by Susan Napier
He tugged her hair, using it to control the angle of her mouth against his, adjusting her so that he could penetrate her more thoroughly, arching her throat so that his free hand could run down the vulnerable length of her, from jaw to flank and then slowly back up again to stroke the velvety skin of her throat with a threatening deliberation. His fingers trailed lightly against the sensitive flesh, teasing her with an unbearably gentle possessiveness until his thumb found the betraying throb of her pulse under the point of her jaw and pressed into it so deeply that she felt dizzy, more dominated by him with every heartbeat. She uttered a tiny, melting moan of confusion and his mouth let her go, but only long enough for her to blink at him in dazed disappointment, her eyes slumberous, her tender mouth a languorous invitation. His bruising expression flared into one of whitehot satisfaction and then he was back, burrowing into her moist heat, using his tongue to explore the completeness of her submission to his masculine aggression, his hunger so intense that he was shaking as much as she.
His hips anchored the centre of her body while his stroking fingers drifted leisurely down from her throat and over the honey-smooth slope to the soft elastic of her blouse, tugging at it until it dipped below her laceclad breast. His palm was warm and dry, creating a delicate friction as he cupped the fragile lace and shaped her to his touch. Oh, yes, this was what she had needed. She arched herself into the pleasurable new sensation and his fingers tightened, his thumb moving to rub insistently back and forth across the firm crest of her breast until Anne felt she was going to burst with exquisite agony.
‘Oh, please…’ She shuddered as his mouth moved to nip at her ear and exposed throat. His fingers paused in their magical work and she cried out in soft protest. ‘Oh, no…please…don’t…’
To her horror he released her breast entirely. ‘Are you still tender from feeding Ivan?’ he murmured raggedly. ‘Are your breasts too swollen and sensitive to be touched…?’
‘Oh, no, I meant don’t stop,’ she begged incoherently, dragging his hand back to her breast, taking over the role of the aggressor as she pulled his head down and began kissing him eagerly, using her tongue the way he had shown her.
She pushed her hands eagerly up under his shirt to stroke his silky, hot, hair-roughened chest. She touched his flat, masculine nipples and was startled to feel them react sharply, hardening under her clumsy caress. Intoxicated by a rush of feverish curiosity, she pulled her mouth away from his and pushed the soft fabric up out of her way, revealing the thick muscles bunching and shifting with every convulsive breath.
‘Anne…’
She was too enraptured by her discovery to notice the husky note of warning in his voice as his hand stilled on her breast.
‘Why, you’re just like me,’ she murmured wonderingly, touching a finger lightly to one rigid nipple where it peeped out of its thick nest of hair and watching it stiffen further.
He shuddered and swore savagely under his breath and she looked up at his face, fascinated by the mixture of smouldering resentment and carnal desire that she saw there.
He was fighting against her, she realised with a quiver of shock—against what she could do to him. But she wasn’t his enemy and she wasn’t about to let him shrug off what had just happened between them as a momentary aberration!
Holding his smoking black gaze with dreamy intentness, Anne leaned forward and pressed her open mouth over the stiff brown button of his nipple. His reaction was gratifyingly swift. As she began to suckle he gave a hoarse cry of shock, his head jerking back and his jaw clenching, his whole body tautening and lifting towards her.
He made the mistake of looking down at her again, seeing her watching him with those provocatively knowing eyes as she feasted on his flesh. Her tongue flicked over him in a wicked, velvety rasp and he went rock-hard at the involuntary image of her sinking to her knees and using that sultry, skilled mouth on him in other, even more pleasurable ways…
‘No, damn you, that’s enough!’ He dragged himself out of her reach, staggering slightly as he turned away to readjust his clothing, leaving Anne bereft and feeling somehow betrayed, an angry frustration clawing at her insides.
He swung back and stiffened at the sight of her dishevelled figure, a sweet disorder of femininity. Her wistful expression of wanton dismay seemed to spark an even greater rejection.
