by Susan Napier
‘You lied to me.’
She held her chin up. ‘Well, yes, but there were extenuating circum—’
He wasn’t interested in explanations. ‘So you have no son?’ He gave her a little shake to prise an immediate answer loose. ‘No Russian lover?’
She shook her head to both, wondering apprehensively where he was leading as his grip eased and her toes brushed the floor.
‘No husband?’
‘No!’
‘No daughter?’
‘No!’ She clutched at his thick forearms, wobbling slightly as he let her legs take her full weight and she discovered that her knees were unusually weak.
‘Just making sure,’ he said grimly, shifting a splayed hand to her back, applying just enough pressure to bring the tips of her breasts against his denim shirt. ‘In your case it pays to be explicit. So there are no other skeletons likely to shamble out of your closet?’
She began to struggle, detecting a menacing new element in his quiet interrogation. ‘No! Dammit, Hunter, stop trying to frighten me. I know you’re not going to hurt me. Let me go.’
The heat of his body was producing a musky aroma that prompted a pulse of startled recognition along her senses. She faltered, briefly tempted, then pride came to her rescue and she renewed her struggles. But her supple strength was no match for his resolute toughness and he controlled her with irritating ease, the brazen pressure of his thighs confirming her sizzling suspicions. She could feel herself getting hot and flustered as she twisted and turned, unable to escape the knowledge that her efforts were achieving the opposite to what she intended. Her temper rose in direct proportion to her helplessness. ‘I said—let—me—go!’
‘Why?’ he murmured tauntingly down into her flushed, antagonistic face. ‘There’s no one waiting for you—you’ve been deserted by your nearest and dearest, remember? You’re quite, quite alone—except for me, of course…’
The hand on her right shoulder moved clumsily, snagging in her soft collar and dragging the open neck of her flowing blouse diagonally down across her shoulder until the top button popped.
‘Now look what you’ve done! You’ve pulled the button off,’ she accused, grabbing at the opportunity to make him feel guilty for a change. His eyelids drooped and she realised with a thrill of consternation that his clumsiness hadn’t been accidental.
‘How dare you?’ she said weakly, trying to disguise her delicious ambivalence.
His smile was slow, predatory, prematurely triumphant. ‘Good cliché, bad defence, darling. What’s next? You could claim it’s feeding time, but no, that excuse won’t work any more for you, will it? There’s no one left here for you to feed…unless it’s me…’
With stunning arrogance his hand moved down, cupping her breasts, fondling them through the soft, well-washed cotton as he murmured with a sexual frankness calculated to shock, ‘I thought these were swollen with milk for your baby…I’m delighted to find out that they’re always this large and luscious—like lovely, warm, ripe fruit just begging to be plucked and tasted…’
And on that insolent note his finger ran lightly down into her cleavage to hook under the next button. Anne gave a gasping cry as with a casual downward flick of his powerful wrist he ripped the rest of her blouse open from collarbone to waist.
Buttons scattered, along with most of Anne’s remaining resistance. If he was deliberately trying to shame her she wasn’t going to co-operate by fighting him, and if it was violent seduction he had in mind then she was a more than willing victim. Her love was stronger than her pride and because of that she could give him the plea that she sensed his own pride demanded. She placed her hands on his shoulders, tacitly opening herself to his touch.
‘Hunter, please…’
‘That’s what you said last time, and I did please you, didn’t I?’ He peeled back the edges of her blouse, displaying her soft, filmy bra, and bent his head to nip at the dark, rosy centres pressed flat against the creamy net. ‘Now it’s your turn to please me…’
He opened his mouth against her and she went utterly weak, not even noticing the rough hand glide smoothly under her hanging blouse and unclip the plastic fastening at her back. As her breasts tumbled free he made a rough sound of greedy satisfaction and sank back down with her on to the firmly sprung couch, holding her across his lap and nuzzling the flimsy fabric aside with his mouth before lapping at the soft, shyly trembling peaks with long, lazy strokes, gliding them with his clever tongue until they were rigid and glistening. He admired his erotic creations with little crowns of biting kisses, then cupped her again in his strong fingers, guiding each stiff nipple in turn into the scalding moistness of his mouth, drawing them deeper as he suckled hotly, with a fierce, lusty enjoyment that drove her into a frenzy of delight.
