‘Piers!’ As she gasped his name, helpless to defend herself from what she was feeling, he seemed to sense her confusion, gentling his kiss.
He told her fiercely, ‘It’s all right...it’s all right. I feel the same way. I want you so much it hurts,’ he added, groaning out loud as he ran his hand down her nightdress-clad back and closed his eyes.
‘Let me take this off, Georgia,’ he begged her. ‘Let me see you...all of you...’
Just for a moment Georgia hesitated. She was by nature very modest—too much so, she sometimes thought—but as though he guessed what she was thinking Piers whispered to her gently, ‘You want to see me too, don’t you? You want to touch me...hold me...’
Her breath catching in her throat, Georgia gave a soft, panting gasp of assent. What he was suggesting, offering, was too alluring, too tempting for her to refuse, her eyes already glistening with emotion at the thought of the sensual riches he was promising her.
‘Let me take this off, then,’ he told her, carefully sliding the straps of her nightdress free of her shoulders. Even that light touch of his fingertips against her naked skin was enough to bring her out in a mass of sensually aroused goosebumps, and Georgia knew before her nightdress slid free of her naked body, to reveal them in all their darkly pink, feminine glory, that her nipples were as eagerly aroused as two rosebuds, just waiting for the hot, silky warmth of the morning sun to coax them into full flower.
Only what her nipples yearned for was not the touch of the summer sun, but the stroke of Piers’s fingers; the moist heat of his mouth. The intimacy of her own thoughts was enough to make her shudder visibly.
He had never seen a woman betray her arousal, her need, so innocently nor so proudly, Piers acknowledged, and he had certainly never felt so awed, so humbled, so blessed in knowing he was the reason for that arousal.
She might not love him but Georgia wanted him, and somehow he knew instinctively that this level of desire was as unfamiliar to her as loving her so intensely was unfamiliar to him.
Very carefully he reached out and cupped her naked breasts, looking first into her eyes and then down to the silken globes he was cherishing with his hands and his gaze, before telling her thickly, ‘You are so beautiful...so perfect...’
‘No...’ Georgia began to deny, but before she could finish he was kissing her, gently at first, and then with increasing passion as he slid his hands around her back, bringing her naked breasts into direct contact with the warm, silky abrasion of his chest. Georgia thought the sensation of his body pressed so close to hers, his heart pumping so strongly that it could have been beating for both of them, was going to make her faint.
‘No one else has ever done this with you before, have they?’ Piers asked her insistently, his emotions overruling his natural caution as the instinctive knowledge that she was giving herself to him with an intimacy she had never shared with anyone else hit him like a jolt of adrenaline released into his bloodstream.
As he spoke Piers’s hand was returning to cover her naked breast with an open possessiveness that made Georgia’s heart turn over inside her chest. Just for a moment, with that look in his eyes, she could almost convince herself that he loved her.
‘If just my caressing your breast makes you feel like this,’ Piers breathed hotly as he felt the mute shudders of delight run through her body, betraying everything that she was feeling to him, ‘just think how it’s going to feel when we do something more intimate.’
Something more intimate! Georgia’s eyes started to widen with a mixture of excitement and alarm. She was already quivering so intensely with the extent of the arousal and longing coursing through her that she didn’t think she could actually bear to endure any more pleasure. But Piers was already bending his head, whispering such things against her mouth and into her ears that her whole body burned to hear them—and burned even hotter to know them.
And then, somewhere in the town, a dog barked.
Immediately Georgia froze. Ben... Ben was stolen, lost, in danger, and here she was lying in Piers’s arms, indulging herself selfishly, not even thinking about him.
‘No,’ she told Piers sharply, pushing him away, her eyes widening with distress at her own selfishness.
‘No?’ Piers tensed. Another few seconds and he would have been unable to stop himself from telling her how much he loved her, unable to stop himself from showing her how much he loved her. He ought to be grateful that she had stopped him and brought him to his senses. He was glad. There was no point in him making the situation between them even worse by declaring a love for her that she quite plainly did not want.