The Mills & Boon Stars Collection. Cathy Williams

light up when he looked at her, move in his arms as though she were a sensually aware woman, but it was unlikely that she would have much to offer.

      He plucked off her shoes, resisting a decidedly warped urge to stroke those tiny feet of hers. Her virginity was unsettling him, Bastien decided, desperate to suppress the strange thoughts and reactions assailing him. But if she was telling him the truth—and he had to believe it was the truth—she would be more his than any other woman had ever been. And for some peculiar reason he liked that idea, he acknowledged in bewilderment. He really liked that idea.

      ‘What are you thinking about?’ Lilah whispered awkwardly as he ran down the zip on her dress.

      ‘Sex. What else?’

      ‘So I asked a stupid question...deal with it,’ Lilah cut back without skipping a beat.

      Above her head, an unholy grin slashed Bastien’s firmly modelled mouth. He eased the dress off a slight white shoulder and rolled the sleeves down her slim arms, completely attuned to the rising tempo of her breathing.

      ‘I’m not going to harm you,’ Bastien breathed with husky assurance. ‘Not in any way.’

      ‘I’ve heard it can hurt,’ Lilah told him stubbornly.

      ‘You make the prospect of having sex with me sound like some form of medieval torture,’ Bastien growled.

      ‘I’m going to shut up now. Zipping my mouth,’ Lilah spelt out jerkily.

      Bastien tugged off the dress and tossed it in a careless heap on the carpet.

      ‘I saw the price tag on that dress, Bastien. You can’t treat it like that...it’s indecent!’

      Bastien flung back his handsome dark head and laughed out loud. ‘I thought you were zipping it? Keep quiet...you’re making me nervous.’

      ‘What have you got to be nervous about?’ Lilah demanded in wonderment.

      She was finding it a huge challenge not to simply dive below the sheets. There she was, with her body on display, skinny as a rail, clad only in little pale pink lacy pieces of lingerie, and she was being forced to pose like some pantomime seductress on a silk-clad bed. Goosebumps rose on her exposed skin.

      Bastien slid a hand into his pocket and withdrew a jewel box. ‘This is for you.’

      Lilah sat up and took the opportunity to hug her knees, covering up her all-too-bare body as best she could. ‘I don’t want gifts, Bastien.’

      ‘You will wear it to please me, koukla mou. The first time I saw you I wanted to see you in diamonds.’ Bastien flipped open the lid on an exquisite shimmering diamond pendant on a chain. He removed it from the box and clasped it round her slender neck.

      Taken aback, Lilah didn’t move a muscle as he put the pendant on her, feeling the diamond settle cold and heavy against her chilled skin. Bastien stepped back from the bed to remove his jacket and unbutton his shirt, but the whole time his attention was fixed to her.

      Lilah met dark golden eyes, tawny as a lion’s, and her skin blazed as though he had set her on fire, all sense of being cool in temperature and cold with nerves instantly evaporating. Beneath his bronzed skin he flexed washboard abs and well-developed pectoral muscles, which made her stare for a second or two. He was what a friend had once described as ‘built’—powerfully masculine in every way.

      She glanced away as his long, tanned fingers reached for the waistband of his trousers, cursing her shyness, her awful self-consciousness with her own body, never mind his. He tossed some foil packets down by the bed, and the nape of her neck prickled.

      He came down on the bed still in his boxers, and with the flick of a finger unfastened her wispy bra and pulled it away. She felt her nipples bead, tightening into pointed peaks, and then all of a sudden, or so it seemed to her in her heightened state of nerves, he was laying her down against the pillows and touching those agonisingly sensitive buds with his mouth and his fingers.

      A little shudder racked her, and then another. Sensation was breaking through her defences as her breasts tingled and swelled, responding to his attention.

      ‘At least put out the light!’ she exclaimed.

      ‘You’re beautiful. I need to look at you.’

      ‘I don’t want you looking,’ she gritted between clenched teeth.

      ‘Close your eyes and pretend I’m not,’ Bastien suggested.

      Sniping back at him became an impossibility while he was tracing a trail down her slender body with his mouth—kissing here, licking there, discovering the areas of her midriff that responded to his blatant teasing with wild enthusiasm and then slowly shifting down to more intimate areas. His fingers tugged at the waist of her knickers and she stopped breathing. She felt his breath on her...there...where it shouldn’t be. He found the most achingly sensitive place of all with his clever fingers, and her hips jerked and her breath hitched and she closed her eyes, blocking out the bedroom while becoming even more insanely aware of Bastien’s every move.

      ‘You’re really practised at this, aren’t you?’ Lilah commented gruffly.

      ‘We’re not about to pursue that subject.’

      ‘No... Oh!’ A strangled exclamation broke involuntarily from her lips as he stroked his tongue across the little nub of nerve-endings at the apex of her thighs.

      With a strangled groan, Bastien came up over her again and crushed her parted lips under his, his tongue plunging only once, but deep, into the moist interior of her mouth, somehow igniting a ball of heat in her pelvis. Startled blue eyes flew wide and clashed with gold circled by lush black lashes.

      ‘Oh...’ Bastien said for her, with a wolfish grin that made her tummy flip in a somersault.

      Feeling like a child who had foolishly stuck her hand in the fire, Lilah closed her eyes again circumspectly. He punished her by returning to his former activity, his fingertips grazing the inside of her slender thighs, where she had never been touched, and every single point of contact tingled and fired hot, like a burn. He used his mouth on her clitoris and it felt unbearably good, with sensation firing through her on all cylinders as the little tickles and prickles of uncontrollable pleasure mounted and she could no longer stay still. Her neck extended and her hips shifted and rose.

      Bastien was touching her so gently. She had not imagined that he could be gentle in bed—had, in truth, been braced for passion, aggression and impatience. He slid a finger into her tight sheath and then another...tender, subtle, tormentingly pleasurable. Her blood was pounding in her veins, her heart was racing, and her whole body was damp with perspiration because everything she was feeling had swiftly become so shockingly intense.

      She gave up on the losing battle to resist and opened her mouth on a gasp of reaction. Indeed, she was all reaction now, as waves of response coursed through her in an unstoppable tide. Every tiny caress and exploration he executed engulfed her in another wash of sensation. A tight feeling nestled at the heart of her and she shifted impatiently up towards Bastien, fighting the hollow sense of tortured frustration he had awakened without even fully grasping what it was.

      ‘Bastien!’ she exclaimed.

      Burnished golden eyes assailed hers. ‘Tell me you want me.’

      ‘You know I do!’ she flared, with a bitterness she couldn’t hide.

      ‘You always did, didn’t you?’ Bastien grated.

      ‘What do you want? A trophy?’ Lilah gasped.

      ‘You are my trophy,’ Bastien told her, his skilled fingertips moving with expert precision at her tender core and setting off a chain reaction inside her.

      The mushroom of heat penned inside Lilah suddenly surged up, with a force that blindsided her and overflowed. Out of her control, her body bucked and twisted and convulsed as the paroxysms of a powerful climax rippled through her slender