by Lynne Graham
‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’ His deep-pitched drawl was disarmingly gentle.
‘I’m cold,’ she lied.
Hovering on the edge of flight, she collided involuntarily with dark magnetic eyes that compelled and controlled. Her heartbeat hung in suspension. He touched a teasing fingertip to her taut lower lip. ‘Would you like me to take your socks off for you?’
‘Jake…I…oh…’ Without making any effort to match the offer to action, he had lowered his head to let his lips hotly explore the slim arc of her throat. Her skin had acquired an unbearable sensitivity. She melted from outside in, completely losing the thread of what she had intended to say.
He eased apart the edges of her shirt to expose the swelling fullness of her breasts. Black hair brushed her chin as he ran his tongue oh, so lightly down the valley between the ripe mounds of creamy flesh. His thumbs grazed over her taut nipples and her hands dug into his shoulders in an unconscious revelation of frenzied need. His mouth fastened to a pink swollen peak and a torment of sweet sensation rippled drugging waves through her quivering limbs. For an instant she thought she might die of the pleasure he was giving her.
Her fingers knotted into his hair and she arched up to find the heated oblivion of his mouth again for herself. Her every skin cell was impatient, greedy, and that first scorching contact with his hard, masculine body excited her beyond bearing. Her hand ran down the length of his spine to press him still closer. Her abandonment jerked a stifled groan from him. The intimate proof of his desire for her was pushing against her stomach, sending her temperature shooting higher. The hand following the curve of her hip to the damp meeting of her thighs stilled as he dragged his mouth free of hers. ‘Slow down,’ he breathed raggedly. ‘I want this to be perfect.’
Imperfect for Kitty was an inch of separation from any part of him. Her passion-glazed eyes focused on him. ‘Don’t stop,’ she framed tightly, and reaching up she mated her tongue deeply with his to extract a soul-deep moan of response from him.
The skill of his exploring fingers drove out the last remnants of her control. What she was feeling could not be contained. A wild, tortured hunger guided her restive, pleading movements, inciting him to the same impatience. He found the rounded softness of her hips and pulled her to him. Kneeling between her thighs, he entered her, and suddenly he was there where she most needed him to be in a piercing, awesome surge of masculine power.
A split second of unexpected discomfort dredged a strangled gasp from her, but the thrusting urgency of his possession submerged the pang in a heady, exultant flood of almost agonising pleasure. She hadn’t believed that there could be anything more, and then all of a sudden she was flying into the burning heat of the sun to shatter into a million glittering pieces in a climax so intense that she was utterly overwhelmed.
She floated back to the real world again. He was heavy in the tight circle of her arms, his face buried in her hair, the smooth skin of his back damp with perspiration beneath her spread fingers. An urge to smother him with grateful kisses and verbally bombard him with her love threatened her instantaneously. Her teeth connected painfully with her wayward tongue. If she had considered herself weak before this hour, she understood now that she was infinitely weaker in its aftermath. The powerful emotions flooding her demanded expression, not denial.
Releasing her of his weight, he stared searchingly down at her. His eyes veiled, a muscle pulling at the corner of his mouth as he breathed, ‘You were nervous because it was a disaster the last time.’
‘Was it?’ Dialogue was beyond her. She didn’t want to think; she didn’t want to talk. She just wanted him to hold her.
‘My ego’s not that tender. If my memory serves me correctly, I hurt you a lot. I was drunk and I didn’t have much experience.’ The suggestion of honesty via gritted teeth larded his intonation. ‘I was half crazy with wanting you and I lost my head—’
‘Do we have to talk about this?’ she interrupted.
He was cruel enough to push her hair off her cheek and deprive her of all natural concealment. His eyes were darkened pools of thoroughly determined gold. It seemed to her that, while she had shrunk in stature by placing herself in an indefensible position, Jake had gathered strength from the ease of his conquest. The idea left a nasty taste in her mouth.
‘You don’t need to talk. You only need to listen.’
