From Prim to Improper

by Cathy Williams

  ‘I agreed nothing of the sort.’ He didn’t rush as he went to the door and locked it. Elizabeth spun round as that definitive click sent a shiver of forbidden excitement and dread coursing through her veins. She wondered how she could have been naive enough to think that a man like Andreas—hot, passionate, accustomed to getting his own way—would politely give in to her rules. She stood up, reminding herself that when she was in this office she was no longer his lover but his employee—but, when she opened her mouth to tell him that, nothing came out but an inaudible croak. She watched him draw the curtains, instantly plunging the room into semi-darkness.

  ‘We should be working…’ she said breathlessly as he strolled towards her, as relaxed and as determined as a tiger moving in on its cornered prey.

  ‘Yes, I know, but I’m willing to break all my own rules. For you.’ His fabulous dark eyes glittered with intent and heat pooled in the pit of her stomach. She was mesmerised by the flare of passion in his eyes and, like a moth to a flame, she took a couple of steps towards him, reaching out and then stifling a moan of response as he pulled her to him.

  Andreas felt a powerful surge of possession as his mouth descended on hers. She had offered half-hearted protests, and it was to her credit that she hadn’t leapt at his generous suggestion that she accompany him back to London when the time came for him to take his leave, but her acquiescence now felt good.

  He continued to kiss her as he propelled her the short distance to his desk, at which point he effortlessly lifted her so that she was sitting on the desk in front of him.

  ‘One of my fantasies,’ he said hoarsely as he unbuttoned her white shirt with unsteady fingers. ‘My desk in London is as big as a bed, but I’ve never wondered what it would be like to see my woman splayed out naked on it.’

  Elizabeth’s brain snagged on the ‘my woman’ bit of the sentence and stayed there for a few seconds, savouring the possessiveness of it before letting it go, because even dwelling on that was a really bad idea.

  ‘And yet…’ shirt unbuttoned, Andreas set to work on her bra, which was a lot less fiddly ‘…with you, it’s pretty much been on my mind every second that we’ve sat in here working together.’ Released from their flimsy restraint, her lush breasts made him breathe in sharply.

  He was familiar with her body in the most intimate way possible, yet was not immune to its magnificence every time he saw her naked. He couldn’t get enough of her, but he couldn’t explain why that was, except that maybe his diet had been a bit over-rich in tall, leggy, skinny blondes and that someone with womanly curves was an irresistible dish of the day.

  Nor could he adequately explain to himself how it was that he could on the one hand tell himself that she was too great an unknown quantity—which was always a bad thing as far as he was concerned—and on the other hand still want her so much that it physically hurt.

  Like now. Stripped bare from the waist up, he pushed her gently back so that she was lying on the desk, her legs dangling over the side, then he paused so that he could devour her hungrily with his eyes.

  Having never known what it was like to have the power to command at her fingertips, she had fast discovered that it was a power she liked. She really enjoyed the way his dark, gleaming gaze dwelled on her with such rampant, masculine appreciation. He made her feel a hundred feet tall and yet as dainty as a kitten. With him, she could become mistress and slave at the same time.

  Right now he was holding her captive as he explored her breasts with his hands and mouth. It was heady, lying prone on his desk half-naked while he was still fully clothed, albeit with his sleeves roughly rolled up to his elbows.

  ‘Please, Andreas…’ she whimpered, as his tongue grazed her nipple, a prelude to the erotic, warm invasion by his mouth as he began sucking hard, sending a spasm of pure pleasure shooting right through her.

  ‘Please…what?’

  ‘Take your clothes off.’

  ‘When I’m good and ready, my darling.’ He pinned her restless hands to her side, so that she was helpless against him, and in response she arched back to meet his questing mouth, pushing her breast against him, urging him on and spiralling into giddy heights of satisfaction as he aggressively made exquisite love to her breasts.

