The Devil and the Deep

CHAPTER NINE



RICK had never tasted anything so sweet as his tongue lapped at the juice, removing every drop from the hard nub. Stella tasted exotic like forbidden fruit, smelled like an ocean breeze riffling through a stand of coconut palms, and the very unladylike expletive that had fallen from her mouth as he nuzzled her breast played like a symphony in his head.

He pulled away and watched as her wet, puckered nipple dried in the breeze. A little frown appeared between her brows just before she moaned a protest and opened her eyes. There was a feverish glitter to her gaze, which went straight to his groin.

He had put that crazy-drunk look there.

The air felt thick and heavy on her palate as Stella dragged in some much-needed breaths. His hand spanned her ribs beneath her breast exactly where her heart pounded like a gong and she wondered if he knew that he had done that to her. He was staring down at her, his gaze roving over her face and chest, lingering on her mouth and her impossibly taut nipple.

‘I have another,’ she murmured.

Rick smiled. He relieved her of her throw, then smoothed his hand to her other bikini cup and dragged it aside with his index finger, satisfied as her breast spilled free. ‘So you do,’ he agreed, watching with fascination as the nipple wrinkled then puckered before his eyes. He groped for the discarded mango cheek.

Her pupils dilated and he heard her breath roughen as he squeezed the cheek again and juice dripped onto her breast, coating her nipple and running in sweet rivulets down her chest. His mouth salivated as he inched his head closer to the gloriously sticky morsel. Her low whimper encouraged him to close the distance and he took it greedily instead of repeating the steady assault he’d used on the other side.

She gasped and he sucked harder, rolling the stiff peak around and around his mouth, grazing the tip with his teeth, pressing it hard between palate and tongue, satisfied only when she arched her back, silently begging for more. His hand found the other nipple, hard and ready. When he brushed it with his thumb she panted. And when he pinched it between his fingers she practically levitated off the deck and cried out so loudly he lifted his head and smothered the husky outcry with his mouth.

Stella, driven by a hunger so insatiable she was blind to everything else, lifted her head off the deck and claimed Rick’s lips with indecent vigour. She pushed her tongue into his mouth and when he groaned deep and low and needy she swallowed the sound whole, lapping up his response, wanting to fuse their mouths together, to fuse their bodies together for eternity.

Her pulse pounded through her head, her nostrils flared with each laboured breath. His hand left her nipple and stroked down her belly and she shifted restlessly against the deck as muscles deep inside shivered and undulated. The boards were hard against her back but she didn’t care. She wanted him on top of her, pressing down, sinking into her. She wanted to feel his skin on hers, wrap her legs around his waist, have the rock and the sway and the pound of them become one with the rhythm of the ocean.

His hand moved lower, whispering across her skin, skimming the edge of her bikini bottoms. Her hips shifted as heat licked from his fingers and bloomed in her pelvis. An ache took up residence between her legs and she moaned as his hand fumbled with a bow.

She felt the tug as he pulled at it and it came undone.

Then another tug as the other bow ceded to his questing fingers and she shivered as he stripped the tiny triangle of fabric away, leaving her bare to the ocean breeze and the stars and his touch.

‘Those damn bows have been driving me nuts all day,’ Rick said, lifting his head briefly before moving his lips to her jaw, her ear, her throat. And lower, trailing towards her nipple as his fingers slowly stroked her inner thigh.

Stella whimpered as more heat fanned downwards from his kisses and upwards from his hand, searing and ravaging everything in between with devastating ease.

Suddenly it wasn’t enough to be just lying here. She wanted to touch his skin—all of it. Feel it smooth and warm and solid beneath her hands, dance fire across it as he was doing to her.

Wreak a little havoc.

Render him a little crazy.

She grabbed for the hem of his shirt, reefing it up and over his head at the exact time his lips met her nipple. She whimpered as he let go for the briefest second and moaned deep and low when his mouth returned immediately to her breast and his fingers found her thigh again. She sucked in a breath, dug her fingernails into the bare warm flesh of his shoulder as he tormented the sensitive peak.

His flesh shuddered beneath her palm and it vibrated all the way down her arm, stroking gossamer fingers over her neck and her chest and down her belly. Her hands kneaded his shoulders and the defined muscles of his back. Her palms smoothed into the dimples she’d seen all those days ago in the moonlight, slipping beneath his waistband to the firm rounded rise of his buttocks.

