Penny Jordan Tribute Collection. PENNY JORDAN

running hot with colour, his chest lifting and falling as savagely as though he had been deprived of oxygen. His forefinger rubbed over her bottom lip, and when she sucked on it his whole body jerked fiercely.

      ‘I want to see you, Xavier,’ she told him softly. ‘I want to touch you… taste you… I want. I want you to take me to bed and pleasure me, fill me.’

      Taking his hand, she placed it against her naked breast.

      ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please now, Xavier. Please…’

      ‘This is crazy. You know that, don’t you?’ she heard him mutter. ‘You are not your sister, you do not… I have not… I am not prepared…’ His voice had become thick and raw as he bent his head to kiss the exposed curve of her shoulder, her throat, his hands sliding down her back to pull her urgently against him.

      ‘There is nothing for you to worry about,’ she told him.

      She felt light-headed with the intensity of her own longing—but she only felt like that because she wanted his child, she was quick to reassure herself. That, after all, was what was driving her, motivating her, even if that motivation was manifesting itself in an increasingly urgent need to touch him and be touched by him, to allow herself to luxuriate in the slow and delicious exploration of every bit of his skin, absorbing its heat, its feel, the essence of him through the sensitivity of her own pores. So that her child, their child could be impregnated through her with those memories of his father he would never otherwise be able to have?

      Ruthlessly she stifled that thought. Her child would not need a father to be there. He or she only needed a father to provide that life.

      What he was doing was reckless to the point of insanity, Xavier knew that, but he also knew that he couldn’t resist her, that he had ached for her, yearned for her too long to deny himself the soft, sweet, wanton feel of her in his arms… his bed…

      But once he had held her, loved her, he also knew that he would never be able to let her go. Could she accept his way of life… adapt to it? Would she?

      She was kissing him with increasing passion, stringing tiny, delicately tormenting little kisses around his throat, her tongue tip carefully exploring the shape of his Adam’s apple, her fingers kneading the flesh of his upper arm with unconscious sensuality. Xavier recognised his senses on overload from her deliberately erotic seduction.

      Mariella gave a small startled gasp as Xavier suddenly lifted her bodily in his arms, so that her mouth was on a level with his own as he took it in a hotly demanding and intimate kiss.

      Helplessly she succumbed to it, feeling the desire he was arousing inside her run through her veins as sweetly as melting honey. He lifted her higher, kissing her throat, his lips moving lower to the valley between her breasts, before trailing with heart-hammering slowness and delicacy to first one eagerly waiting, quivering crest and then the other, and then back again, this time to lap tormentingly at her nipple with his damp tongue tip; the leisurely languorous journey repeated again and again until her whole body was crying out in agonised frustration.

      Unable to stand the sensual torment any more, when his lips teased delicately at her nipple she buried her hands in the thick darkness of his hair and held his mouth against her body.

      Surely he must feel the fierce rhythms pulsing through her flesh; surely he must know how much she wanted him?

      Her hands tugged at his clothes, her voice whispering a soft torrent of aroused female longing that swamped Xavier’s defences.

      His hands helped hers to quickly remove the layers of clothing that separated them.

      When she finally saw the naked gleam of his flesh in the lamp-lit room, Mariella sucked in her breath on a small sob of shocked pleasure.

      In wonder she studied him as tiny but openly visible quivers betrayed her body’s excited reaction to him. So compulsively absorbed in gazing at him, she was oblivious to the effect her sensual concentration was having on Xavier himself.

      ‘If you are deliberately trying to torment me and test my self-control by looking at me like that, then I warn you that both it and I have just about reached my limit,’ he told her thickly.

      ‘Now! Are you going to come to me and put into action all those dangerously seductive promises your eyes are giving me, or do I have to come to you and make you make good those promises, because, I warn you, if I do have to then I shall be demanding payment with full interest penalties,’ he added huskily.

      For a moment Mariella couldn’t do anything. Xavier was watching her as she had been watching him. Excitement exploded inside her. She took a step towards him and then another, measuring his reaction as best she could, but it wasn’t easy given the extent of her own intense arousal.

      She was only a breath away from him now, close enough to reach out her finger and draw the tip of it recklessly down his body, teasing the silky body hair.

      ‘You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to do this,’ she breathed truthfully.

      ‘No? Well, I certainly know how much I’ve wanted you to do it,’ Xavier responded throatily, ‘and how much I’ve wanted to…’

      He gasped and shuddered as her fingertip stroked lower, and suddenly in the space of one single heartbeat she was lying on the bed, with Xavier arching over her.

      ‘Play with fire like that and you’ll make us both burn,’ he told her, his eyes darkening as he groaned. ‘Do you know what seeing that look in your eyes does to me? Do you know how much I’ve wanted to see just what colour they turn when I touch you like this?’

      Mariella hadn’t realised just how ready she was for his intimate caress until she felt his hand stroke softly over her quivering belly, his fingers gently touching the swollen mound of her sex, his gaze pinioning hers as he parted the lips of her sex and began to caress her.

      Mariella knew that she cried out, she knew too that her body arched to his touch actively seeking it, eagerly opening to it, but it was only a vague, distant knowledge, at the back of her awareness. Her self was concentrated on the mind-exploding battle to accept the intensity of her own feelings.

      Frantically she reached for Xavier. Touching him, holding him, wrapping herself around him as she pressed passionate kisses against his skin, willing, aching for him to complete what he had begun.

      And when he did enter her, moving into her, filling her moist sheathed muscles, filling her with such a soaring degree of pleasure that they and she clung to him, wanting to wring every infinitesimal sensation of pleasure from him, it was like nothing she had ever imagined feeling, a pleasure beyond any known pleasure, a sensation beyond any experienced sensation, a driven need that shocked her in its wanton compulsion as she urged him to drive deeper, harder, breaching every last barrier of her body until she knew instinctively that he could not and would not withdraw from her without giving her body the satisfaction it now craved.

      They moved together, his thrusts carrying them both, delivering a pleasure so intense she could scarcely bear it, crying out against it at the same time as she abandoned herself to it.

      She heard his guttural cry of warning and felt her body open up completely to him, the first tiny shudders of her orgasm sensitising her to the pulse of his, to the knowledge that she was receiving from him what she had so much wanted.

      Was it that knowledge that made her orgasm so intense, so fierce that she felt almost as though she could not endure so much pleasure?

      Long after it should have been over, the aftermath continued to send little shudders of sensation through her, shaking her whole body as she lay locked in Xavier’s arms.

      She had done it, instinctively she knew it. Her child, of the desert and of a man who was equally compelling, equally dangerous, had been given life.

      Reluctantly, Mariella opened her eyes. She could hear a shower running, and her whole body ached with an unfamiliar heaviness. ‘So you are awake!’

      She stiffened as she saw Xavier coming towards her,