by Lucy Gordon
‘Becky,’ he murmured, raising his other hand and letting the fingers drift down her face.
The effect was devastating. His touch was so light that she barely felt it, yet it sent through her sensations that she had not known for years. They threatened her, filled her with alarm, yet she could not move.
‘Do you remember?’ he whispered.
‘Yes,’ she said sadly. ‘I remember.’
If only he would let her go. If only he would never let her go. The feather-light movement of his fingers against her cheek was filling her with a bitter-sweet turmoil, too intense to bear.
As if in a dream she found herself putting up a hand to touch his face. Then she took a sharp breath as she realised how close to danger she had allowed herself to drift.
‘Goodbye, Luca,’ she said.
His face became set. ‘You can’t say goodbye to me now.’
‘I must. There can’t be anything else. It’s too late.’
She tried to draw back her hand from his face, but he seized it and turned his head so that his lips lay against the palm.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered. ‘It’s too late-too late-’
He didn’t answer in words, only in the soft scorching of his breath against her palm. She braced herself against it, refusing to yield. He thought he could overcome her, and she would not allow it.
But it was harder than she thought because his touch affected her on two levels. She could cope with the physical excitement that scurried along her nerves, but not the memories of that other, sweeter life.
She was assailed by sensations, not only of pleasure but also of sunshine and happiness. She had forgotten about happiness, what it felt like, even what it was. But now it was there again in visions of a love that had been too intense to last.
The gentle caressing movements of his lips brought back unbearable joy, the nights when she had lain in his arms, revelling in the passion and tenderness of his love.
It had been almost frightening to feel such bliss, but his presence in the bed beside her had been reassuring, and she had fallen asleep against his shoulder, knowing that the next day would bring the same.
Now he was recalling the echoes of that time, and she wanted to avoid them and stay in the safe, chilly cocoon she had built for herself. It was painful to risk leaving that safety, but he was demanding it more insistently with every moment.
‘Do you remember?’ he murmured. ‘Do you remember-?’
‘No,’ she said urgently. ‘I don’t want to remember.’
‘Don’t shut me out, Becky.’
‘I must.’
He didn’t fight her. He simply withdrew his lips and laid her palm against his cheek again, looking so sad and despairing that she couldn’t bear it.
‘My darling-’ she used the words without knowing ‘-my darling, please-try to understand-’
‘I do,’ he said heavily. ‘It was a stupid idea, wasn’t it?’
‘No, it was a beautiful idea, but I guess I have no courage any more.’
‘My Becky had courage enough for anything.’
‘Long, long ago.’
He looked down, and suddenly she couldn’t bear for him to look at her face with the glow of youth gone from it. She pulled his head down to her, so that his lips covered hers.
She knew at once that her body had slept all this time. It wasn’t sleeping any more, because he was summoning it to vibrant new life, urgent in its need, carrying her with it despite her sensible self.
His mouth had the same power to coax and demand, but now there was an extra excitement. The boy had gone. The man had a hard edge that coloured all his actions, making her crave to know more of him. She found herself doing what she had sworn not to do, kissing him in a way that urged him on.
He needed no more encouragement to make him extend the kiss into an exploration of her jaw-line, down the length of her neck to the soft place at the base of her throat. Her heart was beating wildly with anticipation, excitement scurrying down from her throat, between her breasts-
‘Luca,’ she whispered, ‘Luca-don’t…’
Something in her voice pierced the cloud of desire that pervaded him, and he looked at her intently. There were tears in her eyes.
‘Don’t cry,’ he begged.
‘I’m not really. I’m glad it happened. I’ll never, never be sorry we met again, and put things right. But I can’t go on.’
‘Don’t give up so soon,’ he urged. ‘I’m here. You can hold on to me. Becky, take what we have. I don’t believe in “too late”.’
‘I wish I didn’t. Let me go, let me go.’
He didn’t try to restrain her as she slipped out of his arms, but he watched her all the way to the door.
‘You’ll come back to me, Becky.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, please believe me.’
She slipped out before he could speak again, and she knew that she was fleeing danger. She called herself a coward, but she couldn’t help it.
She reached her apartment like a refuge and secured the door behind her, leaning against it, as though fearing an invasion.
She tried to pull herself together. A heavy day faced her, and now she should be sensible and go to bed. But her body was too full of tension and excitement to relax.
She closed her eyes, trying to banish the feel of being held against his hard body, but the more she fought it the more she became aware of it. She’d started something that she had to finish.
All she had to do was go to him now. He might be asleep, but she knew he wasn’t. Her heart told her that he was waiting, listening for the ring of the telephone or the knock on the door. Because he knew, just as she did, that they had not reached the end.
She seized the phone and dialled the penthouse suite. He answered at once, just the one word. ‘Yes?’ spoken in a voice that was tense and urgent. He knew who it was.
She hung up. She was trembling.
Half an hour passed. He did not ring back.
