The City-Girl Bride. PENNY JORDAN

blazing out of his heavily-lidded eyes, Maggie exhaled.

      The feel of her soft sweet breath gusting warmly against his bare skin made Finn grit his teeth against the ferocity of his reaction to her. The air ached with the sexual tension stretching between them.

      As Finn leaned forward to kiss first one of her naked breasts and then the other, Maggie moaned sharply, her body arching towards him in mute supplication.

      It was too much for Finn’s self-control; she was too much for his self-control. Quickly removing the rest of her clothes and his own, Finn lifted Maggie onto the bed.

      The coldness of the cotton duvet beneath her bare back made Maggie shiver, but the heat of her desire for Finn soon burned away that cold. Her body throbbed with longing for him, and the feel of his hands on her skin as he lowered himself against her and slid them beneath her to lift her hips to meet his own made her cry out, a wild tormented female sound of need that echoed the turbulence darkening her eyes.

      ‘Finn,’ she cried out his name as she wrapped herself around him, pressing wild hot kisses against his skin, his throat, his jaw, his mouth, holding it captive with her own whilst her body shook. ‘Now, Finn,’ she begged him passionately. ‘Now.’

      It was the force of the river at full flood, the warmth of the sun on a tropical beach, the cool magical clarity of a frosty sky married to the purity of newly fallen snow; it was every pleasure she had ever know intensified a million times. He filled her body with joy and her heart with an emotion so intense that it spilled from her eyes in pure gleaming tears and from her mouth in a golden sound of loving words. It was a revelation, and somehow an affirmation. It was a world she had always stubbornly refused to believe could exist and at the same time a world a secret part of her had always longed to inhabit. It was. It was Finn and it was love. And as her body came down from the heights his had taken it to and she lay drifting on the soft safe warm afterswell of pleasure, lying at peace in his arms, Maggie turned to look at the man who had just totally changed her life.

      Gazing deep into his eyes, she lifted her fingertips to his face, tracing its contours wonderingly. Looking back at her, Finn took her hand and held it against his lips, tenderly kissing her fingers.

      ‘I love you.’

      Maggie could see shock followed by an intense burn of emotion darkening Finn’s eyes as she said the simple words.

      Saying them had shocked her as well—so much so, in fact, that she immediately longed to call them back, wondering frantically why she had ever uttered them, furiously angry with herself for the vulnerability they were now causing her to feel. As though desperate to escape them she tried to turn away from Finn, but he refused to allow her to do so, taking hold of her instead, his hands gentle on the tense resistance of her body.

      ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked her quietly.

      ‘Nothing,’ Maggie lied sharply as she tried to evade the quiet depth of his searching gaze.

      ‘Yes, there is.’ Finn contradicted her. ‘You’re angry because you said you love me.’

      ‘No,’ Maggie denied fiercely, but she could tell from the expression in Finn’s eyes that he didn’t believe her.

      ‘I don’t know why I said it.’ She tried to cover herself. ‘It must have been some kind of knee-jerk adolescent reaction to the fact that we…’

      When she stopped Finn supplied softly for her, ‘That we made love? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

      Maggie shook her head. She had been intending to use the words ‘had sex’, if for no other reason than to remind herself of just what the reality of their situation was. But something in Finn’s eyes had warned her against doing so.

      ‘We’re both adults, Maggie,’ Finn was telling her gently. ‘Why should it be so difficult for us to use the word ‘love’ about what we’ve just shared, about one another? There was love between us. And to deny that…’

      He paused and shook his head, whilst Maggie, thoroughly unnerved by what he was saying burst out sharply, ‘We hardly know one another. We can’t.’