Fiery needles lanced through Anne’s flesh, concentrating their piercing sensations on the pleasure centres of her body as Hunter shifted sideways and rolled deftly over, pushing her full-length on to the soft, polished-cotton cushions and coming down heavily on top of her, using his hips to wedge her thighs open and accept him as intimately as their clothing would allow.
Anne was lost in a world of languid bliss, unaware of the passage of time as Hunter teased her skirt slowly up her legs, deliberately taking his time in order to savour her uninhibitedly sensual response to each fleeting caress, his warm fingers stroking, delving, sliding, enticing, his mouth always moving, tasting, exploring her with a thoroughness that would have shocked her had she not been blinded by the shattering glory of her first physical experience of love.
She wasn’t aware of the skilful disrobing that accompanied his wildly erotic explorations until she opened her pleasure-dazed eyes and suddenly found herself nude in her lover’s arms, unbearably excited by the feel of his rough clothing against her singing skin, the slide of smooth cotton against her bare back as he shifted her to accommodate his needs. He had released her hair from its faded hoop of elastic and fanned it out to frame the lush, pearly curves of her body, winding his hands in its gleaming luxuriance, teasing it over her gloriously sen- sitised breasts, tantalising her with its feathery friction.
When she teased him throatily about his fetish and protested at the inequity of their dress, Hunter laughed smokily and touched her where she was most vulnerable, stroking her with excruciating delicacy until she melted with a drenching cry, praising her for the splendour of her response.
‘So soft, and hot and silky wet…Don’t lose the rhythm, darling, stay with me…that’s right…a little harder…a little faster…No, darling, don’t fight it…’
Each time she tried to do so, out of fear or innate modesty, he punished her with a new, even more irresistible form of ravishment. With exquisite finesse he drew her deeper and deeper into unknown territory, closer and closer to the secret source of the molten river of hedonistic pleasure, yet never quite allowing her to achieve enlightenment, tantalising her with the certain knowledge that she would only find it with him…
And when she couldn’t bear to wait any longer, and tore impatiently at the cloth which veiled the ultimate mystery from her, he was too fiercely in the grip of his own pulsing arousal to continue the bewitching game, stripping to the skin with shaking hands and guiding her fingers as he prepared himself to take her, fumbling like an inexperienced boy with the tiny packet and groaning as she tentatively stroked the length of his satiny hardness, his big body arching and shuddering with the same rippling tension that she could feel building inside her, his taut buttocks and powerful flanks flexing with an inexorable rhythm as he pushed himself helplessly against her soft palm.
He caught her wrist and dragged it urgently away. ‘Stop it, or I’ll…’
He moaned, shivering convulsively as she enclosed him with her free hand, bolder now, unable to resist her new fascination with his smooth shape and daunting size, the way he pulsed heavily against her fingers.
‘Or you’ll what?’ she dared to tease.
‘Or I’ll do this!’
<
br /> It happened so quickly she had no time to warn him. He was parting her, then sliding sleekly inside with a thick, sensual growl of gratification as she closed tightly around his swollen hardness. To her dazed delight there was no pain…he had been too skilled, too intent in indulging his evident preference for extensive love-play.
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she sighed with revealing eagerness, arching beneath him to rub her breasts against the dense, dark, silky hair of his chest.
He caught his breath, rising up on bulging arms, his hips pressing deeper, tighter as her body absorbed and adjusted itself to him in minute increments. ‘No lover, Anne? Or no lovers at all?’ he murmured raggedly.
Anne let her head fall back. Even at a critical moment like this the man was full of wretched curiosity!