  When she could take it no more, he ripped down her underwear in one smooth movement, and she cried out as he covered her stomach with his hand, easing down until he slipped his fingers into her and teased her moistness over and over, rubbing as he continued to lavish his wet caresses to the tightened bud of her nipple.

  Only then did he break away so that he could yank off his clothes, although he didn’t take his eyes off her heated body for a single instant. He had taught her to be proud of her body, and he liked the way she didn’t try to hide herself; of course, she knew how much he enjoyed revelling in her womanly curves. Everything about her acted on him like a powerful aphrodisiac, even the way she feasted her eyes on his body, and that soft moan she gave as he touched his erect manhood, drawing her attention to his rampant erection. Later, but not here, she would taste it. The thought of that was almost enough to incite ejaculation.

  Stilling that runaway anticipation, Andreas parted her legs and knelt like a supplicant before her so that he could do what he had wanted to do every time she had sat in front of him dutifully taking notes with no idea about what he had been thinking.

  Elizabeth’s breathing quickened and then she held her breath expectantly, releasing it on a sigh of mindless pleasure as he began licking her, expertly finding the place where just the slightest pressure was sufficient to send her into sexual orbit.

  When he finally thrust into her, she was already at such a peak of excitement that it took only seconds for her to explode with an orgasm that left her as weak and boneless as a rag doll. Reality penetrated very slowly as Andreas stood up and looked down at her with a smile.

  ‘Fantasy fulfilled,’ he murmured, turning to rescue his hastily discarded clothes from the ground. ‘And, for once, imagination was not a patch on the reality. I never realised that a desk could be so multi-functional.’

  Elizabeth slid off the wretched multi-functional desk with a cold sense of muted panic, forced to acknowledge that the very last of her painstakingly erected defences lay in ruins around her. Her hands were trembling as she flung her clothes back on. For Andreas, this would have been a little amusing romp, a little sex-fantasy fulfilled. For her, the enormity of what she had done was crashing down on her like a ton of bricks. Against her will, and totally against her better judgement, love had crept up on her but at least she had been able to project some semblance of control. Now what? Was she to become his sex object with a few employee-duties thrown in? It was within his power to destroy what she had built with James, should he choose to do so, and foolishly she had granted him that power and more. She frankly only had herself to blame.

  She couldn’t bring herself to look at him when she was finally fully dressed and back at her desk.

  ‘So…’ Andreas sat on the edge of the desk with an expression closely resembling that of a cat in full possession of the cream. ‘Proof positive of why London with me would be such a good idea. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m a big enough man to admit that whatever spell you’ve managed to weave over me…’ He pushed himself off the desk and sauntered across to the window, idly surveying the grounds before turning round to face her. ‘Well, I’m very happy to let you carry on weaving it.’

  Elizabeth mentally added a couple of vital clauses to that statement: ‘Until I get bored’ was the first, and ‘at which point I won’t expect you to hang around my godfather, as you’ll be history’ was the second.

  ‘You don’t seem to have understood, Andreas—I won’t be coming to London with you. I know your godfather won’t need me here for ever, and I’ve already decided that when that time comes in a few wee
ks’ time I’m going to look for a job locally. I like it here. I like the big, open spaces. I like to think that the coast isn’t a million miles away. London holds nothing for me any more.’

  That they had just finished sharing earth-shattering sex, that he had repeated his offer—which, from where he was sitting, was the best offer she was likely to come across in her lifetime—and that she had politely but firmly turned him down left Andreas speechless. He had even been willing to go against his instincts, to overlook the niggling doubts about her motivation for being in James’s life. Rejection was an unfamiliar taste, and one which brought all his inherent sense of pride slamming into place.

  The smile died from his lips and he looked at her through cool, narrowed eyes. It was not in his nature to beg, and to try and coax her out of her stubborn, idiotic decision constituted begging. He shrugged and walked across to his desk where he proceeded to reboot his computer.