‘Cover yourself!’ he rapped out curtly.
When Anne’s fingers fumbled with the elastic neckline of her blouse he uttered a brief imprecation and pulled it sharply up, taking care not to touch her silky skin, snapping the elastic firmly back into place at an overly modest height before moving quickly out of her reach again.
Anne almost smiled in sympathy. If Hunter was feeling anything like she was right now then she could understand the rawness of his temper. But, after all, it was entirely his fault that they were both feeling frustrated: she wasn’t the one who had cried halt.
She eyed him warily, noting the rigid posture, the fists clenched at his sides, the black scowl. His whole attitude was a picture of stubborn rejection as he avoided her gaze, dark colour streaking his rugged cheekbones. Was he embarrassed at his lack of control? Or was it self-disgust that robbed him of his usual blunt, head-on ap- proach to awkward situations? Or—ghastly thought-was it Anne he was disgusted with?
‘There’s no need to get so uptight, Hunter,’ she said, endeavouring to project a non-threatening breeziness that she didn’t feel. ‘We didn’t do anything wrong. We were just having a little fun—’
‘Fun!’ It was the wrong word to use. Hunter looked as if he was going to explode.
Pride made Anne refuse to back down. ‘Yes, fun. You know, Professor, when you do something purely for pleasure, amusement, diversion…’
His explosion was brief and to the point.
‘Well, I suggest that in future you look for your amusing little diversions somewhere else, because I’m not in the market for your cheap brand of fun!’
‘Cheap?’ Anne was bewildered by his fierceness. ‘We were just kissing, for heaven’s sake. You think I go around kissing every man I meet?’ she asked, torn between offence and laughter.
The urge to laugh was stifled at birth as he rapped out forcefully, ‘If you think what we were doing was “just kissing”, then that explains Ivan. No doubt you and his father were “justhugging” during his immaculate conception—’
Anne flushed deeply at the unfairness of it. ‘Don’t you dare bring Ivan into this!’
‘I dare because it’s evident that you haven’t learnt very much from your past experiences…’
‘There wasn’t much to learn…’ she said bitterly.
‘Oh, no, I forgot—you gave lessons to them.’ He flung her foolishly teasing words back in her face.
‘That was a joke. You can’t believe I meant it?’ she cried incredulously.
‘Can’t I? What other lies have you told me that I shouldn’t believe?’ She flinched and he smiled sardonically. ‘This time the joke’s on you, sweetheart; you can’t plead virtue with a mouth as skilled as yours. You were practically eating me alive.’
Anne was stricken. He made her eagerness sound so sordid, as if he had been merely a passive victim of her lust, instead of the prime instigator.
‘Oh, I see, I should have pretended not to notice when you grabbed me,’ she said furiously, placing the blame squarely back where it belonged. ‘Sorry I got it wrong. You should have told me that lack of enthusiasm is what you require from your women, and I would have dropped off to sleep instead of trying to liven you up!’
‘The last thing I need is livening up,’ he ground out. ‘And don’t flatter yourself that you’ll ever be my woman…There’s more to being a woman, thank God, than the ability to have sex and babies—something you’ve evidently yet to discover!’ He punctuated the scathing exit-line by violently slamming the door after him.
Looking back, it was obvious to Anne that her flippancy had been the trigger for that whole, bitter exchange. She sho
uld have been calm, serious, not tried to hide her insecurity behind joking words, but that had always been the way that she coped with life’s unexpected blows—by turning them inside out and rendering them harmless with her fine sense of the ridiculous. Besides, it was pretty difficult to act calmly when you were shaking like a leaf.
She propped herself up on her elbow again, brushing damp strands of hair off the page in front of her as she frowned down at the Russian phrases that mocked her comprehension.
