by Penny Jordan
As though he had read her mind, Matt suddenly said curtly, ‘You’d better get those wet jeans off. I’ve got a spare pair you can have.’
Emily struggled not to laugh at the thought of her wearing his jeans. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ she told him coolly. ‘I can use the car rug.’
To her astonishment he shook his head. ‘No, we’ll both need that later.’
When he saw her expression he said grimly, ‘Look, I don’t like this any more than you, but we’ve got to face facts. The temperature in here is going to drop so fast that within an hour both of us are going to be frozen. That means we’ve got to preserve what body heat we still have by any means we can.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s almost nine o’clock. A bit early to be thinking of going to sleep, but in the circumstances it’s going to be our wisest course of action. I’ve got a sleeping-bag in the back. It’s large enough for both of us.’
He heard her automatic protest and frowned at her before saying stiffly, ‘Spare me the shrieks of maidenly modesty; this isn’t some kind of sexual come-on. I’d be saying exactly the same thing to another man, and, given the choice between a man, a woman or a dog to share the sleeping-bag with me right now, I’d prefer the dog.’
Emily was quite sure that he would, and she knew what he was saying was the only sensible course of action open to them. Even so, something vulnerable and tender inside her shrank from the intimacy of what she knew must be done. To sleep so physically closely to this hard, cynical man, who had shown her so clearly what he thought of her and of her sex, was so directly opposed to all the dreams she had once held and cherished that it was as though that part of her emotions she had managed to blank off when Gerry hurt her had suddenly sprung into painful, hurting life; and, she thought miserably, how typical of her it was that the first time she should share such intimacy with a man had to be with one who had made it witheringly plain just how unappealing he found her.
What did she want, she asked herself crossly—to make love here in this cold, uncomfortable vehicle, with a man who was a stranger to her? Or was it simply that she wished for once in her life to see herself as desirable in a man’s eyes? Did she simply ache for the panacea of knowing that, had she wanted to pursue it, the opportunity to arouse him sexually was there?
What was happening to her? she wondered nervously. Was it because she had spent the last four days witnessing the very obvious sexual chemistry between Gracie and Travis? Was it because she had known that at night the two of them were wrapped in one another’s arms…sharing the kind of ecstasy she herself had once dreamed of knowing?
Horrible to see herself as the kind of person who could feel envious of another’s happiness…who could actually bitterly resent the unfairness of a fate that had given her such yearning romantic ideals and, at the same time, ensured that her looks and her personality must make the fulfilment of those ideals nothing more than an impossible fantasy. Far better if she could have, as her mother had once said, settled for a dull, pragmatic husband and an equally dull, placid life, instead of yearning for the intensity of passion and desire.
She was quiet for so long that Matt actually began to think she was going to refuse. Idiotic woman, he fumed. Did she really think that he would actually want to take advantage of their intimacy, here in this uncomfortable and unromantic setting?
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, wishing he had not had a sudden and disconcerting image of her lying on soft, clean sheets, her silky hair tumbling round her shoulders the way it had done while she was asleep, those amazing grey eyes slumberous with passion, that delicate, feminine body arched in eager supplication towards his own.
He ground his teeth, infuriated by his own weakness. It was that damned perfume she was wearing…it was conjuring up all manner of erotic images.
‘Look, if you imagine that—’
‘I’m not imagining anything,’ Emily lied quickly, adding as calmly as she could, ‘Of course, you’re right. We have no option other than to share the sleeping-bag.’ She gave a small shiver, aware that already she was getting cold and, worse, that her legs were slowly growing almost numb. It was that knowledge that provoked her into action.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to take off my jeans,’ she reminded him nervously.
‘Yes,’ he agreed tersely, wondering why on earth he was behaving like such a fool. Did he really prefer to risk suffering hypothermia than to matter-of-factly point out to her that both of them were likely to remain far warmer inside the sleeping-bag if they both removed their jeans and sweaters and allowed their combined body heat to circulate between them more effectively?
Emily’s heart sank as he grimly announced these facts. She knew that he was speaking the truth, but the thought of lying next to him stripped down to her bra and briefs was a very daunting prospect.
‘I think perhaps we should have a cup of coffee and a sandwich first,’ she suggested hesitantly, waiting for him to mock her obvious reluctance to undress—but to her surprise he agreed, almost as though he felt as uncomfortable with the situation as she did herself.
It was a novel thought. Her only experience of male sexual behaviour was restricted to Gerry, and Gerry would have been very quick indeed to torment someone in her position. Gerry enjoyed inflicting emotional pain. She had quickly recognised that once the scales had been ripped from her eyes.
A little to her own astonishment she heard herself saying quietly, ‘My father is in a local voluntary rescue team. I know he’d be the first to agree with everything you’ve said.’
His head came up and he looked at her. ‘In that case I’m surprised he allowed you to drive anywhere tonight.’
Emily didn’t tell him that her parents had themselves been on the verge of leaving, this time for the rain forests of Brazil. Instead of telling him this she said coolly, ‘I’m an adult, not a child. I make my own decisions.’
