Master of Paradise (21 page)

“How does it feel?” he asked.

She was so insensible, she didn’t want to
move. But glancing at him through eyes that were drunk with
passion, she couldn’t resist the urge to touch. As with a priceless
vase in a museum, she felt the impulse to run her fingers along the
contours of such wrenching beauty. Her mouth watered as she saw his
erection magnify before her eyes. Just for a touch...just for one
delicious taste...

“See for yourself.”

She shifted, took a handful of the velvety
ground granite, and rubbed it against his erection. She felt him
swell even more beneath her fist. When he was covered with it, she
laughed and pointed to her facsimile. “You see? I told you it was
perfect. I’d be hard-pressed to tell one from the other.”

“I guarantee you’ll know the difference.”

With tenacious hands, he compelled her back
against the ground.

An erotic longing gutted her like a spear.
She felt feverish as she hadn’t in the throes of her illness,
fueled by his lust that curled her toes on a sibilant sigh, and
made her feel like the most desirable woman on earth beneath his
practiced hands. Her body readied itself with blissful
expectation.

With sure hands, he spread her arms wide,
like a cross, then parted her legs. As she watched, he took both
hands, filled them with sand, and dribbled it over her body. More
sand followed, and more, leisurely, as if he had all the time in
the world, until the sand began to accumulate in heavy mounds. As
he dug deeper, the sand was cooler, moist, like dough. With as much
concentration as she’d called on earlier to make her idol in the
sand, he buried her body from her ankles to her chin. All of her
body, that is, except her feet, her hips, her breasts, and her
hands. Then he stepped back to observe his handicraft.

She was completely immobilized by the heavy,
damp sand, as effectively bound before him as if he’d tied her
spread-eagle with ropes. Then he got up and wandered off toward the
sea.

“You’re not going to leave me here like
this!” she cried.

He said nothing, leaving her to wonder why
he’d left her more tender, vulnerable places open to the torrid
air. She saw him bend and pick up a long length of sea kelp, then
move to the water to retrieve another, this one wet. On his way
back, he stopped to scoop up the frond of a palm that had fallen in
the sand.

“Have you ever wondered what kelp would feel
like against your skin?” he asked.

“Never.”

“For instance, what would this dry kelp feel
like on the bottoms of your feet?” As he spoke, he put action to
his words. The kelp was dry and crackly, and it tickled her toes.
She squirmed and laughed, but it was impossible to move away. “Or
what if it were wet?” He trailed the wet kelp along her exposed
breasts. It was slick and slimy, but slipped along her nipples,
highly charged. She could feel herself go wetter still.

He played with her for a torturous length of
time, trailing the insidious wet kelp along her face and throat,
sliding it up between her thighs like a greedy snake, igniting in
her loins a shrieking surge of unadulterated lust. Each place he
touched vibrated to the tease, the light torment of a touch without
touch. He lingered on her cheek but slid all too soon away from her
clit. She tried and tried to angle herself so he’d touch the places
she wanted him to touch most, but nothing would persuade him. Even
as she began to beg him in a voice made velvety by the undulating
friction. “Where?” he’d ask, with a smile. “Here?” Then he’d touch
her briefly—oh, too briefly!—and slither away.

He used the tools of nature as toys to amuse
himself and drive her to the brink. The palm frond was stiff.
Rubbed against the underside of her foot, it tickled her so badly,
she had tears streaming down her face. Stroked against her nipple,
it made her long for the crushing weight of his palm. It was
excruciating, wanting more of him as he plagued her with the
all-too-brief promise of audacious pleasures to come.

The sun had shifted, so it was angled over
her, scorching and stimulating against her exposed skin. She began
to perspire beneath the cool, damp sand. The heat, the seductive
sand, the open sky of azure blue, the birds displaying themselves
overhead, just as he’d displayed her to his eyes, all simmered
together to stir in her a passion as reckless as the roaring sea.
When he moved so his erection brushed her bound hand, she grabbed
on to it and pumped it with relish, straining to bring it to her
mouth. The feel of flesh was exquisite after the torture of
makeshift toys.

“What do you want now?” he asked. “Sand or
flesh?”

