastien admitted grimly. ‘Anatole’s wife, Cleta, hated me on sight. I was the living proof of her husband’s infidelity. As for my half-brother... Leo was an adored only child and suddenly I turned up. Naturally he resented me. But there were some advantages to my new home,’ he conceded, his dark eyes veiled with mystery, his beautiful mouth compressing.
‘Such as...?’ The sliver of onion tart Lilah had selected was melting in her mouth.
Bastien frowned at her continuing interest. ‘It was a fresh start for me in many ways. I was able to see Anatole regularly and I went to a much better school.’
‘Obviously you’re close to your father,’ Lilah commented, relieved to hear that hint of indulgent warmth in his dark drawl when he referred to his parent, because really it was brutally obvious to her that Bastien had been cursed by the most utterly miserable childhood.
‘Yes. I’m very fond of Anatole. He may have been a push-over for the wrong women, but as a father, when I needed him, he was the very best,’ Bastien stated with quiet pride.
Relief filled Lilah that there had been someone loving in Bastien’s life, and she wondered why the idea of nobody having cared for him as a child should disturb her so much. His answers to her questions, however, had given her a certain insight into what had made him so tough and unyielding.
‘But that’s enough about my life, glikia mou,’ Bastien continued, smooth as glass. ‘Tell me about Josh Burrowes.’
Thrown off balance in her turn, Lilah stiffened, her spine straightening. ‘There’s nothing to tell. We were on the same course at uni. He’s one of my friends.’
Bastien lounged back in his seat as their plates were cleared and the main course served. ‘But obviously Josh wants to be something more. You should’ve told him the truth.’
Lilah’s delicate bone structure tightened. ‘I gave my friends the same story you suggested I use with my family. I said you’d offered me a job.’
Bastien rested his shimmering dark gaze on the voluptuous promise of her pink lips as she savoured the tender lamb on her plate. ‘But you should have come clean for Josh’s benefit and told him that you are mine.’
Her small white teeth gritted as if she had trodden barefoot on a stone. ‘I am not yours, Bastien.’
‘You are,’ Bastien purred in immediate contradiction, his accented drawl vibrating through her slender taut frame. ‘I know it every time I look at you. No hunger this powerful is one-sided.’
Lilah concentrated on her meal, deeming silence the most diplomatic response. She was very, very attracted to him, she admitted inwardly, but no way did she owe him that amount of truth.
As she studied him a snaking curl of warmth stirred low in her pelvis and something tightened even deeper inside her, making her shift uneasily in her seat. The hard, masculine lines of his compellingly beautiful face and the suppressed ferocity of his stunningly intense eyes welded her attention to him.
The first time she had seen Bastien she had known that she had never seen a more beautiful male specimen, and in the two years that had since passed that fact remained the absolute truth. Bastien was gorgeous. She knew it and he had to know it too.
Perspiration beaded her short upper lip, and as a member of staff stepped up to the table to refresh their wine glasses she finally dragged her attention from Bastien and breathed in deep.
‘Stefan’s wife is a fantastic chef,’ she remarked, after savouring the first mouthful of a roasted pear dessert served with chocolate sauce and then pushing the plate away in defeat. ‘But I can’t find room for another bite...’
‘Coffee?’ Bastien prompted.
‘No, thanks...’ Lilah tensed as he rose fluidly out of his seat and strolled, jungle-cat-graceful, towards her.
‘I react like a teenager around you,’ Bastien murmured thickly. ‘I can’t wait one minute longer.’
Lilah pushed her hands down on the table-edge and levered herself upright, the layers of her dress spilling out round her in peach abundance. Time to pay the piper, she thought crazily.
Bastien didn’t immediately touch her. Instead he lowered his dark head and circled her mouth almost teasingly with his own, touching delicate nerve-endings that screamed with awareness to send pulses of heat shooting down through her. Her head swam a little...her knees wobbled.
With a guttural sound low in his throat, Bastien swept her up in his arms.
‘I was so angry with you last night when I heard about you kissing Josh,’ he told her unexpectedly as he carried her up the stone staircase, contriving that feat as easily as if she weighed no more than a child. ‘Don’t let another man touch you in any way while you’re with me.’
Her senses still drowning from that extraordinarily intoxicating kiss, Lilah looked up at him with dazed blue eyes and blinked. ‘Not much risk of that.’
‘Why not? You’re a beauty. I saw it... Josh saw it,’ he grated in harsh reminder.
‘But you see things in me that I don’t,’ she muttered uncomfortably, thinking of the conventionally beautiful fashion models he generally took to his bed.
In comparison, she was an aberration. Each and every one of her predecessors that she had seen had been tall, blonde and classically lovely, with Marielle the perfect example of that ideal. Lilah, however, was small and kind of skinny. She had certainly been way too skinny and small in the bust and hip department for any of the boys to look at while she was at school, at an age where having curves had seemed so very important.
