Sunkissed

by Stephanie Ash

Genres: Holiday books; Erotic & Steamy Romance

Synopsis

He had given her everything. There would be no games with him

When Anna Hazel arrives in Crete to work on an archaeological dig for the summer, she has yet to meet her new boss, the brilliant but mysterious Dr William Sillery. He has a reputation as a slave-driver.

As Anna begins to enjoy the sun-drenched Greek island, she also develops a friendship with the darkly handsome host of her villa, Vangelis. Intoxicated by the long, fiercely hot summer, Anna's darkest desires are about to be realised as she embarks on a series of forbidden adventures. But in the end she must decide who will own her heart.

Release date: November 10, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

Isn’t it just sod’s law, thought Anna.

Life with her long-term boyfriend Justin had been going about as smoothly as sandpaper for a couple of months; then, the night before she had to leave England to spend two months working on an archaeological dig in Crete, he seemed to have decided that he did love her after all and what’s more, he wanted to prove it.

Anna couldn’t help thinking about this latest disaster as she stirred two packets of sugar into the barely drinkable coffee she had just bought at the Gatwick North terminal concession of some burger bar. The previous evening, Justin had finished work early, since it was to be their last night together for some time. He had made a special effort with the way he looked too, wearing Anna’s favourite shirt, a soft green one he had had for years which brought out the colour in his gorgeous eyes, and, to go with the shirt, those great black jeans that made the most of his amazing bum.

Anna was more than a little embarrassed when she opened the door to Justin looking his best. All her decent clothes had already been packed away for the trip to Crete and she was wearing her oldest jeans and a T-shirt that had seen better days. Not that the stuff in her suitcase was so much better anyway. After all, there was little call for Armani in the life of someone who spent most of the year knee deep in mud or dust.

So Anna tried to make herself look presentable with a quick trip to the bathroom. She scraped her light brown hair back into a tidy high ponytail, framed her hazel eyes with mascara, and smeared on some deep plum-coloured lipstick while Justin waited in the hall. When she emerged, feeling just a little more butterfly than cocoon, Justin told her to let her hair loose again and take the war-paint off at once.

With Anna scrubbed clean once more, they walked to the restaurant hand in hand. They were only going to the pizza place on the corner of Anna’s street – it did half-price offers on most nights – but it had been their special place at the beginning of their relationship when they were both still poor students. Now Justin was a rich City stockbroker whose biggest problem was in what colour he should order his new Porsche 911. Anna, however, was still quite broke, having decided to stick with archaeology rather than dump her vocation for a nine-to-five, overdraft-free existence in the ‘real world’, as Justin liked to term it.

As they walked to the restaurant, Anna noticed that they were talking carefully about Justin’s day and not at all about hers. It was as though he still expected her to turn around and say that she had been joking, that she wasn’t going away in the morning after all. Justin had tried to persuade her against spending the summer away from him but the Minoan history of Crete was a subject close to Anna’s heart, and the opportunity to work on a major new Minoan site there was one that would become less and less frequent as ancient Greek theme parks with giant labyrinth-style waterslides and rollercoasters took priority over real history in the battle to attract tourism.

But Justin simply refused to understand. He said that Anna was going to Crete because she wanted to run away from him. Perhaps there was an element of truth in that, she thought as he said it for the fiftieth time. But not ‘running away from’, she decided; rather, he was pushing her away, for over the past few months Justin had become so wrapped up in the world of stocks and shares that little seemed to matter to him any more but the manufacture of money from money. Even when he wasn’t at the office, it was still very much on his mind. Anna had noticed his attention drifting to his Blackberry when she talked to him about her work, where once he would have been rapt by her tales from the trenches. After all, archaeology had been his subject at university, too. He could talk for hours about Roman mosaics. But now it was as though he could no longer understand her having enthusiasm for anything that brought home less than fifty thousand pounds per annum, and sometimes Anna had to work hard to stop herself from being made to feel that perhaps what she was doing was slightly trivial compared to his work after all.