  ‘Your choice,’ he dismissed lazily.

  Faced with his immediate acceptance of her refusal, and perversely gutted by the fact that he hadn’t even attempted to talk her out of it, it struck her that she now no longer knew what her role in his life was to be. The thought of ‘nothing’ opened up a gaping, black void that filled her with terror.

  ‘I…I hope this doesn’t make working together difficult.’

  His mobile rang, and as he reached for it he looked at her without a change of expression. He could have been a stranger. ‘Why should it? You do a good job. The sex was a bonus.’

  A bonus? Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest at the arrogance of that statement, but he was frowning into his phone with a tight-lipped, shuttered face and she realised that she was dismissed from the conversation. And if she hadn’t got the message then, she certainly did when he placed his hand briefly over his mobile and nodded at the door.

  ‘Private call. Why don’t you take the afternoon off? If I need you, I’ll let you know.’ With which he swivelled his chair away so that she exited the room with as little ceremony as she had entered it many weeks ago.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ELIZABETH saw nothing further of Andreas for the remainder of the day. He hadn’t summoned her to work and she had no intention of loitering by the office door, waiting for his call. In her heart, she understood that her duties as secretary were over and she was shocked at how deeply she felt the loss—quite apart from the loss of him. It was left to her to offer a mumbling explanation to James over dinner that she probably wouldn’t be working for his godson in the afternoons, and she vaguely fabricated something about Andreas probably returning to London.

  ‘Shame,’ James said, his blue eyes a little too shrewdly fixed on her face for comfort. ‘Guess you’ll miss that. There’s been a lightness in your step these past few weeks.’ She stammered, uncomfortably, that she had no idea what he was talking about, but her face was beetroot-red and she didn’t like the way his eyes twinkled and his lips twitched. She didn’t care for the way he had made a big show of changing the conversation; James, notoriously, could hang on to a subject like a dog with a bone and chew it to death. ‘I know what’s going on, my girl’ that bull-in-china-shop change of conversation seemed to shout, ‘and I won’t embarrass you by pursuing it’.

  For the first time, dinner was awkward, with Andreas’s seat glaringly empty; where he was, she had no idea. She tried very hard to smile and act normal, but the questions in her head which she had damped down for so long rose up demanding answers. Her clear-cut plan of getting to know James, and gently breaking her true relationship with him when his health improved, had been thrown into disarray by Andreas’s unexpected presence—then further obliterated by their growing emotional entanglement. The fact that they had become lovers had been the icing on the cake, for falling in love with him had been step one in her dramatic change of direction.

  The following morning, she half-expected to discover that he had already returned to London, but just in case he was still around—and not knowing what to do about appearing at the office at the usual time—Elizabeth took the coward’s way out and inveigled a day off. She took James for his usual visit to the tea shop so that he could enjoy his weekly round of grumpy flirting with Dot Evans. This had progressed into the occasional evening meeting when Dot had visited the house, bearing cake and flowers and ignoring James’s disgruntled accusation that flowers and cakes made him feel like an invalid.

  She decided she would then spend the remainder of the day exploring a couple of nearby towns because Dot had kindly offered to return ‘this crotchety old man’—‘Heaven knows how you put up with him!’—back to the house.

  And, just in case Andreas did expect her to resume duties in the afternoon, she had cleared her workload and would kindly leave James to pass on the message.

  ‘Can’t tell him yourself?’ James barked over his scone and cup of tea, drawing attention to himself, as he usually managed to do in the tea shop. ‘Since when do you need a go-between? Don’t tell me you’re suddenly scared of that godson of mine, my girl? Wouldn’t believe it if you did. Heard the way you answer him back—wonderful!’

  There was some mumbling about poor service-network for her mobile phone in outlying rural areas, and other random excuses that sounded feeble even to her own ears.