When he groaned against her mouth she squeezed them hard.

Rick reared back as his erection surged painfully, bucking against its confines. ‘Stella,’ he muttered, seeing stars despite his back being to them.

He recaptured her mouth, plundering its soft sweet depths, getting lost in the taste and the smell and the touch of her. Wanting everything at once, impatient to know the noises she made when she came.

His fingers moved a little north and brushed lightly at the juncture. Her back arched and she cried out as he found her hot and wet and ready. ‘God, Stel,’ he whispered, his lips hovering above hers. ‘You feel so damn good.’

Stella shook her head from side to side, her hips rotating restlessly as his fingers stroked and brushed and sighed against her.

It wasn’t enough, she needed more. ‘Please,’ she whispered.

‘Please what?’ Rick murmured, licking along the plump softness of her mouth. ‘What do you want, Stella?’

Stella arched her back as his finger pressed a little harder, slid through the slick heat of her. ‘More,’ she said urgently, rotating her hips as she gripped his buttocks convulsively.

Rick slid a finger inside and felt her clamp hard around him. Her gasp echoed around the empty ocean. ‘Like this?’ he asked, licking down her neck, trailing his tongue down her chest. ‘Or this?’ He claimed a nipple as he slid another finger home.

‘Rick!’ Stella clung to him as he stretched her, taunted her. His expert thumb zeroed in on the impossibly hard erogenous zone as if it were fitted with a homing beacon and the stars started to flash in the sky.

A pressure built from deep inside as his thumb fanned and stoked.

God, she was going to come. Very, very soon.

‘Wait,’ she said, removing a hand from his backside to grab his wrist and still his devastatingly rhythmic movements.

Rick lifted his head and frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, breathing hard.

If she’d changed her mind, got cold feet, he was toast. He might as well just jump into the ocean now and save himself the slow decline into insanity.

Stella licked her lips. ‘It’s been a long time,’ she panted. ‘I swear if you keep doing that it’s going to be over very, very quickly.’

It took a moment for her meaning to sink into his lust-

addled brain, then everything stopped as he smiled. ‘Really? You mean this?’ He rotated his fingers deep inside her and grinned at the whimper that rent the air.

‘Rick,’ she pleaded, squeezing his wrist hard.

‘What, Stel?’ he murmured. ‘You don’t like this?’ He repeated the manoeuvre, applying pressure to the hard little nub beneath his thumb.

Stella gasped as she shut her eyes. ‘Rick, please.’

‘What about this?’ he asked as he groped awkwardly one-handed for the discarded mango cheek.

Stella opened her eyes as she felt his heat move from her side. His eyes glittered down at her as he half knelt beside her, one hand stroking her intimately, the other paused above the juncture of her thighs.

‘You like this, Stella?’ he asked as he squeezed the almost spent cheek, wringing the last drops of juice from its now pulpy flesh.

Stella felt the warm sticky ooze mingle with her own slickness as a waft of soft ripe fruit and sex enveloped her. And when he bent over her, his tongue joining the delicious friction, it was too, too much. A sweet wild aroma filled her senses as he stroked and stoked and the pressure accelerated to warp speed.

Rick groaned against her as the salt and the sweet of her slid over his tongue. Her heady aroma surrounded him as he taunted the hard nub, flicking and sucking in equal measure. She bucked and writhed beneath him, begging him to stop, begging him not to stop, as she lifted her hips in silent supplication.

He pinned her down with his hand and his mouth, lapping at her sweetness, refusing to yield. Even when she shattered around him seconds later he gave more, wringing every last tantalising morsel from her as he had done with the mango.

Stella jackknifed up, crying out, ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ fearing that she might actually die from the intensity of the pleasure.

Rick was breathing hard as he withdrew, rocking back on his haunches, watching as Stella collapsed back against the deck, delightfully naked aside from two pushed-aside bra cups.

He quirked an eyebrow. ‘You look like you needed that.’

Stella grunted, which was all she was capable of as strong post-coital aftershocks undulated deep inside her. The stars burst around her like fireworks. ‘You have no idea,’ she panted.

Diana would be proud.

He ran his eyes over her naked abandon one more time. She lay all loose limbed, her nipples still erect, her legs spread, and his erection twitched painfully in his boardies. ‘I think I do.’

Stella saw a flash of carnal hunger glitter in his eyes, aware suddenly that she’d short-changed him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her breath still laboured. ‘I don’t know what the equivalent of premature ejaculation is in females but I think I just had an acute attack.’

