In Bed With a Stranger Read Online Free

her head that wasn’t concerned with the immediate need to wrap herself around him. To feel him against her and inside her until there were no joins left and the distance of the last one hundred and fifty-four days was forgotten.
    His hands were warm on her back, moving across her quivering skin with a certainty and steadiness of touch she couldn’t possibly match as she struggled to undo his belt, impatient to get rid of the last barriers that stood between them. She gave a gasp of triumph as she managed to work the buttons free. Swiftly he kicked off his desert combats and they fell back onto the bed.
    None of it was as she’d planned. There was no champagne, no sexy silk nightdress, no sense of seduction, no conversation, just skin and hands and a need so huge she felt as if it might break her wide open.
    There would be a time for talking. Later. Tomorrow.
    This was the best way she knew of bridging the spaces between them, of telling him what she wanted him to know, of reaching him. Just like the first time they’d made love, on the night he’d found out that Ralph Fitzroy wasn’t his father. There had been nothing she could say then because it was too big, too raw, too complex, but for a while it had been flamed into insignificance in the heat of their passion.
    His body was rigid with tension, his shoulders like concrete beneath her fingers. They were both shaking, but as he entered her she felt some of the tightness leave his body as if he too felt the wild, exhilarating rightness that surged through her. Her arms were locked around his neck, their foreheads touching, and the feel of his breath on her cheek, his skin, was almost enough to make her come. Her body shivered and burned, but fiercely she held back, tightening her muscles around him, holding on like a woman in danger of drowning.
    With a moan he slid his arms beneath her back, gathering her up and pulling her hard against his chest as he sat up. Sophie wrapped her legs around his waist, and the increase in pressure was enough to tip her over the edge. She let go, arching backwards and gasping as her orgasm ripped through her.
    He held her, waiting until it had subsided before pulling her back into his arms and burying his face in her neck. She could feel him inside her still, and slowly she rotated her pelvis, stroking his hair, holding him tightly until he stiffened and cried out her name.
    Together they collapsed back onto the bed. Cradling his head against her breasts, Sophie stared up into the darkness and smiled.

CHAPTER TWO
    K IT woke suddenly, his body convulsing with panic.
    It took a few seconds for reality to reassert itself. It was light—the cool, bluish light of an English morning, and the sheets were clean and smooth against his skin. Sophie was lying on her side, tucked into his body, one hand flat on his chest, over his frantically thudding heart.
    The fact that he wasn’t actually walking along a dust track towards a bridge with a bomb beneath it told him he must have slept. After a hundred and fifty-four largely sleepless nights it felt like a small miracle.
    He shifted position slightly so he could look into Sophie’s sleeping face, stretching limbs that had stiffened from being still for so long. His heart squeezed. God, she was so lovely. The summer had brought out a faint sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and put a bloom into her creamy cheeks. Or maybe that was last night. The erection he’d woken up with intensified as he remembered, and he looked at her mouth. Her top lip with its steep upwards sweep and pronounced Cupid’s bow was slightly swollen from his kisses.
    It was also curved into the faintest and most secretive of smiles.
    Deeply asleep, she looked serene and self-contained, as if she was travelling through wonderful places where he could
never hope to follow, full of people he didn’t know. No godforsaken, mine-strewn desert roads for her, he thought bleakly.
    The light filtering through the