  But now, free to explore the countryside, which she had done precious little of over the last month or two, Elizabeth found things to be lacklustre. She went through the motions of trying to enjoy her day off, but her mind continued to gnaw away at all her misery and uncertainties and zoom in on a tortuous circle of self-blame and regret.

  Furthermore, she had no idea what she was going to say to Andreas when she next met him, and the prospect of that meeting was enough to send her pulses racing and her stomach twisting into sickening knots. By three, she was more than ready to head back to the house, but she forced herself to linger a little bit longer so that it was a little after five by the time she eventually turned the corner of the single-track road that led to it. She had been given the use of the little runaround used by Maria for errands in the village, and the car seemed as relieved to be back in its familiar surroundings as she was, strangely enough.

  She drove into the enormous courtyard, and the first hint that something wasn’t quite right was the jaunty red sportscar skewed at an angle in front of the house.

  Cautiously, Elizabeth let herself in through the kitchen door and, having scuttled past some empty rooms, was easily on the home stretch to her own bedroom when a woman’s voice stopped her dead in her tracks.

  ‘You!’

  The accent was pure-bred cut glass, and seething with venom. Very slowly Elizabeth turned round, and her startled green eyes met with icy-blue chips narrowed with hostility. The woman standing in front of her with her hands on her hips was the most drop-dead-beautiful woman Elizabeth had ever seen in her entire life. She wore a dove-grey trouser suit, and in her high heels must have stood at six foot at the very least. Wind swept, fed up and devoid of make-up, Elizabeth’s already fast-fading self-confidence took an immediate nose dive as she hovered uncertainly with her hand on the banister.

  ‘Me?’ A quick glance around told her that she surely was the one being addressed as there was no one else in the hall. She cleared her throat while her brain continued to process the woman’s amazing beauty. She had the body of a gazelle, and poker-straight blond hair, of the type Elizabeth had always secretly yearned for, swung around her perfect face in a sharply cut, graduated bob. Had it not been for the scowl, the woman could have been described as having the face of an angel, from the blond hair and blue eyes to the rosebud mouth and fine, arched eyebrows.

  ‘I know what’s been going on here.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Elizabeth took a couple of small steps back, because physical injury seemed to be a possibility.

  ‘Andreas’s told me everything!’

/>   ‘Who are you?’ With a rapidly beating heart, she began to mount the staircase, while searching for divine rescue from one of the many doors leading out of the hall.

  ‘I’m Andreas’s girlfriend—or rather I was until he got it into his head that it might be a good idea to start sleeping with the staff.’

  Elizabeth could feel her face drain of colour as guilt, shame and anger burst inside her like a boil being lanced.

  ‘You’re his girlfriend?’ Andreas had been sleeping with her while he had had a girlfriend? And not just any girlfriend—one who looked as though she had stepped straight off the cover of Vogue! The laughter and passion they had shared, the camaraderie working together in his makeshift office, suddenly evolved into a stark, bitter scenario of a bored man stuck out in the sticks deciding that a little bit of sex might brighten up the tedium. In London he would sleep with the model, and in Nowhereland he would share his bed with the plain Jane for comic relief.

  Elizabeth had never felt so mortified in her entire life. If the ground had chosen to open up in front of her, she would gladly have jumped right in.

  ‘He broke up with you because of me?’ The words were wrenched out of her as she desperately tried to salvage some dignity from the situation.

  ‘He broke up with me because he happened to be here and you were more convenient—on tap, so to speak!’

  Elizabeth spun round and began fumbling her way up the stairs. She wondered if that was Andreas’s version of events—that he had taken the easy option, the one on tap, so to speak. After all, it wasn’t as though either she or his girlfriend had any emotional ties with him. And maybe he had been amused at the novelty of bedding a woman he wouldn’t have looked at in a million years under normal circumstances. How many times had he laughed and told her how unique she was? ‘Unique’ now seemed a description that covered a wide range of qualities, none of them flattering. A three-headed dog would be unique, but you wouldn’t want to share your life with one.