Free Made For Each Other by Parris Afton Bonds Page A

newspaper and laid it
aside. “Not yet. The boat doesn’t leave for Yucatan until this
afternoon. We’ll spend the morning sunbathing.”
    She resented this imperious attitude
even more than the passionate kiss he had extracted from her the
night before. “I got too much sun yesterday. I think I’ll stay in
my room and read.”
    She turned to go, and Nick’s hand shot
out to grab her small-boned wrist. “You’re my bride, Julie. And my
bride doesn’t spend her honeymoon‘reading in her room.”
    She wanted to protest but knew it
would do little good. Nick was not the sort of man to put up with a
temper tantrum. She had no doubt that he would shake her within an
inch of her life if she went against his will.
    Her lips a tight, thin line, she
removed her wrist from his grasp. “I’ll be ready in a moment,” she
said disdainfully as she rubbed where his fingers had bit into her
skin.
    It was the first time Nick would see
her in the new bathing suit he had bought for her, for she had not
come out of the boutique’s changing room when she had tried the
bikini on. Now, looking at herself in the mirror, she felt almost
naked. She wished she were taller, with longer legs and breasts
like melons instead of ta-tas. And why did she have to wear that
unbecoming brace about her shoulders!
    Nick’s eyes swept over her when she
met him outside their rooms, but he said nothing about the way the
bikini bottom barely concealed her curves, too ample to her way of
thinking.
    He wore black briefs that emphasized
his rock-hard thighs and taut stomach, and she kept her gaze on the
stone steps that descended the bluff to the hotel’s private beach
so her gaze would not stray to Nick’s virile physique.
    The two of them were alone on the
beach that early in the morning, although by ten the sun was
already white hot. Nick stretched out on the tawny sand without
looking at her and crossed his hands behind his head. she seated
herself a few feet away and began to rub the suntan cream she had
brought on her legs, though it could just as easily have been sand
she rubbed for all she noticed. She was more aware of Nick’s long,
lean body only inches from hers. When he turned over on his
stomach, cradling his head in his arms, she jumped and dropped the
tube of suntan cream.
    What if she had angered him enough the
evening before that he had decided to forgo his promise? If he even
touched her . . . the prospect made her stomach muscles tighten in
apprehension – and,yes, anticipation.
    “Rub some cream on my back, will you?”
he mumbled lazily.
    Her tongue played over her lower lip.
She knew darned well Nick was aware of the volatile emotions his
presence aroused in her! Gathering her courage, she knelt beside
the lithe brown figure. She squeezed out the cream in a snakelike
figure down the length of the broad back, stopping just where the
waist tapered into the narrow hips. She found herself admiring
those hips—not slat-ass like some men’s she had noticed, but firmly
rounded with muscles.
    “I’ll fry before you rub the cream
in,” Nick said casually, but for the first time that morning she
thought she detected the slightest hint of humor in his
voice.
    She steeled herself and began to rub
the cream into the warm flesh. She tried to keep it on an
impersonal level, but as her fingertips moved over the tendons and
muscles that involuntarily rippled at her touch, her heart began to
beat faster, and the tight knot of desire began to expand in her
stomach so that it would soon snap at the unrelieved
tension.
    She wanted to stop then before she
gave herself away, for surely he could detect by the way her hands
almost caressed his body how highly aroused she was—and,
unreasonably, she wanted to go on touching him. It would be one of
the few times she would have an excuse to without betraying her
feelings—and that was something she was determined not to do. She
would not behave like all the other women who clustered around
Nicholas