Phantom Lover

by Susan Napier

  ‘Honor—’

  ‘That’s the last time you go anywhere with Adam Blake, even if he grovels to you on bended knees. Comprenez?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘This is the one man in the entire world who’s not available to you. OK? Even if he thinks he is, I’m telling you that he’s not. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not within your lifetime. Are you getting the message now? Whatever happens between him and me makes no difference: he’s off limits—forever. Find some other hunk to amuse you. I was here first. This one is mine.’

  ‘Uh—Honor—’

  Honor wasn’t ready to stop. ‘Back off!’

  ‘Look, Honor—’

  ‘No, you look—’

  ‘Can I look, too?’

  The low, silken drawl came from the vicinity of the adjoining door behind her. Honor turned slowly and Helen said apologetically, ‘I did try to tell you, sweetie, but you were stuck at full throttle. He’s been there pretty well all along...’

  Honor didn’t hear her, or see her shrug of tipsy resignation at Adam before she slipped out the door.

  ‘That was quite some speech...’

  Adam’s hands were in the trouser pockets of the dark blue suit he had worn out of the house that morning. Lounging against the door-jamb, he was making no attempt to hide his blatantly sexual study of her lush, provocatively framed figure. ‘Did you mean it?’

  Honor tossed her head, which unbeknown to her had an interesting flow-on effect down the rest of her body. ‘What do you think?’

  His eyes were pure gold and dead sober. ‘I think you’re a sinfully attractive woman.’

  She was disappointed in him. She glared proudly. ‘You don’t have to lie to me—’

  ‘You attract me, therefore you must be attractive,’ he pointed out with seductive logic, taking his hands out of his pockets as he shouldered off the edge of the door and sauntered towards her. ‘And in that sexy bit of nothing you’re definitely an invitation to sin. Are you extending that invitation to me tonight, darling? I do hope so, because I have every intention of accepting...’

  She stared at him, half hypnotised by the frank appreciation of his words and the glitter of sensuous determination in his eyes. He looked down, smoothing his hands over the warm upper swells of her breasts where they were lifted and separated by the soft boning of the basque-style bodice. Then his fingers traced down the narrow strip of skin revealed by the lacing to her indented navel, where he inserted his thumb and withdrew it, and repeated the action, stretching the tiny, shallow cavity with a series of wickedly suggestive thrusts that flooded her womb with warmth.

  Much as she would have liked to melt, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t. ‘About Helen...’ she forced herself to say.

  ‘Apart from drinking a glass or two more than she should have, your sister behaved impeccably—and so did I. She is an interesting woman, but not my type. You are. So I asked her all about you and she told me. At length. She told me all about you from the day you disrupted her tranquil, self-centred, childish existence by arriving home a squalling, chubby-cheeked cherub in her mother’s arms to your present, quiet, sedate self. But you don’t look anything like a cherub tonight and you certainly look anything but sedate...’

  His voice drifted down an octave as he watched his finger trace the tiny bow that fastened the lacing between her breasts. ‘Why wouldn’t you look at me when you introduced Helen this morning?’ He lifted one end of the bow on the pad of his finger.

  She didn’t realise he had been aware of her rigid defensiveness. ‘Because I knew what I would see...’

  ‘Did you? Or were just so afraid of what you might see, you preferred not to look at all...?’

  Honor was finding it hard to breathe. If he played with that end of the bow for much longer it would...

  It unravelled with a little rush.

  ‘Oh,’ he said softly, with mock-dismay. ‘Look what’s happened. What shall I do now?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ asked Honor shakily, feeling that the world had shifted on its axis for the second time today.

  ‘I want to lay you down and make sweet, slow love to you for what’s left of the night...’

  ‘Oh.’ His passionate simplicity stole even more breath from her throat. She cleared it awkwardly, and said nothing, wondering belatedly whether the exotic boldness of her lingerie had badly misled him as to her experience.

  He took her hand and backed away, leading her gently into his room, but instead of drawing her into his arms immediately he asked curiously, ‘Why wait until tonight to deliver that lecture to Helen? Why didn’t you say something this morning?’

