Island Heat (A Sexy Time Travel Romance With a Twist) (14 page)

The flower continued to tease my bellybutton, twirling slowly on the ticklish skin.

I reached up to pull his hand in mine, forcing him to drop the flower. His fingers entwined with my own. My mouth sought his in another hard, seeking kiss, and my tongue licked at the seam of his mouth, hungry.

“
Belleza
,” he chided, pulling away to kiss lightly at the corners of my mouth, detangling his fingers from mine. “Your beauty is mine today. Let me enjoy it. I have waited a long, long time for such joy.”

“It’s only been a week or two,” I protested, my fingers flicking across his nipple again, trying to incite his body to the same fever pitch of lust that mine was brimming with.

He chuckled. “For you, perhaps. For me, it has been lifetimes.”

“What—“

He kissed me again, silencing my questions. They weren’t that important, I decided, mesmerized by the stroke of his tongue against mine, the fire it stoked in my body. He slid lower, kissing my jaw and lower, nipping at my throat. I sighed with pleasure. Fine, no questions. If he wanted to drive, I’d let him drive.

Salvador pulled me upright against him. My bare breasts grazed his smooth chest, and I moaned in pleasure, my hands skimming his chest. “God, your body is amazing,” I murmured, running my fingers over the rock-hard ripples of muscle. “Like one of those statues of the Greek gods. You could totally be Apollo to my Diana.”

His husky chuckle made a shiver of delight pulse through me, his fingers slid the rest of my blouse off my body. It left me naked – I’d worn no swimsuit under my clothes since we’d gone to the waterfall, and my bare breasts peaked at being exposed to the air.

I crossed my arms over my breasts, feeling shy.

He stopped me, lowering my hands back to my sides and just staring at me, drinking his fill at the sight of me. Then his fingers moved to the waistband of my skirt and he grasped it, tugging downward. I readjusted myself in his lap, helping him pull off my skirt and slide it down my legs.

Once it was off, he tossed it to the side, his hands running down my thighs as if he couldn’t get enough of touching me. “Your skin is so pale,” he said, murmuring against my breast, the nipple close to his mouth and yet ignored. “The sun has not warmed you yet.”

“I feel pretty warm right now,” I said, brushing the tip of my breast against his lips suggestively.

He only chuckled and lightly nipped at my flesh in a playful tease, sending a shockwave through my body. I needed more than just a quick brush of his lips.

His hands moved over my naked skin, exploring me as I sat in his lap. Fingers trailed up and down my arms, my thighs, the backs of his hands grazing across my belly in a leisurely caress.

I reached for his loincloth. I stroked my fingers over his erection, noting the size of the package underneath. “Take this off,” I said, my lips brushing against his face. “I want to feel your body on mine.”

He stilled for a moment, his hands tightening on my waist as if composing himself. “No,
belleza
. Let me show you beauty. Let me show you what I offer.”

With that, he bore me back down to the ground. I lay stretched out in the flowers before him, my body naked and quivering at the smoldering looks from his green eyes.

Then, he leaned over me, his lips brushing against the tip of one nipple, and I was lost. He coaxed and teased them into stiff points, rolling a tip between his teeth and then licking it, until I was writhing beneath him and panting his name. He switched to my other breast and gave it the same lavish attention, his lips scalding against my flesh.

His mouth slid down to my navel, tongue dipping into the indention, and my entire body shivered with delight. My fingers knotted in his hair, my hips moving restlessly beneath him. He kissed lower and I began to tense. His mouth moved to the curls at the juncture of my thighs, and I felt faint with giddy need, anticipation driving me wild. “Salvador,” I whimpered, questioning. My thighs slid together, my body tensing at the thought of the most intimate of touches. “Are you sure—“

“Let me,
belleza
,” he whispered against my flesh, his fingers sliding between my legs to part my thighs once more. “I will not hurt you.”

I was just about to protest that I wasn’t afraid of him hurting me at all, when he parted my sex with his thumbs, and his tongue stroked my core.

My words died into a gurgled moan. I was lost.