‘I know that I want you,’ Bastien spelt out. ‘Everything else fades in the face of that.’
‘Everything?’ Lilah questioned in disbelief.
‘Everything...’ Bastien husked, breathing in the coconut scent of her shampoo, the faint aroma of the cosmetics she had applied, the fragrance that was uniquely and alluringly hers. And those eyes, he savoured, those sapphire-blue eyes that shone like jewels...
He settled her down on the bed in her room, and the hunger driving him spooked him more than just a little as he looked down at her. That hunger would fade as soon as he’d had her, he told himself cynically, and in all likelihood even the sex would be a disappointment. How could it be otherwise when she had no experience? She couldn’t possibly be a truly sensual woman, his rational mind assured him. No truly sensual woman could have stayed untouched as
long as she had. She might light up when he looked at her, move in his arms as though she were a sensually aware woman, but it was unlikely that she would have much to offer.
He plucked off her shoes, resisting a decidedly warped urge to stroke those tiny feet of hers. Her virginity was unsettling him, Bastien decided, desperate to suppress the strange thoughts and reactions assailing him. But if she was telling him the truth—and he had to believe it was the truth—she would be more his than any other woman had ever been. And for some peculiar reason he liked that idea, he acknowledged in bewilderment. He really liked that idea.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Lilah whispered awkwardly as he ran down the zip on her dress.
‘Sex. What else?’
‘So I asked a stupid question...deal with it,’ Lilah cut back without skipping a beat.
Above her head, an unholy grin slashed Bastien’s firmly modelled mouth. He eased the dress off a slight white shoulder and rolled the sleeves down her slim arms, completely attuned to the rising tempo of her breathing.
‘I’m not going to harm you,’ Bastien breathed with husky assurance. ‘Not in any way.’
‘I’ve heard it can hurt,’ Lilah told him stubbornly.
‘You make the prospect of having sex with me sound like some form of medieval torture,’ Bastien growled.
‘I’m going to shut up now. Zipping my mouth,’ Lilah spelt out jerkily.
Bastien tugged off the dress and tossed it in a careless heap on the carpet.
‘I saw the price tag on that dress, Bastien. You can’t treat it like that...it’s indecent!’
Bastien flung back his handsome dark head and laughed out loud. ‘I thought you were zipping it? Keep quiet...you’re making me nervous.’
‘What have you got to be nervous about?’ Lilah demanded in wonderment.
She was finding it a huge challenge not to simply dive below the sheets. There she was, with her body on display, skinny as a rail, clad only in little pale pink lacy pieces of lingerie, and she was being forced to pose like some pantomime seductress on a silk-clad bed. Goosebumps rose on her exposed skin.
Bastien slid a hand into his pocket and withdrew a jewel box. ‘This is for you.’
Lilah sat up and took the opportunity to hug her knees, covering up her all-too-bare body as best she could. ‘I don’t want gifts, Bastien.’
‘You will wear it to please me, koukla mou. The first time I saw you I wanted to see you in diamonds.’ Bastien flipped open the lid on an exquisite shimmering diamond pendant on a chain. He removed it from the box and clasped it round her slender neck.
Taken aback, Lilah didn’t move a muscle as he put the pendant on her, feeling the diamond settle cold and heavy against her chilled skin. Bastien stepped back from the bed to remove his jacket and unbutton his shirt, but the whole time his attention was fixed to her.
Lilah met dark golden eyes, tawny as a lion’s, and her skin blazed as though he had set her on fire, all sense of being cool in temperature and cold with nerves instantly evaporating. Beneath his bronzed skin he flexed washboard abs and well-developed pectoral muscles, which made her stare for a second or two. He was what a friend had once described as ‘built’—powerfully masculine in every way.
She glanced away as his long, tanned fingers reached for the waistband of his trousers, cursing her shyness, her awful self-consciousness with her own body, never mind his. He tossed some foil packets down by the bed, and the nape of her neck prickled.
He came down on the bed still in his boxers, and with the flick of a finger unfastened her wispy bra and pulled it away. She felt her nipples bead, tightening into pointed peaks, and then all of a sudden, or so it seemed to her in her heightened state of nerves, he was laying her down against the pillows and touching those agonisingly sensitive buds with his mouth and his fingers.
A little shudder racked her, and then another. Sensation was breaking through her defences as her breasts tingled and swelled, responding to his attention.
‘At least put out the light!’ she exclaimed.
‘You’re beautiful. I need to look at you.’
‘I don’t want you looking,’ she gritted between clenched teeth.
‘Close your eyes and pretend I’m not,’ Bastien suggested.