  ‘I—is that what I was supposed to do?’ Honor asked, a little trill of pleasure skipping along her nerves as Adam slowly loosened his tie and took it off. Then he removed his jacket and his pale blue shirt, never taking his eyes off her flushed face. ‘Did you want me to act like a jealous bitch?’

  ‘Why not—you were, weren’t you?’

  As she shifted her head nervously, her eyes caught the light, their colour intensifying. His hands paused on his belt-buckle.

  ‘Very green-eyed,’ he confirmed in a low husk of amusement. ‘You disguised it very well at the time; I thought you didn’t care or you would have called my bluff and invited yourself along, so that I’d have a chance to show you that she leaves me cold. I would have loved some indication that you were prepared to fight for me. There’s nothing wrong with being jealous of a lover. After all, I’m jealous...’

  Honor’s lips parted in surprise. ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of this...’ He ran his hand caressingly up the front of the teddy to where her breasts crowded the silk. ‘Of everything you wear next to your skin. That’s where I want to be. And I’m jealous of Helen and all the other people who know more about you than I do—especially the men...’ He boldly stripped his belt from his waist and lowered his zip before pulling her close and shuddering. ‘Touch me, Honor. Put your hands on my chest...’

  There was one more thing she had to settle first, even though it was becoming as hard to think as it was to breathe.

  ‘Adam—about Helen...’

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘No, not mine, the other one. The Helen you fell in love with and wrote those letters to...’

  ‘You mean Mary?’

  ‘Not your wife—Helen.’ She wondered whether the same desire that smoked along her senses and obscured her thoughts had also clouded his.

  ‘But Mary was Helen...Helen was Mary. My God, didn’t I ever tell you that?’ he murmured, in as much shock as she. ‘It was a sort of a joke between us—she was my Helen of Troy, I was her Paris—kidnapping her love from her parents and carrying her off for myself. Which is exactly what I did. Her parents disapproved of our marriage—she was an only child and they thought Mary was too young and I was too big and rough, too hot-blooded and disrespectful ever to be suitable for their delicate little girl. They disapproved of me until the day they died. I could never forgive myself for being the reason that Mary was alienated from her parents, even though she never once threw it up at me...’

  Honor’s unfurling confidence froze, darkening her sea-green eyes with doubts. Could she still go through with this? According to Greek legend Helen was the most beautiful woman of her entire age! Everything she learnt about Mary-Helen seemed designed to make Honor feel lack-lustre and ordinary.

  And yet Adam didn’t think of her that way...

  ‘I wrote those letters in a rage of hormones—I stole bits from great literature because I didn’t think I could match their fluent skill in seduction,’ he murmured, picking up her wrists in his strong hands, as if he sensed her uncertainty and was focusing sharply in on it.

  ‘But you didn’t have to cheat like that, Honor, because you have an incredibly sensuous response to words and a romantic nature that makes you instinctively know how to use them. When I read some of the things you said it was like being stroked with a velvet glove. I got aroused, and I knew th
at you had been aroused when you wrote them for me, too...’

  In that same, sultry voice he quoted her one of her wilder paragraphs. ‘I like the idea that I can inspire you to write something like that...’

  Honor’s captive pulse beat heavily against his palms. ‘It wasn’t so much you as your letters,’ she denied huskily.

  ‘You were absorbed by the rapture of your love,’ he said, lifting her hands to the level of his chest. ‘And that love was embodied in every lustrous word...’ He dipped to kiss first one wrist, and then the other in tender salute.

  ‘Lustrous being exactly the right word.’ Honor tried to keep the last fragment of her pride intact with the foolish pun. ‘It was a physical infatuation expressed in metaphysical form—’

  ‘You fell in love with a phantom.’ He mocked her refusal to admit it. ‘And now you need him to love you back.’

  She wouldn’t let him see how devoutly she wished it. He might want to tease her into saying it, but she wouldn’t be able to say it as teasingly as he wanted her to. She couldn’t. And her serious intensity might very well drive him away...