Hotly, he tongued the entrance to my body, teasing and exploring, then settled to circle at my clit. As lavished attention on it with his mouth, my legs tensed and my body began to quiver all over, and I wasn’t able to stop the cries that erupted forth from my mouth. My fingers twisted in his hair, digging in insistently, letting him know how much I liked his mouth there. When he flicked his tongue, I shuddered. When he sucked gently at the nub, I moaned, and when he slid a finger inside me in the next moment, I broke apart. I came in that moment, tensing all around him and crying out his name in the most explosive orgasm I’d ever had.

He didn’t stop, his fingers sliding in and out and working me with his mouth until I climaxed again, coming hard on top of the first one.

After that, it seemed to take forever for my body to stop shuddering with pleasure, and when it did, I felt wrung out and weak, and oh-so-delicious. He didn’t stop stroking my skin, even when he sat me up and pulled me in his arms, his hands stroking my back and my backside and still pressing small kisses along my shoulders.

“Oh...my...God,” I said eventually, the words escaping in a sigh. “Salvador,” I breathed, my hands reaching for him and in surprise, I felt his loincloth at his hips. He’d never undressed. “You...you didn’t...?” I was surprised; so lost in my own pleasure, I hadn’t even realized that he didn’t take his.

He lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss on the palm. “I have waited a long time, Diana. I can wait until you tell me that you are ready.”

I gave him a wry look. “I was pretty ready a few minutes ago.”

Salvador shook his head, kissing my palm again and then curling my fingers shut around my palm, as if he could trap the kiss there. “Today, I courted you. Someday soon, when you want me, you will court me, yes? And you will tell me that you are ready.” His hot green eyes roamed over me possessively. “In all ways.”

“If you say so,” I said languidly, snuggling up against his hard, broad chest. The wind was definitely high here, and cut against my naked skin. “Is that why you stopped the first time in the waterfall?”

“No,” he said. “The first time was because we were watched.”

“What?” I jerked up, staring into his eyes in shock. “Someone was watching us?”

He shrugged. “Eustace, most likely. It was why he was so eager to claim you for his own, but you are mine.” His thumb skimmed along my lower lip, still swollen from our kisses.

Well, that was creepy.

“Diana,” Salvador began. “We should talk about Olivia.”

The perfect afternoon dampened a little, and I felt selfish. “Do we have to talk about her right now? Can’t we talk about it later? I don’t want to ruin the moment.” There was plenty of time to think about all the unhappy things in the world later. Right now I was content to relax in Salvador’s arms and bask in the afterglow.

“Later, then,” he whispered huskily against my ear, and pulled me close.

We watched the skies and enjoyed the peace of the afternoon for a time, and I snuggled in Salvador’s arms. Try as I might, the image of Eustace spying on the two of us in the waterfall stayed with me even when we dressed and made our way back down the tree. I thought of Eustace and was thankful again that Salvador was the better fighter of the two.

I watched his lean, muscled form as he held my hand and led me through the forest. There could be a lot worse things than being stranded on a deserted island with a gorgeous man like this.

When we arrived back at the cave, Olivia already had supper cooking, the two rabbits spitted over the fire and slowly turning. She took one look at my tousled hair and my clothing and flushed, retreating to the far end of the cave and ignoring us. I glanced down at my blouse and noticed it was buttoned wrong and half-untucked out of my skirt, and hastily fixed it.

Salvador chuckled at my expression and pressed a kiss at my temple, finger-combing my hair for me.

I shooed him away with my hands. “It’s not funny. She’s going to think I’m a huge slut.” After a moment, I added, “More than she already thinks I am.”

He gave me a slow, sensual smile that made my toes curl even though I was still limp and exhausted from our experience in the nest. “Let her think what she likes, Diana. She knows you belong to me.”

His searching eyes made me feel suddenly shy, and I leaned over to give him a quick kiss on the mouth, and whispered, “Thank you for today.” I blushed even as I said it, but I felt the need to say something.

Salvador pulled me against him, running his hands along my sides again, a line of concentration on his forehead, and I knew he was struggling to keep himself in check. “I have waited a long time for you, Diana. It was a pleasure to be able to give you such joy with my mouth.”

Oh. I blushed at that and concentrated on twining my fingers in his again. “How long have you waited?”

He leaned over to nibble at my ear, his voice husky and sad. “Four hundred and eighty-nine years.”

I jerked away from him in surprise. “What?”