On second thoughts, taking their brief encounter seriously would probably have achieved exactly the same result, only faster. University gossip had it that the dynamic professor had only rarely been sighted with the same woman twice, which only added fuel to the wild rumours: that he was secretly having an affair with another professor’s wife; that he was a misogynist; that he was a satyr who could never be satisfied by one woman; that he was a closet gay; that he was suffering from a bad case of unrequited love or still carrying a torch for his dead wife.
Of all the rumours, Anne was willing to give credence only to the last. Some judicious shaking of the grapevine had revealed that Hunter had been a widower for over five years, his wife having died while they were living in Australia, and yet his extreme reticence about his marriage seemed indicative of some deep, unresolved feelings. As he was hot-tempered, demanding, impatient and articulate, it had to be a very powerful emotion that was capable of inhibiting his natural expressiveness. If he still felt loyalty to the memory of his wife, that would explain his violent denial of any attraction towards Anne. He had certainly been avoiding any chance of a recurrence, by being singularly elusive.
Unfortunately, it seemed that every time Anne had seen Hunter since that night, she had been welcoming or farewelling a different male, and of course he hadn’t given her the chance to explain the entirely innocent circumstances. No, he had merely given her one of those hooded stares, oozing with suspicion, which seemed to have become his speciality…
On Rachel’s advice, Anne had put up a card on the university library bulletin-board advertising the massage skills that she had acquired while nursing her mother and, somewhat to her surprise, had found herself with a small but regular trickle of clients in the shape of brawny student sportsmen who couldn’t afford professional physiotherapy treatment for their minor injuries but who, if they couldn’t come up with the very modest fee she charged, were willing to swap services which to Anne were even more valuable than money.
Thus she had quickly acquired two terrific male baby-sitters—a catering student who cooked her gourmet meals and a rugby player who chauffeured her to the shops and back. Then there was the trainee soundtechnician who had made her the typing sound-effects tape, no questions asked!
Twisting sideways to flip impatiently through her Russian-English dictionary, Anne caught sight of her exercise mat rolled up in the corner of the room and was instantly revisited by last night’s infuriating débâcle.
All Hunter’s worst suspicions about the parade of impressive physical specimens to her door must have been confirmed the previous evening, when he had brought her some mail which had been left in his letterbox by mistake.
Anne had just finished strenuously working on her rugby player, whose thigh had been over-stressed by some typically macho posturing on the weight machines at the gym. It had been hot, and she had stripped to a singlettop and shorts, her skin damp with perspiration. Jerry, who had been wearing even less, had rolled over on the floor and started pulling on his faded tracksuit bottoms as she’d answered the door.
Handing her letters over, Hunter’s eyes had flicked briefly past her to the man scrambling into his clothing and the rumpled sheet spread out over an exercise pad on the hard floor.
‘Been having fun, Anne?’ he murmured silkily.
‘Actually no, it’s very hard work,’ she replied evenly, determined that this time she would not let the situation degenerate into farce. She would explain clearly and succinctly what was going on and Hunter would stop looking at her as if she had just crawled out from under a stone.
‘Not for me.’ Jerry had got to his feet and now sauntered up behind her, his cropped gym shirt still in his hand, acknowledging the man at the door with a non- chalant disrespect that revealed his engineering school origins. Cocooned by the sciences, he had never had to worry about facing Professor Lewis’s legendary temper on a personal basis. ‘All I have to do is lie back and let myself be mauled by this little tiger,’ he grinned, and suddenly his overgrown-puppy personality was less endearing than usual.
‘No one can make me feel as good as Annie can. She’s got a magic touch,’ he burbled on, slinging a broad, naked arm around her neck and hugging her back against him. Jerry had already made the obligatory pass—on his first appointment—and had taken his rejection with cheerful unconcern, so Anne knew that his action was merely friendly. But with Hunter’s hawkish gaze on them she felt awkward and tried to squirm discreetly out of the casual embrace. Unfortunately Jerry didn’t know the meaning of discretion and thought himself excruciatingly witty.