She turned away from him, savaged by the lowering acknowledgement that once again she had given herself too lightly. ‘I don’t want to listen either!’
A ruthless hand connected with her shoulder and unceremoniously pushed her flat against the pillows again. ‘Tough,’ he said succinctly. ‘You’re not wearing the trousers in this relationship. Lie there and listen. I’ve lived with that night on my conscience for a very long time. I hated myself for it. You were sweet and innocent and no way were you ready for a physical relationship, but if there’s a red-blooded male within a thousand miles of here who could have withstood the encouragement you gave me that night, I’d like to meet him!’
Her absolute silence inflamed him. His mouth tightened. ‘I’m only asking you to put that night in some kind of perspective. When you ran away from home, I was worried half out of my mind about you. I blamed myself and I still blame myself. No comment?’ he almost snarled down at her. ‘Damn you, why are you freezing me out again?’
When he had supposedly been worrying himself out of his mind he had still been in the honeymoon phase with Liz. Scorn and pain mingled in her retort. ‘Just because we’ve slept together, it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to—’
‘Talk?’ he cut in derisively. ‘Or stake a claim on you? Is that what’s really worrying you? That there might be strings attached?’
Scalding moisture lashed her partly lowered eyelids. Two minutes of conversation and they were circling each other like wolves again, ready to claw to the death for supremacy. Only this time she knew that defeat would be hers. She was in no state to match his rhetoric. ‘I don’t want to talk about the past. How many times do I have to tell you that?’
‘Do you count Maxwell a part of that past? Or are you hoping that he’s still hovering on the horizon?’ he demanded roughly.
She wrenched the rumpled sheet back and rolled off the bed in one driven motion. ‘You don’t own me. You don’t have any rights over me. Grant is none of your business!’
Snatching up her shirt, she fled downstairs. Shakily she pulled on the garment in front of the low-burning kitchen fire. Painful emotions were gusting through her in debilitating waves. He would leave. He had got what he wanted and more. She shuddered. To think of the gift of her body in such terms was degrading, but she was lacerated by the awareness that she had betrayed every atom of her desperate uncontrollable hunger for him.
Wouldn’t he just love to learn in addition that Grant was her father? That Heaven might play the sultry man-killer on screen, but that Kitty at the age of twenty-five had less experience of men than many a teenager? Her blossoming sexuality had been cruelly arrested at seventeen. And out of fear she had kept herself inviolate from further masculine threat, only to surrender all over again to the same renegade male. What did that say about her moral fibre?
He might as well have put a cattle brand on her hip all those years ago, she reflected in sick despair. She belonged to him still. Heart and soul and body. She was as obsessed by Jake now as she had been in her teens, and once again Jake was the dominant partner—an inequality that shrivelled her pride and her confidence.
‘By my code that bed we just shared makes Maxwell my business,’ a cool, hard voice drawled.
She leapt up off her knees, clumsily holding her unbuttoned shirt closed. His bare feet had been soundless on the stairs. He had pulled on his jeans. In the moonlight he was a half dark, half silver pagan outline less than a foot from her.
As she went to step back, powerful hands clamped to her waist. Indifferent to her gasp of alarm, he lifted her and plonked her down on the edge of the table behind
her. His leashed anger beat down at her from his fierce stare. ‘Now you may find that attitude out of date,’ he continued with galling evenness. ‘But that’s the way I feel and I’m not likely to change either. Have you been in contact with Maxwell?’
‘Let me down!’ she spluttered furiously.
‘I want an answer first,’ he said grimly.
‘No!’
‘No, you’re not giving me an answer? Or no, you haven’t been in touch with him?’ he prompted.
‘No, I haven’t been in touch with him.’ It was a driven surrender, enforced by the humiliating position he had her in.
He freed the small hands he had pinned flat to the table surface and her palms instantly flew up to lodge against his chest, seeking to push him away. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. You were the one to make a drama out of it,’ he murmured infuriatingly as he eased his hands under her thighs, tugging her forward into the cradle of his pelvis.
‘What are you doing, for God’s sake?’ she gasped.