At the restaurant, they were shown to their usual table and they ordered their usual food. As Justin snapped the menu shut, Anna remembered how impressed she had been when they went to a Japanese restaurant shortly after Justin got his first real job after graduating. She had never eaten Japanese food before and so Justin had taken charge. He had ordered for her, telling her that he knew her well enough to know what she would like on that menu full of strange words that meant nothing to her. He had grown increasingly fond of being in charge after that. And not just in restaurants, but in bed, too. Moulding her body to his in a way that ensured not just his pleasure but her own.

At first she had enjoyed this change in him. Justin’s high-flying City job had injected new confidence into all areas of his life. Anna remembered the thrill of being rushed upstairs from an important client’s dinner party to be taken roughly from behind while hanging on to the edge of the hostess’s chintzy dressing table. Justin’s expression reflected in the mirror had been so determined, so confident, so powerful. The Justin she had met at college would have been far too worried about causing offence to take the risk of being caught in flagrante. Justin the City boy just didn’t care.

But now things were different again. Anna too had changed, and she was no longer the meek creature who had been grateful for Justin’s continued attention in the face of all those City temptations. Deciding to take the job in Crete had been a turning point for her. It was a sign to herself that she was going to start taking her career every bit as seriously as Justin took his. The confidence her new employers had shown in taking her on had started to rub off on her attitude.

To be honest, the thought of getting on a plane and flying out to meet a couple of complete strangers for a month on an island where her knowledge of the local language was limited to ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ filled her with something approaching terror, but Anna hoped that she would survive the experience and come out stronger than before. She prayed that the same could be said for her relationship with Justin.

Meanwhile at the restaurant, the food had finally arrived. They bolted it down and soon it seemed that Justin was calling for the bill before Anna had decided that she didn’t really want coffee. His hand was already on her knee beneath the table and even under the shadow of her imminent departure, the passion between them was breaking through the strain.

‘Let’s go straight to bed, eh?’ Justin had said as, a very hurried walk home later, Anna pushed open the door to her flat. She didn’t argue, but let him back her into the bedroom, stripping off their clothes as they went, leaving a trail of his and her garments behind them like scattered petals. Once in the room, Justin placed his hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her down on to the unmade bed. Level with his waist, Anna wrapped her arms around him and covered his taut, toned belly with gentle kisses before moving slowly down his body to where his hard-on already bobbed to attract her attention.

‘I don’t want you to go,’ he murmured hotly into her long silky hair.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But don’t let’s think about it now. We’ve got ages until morning.’

She reached up to pull him down on top of her. Justin nuzzled his mouth against the side of her satin-soft neck, savouring the smell of her delicious perfume as though this might be his last ever chance to smell it. Anna twisted her fingers in his thick blond hair and sighed as he moved his attention further down her body, kissing a trail from her porcelain neck down to her beautiful breasts, greeting each of the perfect hemispheres with a kiss as though they were old friends.

Sighing, Justin cupped a delicate pink breast in each hand and brought them together, burying his face in the deep cleavage he made between them. Now Anna sighed too, as Justin moved to tongue her waiting nipples into hard pink peaks. Then he nipped at them, carefully, until she thought she might squeal with excitement. Justin could always press the right buttons in the bedroom. He knew Anna’s body almost as well as she knew it herself.

‘I love it when you do that,’ she told him as he suckled at her breast. He obliged by doing it slightly harder. Anna drew in breath sharply and ran her hands up Justin’s back, scratching urgent pink pathways on his smooth brown skin with her long fingernails. Justin arched his back in response. His eyes were closed and his mouth already stretched wide into an ecstatic smile.

Then Justin moved down her body again. This time, he hesitated around her waist, first gently tracing the outline of her navel with his tongue, then probing at it, penetrating it, until she began to squirm. Down below his kisses, Anna could already feel herself becoming aroused, her vagina getting wetter and warmer in response as Justin circled her belly button. After a while, she had to push him away again, giggling as she did it, to get him to concentrate on the areas that really mattered.

Justin slipped down from the bed and knelt before her on the floor. Putting a hand on each of Anna’s knees he parted her legs so that she lay fully exposed to him. Teasingly, he began to lick at the bottoms of her tiny narrow feet. As he tickled, Anna curled in her toes and squirmed in a vain attempt to avoid his tongue, but he had a hand on each of her ankles now and she knew that he wouldn’t let her go until he wanted to.

