by Susan Napier
‘You’re the incredibly generous lover…’ he murmured, propping himself up on one elbow so that he might gauge her reaction to his languorous caresses. ‘For all you know you might have just ruined your chances of being thoroughly bedded…’
She gave a small gurgle of sultry delight. ‘I doubt it, if your previous performances are anything to go by…’ Her breath ended on a little hiccup as his touch feathered dangerously low on her concave belly.
‘Your husband didn’t satisfy you in bed, did he?’ He traced his way back up to her aroused breasts and bent over to softly moisten a rosy nipple.
She shivered. ‘I thought he did…’ she said huskily, ‘…until you…Then I knew. With him it never felt—I didn’t—I never…’
His eyes were moon-silver as he combed her hair across the pillow. ‘You never had an orgasm…’ She blushed at his tone of gloating satisfaction and his soft laugh was tinged with triumphant pride. ‘You were so delightfully frantic that first time—as if you didn’t quite realise what was happening to you—but afterwards you were wildly uninhibited, and so eager to experiment I could hardly fail to oblige…’
He nuzzled at her mouth, deliberately abrading her cheeks with his soft whiskers, kissing her, stroking her until she was moving ceaselessly, restlessly, rubbing herself against him, becoming increasingly excited as she felt him hardening against her belly, and then he was reaching for her, rolling her under him.
‘Miracle-worker…’ he growled sexily as he pushed her thighs apart, settling himself firmly against the juncture of her body.
She felt the blunt force of him testing her readiness and suddenly stiffened. ‘Are you—? Joshua, you’re not wearing any protection—’
He froze and looked down at himself, stunned, then into the yearning violet eyes that were suddenly drenched with unexpressed sorrow.
‘It isn’t safe,’ she told him shakily. ‘I haven’t used the pill since Michael died. He—he never wanted me to have his baby,’ she whispered. She couldn’t stop the words spilling out: how Cindy had confessed that Michael had thought her too brash, too poorly educated, too overtly sexy with her bleached hair and big breasts, to be groomed into a proper corporate wife, whereas Regan had been tailor-made for his ambitions. How, to please Michael, Regan had continued with her law studies, even when she’d realised she wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer; how she’d increased the hours of her part-time job in order to help them afford the big, up-market house in a swanky suburb that he had insisted was essential to his image; how she had acted as his hostess whenever he’d wanted to show off his stable home life, and nobly respected his long hours of work and frequent absences from home.
‘But whatever I did to please him, it never seemed to be enough. And I couldn’t even make him want our child,’ she said bleakly. ‘He let her get pregnant, but he stood over me every morning until I’d taken my pill, to make sure I couldn’t conceive…’
‘Ah, Regan…’ He drank from her trembling lips and rolled his forehead against hers. ‘He was a worthless cheat. Controlling your fertility was just another way for him to exert his domination over a wife whom he knew was his moral and intellectual superior. Don’t be sad—be glad that your babies won’t carry his genes.’ He shaped her breast and stroked the tender peak. ‘One day you’ll suckle a baby at your breast, and I know you’ll make a wonderful mother…’
But not with him…
He rolled off the bed and was back again before she could recover from his shattering words, donning the protection with deft movements that ensured she had little time to think before he was gathering her up again and moving smoothly between her thighs.
Sensing that only passion could banish her lingering tristess, he braced himself over her on locked arms and plunged inside her, each powerful, explosive thrust of his thighs and buttocks forcing her further up the bed. His pace didn’t falter, the added tension in her tautly straining torso and her spreadeagled limbs exciting him to even more reckless heights. In the air-conditioned coolness the sweat glinted on his chest, forming droplets that pearled in the thick mat of hair and trickled down his rippling belly to add to the steamy moisture that slicked their thighs where their bodies met.
His face was hard and glazed, his eyes locked with hers, all his attention focused on her approaching climax as she jerked and shuddered under his rampant assault, uttering heated little whimpers and moans of encouragement that fed his lust to see her come totally apart before his own orgasm destroyed the last of his control.
