One Stolen Kiss (18 page)

“
No,” she answered. The water felt a tiny bit colder. “I know you don’t want to kiss me.”

“
I do want to kiss you.”

“
For them, you mean.” She stared out at the boats.

“
There’s a good reason I haven’t kissed you yet.”

“
I know.” Her forehead dropped onto her own arms.

Why was this happening now?
And why did he say ‘yet’?

She shivered as his fingertip drew across her shoulder-blades again, like at home in London. This time, his hand closed around her opposite shoulder at the end, and his lips pressed down against the spot where he had started, with the tiniest tickle of stubble against her damp skin.

It’s supposed to look real.
She was forgetting the situation, in her own selfish state of mind. She hadn’t earned the right to expect a real kiss. She still owed him for the one she had stolen.

Christie took a deep lungful of air to compose herself, and raised her head a fraction.

“Movie-star kiss?” she said, to ascertain. “For the cameras?”

“
Like this,” he told her.

One arm still around her shoulders, he tilted her chin up towards him.

The sunlight briefly caught in her eye, dazzling her, and then she felt the warm touch of his lips meeting hers.

It was as if she could hear the world stop turning, exactly as it had seemed to do on that night in Switzerland.

“Make that two good reasons,” he amended, under his breath.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

The sun, the sky, the pool, the view, and the boats – everything suddenly fell away around them.

There was only the intense, sweet torture of their lips meeting a second time, lingering further – and still holding back.

“So that’s a movie-star kiss…” Christie breathed, her whole body tingling unbearably.

“
I think ours might be better,” Adrik admitted, letting his forehead rest gently on hers.

Both of his arms had found their way around her now, barely holding her in the water, as if she might slip away at any moment. She knew that her own had crept up around his neck, with the same tentative caution, not knowing what would happen next.

“Why did you think I don’t want to kiss you?” he asked.

“
Because…”

She hesitated, but he didn’t, capturing her mouth again with a more urgent, but still controlled pressure. The placid pool had now become a pirate ship on high seas, seeming to tilt them towards one another, with a life of its own.

“I haven’t told you my reason,” he said, still so close, their lips brushed as he spoke. “Reasons…” he corrected himself again, succumbing to another chaste kiss-for-the-cameras, that felt like it was anything but discreet.

Christie dared herself to ask.

She needed to know. For her own sanity.

“
What are your reasons?” she queried, once she had reluctantly managed to tear her lips away from his.

“
One…” he began, and added another kiss for punctuation. “I knew that if I kissed you… and you changed your mind about what was happening… you wouldn’t have the opportunity to say ‘no’…”

“
Oh…” It wasn’t what she was expecting to hear at all. But perhaps…

“
And two,” he continued, this time dropping his head to nuzzle her neck. His hands strayed, exploring her spine and hips, drawing her dangerously close. “I just realised… that if I kissed you… I wouldn’t be able to stop.”

She caught her breath, as skin met skin beneath the surface of the pool, out of sight of the paparazzi cameras. He steadied her carefully, raising his head to look down into her eyes.

“Do you understand me?” he asked, and she heard the faint warning.

He couldn’t kiss her properly. Not like that, again.

Not
yet…

“
Yes,” she replied at last.

“
So I’m going to ask you to make a choice,” he said. “Before things go too far where we are right now. Either you come back to the terrace, and I’ll put some sun-block on you and some ice down my shorts – or we go back indoors, and make a real mess of that bed.”

Christie’s voice had escaped her, but he waited, his eyes never once leaving hers.

“Bed…” she whispered.

He left a pause, almost in case it had been a slip-up.

“Say it again.”

“
Bed,” she repeated. All of the scenery surrounding them was now surplus to requirements. “Please, Adrik.”

There was another pause, that was only filled by an aching, overwhelming need.

“Okay.” He held her shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead. “Say goodbye to the cameras. They’re not invited.”

Christie glanced back over her shoulder to where the boats were anchored as he led her by the hand out of the pool. But the paparazzi boat, whether they had gotten their images, or had been spooked by something else, was already speeding away down the lake.