‘Who cares now…?’ She moaned and clutched desperately at him as he suddenly withdrew, but it was only to slide forward again, sheathing himself even more deeply this time, his breathing harshening as the tension shivered across his hard belly and a sheen of sweat began to glisten on his thickly muscled shoulders and in his tangled chest-hair.
He braced his knees against the firm springs, his feet against the high-rolled arm of the couch, blessing the fact that it was a trifle too short for a man of his size as he used the resulting leverage to control carefully the instinctive aggression of his thrusts, drawing another wondrously flattering sigh from the new-born voluptuary beneath him.
‘Am I the first man to do this to you, Anne?’
He withdrew once more, and again she couldn’t stop herself from panicking, digging her short, practical nails into his tight buttocks until he eased forward, this time a little faster and more roughly, beginning to establish a rhythm that was both exhilarating and frustrating.
‘Am I, Anne?’
This time as he pulled back Hunter deliberately hesitated and, as he expected, his answer arrived in a wild rush as she wound herself around him.
‘Yes, yes! Although if I’d known it was going to be this good I wouldn’t have waited so long!’ She slid her fingers through the hair on his chest and stroked the fine pelt, following the silky line down his belly to push into the thickening where his body joined with hers—Anne and Hunter, Hunter and Anne—if only it could go on forever. ‘Oh, what does it matter? What does anything matter? Just shut up, Hunter, and keep doing whatever it is you’re doing and, whatever happens, this time don’t stop!’
There was a quiver of laughter in his voice as he responded explosively to her desperate order. ‘Don’t worry, little tyrant, there’s no danger of that. Hold on tight, now—I have a feeling this is going to be a turbulent ride!’
Anne lay on her back in a state of blissful exhaustion, staring at the afternoon sunlight painting patterns on the white ceiling of her bedroom.
‘So that’s what all the fuss is about!’ she said smugly to the sweat-soaked man lying beside her.
‘I take it you’re quite satisfied?’ Hunter smiled at her gloating expression, rising on one elbow to regard her sprawling figure.
‘Didn’t I give that vague impression?’ she said lightly, although secretly she was embarrassed. She knew she had amused him with her effervescent enthusiasm.
It was too much to expect that he wouldn’t guess. ‘You’re a very passionate woman; don’t apologise for it.’
‘Is that what I was doing?’ She suddenly realised that the sheets were twisted underneath her and she sat up, trying to tussle the top one free to cover her nakedness.
Hunter took the sheet out of her hand and threw it out of reach on the floor. Then he lay back and stretched, long and luxuriously, in an unnecessarily flagrant display of his rippling physique. Still, his ease with his nudity made her less self-conscious about her own.
She frowned at him. ‘I might have been cold,’ she said haughtily.
He smiled at her lazily. ‘You might have been. But you weren’t. Aren’t you going to ask how I know?’
His eyes drifted down to her breasts and she instinctively raised her hands to shield her soft nipples from his provocative glance, flushing as she felt them pucker lightly in loving memory.
He chuckled. She had never seen him so mellow and relaxed, totally at peace with the world and, she realised with a quickening of her pulse, with her. Yet even at his most passionate he had maintained an emotional distance that had precluded words of love in his love- making vocabulary…as if they were still, in his mind, reserved for someone else. For Deborah, she thought sinkingly. The serious wife his mother had disapproved of, but whom he had evidently loved enough to make him shy away from committing himself to anyone else.
‘Are you always like this after sex?’ she asked him jealously. If he didn’t use love-words, neither would she.
He raised his eyebrows, his expression cooling. ‘It depends on whether I enjoyed it or not.’
She tossed her head at the non-answer, and a swath of long hair flicked across his chest, catching against the curly thatch and pulling at it slightly as she whisked it away again, causing him to suck in his stomach with a small shudder.
‘Remind me to get you to do that to me properly some time,’ he murmured huskily.
‘What?’
‘Stroke me with your hair.’