Rick chuckled. ‘It was my pleasure.’ He held out his hand to her and pulled her towards him as she took it, kissing her nose. ‘Fancy a shower?’

Stella was pleased for the cover of night as an image of a naked Rick, water and moonlight caressing his magnificent body, sprang instantly to mind. Never, all those nights ago when she’d spied on him, had she thought she’d ever be joining him under the deck shower.

He didn’t give her a chance to indulge the embarrassing memory or to say no, pulling her to her feet, dragging her towards the bow. He let go of her to flick on the taps and rip at the Velcro on his boardies. In a trice they were gone and he was standing before her, proud and erect, the jut of his sex a tantalising silhouette. An illicit reminder of her peep show with the full embellishment of her fantasy life included for good measure.

Rick felt a tug deep inside as she stared at his erection. Somewhere behind him the water sprayed unattended, his heart pounding just as erratically. The moisture in his mouth dried to dust. ‘Your turn,’ he murmured.

She frowned for a moment, confused by his comment, then she looked down at her half-on, half-off bikini top and understood. She pulled it off over her head, being careful not to jar her almost recovered arm. It dropped to the deck next to his boardies.

Rick devoured her curvy roundness in one long slow look. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he breathed.

‘So are you,’ she murmured, her gaze roaming over the perfection of him. This was how she had imagined Vasco. But Rick was more. So much more. He was no figment of her imagination. He was solid flesh and hard muscle and warm blood and he wanted her—Stella—not Mary.

She hadn’t even realised she’d been jealous of Mary until this moment.

But then Rick held out his hand again and she took it and everything else was forgotten. He stepped backwards into the shower and she followed, watching as the water soaked his hair and ran down his chest, before running free down his obliques.

She stepped closer, raising herself on tippy toe, gliding her hands up his pecs and onto his shoulders. His erection pushed against her belly, thick and rampant, and her hand reached for it as she lifted her mouth to his. She felt the jolt through his body as she palmed the length of him and swallowed his groan as their lips fused.

‘Oh...dear...God,’ Rick gasped against her mouth as she increased the intensity of her intimate caress, using the water to her advantage.

Stella couldn’t agree with his sentiments more. She could taste mango and sex on his mouth and the water flowing over their heated skin caressed like icicles and he felt good and right in her hand.

But she wanted him good and right elsewhere.

Inside her.

Deep, deep inside her.

‘You need to be in me,’ she panted, her pulse thrumming so loudly through her ears she was sure she was about to rupture her eardrums.

Rick didn’t need a written invitation. He grabbed her around the waist, boosting her up. As she locked her ankles at his waist he turned around in one easy movement. He pushed her against the entirely inadequate pole the shower head was mounted upon and lowered his mouth to hers, plundering hers until nothing but their two frantic heartbeats registered.

Not even the push and pull of the vast, vast ocean.

And when that wasn’t enough he dropped his head to her chest, devouring the delicious ripeness of her breasts, revelling in the arch of her back and the crazed keening coming from her throat.

‘Now,’ Stella begged, her head thrown back, her chest thrust out in pure debauched abandon.

Rick was hard and ready and done with denying himself. He lifted her slightly, aligning her, aligning himself, nudging her entrance, feeling the still slick heat of her.

‘Rick!’ she begged, lightly pummelling a fist against the muscles of his shoulder as she felt him thick and hard but still not where she wanted him.

Where she needed him.

Rick chuckled at her frustration. ‘Easy, Stel, easy. Let’s make it last this time, huh?’

Stella whacked him harder. ‘Now, damn it,’ she ordered.

Rick grinned. ‘Aye, aye captain,’ he murmured, smothering the very unladylike bellow that came from her mouth as he pushed into her long and hard and deep.

Stella broke away, gasping for air as he slowly withdrew and steadily pushed his way back in again, hitting exactly the right spot every time. ‘Oh, God, yes,’ she panted. ‘Just there. Don’t stop. God, don’t stop!’

She squirmed against him, her head lolling back, water flowing down her breasts, her lips parting in a blissful O.

Rick stroked his tongue down her throat, sipping at the rivulets of water as he kept up the slow easy pace. Her whimpers vibrated against his mouth and he pushed deeper as he slowed right down.

Stella moaned as the subtle friction drove her crazy.

In a good way.