Sniping back at him became an impossibility while he was tracing a trail down her slender body with his mouth—kissing here, licking there, discovering the areas of her midriff that responded to his blatant teasing with wild enthusiasm and then slowly shifting down to more intimate areas. His fingers tugged at the waist of her knickers and she stopped breathing. She felt his breath on her...there...where it shouldn’t be. He found the most achingly sensitive place of all with his clever fingers, and her hips jerked and her breath hitched and she closed her eyes, blocking out the bedroom while becoming even more insanely aware of Bastien’s every move.
‘You’re really practised at this, aren’t you?’ Lilah commented gruffly.
‘We’re not about to pursue that subject.’
‘No... Oh!’ A strangled exclamation broke involuntarily from her lips as he stroked his tongue across the little nub of nerve-endings at the apex of her thighs.
With a strangled groan, Bastien came up over her again and crushed her parted lips under his, his tongue plunging only once, but deep, into the moist interior of her mouth, somehow igniting a ball of heat in her pelvis. Startled blue eyes flew wide and clashed with gold circled by lush black lashes.
‘Oh...’ Bastien said for her, with a wolfish grin that made her tummy flip in a somersault.
Feeling like a child who had foolishly stuck her hand in the fire, Lilah closed her eyes again circumspectly. He punished her by returning to his former activity, his fingertips grazing the inside of her slender thighs, where she had never been touched, and every single point of contact tingled and fired hot, like a burn. He used his mouth on her clitoris and it felt unbearably good, with sensation firing through her on all cylinders as the little tickles and prickles of uncontrollable pleasure mounted and she could no longer stay still. Her neck extended and her hips shifted and rose.
Bastien was touching her so gently. She had not imagined that he could be gentle in bed—had, in truth, been braced for passion, aggression and impatience. He slid a finger into her tight sheath and then another...tender, subtle, tormentingly pleasurable. Her blood was pounding in her veins, her heart was racing, and her whole body was damp with perspiration because everything she was feeling had swiftly become so shockingly intense.
She gave up on the losing battle to resist and opened her mouth on a gasp of reaction. Indeed, she was all reaction now, as waves of response coursed through her in an unstoppable tide. Every tiny caress and exploration he executed engulfed her in another wash of sensation. A tight feeling nestled at the heart of her and she shifted impatiently up towards Bastien, fighting the hollow sense of tortured frustration he had awakened without even fully grasping what it was.
‘Bastien!’ she exclaimed.
Burnished golden eyes assailed hers. ‘Tell me you want me.’
‘You know I do!’ she flared, with a bitterness she couldn’t hide.
‘You always did, didn’t you?’ Bastien grated.
‘What do you want? A trophy?’ Lilah gasped.
‘You are my trophy,’ Bastien told her, his skilled fingertips moving with expert precision at her tender core and setting off a chain reaction inside her.
The mushroom of heat penned inside Lilah suddenly surged up, with a force that blindsided her and overflowed. Out of her control, her body bucked and twisted and convulsed as the paroxysms of a powerful climax rippled through her slender frame.
Bastien ripped open a foil packet with his strong white teeth. He didn’t want to hurt her, he didn’t want to harm her in any way, but now she was as wet and receptive as she
would ever be. He dragged a pillow under her to tip her hips up more and settled between her spread thighs.
The pleasure Bastien had meted out was like a powerful drug that took time to wear off. Lilah was still in a daze when she felt the pressure of Bastien’s entry stretching her tender flesh. Apprehension made her stiffen, a heartbeat before the sharp sting of his full possession made her catch her breath on a huff of dismay. He withdrew, hooked her legs higher and thrust into her yielding body again. This time there was no pain—only the amazing sensation of his fullness inside her.
‘It’s not hurting,’ she told him in relief.
A sheen of perspiration dampened Bastien’s lean, handsome features—for such care, such temperate precision, had not come without cost. ‘Se thelo...you feel unbelievable, hara mou.’
He rolled his hips in a wicked snaking motion that sent extraordinary sensation flooding through Lilah’s pelvis, and her eyes went wide with surprise. As he began to move, the first jolt of excitement careened through her without warning, and then the heat and pressure at the heart of her began to build again. It was a little like hitching a ride on a comet, she thought dizzily, with new responses released and overwhelming her.
Hunger sank talon claws of need into her very bones. Her heart slammed against her ribcage. Her body thrummed and pulsed with rippling darts of pleasure that only stoked her rising hunger. And then the intensity climbed to an unbearable height and pushed her over into the intoxicating grip of wave after wave of sweet, drowning pleasure.
It was over...it was done, Lilah reflected in a daze, crazily conscious of the crash of Bastien’s heart against hers, the brush of his hair against her cheek, the dampness of his big, powerful body against hers, the sheer weight of him and the incredible intimacy of their position. Well, she had no complaints, she conceded thoughtfully. In fact, he had made the experience amazing.
In the process of rebooting, after the longest, hottest climax in his considerable experience, Bastien breathed again. He rolled off her and caught her back into his arms, pressing a kiss to her brow without even thinking about it...