  ‘I want him to make love to me.’ She made the distinction boldly. ‘But he seems more interested in word-play than love-play. Do you usually make it so difficult for a woman to start an affair with you?’

  His face was unreadably still. ‘An affair...is that really all you expect from me, Honor?’ Was that a trace of anxiety in his question? She rushed to reassure him.

  ‘Of course it is. Friends and lovers, you said.’ She pushed against his restraining fingers, until her hands could flatten against his hard chest. ‘Or have you changed your mind?’

  His nostrils flared as he watched her breasts lift with the act of placing her palms on the thick pelt of his chest hair, the blue veins on their surface becoming more prominent as blood flowed under her skin, engorging them with a heavy ripeness.

  ‘So be it.’ His hands covered hers for a moment, pressing them against his hot chest, then moved to bracket her hips, pulling her hard into the cradle of his hips with a groan of relief.

  ‘Oh, yes, yes...’ His head tilted back as she raked her nails lightly against him. ‘Harder, Honor, I need to really feel you! To know you’re real. Like this...touch me like this...’

  His fingers had found her nipples through the stiff cups of lace, drawing them out with gentle twists that sent ribbons of fire unfurling through her body. When she copied him, seeking out the flat masculine areolae in their nests of soft curling hair, he shuddered violently and Honor was stunned to feel them harden and thrust eagerly against her caressing fingers.

  ‘Oh, yes, God, yes, I like that...do that again, harder—and this, do this to me, too...’ He bent his head and her body leapt in shocked pleasure as she felt him run his open mouth over the twin curves of her breasts straining above the black lace. He pressed his face deep into the abundant softness and rubbed it back and forth. The sensation of him crushing and kneading her and then biting and sucking moistly at the creamy mounds was profoundly and primitively erotic.

  He cupped her head when she feverishly sought reciprocal rights, shifting her mouth against his chest, guiding her for his pleasure while his hands explored beneath the frill that veiled the shadowed mound between her legs and the high rise of her buttocks. For long, sumptuous moments they shuddered and fought against the restrictions of being a single desire in two separate human bodies, until Adam uttered a harsh sound of impatience and twisted away to rake the rest of his clothing down his hard thighs.

  He stood before her, naked and unashamed, magnificently aroused, his muscles thick and corded, bulging with a brutal tension that screamed for release. Honor’s eyes were momentarily stunned with admiration until she saw how his swollen body reacted to her silent worship, shifting and hardening even further in a way that terrified and excited her. She trembled as she guided his big hand back to the trailing laces that hung down the front of the teddy.

  He was swift to interpret her shy request. ‘This lacing must be uncomfortably tight...’ he suggested softly, pulling it momentarily tighter, the compression delivering a sexual jolt to her highly sensitised nerve-endings.

  Honor watched him under heavy lids, responding as she knew he wanted her to. ‘Yes, yes, it is...very...’

  ‘Would you like me to ease it for you?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said breathlessly.

  He sat her on the edge of the bed and knelt at her feet, applying delicate pressure on her knees to part them and, moving boldly into the space he had created, began unlacing her with a deliberately tormenting slowness, holding the two edges of the teddy together as he removed the ties from their lace eyelets.

  ‘Now...let’s see if I can relieve that painful discomfort,’ he murmured thickly, slowly peeling the bodice away, tugging it roughly apart at the last to burst the snaps that fastened the narrow band of silk between her legs. The sharp, satiny friction made her gasp and to her shock he touched her lightly there, a teasing stroke of a finger against her parted softness. She moaned.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’

  She shook her head mutely, her mouth too dry to talk.

  ‘There, does that feel better now that there’s nothing here to bind you?’ He traced the faint impression of a seam down her side. She seemed to quiver all over, her softly rounded nudity acutely receptive to the sight and scent of his aroused masculinity. She was utterly his, and he knew it.

  She licked her lips. ‘A...little.’