She watched as his mouth compressed. He had a rather nice mouth beneath that straggly beard. His bottom lip was full and curved. She wondered hazily what it would feel like to touch it with her fingertips, and then swallowed nervously as her stomach plunged in shock at her own wayward thoughts.
‘An adult! You’re, what…eighteen? Nineteen?’ He was scowling at her again.
‘Actually,’ she told him shakily, ‘I’m twenty-six.’
Twenty-six! He stared at her. It must be because she was so small that she looked so much younger. Twenty-six…a woman, not a child…and so not innocent, either, despite the fact that those huge grey eyes seemed so unaware and unawakened.
‘I’ll get the coffee,’ he told her austerely. ‘You’d better get those jeans off.’
For such a large man he was surprisingly light on his feet, Emily reflected, as he managed to manoeuvre himself between the two front seats to crawl into the rear of the vehicle.
Her own hands had become awkward and clumsy, or perhaps it was the thick and unfamiliar fabric of the jeans that waywardly refused to respond to her demands. Whatever the cause, it seemed to take her ages to tug off the clammy fabric.
Once she had done so she was grateful for the huge oversized sweatshirt, which reached down almost to her knees…and not just for the warmth it offered, but because it concealed the minute briefness of her underwear which had been chosen because she had liked the pretty delicacy of the embroidered satin, and which she had never intended should be exposed to anyone’s view other than her own. The cut of the briefs was such that they emphasised the feminine roundness of her hips and the length of her legs in a way which she was suddenly aware was very provocative indeed.
‘Coffee?’
The curt voice from behind her made her swing round, causing Matt to wonder what on earth had put that look of sick misery in her eyes, unable to know that she had been thinking of Gerry, remembering how he had taunted her so cruelly, how he had found her so undesirable.
‘You’d better get in the back,’ Matt announced brusquely. ‘It’s getting dangerously cold in he
re. The sooner we’re in that sleeping-bag, the happier I’ll be.’
Acknowledging that he was right, Emily started to crawl awkwardly into the back of the Land Rover, totally unaware that, as she did so, the front of her sweatshirt was trapped beneath her body causing the back to ride up, so that Matt, automatically glancing into the driver’s mirror, had a very clear and erotic view of the rounded curve of her bottom, more revealed than concealed by the brief scrap of satin clinging so seductively to her skin.
It infuriated him that he should continue to stare into the mirror for far longer than he would have wished, so that the way he finally took hold of her shoulders and virtually hauled her over the seat left Emily not only feeling bruised and breathless but also in no doubt of just how exasperating and irritating he found her presence.
She drank her coffee quickly, savouring its fragrant warmth, but decided that after all she didn’t want to eat. Her stomach was churning nervously and she was having to fight hard not to look at the sleeping-bag Matt had unrolled, and to rigidly keep her back to him as she heard the small betraying sound that signified that he was removing his outer clothes.
She intended to keep on her sweatshirt until the last possible moment, all too conscious that her bra was every bit as revealing as her briefs, and so she waited until she was quite sure that all the slithering sounds which she suspected meant that Matt was climbing into the sleeping-bag had finished, before quickly tugging off her sweatshirt and hurriedly diving for the protective cover of the sleeping-bag.
Only Matt wasn’t already in it. Instead, he was waiting grimly beside her. The sight of him—a shadowy, intimidatingly male figure with a bronze torso and a wedge of dark hair that arrowed downwards over a body that was less bulky and muscle-bound than she had envisaged to a pair of mercifully respectable boxer shorts—caught her unprepared. She froze and looked wildly for something to focus on other than his body, while he said frigidly, ‘If you’re quite ready, I think we’d both better get inside the sleeping-bag before either of us loses any more body heat.’
She was already shivering, her legs icy-cold from the knees downwards. Even so, she found herself hesitating, wishing there were some other way. But there wasn’t, and she had no other option but to crawl into the sleeping-bag which he was holding open for her, to find that he had already put the car rug inside—which would account for the rustlings she had heard and which had deceived her into thinking he was already inside it.
There wasn’t much space in the back of the Land Rover, and in order to get inside the sleeping-bag she had to wriggle past him. Her hip brushed against his arm, her skin quivering at the contact with the rough hairiness. Tiny flutters of sensation quivered to life deep in her stomach, an odd physical tension aching there. Shadowy insubstantial thoughts clouded her mind. Sometimes in her dreams she had felt like this, experienced this disturbing ache.
Shivering, she crawled into the sleeping-bag, keeping firmly to one side of it and lying with her back to its centre as she waited for him to join her. He was equally cautious—only there was a lot more of him than there was of her, and the sleeping-bag was not really designed for two people. It was inevitable that, as he slid down inside it, his body should brush hers, but what was surely not equally inevitable was the sensation that that brief contact should cause.
Once, she had desired Gerry, or she had thought she had, but even his most coaxing, skilful caresses had never aroused that sudden wanton spurt of awareness she had just experienced now. It must be her age, she told herself shakily as she lay rigid with shock. Either that or a reaction to Gracie’s engagement…or perhaps her body was simply reacting physically to the intimacy she had sensed between Gracie and Travis.