‘Don’t tickle me,’ she begged him. ‘Do something more exciting.’

Rising to the challenge, Justin slid his hands up her calves, following close behind them with his mouth, kissing a damp path along the inside of her legs until his hot lips reached the tops of her thighs. Anna’s hands rested delicately on her pubic bone. Justin moved them away with his chin and nuzzled his face in her glossy pubic hair.

‘Oh, yes,’ Anna sighed. ‘Yes. Do that. That’s good.’

His darting tongue had found her clitoris, already swollen and quietly aching for his attention. He flicked the little nub from side to side with his strong pink tongue, then sucked it between his lips as though it were a miniature penis. Nipping gently at the tiny nub with his perfect teeth, he drew a sharp breath from Anna above.

He slipped his hands between her thighs again, this time finding her labia and parting them carefully like a fisherman expecting to find a pearl. On the bed, Anna twisted luxuriously in anticipation of the feeling of his tongue on those other lips. Her vulva already glistened with the juice of her desire for him, ready to mingle with his saliva and make her wet enough to take him in easily in one ecstatically welcome stroke.

Justin delicately caressed the shining pink lips of her vulva with his mouth. The warm musky scent of her body filled his lungs, mixed tantalisingly with the heady tropical flower perfume of the body lotion she had smoothed on to her thighs in preparation for this last precious evening together. Justin stretched out his tongue and probed deep inside her, holding her thighs steady so that she couldn’t roll away and escape.

‘Take me now,’ she begged him when she thought that she might break down and come before he even got anywhere near her.

But she needn’t have worried, because Justin was more than ready. He moved up the bed until he was lying directly on top of her, then slid his hand down between their hot bodies and guided his stone-hard penis between her legs and her slippery labia. Anna drew breath sharply at the first thrust, quickly relaxing again when she felt his pelvis touch hers. Then, sighing deeply, she thrilled to the singular joy of being filled so completely and expertly by his shaft.

Justin gazed at her face steadily as he began to move, holding himself high above her body with his strong arms. Anna’s own gaze wandered over the taut muscles of his arms and his chest. It was as though she were trying to take in a picture of him that would keep her feeling close to him all the time she was away. A picture of the way that his pumping veins bound his hard muscles like tightly wrapped cord. A picture of the powerful flex of his pectoral muscles as he moved forward above her and took all his weight on his beautiful arms.

Next she switched her attention to his pelvis, to the way he was thrusting slowly in and out of her, so that their bodies appeared like two parts of a fantastically well-oiled machine. To Anna the sight of Justin’s dick plunging into her was almost as good as the feeling it gave her deep inside. She felt her vagina begin to pulse in appreciation of him with the first stroke. It was a steady, rhythmic pulse that began to spread slowly throughout her limbs like the spring sun melting ice.

Justin knew exactly what she wanted. He always had done. When he was sure that she was almost unbearably aroused, he began to change the direction and depth of his thrusts. Whether he was aiming straight for her G-spot or just tickling at the edges of her labia with the very tip of his shaft, each and every stroke was carefully calculated to drive her completely wild.

Anna lifted her legs from the bed and wound them tightly around Justin’s body, at the same time grasping his buttocks with her hands and using them to bring him further inside her still. Her fingers dug hard into his soft warm flesh as she grew more and more excited, forcing him to increase the pace of his movement to keep time with her racing breath.

‘Do it harder,’ she told him huskily. And he responded instantly. His teeth were gritted together in ecstatic determination as he thrust into her powerfully with strokes that hammered against her swollen clitoris and drove her to the edge. Deep down inside, she had the sensation of reaching the very top of a rollercoaster. Her stomach suddenly seemed to flip over inside her and for a moment she felt quite weightless as her orgasm set in and quickly took hold of every nerve in her shaking body.

She was coming long before him. Her vagina contracted and throbbed around his penis as though she were trying to pull him inside her for always. Justin continued to thrust, his face smiling down on her face. Anna’s eyebrows wer. . .