  A carnal expression of satisfaction burned in his eyes at the sound of her husky challenge. ‘Only a little? Then let me see if I can do a lot better...’

  He groaned, but not with effort, as he lifted her with easy strength to lay her flat on the bed, her bent knee brushing his rigidly swaying length as he moved over her, settling between her restless legs.

  Her hands reached for his lean male hips but he drew them away. ‘No, not yet, darling, I want you readier for me than this...and if you touch me now I’ll explode. Here...hold on, darling—promise you’ll hold on tight for me...’

  He wrapped his big hands around hers and lifted them to the vertical bars of the bedstead, curling her fingers around the thin cylinders of cold brass and holding them there so that her arms were outstretched over her head, her torso lightly arched over the thick, soft pillow under her shoulders as he bent to his self-appointed task.

  ‘No, don’t let go,’ he growled, long, agonising minutes later as he slid further down her perspiration-slicked body, and Honor’s hands clenched violently on the brass as she felt his first, delicate, exploring touch.

  ‘That’s right, arch your body, move with me, but whatever you do, darling, don’t let go!’

  ‘Adam—!’ The cry was wrenched from the depths of her bewilderment.

  ‘No, let me do this...let me be selfish...I want to see it happen to you first before I take you. I want you to be as sweet and ripe inside as you are here, and here...and here...’

  Honor needed her cold brass anchor to reality as her whole world splintered and formed and reformed around her, around the slow, languid, flicker and lash of his tongue and the hot, hazy pooling of pleasure created in the dips and hollows of her body by his big, capable hands. The slow, thick pulsation of her heart moved from her chest to the place between her parted thighs, where all sensation began and ended...with Adam.

  Suddenly Honor cried out, her whole body contracting, her hips lifting from the bed in a violent series of wrenching convulsions as she was cast into a turbulent new realm of experience. At the instant the first paroxysm hit Adam cried out her name in a savage shout of triumphant exhilaration and reared up, coming down with a powerfully driving thrust that obliterated her last conscious thought, stretching and filling her, lifting and plunging again and again as he rode her to an ecstatic completion. His own culmination was just as turbulent and violently fulfilling and seemed to go on forever.

  And afterwards, a long time afterwards, when light was streaming i
n through the chinks in the curtains, and he had made love to her twice more—each time urging her to more reckless heights of passion—he grimly asked the question that had hovered silently in the air above their heads since the first moment of his possession.

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you warn me I was going to be your first lover?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS strange how much more a tone could convey the words themselves, thought Honor, hideously graunching the VW’s new gears as she changed down in order to lurch up another winding hill.

  If Adam had held her in his arms and asked his all-important question with tender curiosity she wouldn’t be driving home now, making the reckless flight that she had contemplated last night—for very different reasons.

  But he hadn’t. He had rolled away from her on to his back, spoken with a brusqueness that verged on anger, edged with something that sounded chillingly like regret. And, too, he had used ‘warn’ rather than ‘tell’. To warn someone was usually to notify them of possible danger ahead. What possible danger could her innocence have been to Adam? How could something that had seemed so beautifully right turn out to be so ugly and wrong?

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you warn me I was going to be your first lover?’

  Honor had reached down to pull a corner of the rumpled quilt across her body, suddenly embarrassed by her wanton sprawl.

  ‘I said I had chances, not that I ever took them,’ she replied quietly.

  ‘A virgin. At your age!’ he muttered in brooding disbelief tinged with...was it contempt? No, that was too strong, it was more like angry disappointment.

  Oh, God—he was disappointed!

  Honor cringed. He had expected something extraordinary from her and she had given him only her very ordinary self. She had probably been clumsy and inept compared to his flawless Mary-Helen. He had made love to her three times, each time more fiercely than the last, but maybe that hadn’t been because her eager response had inspired him to ever greater passion, as she had naïvely imagined, but because he had been desperate to find the fulfilment that had been promised by the sizzling sexual tension that had built up between them. Only there was no true fulfilment, only a bitter emptiness that prompted an angry questioning of what had gone wrong.