It was ironic to remember that once she had daydreamed about just such an encounter, just such a stranger coming into her life and stirring her to immediate and reckless need and desire. Then it had seemed an idyllic romantic daydream; a thrilling fantasy of instant mutual awareness and responsiveness. Now that she was actually faced with the reality of experiencing urgent and extremely wanton physical yearning for a man who was a complete stranger, she was terrified by the implications of that desire, unable to understand why she was experiencing it.
It was just proximity, she told herself frantically…just a dangerous trick that her body was playing on her; but, as she felt the warmth of Matt’s body reach out to engulf her, she held herself rigid with tension, genuinely appalled by the reactions of her own body, terrified of going to sleep in case in doing so she somehow or other betrayed what she was experiencing.
Matt didn’t need his already low opinion of her sex reinforced by having to wake her up and point out to her that he did not find her sexually desirable. She could just imagine his reaction, were she in her sleep to give in to the lustful impulses that were filling her with such extraordinary and unfamiliar sensations.
She, who had never once in her life felt the slightest desire to make sexual advances to a man, and yet who was now unbelievably struggling not to give in to the mental temptation of allowing herself to imagine how it would feel to run her fingers over that dark wedge of body hair, to press her lips to that strong male throat…to…
‘For God’s sake, relax. I’m not going to touch you.’
The harsh command made her jump guiltily. No, he wasn’t going to touch her, but she—she dared not make any response to him. It was safer to pretend that she was already asleep.
On his side of the sleeping-bag, Matt groaned and told himself that the discomfort in his body was caused by the fact that he hardly dared to breathe, never mind move. He could almost feel the tension emanating from the slim feminine body lying so close to his own.
What in hell’s name did she think he was going to do? Did she really think he had so little control, so little respect for her as a fellow human being? But then, perhaps she had after all been aware of that far too lingering attention he had given the sight of her half-naked body. He closed his eyes and then opened them again as he was tormented by a mental image of his hands reaching out to close on the warm curves of her hips, to draw her back against his own body and turn her round and…
What the devil was the matter with him? Here he was, indulging in the most erotic kind of mental fantasies over a woman he knew absolutely nothing about, who probably already had a whole string of lovers, and who had made it more than plain that she had absolutely no desire to include him in their number.
No. Honesty compelled him to admit that his own extraordinary responsiveness to her had in no way been caused by any overt or covert sensual invitation on her part.
He only prayed that he did not turn over in his sleep and put his erotic fantasies into action. If he did, he had no doubt at all that his sleeping partner would be very caustic and acerbic in her denunciation of him—and quite rightly so.
Half an hour later, still wide awake and no closer to subduing his unruly body, Matt knew what he was going to have to do.
Emily felt him move beside her and tensed as she realised he was getting out of the sleeping-bag. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him woodenly. Had she somehow or other communicated her feelings to him? She had been so careful not to touch him…not to allow her flesh to even brush against his, and yet humiliatingly it seemed he must be aware of what she was feeling.
‘It just occurred to me that perhaps I ought to try and stay awake,’ he lied. ‘Someone might be trying to get through with the snow plough.’
Emily knew that he was lying. There was no way that they would attempt to clear the road until daylight. Outside the temperature was still dropping, and it was still snowing. She sat up, too emotionally disturbed for caution as she said shakily, ‘You’re lying. You know no one is going to attempt to clear this road tonight, and so do I.’
There was a small silence, and then he agreed almost curtly, ‘All right, so I’m lying. If you must have the truth, dammit, you might as well have it—but I warn you, you won’t like it. If I stay in here with you on
e more minute, I doubt that I’ll be able to keep my hands off you.’
It was said so abruptly, so reluctantly, and with so much self-dislike that it was several seconds before what he was saying actually sank in. When it did, Emily felt her skin flush with brilliant colour, her voice as dazed as her brain as she whispered huskily, ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t mean it, but I’m afraid it’s the truth. I want you in my arms, under my body—in the most intimate way it is possible for a man to want a woman,’ he underlined almost savagely. ‘And believe me, you can’t be any more contemptuous of me than I am of myself. I assure you, I’m not—’
He broke off, leaving Emily to wonder what he had been about to say. He wasn’t going to pretend he loved her…how could he? He wasn’t going to apologise for wanting her? He wasn’t going to actually put his physical desire into actions? Why not, when every sense she possessed was telling her how much she wanted that same intimacy with him which he had just described so brusquely. Wanted it…ached for it…yearned for it… She took one shaky breath and then another. This had to stop, and right now.
She opened her mouth to tell him so and instead, shockingly, incredibly, heard herself asking breathlessly, pleadingly almost, ‘Do you really want to make love to me?’ What was she saying? Where was she going? What was she doing, embarking down a road which could only go one way?
It seemed a long time before she heard his bleak, clipped, ‘Yes…why?’
She took a deep breath, not allowing herself to think about what she was doing, holding fast to a deeper, more primitive instinct, like someone clutching a lifeline in heavy seas.
‘I…I feel the same way.’ When he was silent, she added, ‘I want to make love with you.’
It was said…the need voiced. She had opened herself to him to accept—or reject—whichever he chose, and she could not begin to understand why she had done so. Only that she had responded to something within him that had struck an answering chord within her.