In a never-ever-stop way.

The way she’d always imagined it.

Hard and slow and perfect.

But this was better. So much better. Because it was real.

Rick watched Stella’s breasts rock as he slowly surged into her again. Water sluiced down her chest, traced the contours of her cleavage, clung in droplets at the ends of her nipples. Stars formed a crown above her head and with her blonde hair plastered in wet strips over her shoulders she looked like a water nymph.

‘God,’ Rick groaned, his forehead falling against her chest as the tightness in his groin started to tug at his resistance. ‘You look great in a shower.’

Stella gasped as he pulled out further this time and thrust all the way in. So did he. ‘I have a confession,’ she murmured.

Rick felt his orgasm drawing nearer and beat it back. ‘You do?’ he panted.

She nodded as his pulsing became thrusting once again. ‘When you had a shower the other night at the yacht club in Moresby...’ her teeth sank into her lower lip and she clenched his shoulder as he picked up the pace ‘...I was spying on you.’

Rick pulled out all the way this time, pushing back in until she gasped and arched her back. He was a perfect fit.

‘I have a confession too,’ he said as a more urgent rhythm took over, nudging the slow inexorable build into something much harder to control. He withdrew quickly and just as quickly plunged back in. ‘I saw you.’

If she hadn’t been about to come Stella might have been angry. Embarrassed certainly. But the fact that he’d known, that he’d turned so she could see all of him, was inexplicably arousing. That combined with the continual in-and-out thrust of him was a heady combination.

‘Pervert,’ she gasped as he hit the spot that made her shudder and quiver and cling.

Rick grunted as her fingernails dug in and everything started to unravel. ‘Look who you’re calling pervert, my lovely.’

Stella was going to say something else, but all that came out was a gurgly whimper as she let the hypocritical protest fly up and become stardust. ‘Ah-h-h,’ she cried out as time and space blurred and all that remained was him and her and the silent permission of the ocean.

Rick felt things heat and boil as his belly tensed to an unbearable rigidity. He pulled her into him and crooned, ‘Yes, Stella, yes,’ directly into her ear as she threw back her head and called out his name, clamping tight around him, falling apart in his arms.

It was all that he needed and he bellowed into her chest, thrusting with none of the finesse of earlier as he rode the savage dictates of his body to their final release.

* * *

After a long night of getting acquainted in a way they never had before, Stella woke late the next morning to find Rick propped up on his elbow looking down at her. His eyes seemed even bluer in the morning sunshine slanting through his undressed portholes, his eyelashes longer. His hair seemed shaggier as it hung around his face and brushed his broad bronzed shoulders. His lips fuller.

He should look girly but he didn’t.

He looked utterly masculine with nothing but a white sheet riding low on his hips.

‘Good morning,’ she murmured, blushing as she remembered just what lay beneath that sheet and the things he’d done with it.

She’d done with it.

Rick smiled at the pinkness in her cheeks, surprised that someone who knew him so carnally was capable of such modesty. ‘Good morning to you too,’ he replied, dropping a kiss on a bare shoulder.

His smile slackened as a feeling he wasn’t familiar with washed over him and took up residence in his gut like a lead sinker. Nothing like how he usually felt the morning after—loose and light with all his kinks ironed out. Stella wasn’t some bar hook-up or one of his many port calls. He wasn’t sure what came next.

Stella noted his pensive look. ‘I hope that’s not buyer’s remorse,’ she murmured.

Rick shook his head. If she slapped him in the face and swam back home to England right this moment and refused to see him again he would never regret last night. ‘Never.’

He lowered his head again and kissed her on the mouth, a long, slow, lingering kiss that tasted of them and left him hard beneath the sheet and aching for more.

Stella sighed as he pulled back, brushing her fingers along the soft bristles of his perpetual three day growth. ‘So what’s up?’ she murmured.

He turned his face, kissing the tips of her fingers. ‘I guess,’ he said, looking down into her sleepy olive gaze, ‘I’m not sure what comes next...’

Stella smiled. ‘Breakfast, I think. Unless you want to—’ she dropped her hand to his chest, traced her index finger down his belly to the interesting bulge in the sheet ‘—fool around a bit more?’

Rick captured her hand before it hit her target and thinking wouldn’t be possible. ‘Stel,’ he said. ‘I’m serious. Normally I’d kiss you and tell you I had to be somewhere in a couple of hours but...this is you and...I don’t have a well-rehearsed morning-after plan for this. Frankly I’m torn between freaking out and ringing Andy Willis to tell him I’ve seen your boobs.’

