‘This time,’ he said roughly, ‘I’m going to take my time enjoying you...’ He started with her breasts, working his way to them via her soft shoulders, down to the generous dip of her cleavage, nuzzling the heavy crease beneath her breasts until he settled on a nipple, and there he stayed, lathing it with his mouth, suckling, teasing and tasting, drawing the throbbing, stiffened bud into his mouth, greedy for her.
Becky writhed and groaned. She spread her legs and wrapped them around him, desperate to press herself against the hardness of his thigh so that she could relieve some of the sensitivity between them. But he wasn’t having that and he manoeuvred her so that she was lying flat, enduring the sweet torment of his mouth all over her breasts.
He reached back to rub between her legs with the flat of his hand but not too much, not too hard and not for long.
He needed more than this erotic foreplay. He needed to be inside her, to feel that wetness all around him.
‘My wallet’s in my bedroom,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I need it to get protection. Don’t go anywhere...’
Where was she going to go? Her body physically missed his for the half a minute it took for him to return and, during that time, she thought again about whether she should tell him the truth, tell him that she was a virgin...and, just as before, she quailed at the thought.
But as he applied the condom, looking directly at her as his fingers slid expertly along his huge shaft, she felt a twinge of nerves.
Theo settled between her legs and nudged her, pushing against her wetness gently. He wasn’t going to go hard and fast. He was going to take his time and enjoy every second of her. He felt her momentarily tense but thought nothing of it. He was so fired up he could barely think at all and he certainly couldn’t read anything from her response until he pushed into her, sinking deep and moving faster than he wanted but knowing that he just had to.
He heard her soft grunt of discomfort and stilled. ‘I’m a big boy...tell me if I’m hurting you because you’re really tight. Deliciously tight...’ He sank deep into her and then it clicked.
Her blushing shyness, the way he had felt, as though everything he was doing was being done for the first time, that momentary wince...
‘Bloody hell, Becky—tell me you’re not a virgin...?’
‘Take me, Theo. Please don’t stop...’
He should have withdrawn but he couldn’t. A virgin. His body was aflame at the thought. He’d never wanted any woman the way he wanted this one. Every sensation running through his body felt primitive. He was the caveman he never thought he could be, and the fact of her virginity made him feel even more primal, even more like a caveman.
Their bodies were slick with perspiration. With a groan, he thrust hard, deep into her tightness, and the feeling was indescribable as she rocked with him, wrapping her legs around his waist and coming seconds before he did, crying out as she raked her fingers along his back, the rhythm of her body matching his.
‘You should have said.’ He fell onto his back, disposing of the condom and thinking that he should be feeling a lot more alarmed that he had slept with someone as innocent as she was. So much for her escape to the country in the wake of some dastardly affair with a married man, or whoever it had been.
He was her first.
He’d never been more turned on.
‘It doesn’t make any difference.’ She rolled so that she was half-balancing on his chest and staring down at him. ‘Like I said, Theo, this isn’t the beginning of anything for me. One night and then we exit one another’s lives for ever...’ She traced her finger around his flat, brown nipple. Why did it hurt when she said that?
‘In that case...’ Theo wasn’t going to play mind games with himself as to whether he had done the right thing or not. ‘Let’s make the most of the night...’
CHAPTER FOUR
THEO STROLLED THROUGH into the kitchen of his sprawling four-bedroom penthouse and ignored the food that had been lavishly prepared by his personal chef, who kept him fed when he was in the country and actually in his apartment. The dish, with its silver dome, was on the counter, alongside a selection of condiments and some basic instructions on heating.
Instead, he headed straight for the cupboard, took down a squat whisky glass and proceeded to pour himself a stiff drink.
He needed it.
His mother, still in Italy, was back in hospital.
‘A fall,’ her sister Flora had told him when she had called less than an hour ago. ‘She was on her way to get something to drink.’ She had sounded vague and unsettled. ‘And she tripped. You know those tiles, Theo, they can be very smooth and slippery. And I have told your mother a thousand times never to wear those stupid bedroom slippers when she is in the house! Those slippers with the fur and the suede are for your little box houses in England with lots of carpet! Not for nice tiles!’
‘On her way to get something to drink?’ Theo had picked up on the uneasy tone of his aunt’s voice, and he had been right to, even though it had taken some prodding and nudging in the right direction to get answers out of her.
Now he sank into the long cream leather sofa and stared, frowning, past the stunning art originals on either side of the marble fireplace at nothing in particular. His mind was consumed by the very fundamental question...
What was he going to do?
His mother had not been on the way to fetch herself a glass of orange juice at a little after three-thirty in the afternoon. Nor had she tripped in her haste to make herself a fortifying cup of tea.
‘She has been a little depressed,’ Flora had admitted reluctantly. ‘You know how it is, Theo. She likes it out here but she sees me...my grandchildren... I cannot hide any of this from Marita! I cannot put my children and my grandchildren in a cupboard and lock them away because my sister might find it upsetting!’