She slipped quietly out of her apartment, and to the elevator, which drifted up almost soundlessly through the darkened building. At his door she paused only briefly before knocking, and it was opened immediately. He had been waiting for her.
He looked at her for a moment before pulling her fiercely inside and clasping her in his arms so that she was lifted clear off her feet. She could feel the relief that shook him as she put her own arms about him and laid her lips on his.
This was her kiss, with nothing held back. She was too honest to play coy. This had been inevitable from the moment she touched him, because after that she had to touch him again and again. She had to find out if his body was as strong and thrilling as she remembered.
‘What do you want?’ he whispered.
‘I want you,’ she murmured back against his mouth. Her hands were at work, pulling open the rest of his buttons, feeling the light sprinkling of hair beneath.
He took over, ripping off the rest of his clothes before ripping off hers. They fell on the bed together, both equally lost in a delirious need to be satiated with each other’s bodies.
Rebecca was awake now, every inch of her, vibrant, passionate and hungry, giving him everything she had or was, making feverish demands from the one man who had it in his power to fulfil her.
Luca had always had vigour, but time and experience had added subtlety. He explored her with hands and lips, using both with consummate skill to inflame her senses until she was drawing long, heated, half-moaning breaths.
How could so many years vanish without a trace? How could they still know each other so intimately? She was ready for every move he made, answering with caresses that were skilled in the ways he had always loved, caresses she had offered to no other man, because in her heart she had known they belonged only to him.
As he moved over her she had one last wild moment of doubt. This man was essentially a stranger. But it was no stranger who entered her with the slow, relentless power that had once thrilled her and now thrilled
her a thousandfold. Her flesh had slept too long. The awakening was fierce, devastating and total.
She was in his rhythm at once, claiming and releasing him, demanding while she gave, until the mounting pleasure seemed to explode deep within her. Now there was light everywhere, blinding, dazzling, breathtaking. It filled the world, the universe, and it was what she’d been waiting for during all the dead, meaningless years.
CHAPTER SIX
S HE came down from the heights to find herself held tightly in Luca’s arms. Perhaps a little too tightly, but she missed the threat of possessiveness because the shattering feeling of sexual release was so powerful, so welcome.
She knew now what she had always suspected, that the reason she was so unresponsive to any other man was that there had always been one man for her. And this was the man.
Luca, blunt, harsh, vengeful, unforgiving: everything she found hard to like. Yet he was the one, because he always had been, and part of her had never changed.
Then he said the wrong thing.
‘That was good.’
The hint of calculation chilled her.
‘Wasn’t it?’ he demanded.
Inwardly she withdrew a little, feeling bullied.
‘Yes,’ she said politely.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, just clever enough to know that he’d lost ground, not subtle enough to know why.
‘Nothing. I’d like to get up, please.’
‘Tell me, first.’
‘I want to get up.’
‘Tell me!’
‘Luca, if you don’t release me right now you’ll never see me again.’
He released her at once. She was surprised. She hadn’t expected the threat to work on this hard man, let alone instantly.
‘What is it?’ he demanded as she rose and quickly covered her nakedness with a robe. ‘What changed?’
‘I guess we shouldn’t expect too much all at once. Let it go for now.’
Her tone contained a warning and, again to her surprise, he heeded it. After a few moments the silence made her look at him and what she saw melted her heart.
His face showed confusion, and the hurt bewilderment of a child who didn’t know what he’d done wrong. It sent her back into his arms.
‘Yes, it was good,’ she reassured him.
‘I still know how to please you?’
‘Yes, like nobody else.’
It was the wrong thing to say. His face darkened.
‘I don’t want to hear about other men.’
‘And I’m not going to tell you, but my husband existed. I haven’t lived on the shelf all these years, any more than you have. I’ve been married, so have you.’
‘That’s enough!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Fine, you don’t have to. You don’t have to hear anything you don’t want to.’ She pulled away from him, looking around for her clothes. Instantly he was beside her.
‘Don’t go, Becky. I don’t want you to go.’
‘I think I should,’ she said, starting to pull on garments.
‘No, you mustn’t.’ He put his hands out to restrain her, then snatched them back again.
‘Don’t tell me what I must and mustn’t do,’ she told him.
‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Look, I’m not touching you, but please don’t go. Please, Becky. I’ll make it right, just tell me what to do, but stay, I beg you.’
His words softened her again. Suddenly they were back in the old days, when this fierce man was putty in her hands, but only hers.
She stopped what she was doing, went over and put her arms around him in consolation. He hugged her back, but gingerly, as though afraid of offending again.
‘If you go away, I’m afraid you won’t come back,’ he said gruffly.
‘I will come back. I want to see you again. But take it slowly.’
‘I can’t,’ he admitted. ‘I want all of you at once. Stay with me. Come back to bed.’
‘No, the hotel will be getting up soon and I don’t want to risk being seen.’
‘Spend today with me.’
She mentally reviewed the day she’d planned. There were important appointments that she simply couldn’t cancel.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to make a few calls but-I can do it.’