There was a sad look on Salvador’s face that I didn’t like, one that made me worry and tense with fright, even as I repeated my question. “What did you just say?”

He shook his head. “There is no better way to say this, Diana. I have been on this island four hundred and eighty-nine years.”

I backed a step away from him. “That’s impossible. You know that’s impossible. Nobody lives that long.” A short, bitter laugh escaped me. “You’ve gone crazy on this island, haven’t you?” My laugh turned into a choked sob. “I knew you were too good to be true.”

Salvador took a step towards me, hand outstretched, but I slapped it away. “Diana,” he said. “I wish there was an easier way to say this to you, to show you what I mean. Believe me when I say I do not lie.”

“How can you possibly be on this island for four hundred and eighty-nine years?” My voice broke a little.

“My ship was heading to Florida with Ponce de Leon’s in search of the riches of the New World, when we hit a sudden storm—“

I interrupted him, raising a hand to silence him. “Stop it. I don’t want to hear your lies.” This was ridiculous. First the dinosaurs, now this. Salvador was crazy. Being stuck here on the island had made him lose track of time. I glanced around in the small cave, looking for Olivia – she wasn’t in the main room. I moved back to her quarters and pulled the flap back, ignoring the red-rimmed glare she gave me as she sat on a pile of fur blankets. “Olivia? Tell me that he’s making this up?”

“Making what up?”

“The time you guys have been on the island. Seriously. Tell me the truth.”

She straightened, her eyes somber as she regarded me. “My brother and I left England on Her Majesty’s Ship, the
Rosalie
, in 1840. We ran into a storm, and we were cast here. That was one hundred and seventy years ago. I am one hundred and seventy nine years old.”

She believed this too. No wonder she’d burst into tears when I mentioned that she’d grow out of this soon. If she thought she was nearly two hundred years old, and still trapped in the body of a thirteen year old...

I put my hands to my forehead in distress. “You’re both lying.” I glanced over at the fire, where ancient Harold huddled. “Harold?”

But he didn’t speak. Harold never spoke.

“He landed here thirty-some years later,” Olivia said, her voice dull. “On the Mary Celeste. There was a baby – a young girl, but she died.”

So straightforward, so unabashed with the ‘facts’. A sick coldness twisted in my stomach and grew.

“I am sorry, Diana,” said Salvador. “I wanted to keep it from you for as long as possible, to give you some time to adjust, but I felt you should know.”

When he reached for me again, I slapped his hands away once more and turned away, a hysterical bubble in my throat. “You’re both crazy – everyone here is crazy. Do you know what year it is?”

“Two thousand and ten,” they both replied at the same time. Harold just stared at me.

“That’s right! And people might live to be a hundred, but nobody – nobody! – lives to be four hundred. That’s impossible. Things like this don’t happen in the modern world. Everything is explained by science. Everything.”

“Such as the terrible lizards? The di-no-saurs, you call them?”

Of course they were unfamiliar with the term ‘dinosaur’. It hadn’t been coined before they’d been shipwrecked here. I reeled, cramming my knuckles against my mouth and biting down on them to keep from screaming.

“Diana,” Salvador said, approaching me with his hands outstretched, as if to comfort me. “You know – as we do – that things on this island are not right. Our naval equipment does not work, the stars never move in their position in the skies, and great and terrible creatures roam the land, creatures that do not exist except in the stories Olivia has told me.” He looked at me with serious, haunted eyes. “Nothing on this island ages; not you, or me, or anything at all. We exist here, outside of time.”

I could not bite back the hysterical laughter that bubbled forth in my throat, and shoved past him. I bolted for his small cave, wanting to dive into the wealth of furs and never come out again, to close my eyes and wish fervently that this was all a bad dream.

No sooner had I shut the crude leather curtain behind me than I heard Olivia’s voice. “Let her go, Salvador.” Her voice sounded surprisingly old and tired for one so young. “You know she will need time to adjust to the truth. It is not an easy thing to realize.”

“I do not want her to hurt, Olivia.” His voice sounded as anguished as I felt.

“I know,” she said simply.

I turned away, facing the opposite wall, and my straining eyes made out the hash-marks, even in the darkness of the small sleep-nook. Every white scratch etched on the surface of the rock taunted me.