Adrik grabbed the ice-bucket from the tray next to the loungers, as they passed.

“
In case you change your mind at any point,” he teased. “I’ll most likely need this.”

Christie was glad of his firm grip leading her, as her legs were already like spaghetti before she stumbled over the step to follow him through the glass doors into the bedroom.

What if he’s right? What if I can’t handle it?

The silk voile partition wafted aside in the breeze as they walked through, to be confronted by the awaiting and ominously decorated bed.

It looked as though it could eat them whole.

Christie stared at it, while Adrik deposited the ice-bucket on the baroque-style bedside table. He promptly ran his icy-cold finger down the middle of her back, eliciting another shiver from her, as he turned her towards him.

“I like this bed,” he remarked. “It’s like mine. No posts or pillars. No nasty evil headboard.”

The headboard and footboard on this one were plain white, while at home his were black, with the same subtly padded leather, but she knew what other bed he was referring to.

Wrought iron, decorative, with lots of useful ins and outs and embellishments…

“
So…” she gulped. “Do you think it would only be safe for us to kiss properly if you were tied down?”

“
It’s the only reason you got away with just a kiss before,” he replied. “But I’d like to see you try this time.”

She suddenly found herself flat on the bedspread with a gasp, in the midst of a snowstorm of rose-petals. Adrik had controlled her landing with a hand supporting either end of her spine, and landed in turn half-astride her, one knee pressed into the bedcover between hers.

“What was that?” she asked, blowing a rose-petal away as it stuck to her nose.

“
Judo,” he replied, mildly. “But we’re not here to wrestle.”

Other petals had settled on her. He found one near her navel and set his fingertip on it, drawing it around on her skin in a swirling pattern. She tensed immediately, feeling her muscles wanting to contract around it, chase after it.

“No,” he murmured, stopping. “Relax. Not tense. See where the journey takes you.”

Christie took a deep breath and tried to release the tension in her body, as the petal started to move again, even slower, finding a pace she could cope with. Adrik propped himself on his other elbow beside her. She flinched involuntarily, as he leaned in, still doodling on her belly with the petal, and blew another interloper away from the front of her neck.

“Better start getting used to it, unless you want me to stop already,” he told her. “Because there are a lot of these to play with, stuck to you at the moment.”

To illustrate, he reached across her to another, adhered to her wrist, and drew it slowly up her arm. At the same time he lowered his head to one on the very edge of where her bikini-top skimmed the upper curve of her breast, and kissed it away.

“Maybe I’ll eat them off you,” he suggested, showing her the petal in his teeth. “Shame – I don’t know what chemicals they use on them. I might die before I finish.”

“
Please don’t,” Christie replied, already aching and wanting more than she could stand.

“
Don’t what?” he asked. His hand strayed to tease a petal from the edge of her briefs, moving it down her inner thigh. “Don’t do this?” He licked her earlobe, catching another. “Or that?”

“
Don’t die,” she said. A slight breeze from the terrace again ruffled the petals, on the bed and on her body, heightening the sensation even further. “Eating rose petals off me.”

“
Ah.” The one on her inner thigh traced around in a small circle, and she recalled the night with the stockings. “Can you do the Heimlich manoeuvre?”

“
Of course.”

“
I guess I’ll be all right, then.” His lips followed the line of the halter-tie back down her bikini, biting it gently. “I’d love to cut these strings right off you. But you wouldn’t be able to trust me with them afterwards.”

“
I thought it was
you
that couldn’t trust
me
with them…?”

“
Did I say it wrong?” He looked up at her, angling an eyebrow. “Hmmm.
More-zhna.
”

“
Stop saying that!” Christie wriggled in frustration, but it did nothing other than shift the petals around, and reattach themselves to her. “I’m starting to think it means the same as
Puta
.”

“
Ssshh – unless you want the parrot to join us,” he joked. “No, it doesn’t mean that. I’ll tell you later. It’s just a regular Russian phrase. Where was I? I think I was here…”

She felt the petal, under his fingertip on her thigh, sliding upwards and inwards again, and something inside her body focused on it, painfully, like a magnet pulling from within.