‘Hey, quit wriggling around like that, Annie,’ he said in an oily, mock-leering voice. ‘You might give the professor the wrong idea about us…’
As if he didn’t have it already! She was tempted to slap his face for what she read in the narrowed black eyes. Did Hunter really think she had so little self-respect? And so much stamina! She studied all day, looked after Ivan, supposedly wrote all night—where she was supposed to get the energy for all this frantic sex he seemed so keen to think that she constantly indulged in?
‘Jerry’s studying engineering…He plays rugby for the university,’ she began tightly. ‘I was just—’
‘Running through some plays with him?’ Hunter interjected smoothly.
To her annoyance Jerry pre-empted her cutting response with a laugh and a friendly slap on the flank. ‘She just can’t keep her hands off me, can you, Annie? But I must admit she’s getting me in great shape for the touch season.’
‘How apt,’ Hunter said with cool sarcasm as he looked at the beefy hand where it had come to rest against the pale, rounded thigh revealed by Anne’s frayed denim shorts.
‘Well, don’t let me interrupt any further,’ he drawled, turning on his heel with a thin smile. ‘By all means go back to your…tactile exertions…’
‘He was talking about summer touch rugby,’ yelled Anne at Hunter’s retreating back, but he ignored her, the back of his head and set of his wide shoulders as expressive of contempt as his coldly insolent smile had been. If it weren’t for Jerry looking interestedly on she would have marched after him and insisted that he give her a proper hearing. Dammit, one day she was going to demand that he stand his ground and back up these ridiculous notions he had about her!
What really fretted her was that he might have knocked on her door for a reason other than just to deliver her letters. After all, it would have been more in keeping with his current policy of isolationism to have left them in her letterbox, or on her front doormat. Instead he had chosen to make personal contact.
But if the gesture had been a small olive-branch then he had certainly snatched it back with unflattering alacrity! It was almost as if he had welcomed a further excuse to despise her.
Anne sighed heavily again, her pen tracing absently over the Cyrillic script in front of her. She persevered valiantly for a few more minutes, but finally she threw the ball-point down in disgust and sat up.
‘This is ridiculous!’
Since she obviously wasn’t going to be able to get any serious work done until she had confronted Hunter, she had no choice. She’d just have to bite the bullet and beg for the opportunity to watch him grovel.
She was almost out of the door when she remembered her typing tape still chattering away and rushed back to switch it off. The sudden cessation of noise woke Ivan and as she picked him up it occurred to Anne that Hunter might need some softening up. To talk properly with him she would first have to get invited in,
and perhaps Ivan could do that for her. She could say that she needed to look up an all-night chemist in his phone book so that she could get some more gel for his gums or something…
Ivan looked suspiciously calm and drowsy for a supposedly fractious baby but Anne decided to chance it. The worst that Hunter could do was to shut the door in her face.
If he opened it in the first place, of course!
Standing outside in the narrow hallway, knocking on his door for the fourth time, Anne found herself getting annoyed. For a grown man Hunter was acting very immaturely, hiding in his room like a sulky child. He should come out and take his punishment like a man!
‘This is the last straw!’ Anne told Ivan grimly as she marched back down to the cupboard where the fuse boxes were and felt in among the rusty nuts and bolts in a small cardboard box. The key was there, where Hunter had advised her to leave a spare of hers when she had locked herself out of her flat one day.
‘I suppose this is an unforgivable invasion of privacy,’ she murmured to Ivan as she quietly inserted the key into Hunter’s front door, and was delighted to feel it smoothly unsnick the lock. ‘If not actually illegal…’
Ivan’s head loyally bobbed back and forth as he gabbled his views on the individual’s right to privacy. Anne shushed him and he shushed moistly back, making satisfying bubbles. She couldn’t resist popping one with her finger, which made him blink in astonishment then go squinty-eyed with glee.
‘Hunter?’ She pushed open the door and then was impatient with her own tentativeness. ‘Hunter!’
She held Ivan protectively in front of her, half expecting Hunter to rush out of the darkness at full throttle.