Regan’s vision began to fade around the edges, her mind disengaging as her senses drastically overloaded, unable to process the escalating bombardment of pleasure. Her eyes purpled as she rushed towards the abyss of ecstasy, exulting in Joshua’s fiercely unrelenting possession, thrilling to the intrusion of his hard body, the hugeness of him filling her, loving her to the hilt, and the incredible feeling of swelling tightness that grew and grew until it exploded and she screamed with the agony of blissful release.
Then Joshua was wrenching and groaning and pouring himself into her, and their bodies eased into the sweet aftermath of mutual fulfilment that to Regan felt like the settling of her soul, like coming home…
She rolled over onto her side at the edge of the bed, facing away from him, trying to control the unruly emotions that threatened to spill out of her mouth. She stared, dry-eyed, across the cabin, trying to close herself off from the press of feelings, reaching inwards for the courage to accept what she couldn’t change. Joshua wouldn’t want tears and tantrums—he probably got enough of those from Carolyn. He would want her to be cool and sophisticated. He might even, God forbid, want them to remain friends…
‘I’m sorry…’ She heard the bittersweet remorse in his voice as she felt a finger slowly trace the bony centre line of her back from her nape to the hollow at the base of her spine.
‘I’m not!’ She widened her eyes fiercely, refusing to regret a moment of her glorious physical outpouring of love.
‘No, not for what we’ve just done…’ His finger stroked up again. ‘But for the fact that I can’t offer you any more than this…’ She felt his lips against the wing of her should-erblade. ‘If I were a different sort of man and you were a different sort of woman we could remain lovers, but we both have too much pride and self-respect to sacrifice honour to a self-serving lie…’
She remembered that he had quoted her Shakespeare about her being a pearl, and now another quotation floated into her mind that summed up her understanding of Joshua Wade…‘Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done.’ She could not love him half so much if he were not a man of such unflinching principle.
‘I know…’
She felt his hand spread out across her back as the breath came sighing from her lungs. ‘Chris wanted a long engagement…he didn’t want to lose Carolyn, but she refused to move in with him and he didn’t feel quite ready for marriage. When she broke the news that she was pregnant they had a fight in which he accused her of trying to trap him and she accused him of wanting her to have an abortion. They both said some ugly things that neither seem willing to overlook—’
‘You don’t have to tell me this—’ she began painfully, but he firmly overrode her.
‘That morning after you left the apartment, Carolyn phoned me from here in hysterics, begging me to come up and help. She and Chris had been rowing for a week, and she was at the end of her tether. She isn’t cut out to be a single mother; she’s tough in some ways but emotionally fragile in others. She had given herself to my brother in good faith and he had turned his back on her when she most needed his support. I promised her that she wouldn’t have to go through this on her own and I have to stand by that promise. I owe that to her—and to Frank and Hazel, for the way that they’d welcomed Chris into their home.
‘Whatever her feelings for Chris, we agreed that if we married, then for the baby’s sake it has to be a real marriage…not simply a temporary sham for the sake of
convention. I’ll be a faithful, protective husband and do my utmost to ensure that she’s a contented wife. And the baby will grow up as Ryan’s brother or sister.’
How noble of him. The acid words burned on the tip of her tongue as envy challenged her good intentions at the thought of another woman as the sole object of his cherishing. And yet it was balm to her heart to believe that the reason he had never tried to contact her again after their original tumble between the sheets might not have been because he hadn’t been interested, but because his orderly world had suddenly exploded in emotional chaos and his strong sense of honour had relegated all women but Carolyn firmly into the past.
Only, where Regan was concerned, his past had come back to tempt him to dishonour…
She stiffened as there was a light tap of the door.
‘Ahem…monsieur? Excusez-moi, but I thought you’d like to know that we’ve arrived back at the moorings. The captain is just backing into the slips…and your brother is waiting on the dock.’
‘Chris?’ Joshua swore in a low voice while Regan automatically yanked the edge of the satin cover over her nakedness. ‘What in the hell is he doing here?’ He lifted his voice. ‘Thanks, Pierre—I’ll be right up. Tell Grey not to lower the gangplank until he sees me on deck.’