He bent his dark head to do something sinfully erotic to her earlobe. Laughter shook him as an agonised ache of anticipation uncurled in her belly. Feverishly disorientated by his swing from threat to passion, she uttered a stifled negative which he completely ignored. The force of his mouth thrust her head back. He devoured her with the hot, rapacious intimacy of a lover and she went boneless, her defensive fingers unbracing to slide weakly down to his flat stomach, feeling his muscles jerk in reaction to the accidental caress.
‘God, I want you all over again,’ he groaned, bending her back over his supportive arm to send his lips travelling over her bared breasts, his tongue lashing wetly over her urgently sensitive nipples. Crying out, she clutched at his thick hair.
He wrapped her legs round his lean hips and carried her upstairs that way while he told her with a lack of inhibition that both shocked and excited her exactly what he planned to do next. Her aroused body had the consistency of melted honey heated to boiling-point when he tumbled her down on the bed. She sought him blindly with her hands but he would not be hurried. His control was infinitely stronger than hers.
Storm after storm of drowning sensation had alternately ravished and inflamed her before her sobbed pleas brought an end to the torture. He plunged into her and her nails scored his back. A sound between anguish and ecstasy escaped her. Her every sense was abandoned and attuned to the raw physical reality of his body moving on and within hers, hard and fast and then soft and slow until she bit his shoulder in a torment of frustration and the game stopped as he drove deep into her silken sheath. What she had dimly believed couldn’t happen again happened in an agony of intense fulfilment as convulsive pleasure shuddered through her.
Dawn had fought the darkness for a long time while she lay, content just to look at him. His arm was a heavy anchor across her, his dark, tousled head resting against her shoulder. He slept in an extravagant sprawl, taking up most of the bed. Her fingertips itched to trace the straight, uncompromising jut of his nose and the stubborn angle of his stubbled jawline.
Sleep had been impossible for her. There was a sense of almost childish wonder that he was actually there in the flesh beside her. Eight years of feverishly suppressed need and longing were running riot with her emotions. To lose a single precious moment in sleep would have been heresy. She was extremely uncomfortable, pinned to the lumpy edge of the mattress, but she could have lain still on bare boards with alacrity because he was holding her close. Oh, yes, this was love, great rolling breakers of feeling flooding her with a strength that only increased by the hour.
Was it really like last night for everybody? she wondered still in a partial daze. An insatiable passion, never entirely damped down, never completely satisfied? He had reached for her again and again. How many women had experienced that same mindless satisfaction in Jake’s arms? Stiffening, she struggled to bury that first unwelcome shard of disquiet and insecurity, but it was swiftly followed by another.
Paula appreciates her freedom as much as I do, he had told her bluntly yesterday. Oh, why did she have to remember that now? Why did she have to remember that tomorrow and the next day weren’t ringed on Jake’s calendar with her name beside them? Hot-blooded sensuality lay at the very core of Jake’s temperament. He was a very physical male with a strong sexual appetite. Why was she lying here like a lovesick, dreaming idiot with her heart in her eyes?
Jake had simply taken what he considered to be on offer. He hadn’t intended to become involved with her. At the start he had avoided her. But somewhere along the line he had decided that she was a permitted weakness. For one night? Two nights? She inched dully out of the seductive warmth of his hold. Her glow of unreasoning euphoria had ebbed through the intrusive bars of reality. Jake didn’t love her. He wanted her. Nothing had changed.
Last night she had faithfully promised herself that she would still leave. A desperate promise made by a desperate lady, fearfully accepting that she had lost all control of her emotions. On tiptoe she crept into the bathroom with an armful of clothes. Daylight shed a humiliating clarity on their respective motivations. Jake drew her like a magnet to her own downfall. When this ended the grief would be hers, not his, and she couldn’t blame him for it this time. The scenario was all of her own making. She should never have come back.