Theo had gritted his teeth and moved the grudging conversation along, to discover that depression was linked with drinking. His mother had gradually, over the weeks, become fond of a tipple or two before dinner and it seemed that the tipple or two had crept earlier and earlier up the day until she was having a drink with lunch and after lunch.
‘Why haven’t you told me this before?’ he had asked coldly, but that had produced a flurry of indignant protests and Theo had been forced to concede that Flora had had a point. She didn’t share the villa with his mother. She would not really have seen the steady progression of the problem until something happened to bring it to her notice.
Such as the fall.
‘She’s due out of hospital in a week’s time,’ Flora had said. ‘But she doesn’t want to return to London. She says that she has nothing there. She enjoys my grandchildren, Theo, even though it pains her to know that...’
There had been no need for his aunt to complete the sentence with all its barely concealed criticism.
Getting married and having hordes of children was the Italian way.
Going out with legions of unsuitable women, remaining stubbornly single and promising no grandchildren whatsoever was not.
And it wasn’t as though he had siblings who could provide for his mother what he was unwilling to.
But he had to do something...
He glanced at his computer, lodged on the gleaming glass table on which he had stuck his feet. For a few seconds, he stopped thinking about the predicament with his mother and returned to what he had spent the last fortnight thinking about.
Becky.
The woman had occupied his mind so much that he hadn’t been able to focus at work. The one night, as it happened, had turned into three because the snow had continued to fall, a wall of white locking them into a little bubble where, for a window in time, he had been someone else.
He had stopped being the powerhouse in charge of his own personal empire. He had stopped being responsible for all those people who depended on him for a livelihood. There’d been no fawning women trying to get his attention wherever he went or heads of companies trying to woo him into
a deal of some sort or another. He was untroubled by the constant ringing of his mobile phone because service had been so limited that, after informing his PA that he couldn’t get adequate reception, he had done the unthinkable and switched the phone off.
He had shed the billionaire persona just as he had shed the expensive clothes he had travelled in.
He had chopped wood, did his best to clear snow and fixed things around the house that had needed fixing.
And of course he had noted all the flaws with the cottage, which were not limited to the leaking roof. Everywhere he’d looked, things needed doing, and those things would only get worse as time went on.
He knew that if he played his cards right he would be able to get the place at a knockdown price. He could bypass her altogether. He had found out where her parents lived, even knew what they did for a living. He could simply have returned to London, picked up the phone and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Judging from the state of the cottage, it wouldn’t have had to be a high offer.
But that thought had not even occurred to him. He had played fast and loose with the truth when Becky had first asked him what had brought him to the Cotswolds and, like all good lies, it had been impossible to disconnect from it.
Maybe he had kidded himself that once he returned to London his usual ruthlessness would supplant his momentary lapse in character when he had been living with her. It hadn’t worked that way and he had spent the past fortnight wondering what his next step was to be.
And, worse, wondering why he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Thinking about her body, warm, soft and welcoming. Thinking about the way she laughed, the way she slid her eyes over to him, still shy even though they had touched each other everywhere. She haunted his dreams and wreaked havoc with his levels of concentration but he knew that there was no point picking up the phone and calling her because what they had enjoyed had not been destined to last.
They had both recognised that.
She had laughed when he had stood by her front door, back in his expensive cashmere, which was a little worse for wear thanks to the weather.
‘Who are you?’ she had teased, with a catch in her voice. ‘I don’t recognise the person standing in front of me!’
‘It’s been fun,’ he had returned with a crooked smile but that about summed it up.
Back in the clothes she usually didn’t step out of, she was the country vet, already thickly bundled up to go to the practice where she worked. He could no more have transported her to his world than he could have continued in her father’s old clothes clearing snow and chopping wood for the fire.
But he’d felt something, something brief and piercing tugging deep inside him, a sharp ache that had taken him by surprise.
He focused now and looked around him at the fabulous penthouse, the very best that money could buy. He’d bought it three years previously and since then it had more than quadrupled in price. It sat at the top of an impressive converted glass and red brick government building which was formidably austere on the outside but outstandingly modern and well-appointed on the inside. Theo liked that. It gave him the pleasant illusion of living in a building of historic interest without having to endure any of the physical inconveniences that came with buildings of historic interest.
He wondered how Becky would fit in here. Not well. He wondered how she would fit into his lifestyle. Likewise, not well. He moved in circles where the women were either clothes horses, draped on the arms of very, very rich men, or else older, at ease with their wealth, often condescending to those without but in a terribly well-mannered and polite way.
And the women all dripped gold and diamonds, and were either chauffeured to and from their luxury destinations or else drove natty little sports cars.
