Golden Paradise by Susan Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

wanted, too. She was unlike other women he knew, so different he had no comparison. To please himself he had to please her, too. He was poised on the perimeters of unfamiliar emotional territory and perhaps he did it for her after all. It wasn't a time to debate or presciently attempt to see the future. He wanted her desperately and she him.
    He gently touched the heated dampness between her thighs, his arousal quivering in his own need for her. Feeling her readiness and the surprising strength of her hands pulling him close, he said, "Hold on tight," a heartbeat before he thrust into her waiting body and buried himself in her honeyed sweetness.
    She didn't cry out. She sighed, a great, melting, bewitching sigh, and he thought she must be a nymph sent from heaven or Olympus or Allah to welcome him back from the war. She reached up to kiss him and he smothered her waiting mouth with a restless kiss, feeling as though heaven had opened, as though his heart were beating outside his body. Then he began to move gently within her so she could feel the enchantment, too.
    "My toes are curling," she blissfully murmured against his throat.
    "I'm glad," he whispered, and bending his head, he nibbled at her mouth, pressing upward into her until she felt him fill her deep and hard and so intensely that she cried out in ecstasy.
    "Am I dying?" she breathed a long moment later when the sound of her voice had faded into the night.
    "No, darling, it's the very best of living, trust me," he murmured into the curls near her ear, and the rhythm of his lower body, slow and smooth and carefully choreographed to suit her, to please her, brought the entire focus of the world to the flame-hot center of her body. It was living, she thought, breathless, her pulse beating in her ears, her skin so hot she felt as though they were back on the plain of Kars. It was bliss and an open door into paradise. Was this love, too, she wondered, this torrid, melting lust? Did you love a man like this, skilled and perfect and so beautiful?
    She hoped not, she thought in the small pocket of logic that remained in her dissolving brain. She hoped not because she'd get lost in the crowd.
    It wouldn't be much longer, Stefan decided, short moments later, watching her eyes and the flush on her face and throat, aware of her small hands fiercely pulling him close so she could feel him longer and deeper and more intensely. She was the most flagrantly sensual woman he knew, untouched by convention, more heated in her intemperate response than his Gypsy lover. Maybe it was the Kuzan blood. Sensuality ran unbridled through the family. She was a glowing, extravagant woman and she was about to climax.
    He met and joined her passion with his in a driving, insistent wildness that kept her agonized, dying with pleasure for long practised moments until she trembled with small gasping sobs in his arms and he poured, shuddering, into her. Then they lay, sheened with sweat, their heartbeats shaking the bed.
    In the course of the summer night they dallied like the lovers in Hafiz, and he taught her what pleasure was. She would say into the moonlit room, breathless with passion, "You know that too?"
    "And that!" She lay gilded with moonlight and pampered indulgence.
    "And than"
    Finally he laughed and said, "I'll have to show you the Renaissance printmakers and the Japanese, sweet child. Hafiz is only one in a galaxy."
    Her smile was new when she looked up at him lying above her, and it was touched with a delightful sangfroid in addition to her habitual imperturbability.
    "How nice," she said.

Chapter Three
    I n the morning the Prince decided against an immediate return to Tiflis. Instead he sent his troopers ahead and pursued idyllic leisured activities with the Countess for several additional days. And when they finally chose to travel north, the Countess's wardrobe having been nastily restored by Aleksandropol's only French dressmaker still in residence, the two-day journey stretched