Hired: A Bride for the Boss: The Playboy Boss's Chosen Bride / The Corporate Marriage Campaign / The Boss's Urgent Proposal. SUSAN MEIER
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excitement broke loose. Her mouth sucked his tongue in hard, instinctively pursuing the blind need to have him deep inside her. He instantly reciprocated, propelling a driving urgency that he suddenly cut off, retreating to tantalising nibbles on her lips.
‘Not yet, not yet,’ he breathed raggedly. ‘Let’s get these off.’
He bent quickly, peeling the last of her clothes down her quivering thighs. His head dropped through the loop of her arms, leaving her hands grabbing onto his shoulders, needing the support as he lifted her feet, one after another, removing her shoes, stripping her completely naked like him. Her body shivered at the sudden loss of his heat. She was light-headed, dizzy.
It was sheer blissful relief when he simply picked her up, cradling her tightly against his chest as he straightened to his full height again, one arm hooked around her thighs, the other supporting her back. Her head nestled happily on his shoulder while he trailed soft kisses over her hair, his mouth moving down to her ear, blowing an erotic waft of warm air into it, making her heart leap and race with excitement.
‘Your bedroom, Merlina…where is it?’ he murmured.
‘Last door at the end of the hall,’ she answered without the slightest hesitation, wanting him to take her there, wanting everything to happen with this man.
Her hands glided over his strongly muscled back as he carried her down the hall. He was so gorgeously male—all of him—and somehow that made her feel more intensely female, stirring the primal instincts no amount of civilisation could retrain. They had broken loose and were zinging through her, exulting in the promise of what was to come.
He opened the door to her bedroom, switched on the light. Yes, she thought wildly, let there be light. She wanted the visual pleasure of seeing him, watching him—Jake Devila, pumped up with desire for her and acting on it, intent on sweeping her along with him.
He laid her on the scarlet silk doona she had brought back from China—a tourist trip she had taken after leaving her last job. Buying the doona had been total self-indulgence but she’d loved it on sight, the brilliant scarlet printed so exotically with graceful sprays of flowers and pagodas and Chinese ladies in traditional dress, carrying pretty shade umbrellas and walking over curved bridges which invariably featured in the Chinese gardens the tour group had visited. She’d bought the matching pillow slips, as well, unable to resist the complete set.
Having it—using it—had been a private pleasure, yet now as Jake stood back, his gaze travelling slowly over the vision she made with the scarlet silk spread underneath her, she was glad to have surprised him with something extraordinary, elated that he looked at her as though she was the perfect centrepiece for such sensuous splendour. But she didn’t want him standing apart from her.
Acting instinctively to draw him to her, she slithered her body over the silk, stretching out invitingly, seductively, taking a feline satisfaction in feeling it against her skin, though it was Jake’s skin she wanted to feel most, moving against hers. Her eyes passionately burned their own message at him—Come to me…me…
* * *
Jake was momentarily stunned. The sight of a woman on a bed had never before checked the need which was still rampaging through him, but Merlina…the glorious beauty of her had made him pause. The soft, voluptuous curves were all woman. As a woman was meant to be, he thought, the images of art masterpieces running through his mind, wonderful nudes posed in opulent settings. Her lovely smooth skin gleamed like satin. Satin against silk. Red silk. So incredibly sexy. Like a fantasy. Though the marvellous female mystique would have been heightened if only…
‘Mad…stupid…’ he muttered, shaking his head over the blind error in judgement he’d made. ‘Why didn’t I see?’
The compulsive yearning in Merlina’s heart skipped into panicky bewilderment. ‘See what?’ spilled straight off her tongue, the need to know how he was thinking jerking through her mind.
‘I was so wrong. Long hair was right for you. It should be cascading all over these pillows.’ He stretched out on the bed beside her, propping himself up on one elbow as he softly raked the shorter spill of her layered hair back behind her ear. ‘Forgive me for being an arrogant fool.’
A tidal wave of relief.
Plus the unexpected burst of humility from Jake shook the playboy wall she had built around him. It made him more human, more accessible as a person. ‘You didn’t know me, Jake,’ she said, hoping, fiercely willing him to take that step, making her different—uniquely different—to all the other women he’d taken to bed. She so desperately wanted to be the special one…the one he’d love…the one he’d marry…
His eyes searched hers with deeply probing intensity, feeding the hope, making it swell until it bubbled through her mind like champagne. ‘Who is this woman I see now?’ he murmured, his voice gruff with emotions he wasn’t expressing but they certainly suggested more than a passing lust for her. ‘What else have you kept hidden from me, Merlina?’
Happiness gushed through her like a fountain bursting into brilliant play. She lifted one arm up around his neck and ran her hand into his hair, revelling in touching him, feeling him, wanting to wind her fingers through the thick waves and into his mind, touch him there, as well, touch him deeply.
‘Nothing that wasn’t there for you to find if you’d been truly interested in looking,’ she said softly, her eyes—the windows to her soul—wide-open to him. ‘You put the image you wanted between us, Jake.’
‘I don’t want that image back,’ he declared emphatically. ‘I want the real you.’
Did he see the joy erupting in her soul—the joy she couldn’t contain? ‘I’m here,’ she said simply, offering herself up to be loved.
A smile of sheer devilment broke across his face and his eyes were suddenly steaming with plans he intended to execute with maximum impact in mind. ‘Yes,’ he said with relish. ‘Here with me. Let’s make that in every sense there is.’
Did he really mean every sense or was he only talking in the sexual sense? For a moment Merlina felt a little flicker of disappointment. She’d opened a door to him and it seemed he was side-stepping, but she had no time to think about it. He kissed her, instantly drawing her back into a world of vibrant sensation, bombarding her with such intense excitement it was impossible not to give herself up to it.
He kissed the pulse at the base of her throat, heating her entire bloodstream. He kissed her breasts, his tongue swirling around her nipples, lashing them into peaks of hard need, then sucking them into his mouth, making a wildly erotic feast of taste and titillation that drove her into offering them up for more of it, her own hands sliding under and lifting the soft flesh, wantonly aiding and abetting the exquisite ravishment, totally enthralled by it.
But he didn’t stay there. He moved lower, sweeping kisses over her stomach, teasing her navel with his tongue, grazing his mouth over the erogenous zones under her hip-bones, causing her skin to twitch with pleasure, his hands caressing her legs apart, long, shiver-inducing, purposeful caresses on her inner thighs, and the tension of becoming more and more intimately exposed to him had every nerve and muscle in her body poised on a very fine edge in anticipation of being touched there, and taken to even more extremes of feeling.
Her stomach was contracting. Her heart was drumming in her ears. Her breathing was reduced to quick panting, her mind seized with the waiting, the knowing it would come, focussed totally on how it would be, her eyes shut tight, instinctively closing out everything else so that her entire being was tuned to this inner world of Jake’s making.
She felt his fingers slide slowly between the folds of her sex, seeking the source of the moist heat that surely told him how wildly aroused she was. They circled the highly sensitive opening while his thumb laid bare her clitoris, caressing it into a stiff pulsing peak, which he then covered with his mouth, licking, sucking, making her body arch with almost torturous tension.
She couldn’t bear