“Well, I was hoping while we’re here and real life is on hold for a little while, maybe you could teach me…” This time she didn’t draw out her words to tantalize. She did it because she was clearly embarrassed. Her skin was flushed as she finally said, “Things.”

“Things?” The word came out strangled from his throat. “You want me to teach you things?”

“Yes.” Such innocence, even as she made the sexiest request on the planet. “Sexy things.” There was another pause, another moment of obvious bashfulness, before she lifted her bright eyes back to meet his. “Please.”

It was the sweet and simple please that got him. That, and the fact that for all his legendary self-control, in this small room, on this island, in the throes of this storm, he was lost.

Completely, utterly lost in Tatiana. Even when he knew better than to drag either of them deeper...

She watched him, clearly confused as he got up off the bed and walked naked—and aroused—across the room to pick up one of the red-painted wooden chairs. Deliberately, he set the chair at the foot of the bed and sat down on it.

“Touch yourself.”

He could see a thousand new questions pop up in her eyes, but she finally settled on only one. “Is this your way of saying yes?”

He didn’t smile, though he wanted to. He didn’t reassure her, either. She’d said just minutes earlier that it turned her on when he was a little rough. A little hard. Lord knew his erection was as hard as it had ever been from nothing more than looking at her sitting sweet and naked on the crumpled quilt.

“Touch. Yourself.” Each word was spoken as a command, because for all her strength, for all her determination, it was obvious to him that she also loved giving herself up to his dominance in the bedroom. Not every time, perhaps, but definitely tonight.

While he taught her things.

Jesus, he thought as his erection pulsed hard between his thighs, he wanted to pounce on her, wanted to take her again and again until he’d figured out a way to burn through his fierce need for her. Instead, he forced himself to remain on the chair as she blushed and began to slowly slide her hand on top of her stomach.

She bit her lip, the flush now moving from her cheeks to spread over her br**sts. “Do you want me to touch my br**sts? Or...between my legs?”

He didn’t stop his lips from curving into a smile this time. Of course, as an actress, she would ask him for direction. And he would give it to her. Only, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the kind of direction she was expecting.

“I want you touch yourself the way you have, alone in your bed, naked beneath the sheets, since the day you met me at the wedding.” Her eyes grew even wider as he said, “I want you to show me if my own fantasies about you were right.”

“You fantasized about me?”

“I thought you wanted me to teach you things,” he replied in a deceptively gentle voice, “but from the way you keep stalling with more questions, maybe you aren’t serious, after all.”

That was all it took to persuade her to shift on the bed so that she was lying on her back with her legs falling open on the messy bed covers. From his perfect vantage point, he could see that she was still aroused from their earlier lovemaking, the smooth skin between her thighs plump and slick. Her hair was wet and tangling over her shoulders, where a few marks from his lips and teeth were starting to come into stark bruised relief against the pale skin. There was no order whatsoever to any part of the picture she painted before him...and yet, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever set eyes on.

Order, he was beginning to believe whenever they were together, was vastly overrated.

She brought her hands up to her br**sts and as she softly cupped them, her eyes fluttered closed. Looking as if she was going deeper into her imagination, into the fantasies she’d once created about the two of them, her hands squeezed, pinched, caressed her soft flesh and ni**les that grew harder by the second. When a low moan fell from her lips, he decided it was time to push her a little farther.

“Very pretty,” he said, wanting her to know how much he appreciated, and approved, of what she was doing before he shoved her all the way past comfort. “But I want more, Tatiana.” Hell, he wanted so much from her that it was nearly ripping him to shreds.

“Tell me what you want, Ian. Tell me and I’ll do it.”

“I want you to tell me what I’m doing to you in your fantasies.”

Her hands nearly slipped from her skin as a number of different emotions—surprise, lust, fear, along with determination to see this through—raced across her beautifully expressive face. But when only lust and determination remained, she held his gaze as she began to speak in an intoxicatingly sensual tone.

“After we met at the wedding and you shook my hand, I couldn’t forget the way it felt. Your hand was so big, so warm, and rougher than I thought it would be for a businessman. I couldn’t stop thinking, fantasizing, about what it would feel like if you were touching me somewhere else.” She didn’t so much as blink as she told him, “Everywhere else.”

He swallowed hard as she moved her hands away from her br**sts to slide over her neck, and then to her flushed face. “I wondered what it would feel like if you held me still so that you could kiss me exactly the way you wanted to. And how it would be if you fisted your hands in my hair—” She moved one hand from her cheek to her damp locks. “—so that I had to go wherever you decided to take me.” Her hips shifted slowly up and down on the bed in a rhythm that told him just how ready she already was to take him again. “I wanted so badly for you to take me.”

She was whispering now as she ran her hands back down over her neck, her collarbones, and then the upper slope of her br**sts. And, oh, how he’d wanted it, too, wanted to take her every single second from that first handshake. Knowing that she’d been just as hungry, just as desperate for him, didn’t just send him all the way to the edge, it nearly tipped him into the abyss. But if he moved, if he spoke, he knew she’d stop confessing her erotic fantasies to him, so he stayed exactly where he was, even as he watched her fingers move over her ni**les, rougher on the second trip so that her flesh stood hard on the tips of her full br**sts when she finally continued her journey down over her ribs.

“I knew that if—when—you took me, it would be good, better than anything I’d ever known.” Her mouth curved up into a sexy smile as she brought one hand back up to her br**sts and let the other move lower, then lower still, until her fingers hovered just above her sex. “I was right.”