Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

looked at her surroundings in confusion, momentarily disorientated by the anonymous, cream-washed walls and the nondescript paintings of a room which she had rarely been in.

      ‘But this isn’t my bedroom!’ she exclaimed in surprise. There were a number of rooms he could have chosen, including her own, which was decorated in soft, pale greens and peaches, and which she had chosen for its cool neutrality—it was feminine without being at all fussy. But at least he had not chosen to bring her to what she had always assumed was Peter’s old bedroom, with its deep crimson walls and its sporting prints and old, polished wood.

      ‘No,’ agreed Geraint quietly. ‘It isn’t.’ He shifted slightly, positioning himself so that he could stroke all the wayward curls off her face. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her.

      ‘No!’ She shook her head furiously. ‘You don’t have to say that just because we’re—’

      ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said again, very deliberately, and this time, largely because of the intense look which accompanied it, Lola actually found herself believing it.

      ‘And you’re still wearing your uniform,’ he commented, on a delicious note of anticipation.

      The anticipation struck an answering chord in Lola, and she found herself stretching indolently, opening her eyes very wide as she replied, ‘Mmm, I know!’

      He cocked his dark head to one side. ‘It must be a little hot and uncomfortable, surely?’ he quizzed.

      ‘Well, y-yes. Funny you should say that. It. . . is. . . actually,’ she managed, through lips which were suddenly parched.

      His fingers moved unerringly to the top button of the pale blue shirt which strained across her tender, swollen breasts, and he stared down at her, a question in his stormy grey eyes.

      ‘I think we ought to take it off,’ he mused. ‘Don’t you?’

      Even if she had wanted to say no, which she most definitely didn’t, Lola still felt that she would have been powerless to, especially when he was looking at her that way—with that smoky look of passion darkening his eyes, that barely contained hunger hardening his lips.

      ‘Oh, yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, please!’

      He gave a laugh of delight. ‘Oh, sweet Lola,’ he sighed as he trailed his fingers provocatively down to the first button. ‘I’ve dreamt of doing this to you since the first moment I saw you. Dreamt of this luscious, sinuous body and imagined it naked and compliant in my arms.’

      It was so close to her own fantasy that Lola trembled with excited recognition, wondering how a man with a look of such stark passion on his face could have the control to take so long to remove a shirt.

      Oh, yes, she was enjoying the teasingly provocative movements of his fingers as they grazed over the thin cotton—in fact, she was getting more and more turned on by the second-but she wanted him to take the wretched thing off. And quickly!

      ‘There.’ She could almost hear the smile of satisfaction which deepened his voice as he released a second button. ‘How’s that?’

      Lola gave herself up to the feelings which were building a delicious slow blaze deep inside her. ‘Oh, Geraint,’ she gasped brokenly. ‘It’s so. . .’ Words failed her, and he smiled.

      ‘Isn’t it?’ he whispered, and Lola thought she detected a faint note of surprise in his voice.

      She opened her blue eyes very wide, aware of the first faint flush of sexual excitement which tingled along her cheekbones, finding the way that he was watching her almost unbearably intimate.

      She shut them again immediately. Quite apart from anything else, if she kept her eyes tightly closed, then her inexperience would be kept secret from him until the last possible moment—and by then it would be too late for him to stop. Lola had read enough books on sexual behaviour to have heard about the ‘point of no return’.

      Because although she had claimed to know nothing about Geraint Howell-Williams she suspected that beneath his harshly handsome, swashbuckling exterior there lay an honourable man.

      And honourable men did not bed virgins! Not unless their intentions were serious. And Lola was not going to fall into the trap of believing that.

      ‘Oh!’ she gasped suddenly as the third button flew open, and then the fourth, and the fifth. She felt the cool air washing over her heated, swollen breasts and longed for him to take her bra off.

      ‘Oh, what?’ he husked innocently.

      She shook her head.

      ‘Tell me,’ he urged.

      ‘I like it,’ she told him honestly. ‘So much.’

      ‘Do you? And this?’ He watched her closely. ‘Do you like this, too?’ His finger lightly grazed over her bra, where the hardened nubs were now clearly visible through the silken cobweb of lace, and Lola started violently as his touch produced an unbearable ache deep in the most intimate fork in her body.

      She felt the sweet, wet release of desire and her throat dried and constricted and she made tiny, mindless moans of pleasure.

      ‘Yes,’ he agreed, as calmly as if he were discussing the price of stocks and shares. ‘I can see that you do like it. I think you’re going to like everything I intend to do to you, Lola. Don’t you?’

      ‘Mmm,’ she agreed, though she had scarcely heard what he had said. She began to move restlessly as he peeled off her airline shirt and dropped it over the side of the bed and then his hand moved down to undo her skirt, sliding the zip down in one fluid movement.

      He used his knee to ease it all the way down her legs until it had joined the blouse on the thick, oatmeal-coloured carpet and Lola was left reclining against the antique lace bedspread wearing nothing but that cream bra, her black stockings and suspenders and a pair of navy blue knickers. Oh, why hadn’t she put on matching underwear that morning? she asked herself despairingly.

      He was still for a minute, and silent, too, and Lola lifted her eyelids fractionally, gazing covertly at him from beneath the lush shelter of her eyelashes, and was staggered and thrilled to see the look of rapt absorption on his face as he scrutinised her partially clothed body with all the thoroughness of a policeman searching for vital clues.

      Her knees jerked up protectively to shield her belly, and he frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’

      It sounded so stupid to say it. ‘My underwear doesn’t match,’ she whispered.

      ‘I’d noticed.’ He smiled. ‘And I’m glad.’

      ‘Glad?’

      ‘Mmm. I like the fact it doesn’t match. If you were wearing your most expensive scraps of French lingerie, it would seem as though you had planned this. And I don’t want you in underwear which another man has bought for you!’ he finished harshly.

      ‘Geraint!’ she exclaimed in horror. ‘No man—’

      But he had leaned over and taken her in his arms and now he started kissing her with an unrestrained passion which drove every sensible thought from her head, and suddenly nothing in the world mattered other than Geraint kissing her.

      And when he had kissed her mouth so thoroughly that Lola was certain her lips must be bruised he sought out other erotic destinations. He kissed her neck, her cheeks, her eyelids, and the tiny, vulnerable spot behind her ears, which had her trembling with an ecstatic reaction which made him halt and look down at her with a kind of hungry bemusement.

      ‘God, Lola, you’re so responsive,’ he observed, on a sultry note of pleasure. ‘So exquisitely responsive.’

      Lola felt as though she had just landed in paradise, and the way he was making her feel right now drove all other considerations clean out of her mind. Like how abandoned she must look, with her black-stockinged legs sprawled across the bed, and wearing nothing but a few items of flimsy,