Fortune in the Stars (17 page)

'Libra.'

'Well, we're the most peaceful of sleepers in the entire
zodiac.'

'Dominic, are you sure you're not making all this up as
you go along?' she teased, a love so powerful now welling up in her
that she felt she would burst from it.

'I'm allowed to do that because Lexy says I'm very typical
of my lot—so whatever I say must apply… That's
logical, isn't it?'

Penny nodded, suddenly terrified he might start thinking
seriously about Lexy and get into a drunken agitation. 'Now, would you
mind moving over and getting under the covers—there's hardly
any room for me.'

'You're coming in?' he exclaimed
enthusiastically— every bit as distracted as she had intended
him to be.

'If you're prepared to make some room for me—
yes.'

He managed to tip most of the covers on to the floor in
his contortions to accommodate her, and almost joined them in his
attempts to retrieve them.

'You see,' he murmured with a contented chuckle, as she
managed to catch him just in time. 'I told you I'd need you to stop me
falling out.'

By the time she had finished arranging herself to his
infuriatingly precise instructions—her body curved at just
the right angle to his back and her hand cupping his shoulder exactly
as he indicated—she was exhausted.

'You forgot to turn out the light,' he informed her, just
as she was silently congratulating herself on her achievement.

'Dominic! The switch is only inches from you,' she groaned.

'I know—but you don't want me falling out of the
bed, do you?' he asked, in tones of patient forbearance.

Rolling her eyes in disbelief, Penny hauled herself up,
reached over him, and switched off the light.

'And I refuse to go through all that performance of making
sure I'm positioned to your precise liking again,' she warned him, her
heart turning a crazy welter of somersaults as she nestled against him.

She was mad, she informed herself with exceptional calm,
given she fact that her heart had now started pounding in direct
competition to the activity going on in her
stomach…completely and utterly mad.

'Penny?'

'Dominic, I refuse to move so much as a millimetre.'

'I don't want you to move; I merely wanted to ask you a
question.'

'OK—what is it?'

'If I were to fall in love with you, would you give me my
marching orders instantly…or would you perhaps dally with me
for a while?'

Penny felt herself draw back from him in a purely reflex
movement, her stomach lurching sickeningly.

'Oh, well, I suppose that sudden withdrawal's answer
enough,' he sighed theatrically. 'Anyway, I just thought I'd ask.'

'Dominic, if you don't shut up and go to sleep I'm moving
over to your bed.' Her words, which she had intended as a threat, had
come out so filled with indulgence and love that she immediately found
herself giving silent thanks that he was in no state to notice.

'OK, OK! But it shouldn't come as any surprise to you to
hear I've my fingers firmly crossed against falling in love with
you—I'm far too sensitive a creature to be able to handle the
sort of brutality you'd hand out to me.'

Though his words were joking, her instant reaction to them
was a desire to shake him back into full consciousness and beg him to
take them back.

Of course she was out of her mind, she told herself
wretchedly. She had asked herself the difference between love and
infatuation—and now she knew. For the first time in her
twenty-three years she was in love…and so completely and
irrevocably that it was going to terrify the wits out of her the moment
she got around to collecting those wits enough to examine it. This had
all the makings of the blackest of black comedies, she thought in
desperation—she, with all her recent hang-ups about being
frigid, was in bed with a man she physically desired beyond all reason,
and for no other reason than to ensure he didn't fall out of the bed!
And only someone entirely heartfree could have joked about falling in
love as he just had, she thought on relentlessly. He had escaped love
up to now, so who was she to hope for anything different? And all those
lies!

She sat up, leaning over him and determinedly shaking his
shoulder—drunk or not he had to be told the truth.

'Dominic,' she whispered urgently.

To her complete surprise she felt his body tense in total
rejection to her touch.

'I was rather hoping you were asleep,' he stated
brusquely, hunching his shoulder away from her hand.

'I—I'm not,' she stammered, his tone distracting
her completely from her earlier determination.