The now familiar weakness invaded her belly with a warm tingling. ‘You’re not going to answer my question, are you?’ she made herself ask.
He studied her stubborn face for a moment. ‘No, I’m not. I consider it intrusive and an invasion of privacy.’
She paled as if she had been slapped, turning her head sharply aside so that she didn’t notice his hand beginning to lift in a brief gesture of conciliation, then dropping back to his side.
‘Anne, we’re two mature adults with separate pasts and personalities and a way of life that demands a great deal of personal space,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t like being crowded and neither, if today’s events are anything to go by, do you. We’ve both made mistakes but only because we were impatient for this…’ He splayed his hand between them on the bed, his tone drifting into detached ‘lecturer’ mode that made her long to shake him. ‘If we’re going to be lovers we have to set the boundaries of mutual consideration, so that neither of us develops unreal expectations of the other. This business with Ivan is an illustration in point. There are obviously areas of your life in which you want to keep your own counsel and make your own decisions without my advice or interference and I respect that. In turn you need to respect my need for the same kind of personal privacy. It doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions, only that we shouldn’t be offended if the answer is not the one we want it to be. Just because we’re lovers it doesn’t mean that we have to turn each other inside out…’
‘I rather thought that was just what we had done,’ said Anne, recovering her sense of humour and giving him a pert grin.
‘Lovers’. That was what he had called them. Not sex partners or friends. ‘Lovers’. It had a lovely, warm, semipermanent kind of sound to it. Some people were lovers for years, for decades, for the rest of their natural lives…
He responded with a rakish answering smile but his words were cautious. ‘You may be right. So we’re agreed, then—no encroachment, no tantrums—’
‘I’m not the one who had the big tantrum,’ she pointed out.
‘Mmm.’ His eyes narrowed resentfully. He didn’t like being reminded of it. ‘Acquit me on this occasion because personal privacy does not include the right to take other lovers, let alone flaunt them under my nose. I’m not that liberated and I never will be!’
He swung abruptly off the bed and began picking up his clothes, his movements masking his expression.
‘So I’m allowed to be jealous, then?’ said Anne a trifle snippily, thinking that he didn’t seem to notice that, for all his obsession with mutual benefits, he was the one setting all the rules.
At least he hadn’t ordered her not to fall in love with him—she had broken that one already! ‘I have permission to run off an
y strange blondes who might follow you home?’
His mouth twitched and he turned, clothes in hand, to fluster her with another full-frontal. ‘By all means. I like you when you’re fierce, stroking me with that sharp little tongue, especially as it lies in such a delectable sheath.’
He confirmed his approval by leaning over and kissing her, delicately stroking the tongue in question with his own. ‘Mind if I use your shower before I go?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, sauntering out with a long, easy stride that in a younger man might have been mistaken for a self-satisfied swagger.
He was gone so long that Anne took fright, thinking that he might have left without bothering to say goodbye, or that he had merely been some grief-induced hallucination. She hurriedly pulled on her modest robe and scuttled out, coming to a skidding stop on the wooden floor.
She might have known!
Showered but unshaven, Hunter was sitting in his jeans and shirt at her small desk, reading Katlin’s manuscript. At least, he was holding it—but he was actually staring at the painting on the wall directly across from him with a brooding expression that made her nervous.
‘Er…your mother absolutely insisted I have it,’ she began uneasily.
‘Where’s the rest of it?’
Anne was bewildered. ‘What do you mean? That’s all there is.’
‘Three chapters?’
He was talking about the book! ‘Oh, that—’
‘Yes, that.’ He held the sheaf of papers out to her. ‘This is exactly what was submitted to the awards committee, no more, no less. Not even any revisions. You don’t seem to have written a single usable line since you’ve been here.’ He threw the manuscript down on the desk where it drifted in the mess of university papers. ‘There’s nothing here, not even a draft of your next few chapters. Well, from now on you’re just going to have to get your head down and finish it.’
‘Me?’ she squeaked.