“…And here.”

His teeth grazed a cup of her bikini, drawing it to a peak, and his tongue caught the petal resting over her desperate nipple. Her internal magnet was suddenly polarised at both ends.

She tried to hold in a moan as he dragged the first petal around in a lazy swirl, over the front of her briefs.

“
One of us has a head start,” he remarked. He lifted his hand, and blew the petal from the tip of his finger. “Someone needs to cool off.”

He propped himself up further, twisted aside and reached into the ice-bucket, fishing out a half-melted cube. Christie braced herself, unsure what to expect, but he merely put it in his mouth, holding it between his teeth.

“Are you too hot?” she asked, concerned.

Adrik nodded, and settled himself alongside again, on his elbow. He moved his hand underneath her to cup the nape of her neck, the fingers of his other hand tracing her collarbones and toying with the string ties of her bikini, lightly brushing away the occasional tenacious rose petal. An icy-cold droplet from the ice-cube in his mouth fell to land in the centre of her lower lip.

He moved in to chase it, stroking the quickly melting ice around the contours, leaving her panting and breathless. Within what seemed like only seconds, the ice-cube collapsed into tiny shards across her lips.

“
No kiss for you,” he warned – but the very tip of his tongue, equally as chilled, traced the same outline, sweeping away the last remains of the ice.

Just when Christie thought her mind couldn’t possibly contain any more of his games, she felt the bikini-top slip down under his fingers, and realised his other hand must have undone the knot in the halter beneath her, while she was distracted.

“See what I mean?” He did kiss her cheek, and her neck, and her collarbone, while the bikini slid even lower, the trailing strings now tickling her waist. “Not even a kiss, and I can’t stop myself. But you can still say no.”

“
I don’t want you to stop.”

“
Think you can keep up?” His green eyes were dark and sardonic as he posed the question. A captive rose petal was already working its way in a torturously slow spiral, around and towards her second hungry and now naked peak. “I think you might still be holding something back from me.”

The petal snagged as she puckered more tightly under his touch, but his fingertip continued, skin to skin. The inner magnet tugged, trying to draw his teasing hand down with it, and she was unable to stop herself arching towards him. Adrik caught and steadied her at the waist, his mouth taking over from his fingers, tongue licking away the rose petal, lips pinching and bruising her already tender flesh, sending sweet shocks of pain down her body and a sob of release from her throat.

“Not yet,” he said gently, and the bikini-top was gone altogether, in another stealthy move. “You’re only just starting.”

“
Kiss me,” she heard herself beg, feeling his hand slide over her hip, under the ties at one side of the briefs. “Please…”

“
I intend to,” he replied, and returned to her other nipple, repeating the same trick with a rose petal, only this time using the tip of his tongue to swirl it around – until the petal was forgotten and his tongue took full control, making her whimper. “All over. Everywhere that I didn’t get to kiss you the first time…”

The bikini briefs surrendered to him as well, as if they had never even been tied.

Trembling like one of the many petals in the breeze, Christie tried to slow his progress as he kissed his way down her sternum and solar plexus. His body, if anything, felt more heated and urgent than her own under her timid hands, her attempts to waylay him in order not to break concentration only seeming to increase the tension in his muscles, the hunger in his touch as his hands gripped her hips in response. She had to succumb to the myriad small shudders already washing through her, without a clue of what new sensations could possibly be left to come.

Adrik paused over her navel, teasing with his lips and tongue.

“Anything you want to say?” he asked, between kisses. “Or tell me about?”

“
I haven’t got your diamonds…” She gasped, as he slid one hand back up over her ribs and breast to tweak a nipple, urging her to respond. A million tiny stars exploded in the periphery of her vision, accusingly, almost. She bit down on another cry when he increased the pressure, squeezing, and flicked the pad of his thumb back and forth over the tight bud. “Jeez – I don’t know where they are…”

“
Interesting that should come up,” he mused, and moved down an inch, kissing the sensitive spot directly below her belly-button. “What about now – anything you want to say?”