He climbed lithely over Regan’s prone body and began pulling on his discarded clothes.
‘No—you stay here,’ he commanded as she made a move to do the same, checking himself in the full-length mirror on the en suite bathroom door, raking his hair back with his fingers before buttoning the open collar of his shirt to hide the tell-tale red mark glowing on the skin on the unblemished side of his throat. ‘He probably only wants to ask if he can stay the weekend in the condo. I’ll be back as soon as I get rid of him.’ He swooped and sealed his hastily made promise with a brief kiss on her dismayed mouth.
As soon as the door closed behind him Regan scrambled out of the bed and darted across to bolt the door. She picked up her clothes and shook them out. The skirt was a bit crumpled, but luckily the creases wouldn’t show up on the dark fabric, and her cotton-knit top was uncrushable. She would have liked to have a shower, but didn’t know whether the sound of the pipes would be audible above deck and instead contented herself with a quick sponge-down in the bathroom before hurriedly dressing.
She dashed warm water in her face from the marble basin and used a comb from the vanity to return her hair to silky smoothness. Her face looked naked without make-up, her lips pouty and swollen, and she could see whisker burns on her chin and throat. To her horror she remembered that she had put her handbag down somewhere in the lounge, when Joshua had been showing her around. Unfortunately the drawers in the vanity yielded strictly masculine toiletries, and without recourse to make-up she had to satisfy herself with a pat of male moisturiser and a dab of cologne.
Although the boat no longer felt as if it was moving, the engine still continued to hum, and even straining her ears she could detect no sound from above. The luxury interior fittings obviously included soundproofing.
However, for added safety, she closed the bathroom door and perched on the closed toilet seat to await her rescue. When fifteen minutes had passed by the tick of the excruciatingly accurate platinum watch on her wrist she paced back out into the cabin and peered out of the porthole, but all she could see was the stylish super-yacht parked in the next slip.
After twenty-five minutes she could bear it no longer. Perhaps Joshua had taken Chris across the boardwalk to his condominium. All the two-storeyed condominiums that edged the dock had electronically coded security gates that opened from the boardwalk into private courtyards, and it might be possible for her to slip off the boat without being seen, unless the two men were standing at one of the huge picture windows overlooking the canal.
She silently cracked open the cabin door and peeped down the empty corridor towards the companionway. Everything was quiet. She decided that she would creep as far as the stairs and see if she could hear any conversation from the lounge. Her hand had just touched the smooth, polished stair-rail when there was a slight sound behind her.
‘Looking for this?’
She spun around, hoping that Pierre had tidied up his accent.
Christopher Wade stood in the open doorway of one of the end cabins, her navy jacket dangling from a coat hanger on his finger.
He was looking very casual in white jeans and a striped T-shirt, and behind him an open suitcase lay on the three-quarter bed. Regan realised that whatever had brought him back to Palm Cove for the second consecutive weekend, he hadn’t arrived expecting big brother to give him houseroom. In view of the tension between them he had evidently chosen to stay on the boat.
‘Yes, I was, thank you,’ she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as nervously shrill to him as it did to her own ears. ‘I spilled a drink on myself and Pierre was cleaning it for me.’
‘He left it hanging on the shower door of the main bathroom. I found it when I went in to recharge my razor.’ His gaze went from her slender figure to the cabin door she had foolishly left ajar. ‘I knew it couldn’t be Carolyn’s—she never wears navy.’
She sustained his steady blue gaze with extreme difficulty as he slipped the jacket off the hanger and held it out to her. ‘It seems to be cured of whatever befell it—do you want to put it back on?’
She cleared her throat. ‘No, thanks—I’ll just carry it; it’s a bit warm.’ She smiled as she took it from him, but his expression was uncharacteristically cool.
‘You’re going to have a fairly tender bruise there tomorrow,’ he said quietly, and touched the soft skin at the outermost swell of her breast, where it was exposed by the cut-away armhole of her top. ‘In fact, you’re going to have quite a few by the looks of it,’ he continued, his eyes moving over her bare throat and shoulders. ‘And here I always thought Josh’s bark was worse than his bite…’
Regan fell back a step, clutching her jacket to her chest, feeling worse than naked, her cheeks stinging hot.