But his mother...would like her. She was just the sort of natural girl his mother approved of. There was even something vaguely Italian about the way she looked, with her long, dark hair and her rounded, hourglass figure.
His mother would approve and so...
For the first time since he had returned to London after his sojourn in the back of beyond, Theo felt a weight lift from his shoulders.
Trying to deal with the annoying business of Becky playing on his mind when she should have been relegated to the past had interrupted the smooth running of his life and he could see now that he had been looking at things from the wrong angle.
He should have realised that there was only one reason why he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. She was unfinished business. The time to cut short their sexual liaison had not yet come to its natural conclusion, hence he was still wrapped up with her and with thoughts of making love to her again.
He would make contact with her and see her again and he would take her to see his mother in Italy. She would be a tonic for his mother, who would be able at least to contemplate her son going out with a woman who wasn’t completely and utterly inappropriate.
She would find her mojo once again and, when she was back to full strength, he would break the news that he and Becky were finished, but by then Marita Rushing would be back on her feet and able to see a way forward.
And, he thought with even greater satisfaction, she would have the cottage to look forward to, the cottage she had wanted. Would Becky agree to speak to her parents about selling it to him? Yes. She would because it made financial sense and he had no doubt that he would be able to persuade her to see that. The house was falling down and would be beyond the point of reasonable sale in under a year, at which point the family home would either collapse into the ground or else be picked apart and sold to some developer with his eye on a housing estate.
Would she agree to this little game of pretend for the sake of his mother’s health? Yes, she would, because that was the sort of girl she was. Caring, empathetic. When she had spoken about some of the animals she had treated in the course of her career, her eyes had welled up.
The various loose strands of this scheme began to weave and mesh in his mind.
And he felt good about all of it. He was solution-oriented and he felt good at seeing a way forward to solving the situation with his mother, or at least dealing with it in a way that could conceivably have a positive outcome.
And he felt great about seeing Becky again. In fact, he felt on top of the world.
He nudged his mobile phone into life and dialled...
* * *
Becky heard the buzz of her phone as she was about to climb into bed, and she literally couldn’t believe her bad luck, because she had had two call-outs the past two nights and she really, really needed to get some sleep.
But then she drowsily glanced at the screen, saw who was calling and her heart instantly accelerated into fifth gear.
He had her number. He had taken it when he had been leaving on that last day because the roads had still been treacherous, even though the snow had lightened considerably, and she had been worried about him driving to London in his silly little boy-racer car.
‘I’ll call you if I end up in a ditch somewhere,’ he had drawled, and then he had taken her number.
Noticeably, he hadn’t given her his, and that had stung, even though she had made it perfectly clear that what they’d had was a done deal—there for the duration of the snow, and going just as the snow would go, disappearing into nothing until you couldn’t even remember what it had been like to have it there.
Of course he hadn’t called but for her the memory of him hadn’t disappeared like the snow. Where white fields had faded from her mind, the memory of him was still as powerful after two weeks as it had been after two hours.
It didn’t help either that, with the practice winding down, work was thinning out as the farmers, dog-owners, cat-owners and even one parrot-owner began transferring business to the nearest practice fifteen miles away. She had the feeling of being the last person at the party, hanging around after the crowd had dispersed when the lights were being switched on and the workers were beginning to clear t
he tables. The same sad, redundant feeling of someone who has outstayed their welcome.
And the house...
Becky had decided that she wouldn’t think about the house until she had found herself a new job because there were only so many things one person could worry about.
But neither of those massive anxieties could eclipse the thoughts of Theo, which had lodged in her head and continued to occupy far too much space. She found herself regularly drifting off into dreamland. She wondered what he was doing. She longed to hear his voice. She checked her phone obsessively and then gave herself little lectures about being stupid because they had both agreed that theirs would only be a passing fling. She rehearsed fictional conversations with him, should they ever accidentally bump into one another, which was so unlikely it was frankly laughable.
She wondered why he had managed to get to her the way he had. Was it because he had come along at a point in time when she had been feeling especially vulnerable? With her job about to disappear and her sister finally achieving the picture-postcard life with her much-wanted baby on the way? Or was it because she had been starved of male attention for way too long? Or maybe it had been neither of those things.
Maybe she had never stood a chance because he was just so unbelievably good-looking and unbelievably sexy and she had just not had the arsenal to deal with his impact.
When she caught herself thinking that, she always and inevitably started thinking about the women he might now be seeing. She hadn’t even asked him whether he had a girlfriend! He had seemed, for all his good looks, as the honourable sort of guy who would never have cheated on any woman he might have been seeing, but of course she could have been wrong.
He could have returned to London in his fancy car and immediately picked back up where he had left off with some gorgeous model type.
Realistically she had never expected him to get in touch so she stared open-mouthed at the buzzing mobile phone in her hand, too dumbstruck to do anything.
‘Hello?’
Snowbound With His Innocent Temptation Page 6