'Well, I think it's about time I took myself off to my own
bed,' he announced, heaving himself upright.

'You're not drunk!' she whispered, aghast, the knowledge
that he never had been so certain that she found it almost impossible
to believe she could have been so deluded.

'You sound disappointed,' he retorted.

'But why on earth did you pretend you were?' she
protested, while a powerful surge of physical awareness leapt with
devastating suddenness within her.

'You were the one insisting I was drunk,' he pointed out.
'I told you I'd fallen over your damned shoes when I came in. I must
have sent one flying across the room as I fell…the one that
almost brought me down a second time.'

'The one I nearly fell over, too,' she whispered,
bedevilled by guilt, yet racked with longing. 'Dominic, I really am
sorry I leapt to the wrong conclusion—'

'It was the alacrity with which you leapt to it I found so
galling,' he cut in sharply. 'I was eighteen the one and only time I've
ever been drunk.'

'I've said I'm sorry!' Penny exclaimed, her suffocating
awareness of his proximity sharpening her tone and goading her to
antagonism. 'But you've had the last laugh by tricking me into bed with
you…so now we're quits!'

'No, we're not,' he retorted accusingly. 'I intended
having the last laugh. I can't say I was thrilled to bits to be accused
of being a drunk, but then I began seeing the funny side of stringing
you along…imagining your reaction when you discovered I was
in your bed stone-cold sober.'

'So what went wrong?' she managed to ask, despite the
problems now manifesting themselves concerning her breathing.

'Unfortunately I wasn't drunk.'

'Unfortunately?' she squeaked, her lungs dithering between
exhaling and inhaling as she uttered the word, and ending up attempting
both simultaneously.

'You've already admitted to knowing what alcohol can do to
a man's libido…and yes, unfortunately, mine happens to be
alcohol-free.'

'It's all my fault,' she protested, the terrible tension
in her causing her voice to rise unnaturally. 'I had no right to assume
you were drunk just because you fell over my shoes.'

'There's no need to get so upset,' he stated, his voice
sounding no more natural than hers. 'You can hardly be held responsible
for my libido…well, not entirely. Anyway, I'd best be off to
my own bed, before it runs completely amok—my libido, I
mean,' he muttered, scarcely coherently, 'not the bed.' He turned,
flinging aside the bedclothes with such force that they slid to the
floor. 'Sorry,' he mumbled, reaching across her to retrieve them, an
action that sent an instant shiver of response down the length of her
body. 'Penny, I… Oh, hell!' he groaned, the covers forgotten
as his arms slid around her and crushed him to her. 'Penny, this isn't
what I intended—you have to believe me,' he protested
distractedly, his lips a bare fraction from hers as he drew their
bodies down till they lay side by side.

'I believe you,' she whispered, her arms rising to cling
around him while his lips began raining impassioned kisses on her face.

'Have you any idea how much I want you?' he asked, the
urgent arousal of his body against hers echoing his whispered words and
awakening in her a ravening hunger crying out to be assuaged as he
pulled her fiercely against him.

His mouth took hers, invading it with the ardent sweetness
of his need, then drawing back to groan out soft incoherent words
before returning to continue its hotly demanding search.

Then his hands were dragging impatiently at her nightgown,
his lips again tearing reluctantly from her to urge her to release him
just long enough for him to remove it. And then she was back in his
arms, the sensation of her skin against the taut heat of his filling
her with a languorous intoxication that sharpened until her body was
straining to his almost as though in anger that the demands clamouring
so violently within it were not being fulfilled instantly.

'Don't fight me…please,' he whispered huskily,
lifting and arching her body against his to bury his face against her
breasts, his teeth and tongue sending sharp stabs of excitement darting
through her as they teased and tormented against her aching flesh.

'I'm not fighting you,' she groaned, violent shudders
racking her.

'You are,' he replied, his breath hot against her flesh.
'You're fighting me with your impatience.'