“Oh, flesh,
by all means.
” She could
no longer stand being denied. If he denied her now, she’d perish in
her own clawing need.

“Where do you want it?”

“In my mouth.”

He obliged her by straddling her face and
bringing himself to her. She stuck out her tongue and just barely
touched him before he moved back. Heavy-lidded with passion, she
let out an agonized cry. She wanted so much to surround him with
her mouth. The need was as elemental as the scorched and steaming
air she heaved into raw lungs. Her blistering ardor enveloped her
like flames, incinerating everything as it coalesced in the
scalding compulsion of her desire. She could taste him already. Yet
every time she reached for him, he jerked away.

Her lazy mood, her lingering, drifting
sensibilities, were shot, a mere remembrance from an afternoon long
past. She was as hot as she could remember being, both from the
penetration of the sun’s parching rays, and from the boiling of her
blood as he drove her to distraction with a game of give-and-take.
Her disposition was titillated now to mindless, famished need. As
his hand found her pouty folds, she whimpered and sought to arch
against it, only to find herself restrained. Her imprisonment of
sand electrified her longing for him. He rubbed the rigid length of
himself along her face, teasing her cheeks, then moving lower to
the voluptuous invitation of her breasts. With one hand, he held
them together as he shamelessly thrust himself between; with the
other, he stroked her with light and sensitive fingers that
contrasted with his rugged thrusts, jettisoned any pretense of
pride, and made her cry out for more. As he propelled himself
between the lush globes, the head of his erection barely touched
her mouth to be quickly yanked away. The torture was so sweet, she
felt on the brink of some shattering revelation. He thrust harder
now, penetrating and withdrawing, the propulsion bringing him flush
against her lips. As he did, she opened her mouth and reached for
him with her outstretched tongue, striving with a manic need to
taste the essence of his aggressive passion. But she could never
quite reach him as he moved like quicksilver. And when he withdrew
his hard-muscled body completely, her head fell back with a
disappointed wail.

She wasn’t disappointed for long. He put his
mouth to hers and, after kissing her with searing ardor, said, “You
drive me wild.” Then, as if he couldn’t wait any more than she, he
moved between her extended thighs and slid the hard, corded length
of his arousal into her, plundering her warmth, penetrating her,
invading her, white-hot as a branding iron singeing her flesh.
Plunging deeper, he buried himself in her just as he’d buried her
helpless limbs in the sand. That sand, coating his erection,
created an unexpectedly blissful friction as he pumped like a
madman with ferocious strength. He fell over her and pressed his
hands into her upturned palms, reiterating his domination, making
it impossible even to curl her fingers around his palms as the
pleasure shot through her in wave after wave of rapture. She
shivered in the heat, arched as best she could beneath a searing
shot of yearning that rattled her sagacity and shattered her
soul.

When they’d spent themselves, he lay atop
her, his body heavy as an anvil. “
Deus,
what you do to me,”
he gasped, as if he couldn’t draw air into his lungs. He lifted his
golden head and peered down at her with ardent eyes. “I’ve never
loved another woman in my life,” he told her. “I’ve never wanted a
woman the way I want you. My dreams are destroyed, yet I’m happy
here with you. I, too, feel as though I could live forever with you
by my side, with no other companions.”

“Just the two of us,” she murmured, smiling
lovingly into his eyes. “With no distractions. No rules. No one to
tell us what we must or must not do.”

“You can’t know what it was like, all those
years without you. I thought I was lonely as a child. But I never
knew loneliness until I tasted of your love, then had to leave you
behind. I never guessed that you’d insinuated yourself into my
heart the way you did. But night after night, as the sun set on my
beloved islands, I looked into its golden glow and saw only your
face.”

“Was my face covered with sand?” she teased.
“I’m so full of sand, it’s in my teeth.”

He answered her smile. “I can do something
about that.” And he brushed away her cell of sand, but bit by bit,
slowly, with courtly fingers, so by the time she was freed, she was
stimulated anew.

He read the craving in her eyes and smiled.
“Let’s go wash off,” he suggested, then bounded up and headed for
the sea. He was already crossing the coral reef and wading into the
deeper waters beyond by the time she reached the edge of the water.
He began to swim, cutting through the brilliant green of the water
with robust, effortless strokes.