‘I—I—’
‘I wondered why he seemed so unusually twitchy when I wanted to come down and settle in. He tried to convince me that I’d be better off at the condo—when we both know I’m the last person Carolyn would want around as a chaperon.’
‘I’m sorry—’ Regan’s awkwardly expressed compassion caused a muscle to jump in his jaw, making him look markedly like his brother did when he was in a smouldering temper.
‘Oh, so you’re already in on that sordid family secret, are you?’ he guessed bitterly. ‘Josh is usually more discreet about his problems. I wouldn’t have thought he was the type to indulge in careless pillow talk, but then neither did I think he regarded sex as a combat sport—’
‘That’s enough, Chris,’ Joshua’s voice crackled out as he came down the stairs two at a time, jumping the final distance and coming up behind Regan. ‘There’s no need to embarrass yourself more than you have already.’
‘I’m not embarrassed.’
‘Well, you should be. You’re insulting a guest and I thought I’d taught you better manners. Come on, Regan, I’ll give you a lift back to the house.’
‘Why hustle her off in such a rush just because I’ve inconveniently turned up? Could it be you’re the one embarrassed at being caught with your pants down?’
Joshua stepped in front of Regan, shielding her from his brother’s crudity.
‘You’re asking for a punch in the mouth!’
‘Why? Because I’ve found out the truth?’ Chris said rawly. ‘That you’re not as lily-white as you like everyone to believe? I always knew you were a manipulative bastard, but to con Sir Frank into bringing your mistress up here so that you can flaunt your affair under Carolyn’s unsuspecting nose—’
‘I am not flaunting her, and she is not my mistress!’
‘You’re going to tell me you two were innocently playing checkers before I came on board? Don’t make me laugh! Regan has your brand stamped all over her—God, she even sm
ells of you.’
Regan went hot all over. She hoped he was talking about the expensive cologne!
‘Dammit, Chris—’
‘No—damn you! Don’t you know how humiliated Caro would be if she knew? She trusts you, dammit!’ His voice was thick with torment. ‘She was so very quick to believe that I would let her down that she wouldn’t listen to anything I said afterwards—but big Josh—oh, no, never! She really believes that you’re the saint and I’m the sinner. And she likes Regan, she thinks of her as a friend…and all this time her new friend and her so-called fiancé have been—’
‘Don’t say it!’ Joshua ground out as Chris teetered on the brink of obscenity.
His brother laughed harshly. ‘I knew you were attracted to her, but I naively thought that—being such a stickler for men doing the right thing by their women—you’d merely suffer the tortures of the damned denying yourself.’
Instead of trying to douse the inflammatory situation with his cool reason, Joshua inexplicably chose to pour gasoline on the flames. ‘Or, if I gave in to the attraction, that I’d feel compelled to confess all to Carolyn? Is that what you were hoping would happen, Chris? So that you could rush in and replay the big dramatic scene that you flubbed a couple of months ago, this time with you as the valiant saviour and me as the faithless villain? Forget it. You had your chance and blew it. As it happens, I’ve decided that Carolyn will make an ideal wife. There’s a distinct commercial advantage in a businessman being associated with a beautiful, well-bred wife bouncing the evidence of his potent virility on her pretty knee…’
Regan felt Joshua’s callous, careless taunt like a blow to her heart, but Chris looked utterly shattered. His young face was haggard as he looked at the brother he had idolised for so many years with an expression of pure loathing.
‘You bastard. You think you’re going to have it all, don’t you? I won’t let you do it! If you hurt Caro—’
‘If you keep your mouth shut and mind your own business, she need never find out!’ Joshua snapped. ‘Get real, Chris—Carolyn may have been the embodiment of your boyish sexual fantasies, but, frankly, my tastes are a lot more mature. Now, if you don’t mind, Regan and I will skip the rest of the moral lecture!’