Waking Up In His Royal Bed - Kim Lawrence Page 0,1

managed to disconnect from his stare, but only escaped as far as his mouth, which did an equal amount of damage to her nervous system.

The sharply etched angle of his carved cheekbones, the hawkish dominance of his nose blurred as his head lowered. The first kiss was a warm, tormenting whisper across her parted lips, drawing a fractured moan from her throat. The second, still soft on the side of her mouth, drew her body up into an arch as she tried to deepen the pressure. The ones that followed increased the torment until, unable to bear it any longer, she reached up, her fingers sinking deep into the thick dark hair, her hands locking on the back of his head as she dragged his face downwards, glimpsing the glitter in his dark eyes, before she pressed her mouth to his and closed her eyes.

Restraint gone, they kissed with a wild hunger, and they fell back. Warm bodies sinuously twisting to deepen the contact, driven by a passion that drove every other thought from Beatrice’s head.

‘Bea, are you coming down or shall I bring your coffee up?’

Beatrice stiffened as she was jarringly jolted back to reality. Eyes scrunched, a moan of self-recrimination locked in her throat, as without a word she rolled away from the warm body she was pressed against.

‘Weak…stupid…weak…stupid!’ she mumbled, beating herself up verbally as she swung her long legs over the side of the bed and, with a sinuous, graceful swoop, grabbed a sheet that had at some point fallen on the floor. She didn’t stop until she reached the far corner of the room, where she stood, shoulder blades pressed to the wall, holding the sheet against her body. It was an inadequate shield but better than nothing.

She glanced nervously at the door; a nightmare scenario played in her head of the door opening and Maya appearing.

‘I’ll be down just now!’ she yelled. ‘You need to go!’ she whispered, transferring her agonised glance to the man lying in her bed.

He looked in no hurry to go anywhere any time soon as he rolled onto his back, tucking one hand behind his head, causing the light sheet that lay across his narrow hips to slide another inch lower. He was totally at ease with his naked state but she was not. He was a living, breathing sculpture of perfectly formed muscles and warm olive-toned skin—just looking at him made things shift deep inside her.

The mockery in his expression was not quite in tune with the dark frustration in his heavy-lidded eyes as his glance came to rest on the swell of her full breasts above the sheet she held clutched against herself.

As he watched her struggles to control the white swathe, he visualised the slim curves beneath the tented fabric. The smooth, warm scented skin, the silk touch of her long legs as they wrapped around him. The thousand razor cuts of desire that came with the memory darkened his eyes to midnight.

‘That is not what I need, cara.’

Before she was fatally distracted by the bold challenge of the seductive gleam in his heavy-lidded eyes, the timely interruption of her sister’s voice drifting up the stairs again saved her from getting sucked back into the dangerous sexual vortex.

She clenched her even white teeth so hard she could hear the grind of enamel. She didn’t feel saved at all, or maybe she didn’t want to be saved?

‘Oh, my God!’

He grinned a slow devilish smile of invitation.

‘Oh, my God!’ she whispered again with even more feeling as she realised how close she had come to accepting the invitation in his sinful eyes. She took a deep breath and thought, Do not go there. Her eyes flickered towards the figure in the bed—again!

Once was enough—actually it was too much!

She cleared her throat. ‘I’ll be right down!’ she belted out, then directed an accusing glare at the figure occupying the bed, even though she knew the guilt was as much hers. When it came to Dante, why was she such a weak idiot? ‘Do not make this any more difficult. You need to get out of here.’

His brows, dark, straight and thick, lifted above polished ebony mocking eyes. ‘Why?’

‘You can ask that?’

He casually levered himself into a sitting position with a distracting display of contracting muscle in his washboard belly. ‘I really don’t see what your problem is.’

Eyes indignantly wide, she managed to drag her gaze upwards, not that the breadth of his muscled shoulders and chest offered much respite