'How can I not be impatient?' she begged incoherently,
dragging his head from her as the marauding of his mouth became a
pleasure too exquisite for her to bear. 'How can you not be?' she
shivered, and immediately clasped his head to her once more.

'Penny, I've never felt less patient in my life,' Dominic
breathed huskily. 'But I've wanted you so badly it feels as though I've
been waiting a lifetime for you.'

There was a small spark of sanity—only barely
surviving—in her that warned her she was in over her depth
and should heed the caution contained in his words. But his hands and
mouth had begun wreaking their terrible magic on her body, assaulting
her senses with pleasures so acute that they were almost akin to pain,
and rendering caution an impossibility. He had the feeling he had been
waiting all his life for this moment—her body was telling her
unequivocally that she had.

Caution and patience the thoughts furthest from her mind,
she slid her body downwards against his, a giddy intoxication of
excitement blasting through her as he responded to her action with a
shuddered groan.

'I've changed my mind,' he murmured distractedly, his
hands capturing hers from around him and guiding them to the waistband
of his shorts. 'Be as impatient as you like,' he urged as her shaking
hands responded by drawing the shorts down over his hips.

'I think I can manage the rest on my own,' he told her
with softly breathless laughter, easing back from her.

It was the teasing complicity in his words that
momentarily cleared a space in the passion-clouded confusion of her
mind. She was behaving for all the world as though she knew what she
was doing, she realised dazedly—like a confident, experienced
woman for whom the act of love held few mysteries. For an instant she
felt panic, harsh and suffocating.

'Dominic, I…' she began, but already he had
begun taking her back into his arms and, by the time he had returned
her fully to them, her words, and even the panic instigating them, had
all but been wiped from her mind by the swift renewal of the demanding
hunger within her.

She had denied his whispered plea for patience, and the
urgent purposefulness with which his powerful body was now dictating to
hers left her in no doubt that his patience was no longer on offer.

But the small glimmer of fear that realisation brought was
swiftly smothered by the violence of longing leaping within her in the
moment he cried out her name as his body took total possession of hers.
She felt the breath trapped within her expel in a sharp cry of ecstasy
as her body responded in uninhibited welcome to the thrusting invasion
of his, the ache within her transforming to a throbbing crescendo of
pleasure that swelled to an explosion of innumerable pleasures, each
one more intense than the last.

'Dominic!' His name was torn from her in a reflex sob, his
answer falling on ears no longer capable of hearing as his body took on
a new rhythm and began inflicting that incredible process on hers yet
again.

Soft, incoherent cries began pouring from her as she clung
to him, her arms imprisoning his head in their loving vice, her legs
restless against the powerfully muscled length of his until they curved
around them in the vice-like pattern of her arms, her limbs entwining
him in their loving traps in response to her subconscious need to hold
him ever hers.

Then he cried out her name, a joyous elation filling her
as her body responded yet again to the ever-changing demands of his.
And this time she sensed the heightened urgency in the wild rhythm of
his loving, and heard his hoarse cries mingle with the disjointed
softness of hers as she felt the power of his passion explode within
her and possess her completely. It was then that she was conscious of
experiencing true oneness, her body sharing and reciprocating each
savage peak of ecstasy bombarding his, each shuddered spasm of
fulfilment, then each softly sighing ripple of wonderment as ecstasy
subsided to a spent delight.

For a long while they lay locked in one another's arms,
their laboured breaths gradually subsiding to something almost
approaching normality.

Then Dominic eased the weight of his body from her,
rolling over on to his back and taking her with him in the circle of
his arms.

Cocooned in blissful contentment, she snuggled against him
as his lips began nuzzling against her hair.

'Would you believe me if I admitted to being at a loss for
words?' he asked huskily.

Incapable of speech, Penny nodded.

'Was that a yes?'

She nodded again.

'My, what eloquence,' he murmured with a soft, throaty
chuckle.

'If
you're
at a loss for words how
do you imagine
I
feel?' she protested lazily.