But she was too lazy to swim. The sun,
combining with her climax, was making her sleepy, in spite of the
grittiness of the sand on her sweat-drenched skin. She looked
around and eyed the granite rocks with the waves crashing over the
top. The surface of them dipped naturally in the form of a body.
Perfect, she thought, and scrambled up to the top, gauging her
progress between waves.

Then she settled herself in the curved
indentation, lying on her back with her face to the sun. Closing
her eyes, she waited for the next swell of surf. When it came, it
crashed over her, drenching her with a spray of the warmest water
possible from the sea. It lapped and pooled about her, washing away
the sand, as she stretched in dreamy luxury on the surface of the
smooth-washed rock.

She could easily have fallen asleep, with the
water wooing her every now and then. But Rodrigo’s cry startled her
awake. She rolled onto her side and saw the fin of a gigantic shark
cutting the water toward him. It rose from the depths and she
realized it was immense—perhaps as much as forty feet in
length.

“Gabé, look!” he called.

Terrified, she watched Rodrigo swim toward
the beast, grab hold of its protruding fin, and ride it some
distance until it started heading out to sea. Then he let go,
laughed mightily, and swam back toward her.

“Do you realize what that was?” he said
excitedly. “A whale shark—the largest fish in the ocean. They’re
very rare. You could spend your lifetime out here and never see
one. Some people consider them bad luck.”

“You scared me to death!”

“They’re perfectly harmless. Come swim with
me. It will strengthen your leg.”

“Won’t the shark come back?”

“If it does, we’ll both take a ride.”

But she could see he was teasing. The whale
shark was by now far out to sea.

She left the boulder and crossed the barrier
of the reef with care, holding her arms out at her sides to keep
her balance. The coral was sharp and cutting on her tender feet.
The water was so clear, she had no trouble seeing the plethora of
shells and bits of oddly shaped coral covering the reef. She bent
to scoop up a handful and came out of the water with some of the
most beautiful shells she’d ever seen. Each one was exquisite and
delicately formed. Some were white, some brown, some a deep cobalt
blue, the color of her eyes. The coral in turn was white and
smooth, or bright red and jagged. She held a small shell to her ear
and heard the roar of the ocean from within.

Rodrigo swam to meet her when she reached the
sand beyond the reef. There, the water deepened sharply and it was
possible to swim. The breakers carried her up and back with a
lulling rhythm. She looked up at the sky and drifted on the swells.
But she couldn’t stop stealing glances at Rodrigo. Wet and gleaming
in the sun, he was an enticing package of hard-coiled muscle and
masculine grace. Feeling playful, she swam to him and put her arms
about his neck, wrapping her legs around his waist.

“I’ve got you now,” she teased. “You can’t
get away from me this time.”

Then she slid down the length of him, and as
her face came in contact with the water, she added, “I’ve wanted to
do this all afternoon.”

She dove beneath the surface. Holding on to
his waist, she floated toward his erection, which was swaying with
the rhythm of the water. She was buoyant in the water, coming close
then drifting away. Finally, she succeeded in getting her mouth
around him and a wave came crashing in and toppled him from beneath
her. When she came up sputtering and laughing, he was lying on his
back, exposed to the sun.

She tried again. Each time she thought she’d
succeeded, the tide would foil her, carrying him away. Soon, they
were hysterical with laughter, Gabrielle determined to achieve her
goal, Rodrigo content to let her try.

“What does a woman have to do to get her
mouth around you?”

Finally she gave up. She wrapped her legs
around him again and held his shoulders to keep from floating away.
“You’ll just have to put it somewhere else,” she vowed. And moved
her hand beneath the water to guide him in.

Suddenly, she felt his change of mood. His
shoulders stiffened, and his hand grabbed her wrist and pushed her
away. Glancing up at him, her laughter frozen on her face, she saw
that his alarmed eyes were fixed on a point in the distance. She
turned to look. Her gaze began at the base of the hill and traveled
upward, scanning the horizon. She, too, stilled inside as she
spotted the intruders high on the hill.