Ruby laughed. ‘I thought I was the one who was unable to resist you, not the other way round,’ she teased as she nestled closer to him, the soft curves of her naked body a sweet, warm temptation against his own.
‘Does it feel like I’m able to resist you?’ Sander asked her.
His hands were already stroking her skin; his breath was warm against her lips. Eagerly Ruby moved closer to him. It was still the same—that heart-stopping feeling of anticipation and longing that filled her when she knew he was going to kiss her.
‘I love you…’
The words were breathed against her ear and then repeated against her lips, before Sander finally slowly stroked his tongue-tip against them deliberately, until Ruby couldn’t wait any longer and placed her hands either side of his head. Her lips parted, a little shudder of longing rippling through her.
The sound of the accelerated speed of their breathing mingled with the movement of flesh against fabric, soft whispering sounds of sensuality and expectant desire.
As always, the sweetness of Ruby’s arousal increased Sander’s own desire. She showed her love for him so naturally and openly, with her desire whispered in soft words of love and longing, and encouragement and promises filling the air, breathed against his skin in an erotic litany of emotion. He could now admit that part of him had responded to that in her from the very start, and had in turn loved her for it, even if he had barricaded that knowledge away from himself.
The shape of her body was changing now, and her pregnancy was a gentle swell that he caressed gently before he kissed her growing bump.
Looking down at his dark head, Ruby stroked the smooth flesh at the nape of his neck. She knew now how much both she and this new baby meant to him.
Lying down beside her, Sander cupped her breast, allowing his lips to tease her nipple provocatively, his fingertips drifting tormentingly across her lower belly in a caress he knew she loved. Ruby closed her eyes and clung to him, riding the wave of her own desire as it swelled and pulsed inside her, smiling at the now familiar torment of building pleasure, of raw, sensual need that Sander knew exactly how to stretch out until it became almost unbearable.
Sander knew that if he placed his hand over her mound now he would be able to feel the insistent pulse it covered—just as he knew that the unsteady increase in her breathing meant that the stroke of his fingers within her would bring her alm
ost immediately to orgasm, and that after that orgasm he would re-ignite her desire so that he could satisfy them both with the thrust of his body within hers. He could feel his self-control starting to give way.
His hand moved further down her body. The soft, scented wetness of her sex and the way she offered it to him with such sensual generosity turned his heart over inside his chest. He looked up at her as he parted the folded outer lips. A shudder ripped through her eyes, dark and wild with need. His fingertips stroked slowly through her wetness and then back again, to rub against the source of her desire, hard and swollen beneath his touch, making his own body throb in increasingly insistent demand. His lips caressed her nipple more urgently, his gaze registering the flush staining her skin and the growing intensity of the small shudders gripping her body.
‘San—der…’
It was the way she said his name that did it—a soft plea of longing plaited with a tormenting thread of enticement that smashed through what was left of his self-control.
Ruby shuddered wildly beneath the sensation of Sander’s mouth on her skin—her breasts, her belly, her thighs, and then finally her sex, where his tongue-tip stroked and probed and possessed until the pleasure made her gasp and then cry out.
Sander couldn’t wait any longer. As it was he had to fight against himself to draw out their shared pleasure instead of giving in to the demand of his own flesh and its need to lose itself within her, holding them both on the rack of their shared longing before finally thrusting slowly into her, letting the responsive muscles of her body take him and possess him until they were riding the pleasure together to the ecstasy of shared love and release.
‘I love you.’
‘I love you.’
‘You are my life, my world, light in my darkness, my Ruby beyond price.’
Held safe in Sander’s arms, Ruby closed her eyes, knowing that when she woke in the morning and for every morning, of their lives together, she would wake up held safe and loved.
EPILOGUE
‘OH, RUBY, she’s beautiful.’
Smiling proudly, Ruby looked on as her sisters admired their new niece, who was now just over one month old.
It had been a wonderful surprise when Sander had told her that he had arranged for her sisters and their husbands to visit the island, and Ruby thought it the best present he could have given her—barring, of course, his love and their new daughter.
‘She’s the image of Sander,’ Lizzie announced, with an eldest sister authority that Ruby had no desire to refute.
After all, it was true that Hebe was the image of her father and her twin brothers, and, whilst Sander had said prior to her birth that if they had a girl he would like her to look like her mother, Ruby rather thought that he didn’t mind one little bit that she was a dark-haired, dark-eyed daddy’s girl.
‘It looks as though she can wind Sander and the boys round her little finger already.’ Charlotte joined the conversation, adding ruefully, ‘I’m itching to cuddle her properly, but this one—’ she patted the bulge of her seven-month pregnancy ruefully ‘—obviously doesn’t want me to. He kicked so hard when I tried.’
‘Ah, so it is a boy, then.’
Ruby and Lizzie pounced in unison, laughing when their middle sister tried to protest and then glanced toward her husband, Raphael. He was standing with Sander, and Lizzie’s husband Ilios, who was holding their two-month-old son Perry with the deftness of experienced fatherhood. The three men laughed and talked together.