‘We’ll go somewhere that we won’t be seen by anyone who knows either of us. But you’ll have to say where that is. I don’t know London.’
‘Have you never been here before?’ she asked.
‘Oh, yes, brief visits, business deals, hotel rooms, travelling in the back of a car to conferences, never seeing anything through the car windows because I was always on the phone. I couldn’t tell you how London is different from New York or Milan. If it is different.’
‘That sounds really dreadful.’
‘It’s your world too, Becky.’
‘Yes, but I get away sometimes.’
‘On long country weekends with Jordan?’
‘Jordan’s a forbidden subject.’
‘Suppose I say he isn’t?’
‘Only a minute ago you told me you didn’t want to hear about anyone else.’
‘I’ll make an exception for Danvers Jordan.’
‘But I won’t,’ she said quietly.
His lips tightened with anger. ‘So it has to be on your terms, does it?’
‘You said we weren’t to talk about the past. They were your terms. I agreed to them. Do you think you can just change them when it suits you? Think again. I’m not dancing on the end of your string.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said quickly. ‘I give in. Your terms.’
She touched his cheek, smiling with rueful tenderness. ‘You don’t have to give in. That’s not what it’s all about. But let’s not spoil it.’
He took her hand and kissed the palm. ‘Anything you say.’
It was like driving at speed around a sharp corner, and only just avoiding the wall. You were left with a desperate sense of relief and a need to rediscover the road you were supposed to be taking.
‘So,’ she said, determinedly bright, ‘you were saying about cities looking the same. Didn’t you ever long for the hills of Tuscany?’
He nodded. ‘Or any greenery at all. In New York I always tell myself I’ll go to Central Park, but I’ve never been yet. Once I saw some trees as I was driving through London, and told the driver to stop the car. But then the phone rang. I was late for a meeting, so I told him to start it again.’
‘Where were you when this happened?’
He thought for a moment. ‘We’d just passed a huge round red building. I think the driver said they gave concerts there.’
‘The Albert Hall. The trees you saw were in Hyde Park. Let’s go there, then.’
‘Fine.’ He reached for the telephone.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Calling my driver.’
She placed her hand firmly over his. ‘We’re not calling your driver, or mine.’
‘Aren’t we?’
‘Nope. We’re going to go out and hunt for a taxi, and then nobody will know where we’ve gone.’
That turned it into a conspiracy, and suddenly everything was fun. They took the elevator down almost all the way, and Luca got out one floor from the last. Anyone who happened to be in the lobby saw him walk out of the hotel alone. None of them saw him turn the corner and meet up with Rebecca, who’d gone down the back stairs, left by the kitchen entrance, and was already hailing a taxi.
It was little more than a mile to Hyde Park, but the congestion had already started, and it was three-quarters of an hour before they arrived.
‘Green,’ Luca said, looking around him with joy. ‘Grass. Trees.’
He took her hand and began to walk, across the grass, and she hurried with him. It touched her that Luca, reared amidst savagely beautiful scenery, could still find pleasure in this place with its manicured lawns. It told a whole story about how cut off he�
��d become from his roots.
‘What’s that?’ He had stopped abruptly at the sight of a large stretch of water, snaking out of sight in both directions. ‘A river?’
‘No, it’s a long, thin lake,’ she laughed. ‘It’s called the Serpentine.’
‘And we can take a boat. I see them over there.’
‘Come on, then. I haven’t been on a boat on the Serpentine for years.’
They hired a rowing boat, big enough for her to sit facing him in a cushioned seat. Luca took the oars and began to pull on them strongly, while Rebecca leaned back, enjoying the chance to relax and simply watch him. After the turmoil of the last few days it was good to think of nothing but the beautiful day, and the pleasure of being on the water. She fixed her eyes on him and let her thoughts drift.
But this was a mistake because in a haze of drowsy contentment she found herself looking at his hands, remembering last night. He had touched her in so many ways, sometimes gently, intimately, sometimes fiercely, and she had responded ecstatically to all of them.
And the way she’d touched him back-she found it hard to recall details now. She had explored and celebrated him with reckless joy, revelling in his instant response, demanding more. She had not known herself capable of such vigorous possessiveness.
Her mind drifted back to her ex-husband, the man she thought of as ‘poor Saul’. He’d been entitled to pity because she’d had less than half a heart to give him, and almost no passion. He’d been infatuated and she’d yielded to his eagerness from hope of finding a purpose in her life.
But she had disappointed him, and in his bitterness he’d called her ‘the iceberg’. The kindest thing she had ever done for him was to leave him.
She returned from her reverie to find that Luca’s eyes were on her, and he was smiling faintly.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I’m trying to behave like a gentleman, and not succeeding. The truth is that all I can think of is how badly I want to make love to you.’
The words ‘make love’ were like a signal, starting a slow-burning fuse inside her. It was only a few hours since she’d risen, satiated, from his bed, yet with just two words she’d become ready for him again. It was shameless, and slightly shocking. It was also thrilling, and deeply, searingly enjoyable.