She hunched knee to chin in a shallow bath, angry with herself, hating herself, but the effect of both sensations effectively cancelled out by the tormenting awareness of how much she loved him. As she was climbing out of the bath, water sloshing noisily about in spite of her efforts to be quiet, her ears pricked up at what she briefly thought was the phone ringing. She listened to silence and then towelled herself dry, certain she had been mistaken. Dressed, she padded out on to the landing like a sneak-thief. She didn’t really want him to wake up. Awake he had to be faced.
The bedroom door was ajar, no longer closed as she had left it. With his back to the doorway, Jake was zipping up his jeans although he must have heard her entry.
‘You’re leaving?’ Nothing like stating the obvious, Kitty, she thought with an inner groan. ‘Don’t you want…breakfast?’ she enquired awkwardly.
Silence…seething silence. Rock-hard tension had brought the muscles into prominence on the long, virile sweep of his back. Distractedly noticing the little parallel scratchmarks she had left on his smooth skin, she reddened.
He swung round to snatch up his shirt. ‘You lied to me!’ he bit out in savage condemnation.
Astonished by the attack, she blinked bemusedly. ‘Lied?’
‘When did you phone Maxwell to tell him where you were?’ His clenched features were a mask of dark fury.
Her brain was working in slow motion. ‘But I didn’t…the phone!’ Eyes wide with horror, she grasped that she had indeed heard the phone earlier. ‘Grant? Grant phoned? And you answered…oh, God,’ she muttered in cringing conclusion.
His white teeth were a feral slash against his dark skin. ‘You went crawling back to him, didn’t you?’
Her palms pressed to her hot face. ‘What did he say?’
‘Well, let’s put it this way, he didn’t sound his usual oily, self-satisfied self when I cut the connection,’ he imparted with derision. ‘In fact he displayed an amazing amount of shock and disbelief for a creep who’s been cheating on you from day one!’
She was feeling sick. ‘What did you say to him?’
A black brow ascended. ‘He wanted to know what I was doing here at this hour and I told him. He was still raging when I put the phone down,’ he murmured scornfully. ‘I doubt if he’ll be very forgiving. He’s ninety-nine per cent ego.’
Numbly she shook her head.
‘I swear I don’t know how he found out where I was!’ she burst out. ‘He must have guessed. It was probably him who tried to phone me last night but I didn’t get there in time to answer it.’
Jake loosed his pent-up breath in an aggressive hiss. ‘What a shame. A case of bad timing if ever I heard it!’
&nb
sp; ‘I didn’t have to tell you the truth!’ she said painfully.
He searched her eyes fiercely. ‘If I thought for one moment that you were lying to me…’ He left the threat hanging and visibly ground his teeth together. ‘If I’ve misjudged you, I ought to apologise.’
She waited.
‘How the hell do you think I felt answering the phone to that bastard?’ he vented instead, and strode past her into the bathroom.
What must her father be thinking? Had he realised it was Jake? There was only one parallel between Jake and Grant—a mutual loathing for the merest mention of the other’s name. She sighed. She should have phoned Grant long before now. He didn’t hold spite. She had never really believed for a second that he would cut her completely out of his life. But he had hurt her, and when Kitty was hurt it took her a long time to emerge from her defensive shell again.
When Jake came downstairs, she was replenishing the fire. Covertly she glanced at him, absorbing the brooding stillness of his stance. He had an explosive temper. A volcanic brilliance still lingered in his dark scrutiny even though he had backed down. ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you, but his was the last voice on this earth that I wanted to hear.’
Razor-taut, she murmured, ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘You don’t want to know what I feel.’ His handsome mouth twisted sardonically. ‘That would be breaching the limits you’ve set us. Narrow, nasty little limits they are too. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here last night solely to make love to you.’
Somehow he was putting her in the wrong and she resented that. Strung up with nervous tension, she said, ‘No?’
‘No! I don’t want an affair with you,’ he countered harshly.
Dumbly she looked at him all at sea. ‘Do you want coffee?’ she asked again, desperate to fill up the silence and not even appreciating how ridiculous the question sounded.
He swore under his breath and fixed her with a bitingly aggressive stare. ‘I want to marry you.’