Chapter 10

• Layla blinked, bemused, having assumed he would be as eager to be touched as she was. And, ‘not for the first time’? Was that simply his prodigious self-assurance doing the talking for him? Layla, her body all aquiver about even the thought of a single experience and the unlikelihood of her wanting a second, watched him strip off his clothing with something less than the laid-back cool she had come to expect from him.
• Everything came off at once, ensuring that she had little time to be curious about what her first aroused male looked like. He was larger than she had assumed he would be, but that was only a point of academic interest, she assured herself nervously, surveying the prodding length and breadth of his bold shaft. She knew she would stretch, and she envisaged neither pain nor anything else that might reveal her inexperience. After all, she had gone horse riding from an early age and believed any physical barrier would be long gone. With the same focused intellectual interest, Layla wondered why she literally felt overheated when she looked at Lucas naked, her body hot, her breath catching in her throat as if she lacked oxygen.
• Layla's instinctive fear of what had happened to her mother becoming a reality for her.