Stella laughed, letting her hand fall to the mattress. Andy Willis had been Rick’s best friend when he’d been eleven and had spent a couple of weeks one summer on the Persephone with them. He’d also had a massive crush on Stella.

Rick frowned down at her. ‘It’s not funny, Stella.’

Stella sobered, finding his pout irresistible. She lifted her head to kiss it away. He resisted until she tugged on his bottom lip with her teeth and soothed it with her tongue. She smiled when he groaned and kissed her back.

She pulled away when they were both breathing hard, smoothing his brow with her thumb.

‘You’re not eleven any more, Rick. What’s happened with us has taken us both by surprise so I don’t have a plan for this either. But do we really need one?’

She remembered what Diana had said—you’re going to be on that boat with him for long periods of time where there’ll be nothing to do. She’d rejected it then as an impossibility but, after last night, maybe Diana had a point.

‘You and I both know that we live two very different lives and also know through the bitter experience of two broken families that they’re practically mutually exclusive. But for the next little while we’re on this boat together—alone—and we’re both single and of age and if last night is any yardstick, we’re pretty damn good together. Can’t that be our plan?’

Rick thought it sounded like possibly the best ever plan he’d heard. But could things really be that simple between the two of them? If he shut his eyes he could hear Nathan telling him how special Stella was, what she deserved out of life. And what she didn’t.

‘I don’t know, Stel, maybe your father was right—’

Stella shook her head vigorously, interrupting him, annoyed that her father had meddled to the extent he had. She’d always wondered why none of her father’s crew had ever spent much time with her once she’d grown breasts and now she knew.

‘No, he was wrong. About a lot of things but especially this. I understand, Rick. You’re like him. I get it. The ocean runs in your veins and the sea is your mistress blah blah.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘And I want marriage and one day babies and for the father of those babies to be around full time. I know all that. But that’s not what this is. We’re not talking marriage and happily-ever-afters here, Rick. We’re talking a couple of weeks of hot, sweaty, sandy, frolicking-in-tropical-lagoons sex.’

Rick shut his eyes against the images she evoked as his hard-on voted yes. But...he looked down at her, her blonde hair spread out on the pillow around her, her lovely face so, so familiar...could a woman who immersed herself in happily-ever-afters ever settle for less?

‘And then what? We just go back to being friends?’

Stella shrugged. ‘Sure. It’s not like we see each other much these days, Rick. What...two or three times a year? Probably even less now that Dad’s not around. Hell, it’ll probably be another year or so before I next see you.’

Rick had to admit she made a good point. ‘That’s true,’ he murmured.

Stella smiled, her hand making its way back to where the sheet still bulged interestingly. ‘The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

Rick dropped his head to nuzzle along her collarbone. ‘It certainly makes sense.’

Her hand dipped under the sheet and she hit pay dirt. Rick swore in Spanish, and she smiled, recognising the word he had taught her when she’d been twelve years old. She wrapped her palm around his girth and revelled in the silky hard length of him and the way he shuddered against her.

She stretched languorously, her free hand slipping under the pillow, grabbing a fistful of sheet as Rick claimed a nipple, sucking it into the heat of his mouth, lashing it with hot wet swipes of his tongue.

Her hand nudged something and it took her lust-drunk brain a moment to ascertain it was a book. Without thinking she pulled it out and looked at it.

The cover of Pleasure Hunt stared back at her.

She said a choice swear word of her own, snagging Rick’s attention.

‘Ah...’ he said warily.

‘You’ve read this?’

She frowned as he collapsed back on the mattress and nodded, her worst fears confirmed. She’d wondered when they’d first had that conversation about her writing process if he’d read it, but his comments had set her mind at ease.

His obviously misleading comments.

‘This is Diana’s copy,’ she said as she thumbed through it. She’d have known it without the benefit of her autograph on the title page. She’d know this dog-eared copy anywhere—she’d seen Diana reading it often enough.

‘Yes. She gave it to me just before we left your house that day.’

‘Oh, did she, now?’ Stella murmured, her ire rising as she formulated a rather stinging email rant in her head. But then another thought hit and she sat bolt upright. ‘Oh, God,’ she said as the most important thing of all occurred to her. She turned her head and looked down at him. ‘So you know...’

She couldn’t even finish the statement, it was so embarrassing.

Rick grinned at her mortified look as he crossed his ankles and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘That I’m Vasco Ramirez?’

The pink she’d gone earlier was nothing to the deep red that currently suffused her cheeks. She opened her mouth to deny it but she couldn’t. If he’d read it, he’d know. There was too much of him in it. Not just that tantalising birthmark but the essence of him. His mannerisms, his way with words, his sense of humour.

His sense of honour.

She looked away, her fingers absently stroking the raised lettering on the cover. ‘Well, there’s no need to get too big-headed about it,’ she huffed. ‘I needed a pirate of Spanish descent. It made sense to...model him on someone I knew.’

Whatever happened she couldn’t let him know that she’d been fantasising about him for a long time before Vasco had come on the scene. That Vasco had walked into her head fully formed because of him. He was already freaked out enough about the development in their relationship.

‘But any resemblance to person or persons alive or dead...’

Rick vaulted upright, fitting himself in behind her, his front to her back, covering her mouth with his hand, cutting off the lawyer speak as he kissed her shoulder. ‘Shh, Stella,’ he murmured. ‘I love it that you modelled him on me.’

He brushed a string of kisses up higher as he dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘I’m not going to sue you, I’m...flattered. And impressed how...accurate...’ he smiled against her skin ‘...your descriptions are. That bath scene...’ He nuzzled her ear; his hands moved to cup her breasts, his thumbs brushing over the already erect nipples. ‘It was like you’d painted a portrait of me.’

Stella arched her back and felt her eyes roll back in her head as his mouth and fingers turned her insides to mush.

Rick kissed up her jaw and when she turned her head towards him he feathered kisses along her lips. ‘Like you’d actually seen me naked,’ he whispered against her mouth as one hand left her breast bearing south.

His words triggered a thought and Stella opened her eyes. ‘You knew,’ she murmured. ‘You’d already read the book when you spied me watching you have that shower.’

He chuckled unashamedly in her ear as both hands stroked her thighs. ‘Guilty,’ he whispered.

Her brow wrinkled as she remembered how cannily familiar some things on this trip had been. The shower incident. When he’d tended her wounds as Vasco had done. When he’d squeezed mango juice all over her body.

But he’d turned her whole body into an erogenous zone and when he urged her thighs apart she didn’t object.

‘Have you been deliberately enacting scenes from the book?’ she murmured, raising both arms and linking them around his neck, arching her back as his finger slid between her legs.

‘What did you expect me to do for fun when you took away all my recreational flirting? Anyway, do you care?’ he whispered, his erection pressing into the cleft of her soft round buttocks.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘I’m mad as he...ll.’ And she would have sounded much more convincing had he not driven a finger deep inside her.

He chuckled at her breathy whimper. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t been taking advantage too? That you didn’t think about the book when you were spying on me in the shower? Or when I was tending to your wounds? That bringing those scenes to life didn’t excite you?’

Stella knew he was right. Knew that it would be hard to take the moral high ground when she’d been using him to indulge a few of her own fantasies.

But she was damned if she was going to let him have it all his way. ‘It’s just a story,’ she panted as he stroked between her legs. ‘They’re what excited Lady Mary.’

Rick remembered what she’d said about Lady Mary not being her in anything other than a generic female way. Her slickness coated his fingers and he picked up the pace. ‘And you’re not her, right?’ he whispered.

Stella was so close to falling over the edge. So far gone she didn’t know which way was up, but even she knew to answer that question truthfully would be madness.

‘Right,’ she gasped as she squirmed against him and he stroked harder.

She clutched convulsively at the back of his neck as a tiny pulse fluttered deep and low, fanning out in ever-increasing waves. Mary was forgotten, Vasco was forgotten as it pulsed and grew until nothing else mattered but the magic Rick could do with his hands.

‘Oh, God,’ she groaned, arching her back, tilting her pelvis. ‘Don’t stop,’ she begged. ‘Please don’t stop.’

Rick felt the tension in his groin tighten to almost unbearable tautness. ‘Yes, Stel, yes,’ he panted, working her slickness, feeling her ripple around him. ‘Come for me. Come.’

Stella bucked as the wave broke over her, undulating with a ferocity that tore the breath from her lungs and, for a moment or two, the beat from her heart.

It gripped her and shook her in endless waves and she knew there was no possible way she could be put back together right, once it ended.