by Penny Jordan
‘So you dressed like this because of me?’ she heard Jake demanding grittily and disbelievingly, releasing her wrist abruptly as he added with a growl, ‘Lucianna…’
But as she turned in instinctive response to the harsh command in his voice suddenly his expression changed completely, his hand reaching out towards her again but not this time to restrain her in the old, familiar critical grip he had used on her since her childhood, but, far more dangerously, to gently cup the soft swell of her breast. His thumb caressed the naked flesh above the low-cut cup of her new bra, caressing it and, Lucianna recognised dizzily, edging the fabric even lower so that she could quite clearly see the flushed dusky pink flesh surrounding her nipple and, even more disturbing, feel the urgent pulse of her nipple itself, as though it were silently urging Jake to pull away the fabric altogether.
‘Because of me?’ she heard Jake repeating in a very different voice from the one he had used earlier, a voice which held an unfamiliar, faintly rusty but wholly male message of urgency and arousal. ‘Or for me?’
For him…? Lucianna opened her mouth to deny any such thing, heard Jake say her name in an excitingly harsh voice she had most certainly never heard him use before, and automatically and instinctively took the small provocative step, the fatal step forward that closed the minute distance between them, her body swaying provocatively, unsteadily, as she tried to balance on her new shoes, throwing her forward against him.
‘Oh, God,’ she heard Jake mutter under his breath, ‘I must be crazy doing this.’
Doing what? she tried to ask, but found she couldn’t say a single thing, for the very simple reason that Jake’s mouth was now covering hers and silencing every sound she tried to make, including her small shocked squeak of protest.
Later she would try to tell herself that it must have been the new shoes that caused her to feel so dizzy, just as it must have been the fact that she was only wearing her underwear that made her shiver and draw closer to the warmth of Jake’s fully clothed body—fully clothed maybe, but she was not so naive that she couldn’t recognise the surging hardness of his body as she pressed her own against him and then pressed herself against him again, carried away by the novel discovery that what she had read in her books had quite patently been correct and that men were responsive to a woman’s body language.
Lost in the heady awareness of the power of her sensuality, she was dimly aware of Jake groaning hoarsely as he cupped her face with both hands, but it was only when she felt the urgent thrust of his tongue within the vulnerable cavity of her own mouth that she recognised just what her innocent experimentation had done. By then…by then, inexplicably, all she really wanted to do, all she could actually think of doing, was to wrap her arms around Jake just as tightly as she could whilst her senses spun under the sensual assault of his kiss.
When he finally paused to lick the outline of her mouth with the tip of his tongue and command, ‘Kiss me back,’ it seemed to be the most natural, the most essential thing in the world to do just as he had asked, tentatively at first and then with more assurance as she discovered the heady delight of exploring the moist heat of his own mouth with the darting, uncertain tip of her tongue.
But it was when he captured it, held it prisoner and slowly, delicately sucked on it that she finally realised how out of her depth she was and in what dangerous waters—waters in which the only thing she had to cling to, in which her only safety and security lay in trusting herself completely to Jake and letting him take the responsibility for her.
She opened the heavy-lidded eyes she had closed, trembling in his arms as he traced her swollen mouth with his fingertip. He told her huskily, as she shuddered under the sensual caress, her mouth unbelievably sensitive to his touch, ‘If that’s how you react to being kissed, I can just imagine how you’re going to feel when it’s your breasts, your nipples—you—that I’m sucking and kissing…’
Lucianna couldn’t help it; she felt the shock of his words rip right through her body in a convulsive surge of sensual need and surrender, and without even realising what she was doing she heard herself moaning his name whilst her hands went to her breasts—whether to conceal them or tear away the fabric that covered them, to show him just what effect his words were having on her, she didn’t really know; but Jake, it seemed, did, and the cool rush of air that preceded the hard warmth of his hands holding her naked breasts as he pulled away her bra only seemed to increase the hot, spiralling ache pulsing through her whole body.
Jake was kissing the side of her neck whilst his hands caressed her breasts, his mouth, hot and hungry, scorching her naked skin, and yet instead of feeling shocked she actually seemed to be welcoming it, wanting it.
Lucianna heard herself moan again as her body ached against Jake’s hands, the rough pads of his thumbs moving against her nipples sending her into a frenzy of taut, aching need and unbelievably intense longing to feel his mouth against her body, caressing her in the way that he had so shockingly described to her.
‘Yes…what is it? What is it you want?’ she heard him demanding rawly in response to the impassioned plea she hadn’t realised she had uttered. And it seemed the most natural thing in the world to tell him, in the sobbing, agonised voice she could barely recognise as her own, ‘I want you to do what you said…to kiss me…suck me here,’ she told him, putting her own hand where his covered her breast.
Later Jake was to tell himself that if it hadn’t been for that, if it hadn’t been for the way both her voice and her body had trembled as she’d looked at him with all her newly aroused womanhood in her eyes, he might have been able to stop, to take control of himself and the situation; but he knew he was lying. What was happening had been inevitable, not just from the heart-stopping moment when he had seen her standing there, but from the very first moment he had realised how much he wanted her, how much he loved her.
That, though, was later. Right now, as he felt her hand tremble slightly over his and her body tremble even more, he ruthlessly ignored the stern voice of caution warning him that what was happening must stop, and instead bent to take Lucianna’s full weight as he swung her up into his arms. He then walked purposefully towards her bedroom, pausing in the doorway to lower his head and gently nuzzle the exposed peak of one breast with his mouth.
Lucianna felt as though she was going to die from the sheer intensity of the sensation that swamped her as Jake’s mouth opened gently over the aching tip of her breast. She had never dreamed there could be such a sensation, such a boiling, turbulent sense of aching need, such a compulsion to lock her fingers in Jake’s hair and keep his head, his mouth just exactly where it was.
Her reaction was too much for Jake; the gentle nuzzle became a deep, slow suckle and then an urgent, tugging demand that turned Lucianna’s body to a boneless, melting ache of complicity in his arms and made Jake himself shudder from head to foot, his body drenched in a musky, male-scented film of sexually aroused perspiration.
‘Do you know what you’re doing to me?’ he asked Lucianna rawly. ‘Do you know what you’re making me want to do to you?’
‘Show me,’ Lucianna urged him in response. ‘Show me, tell me…teach me, Jake.’
The look she gave him to accompany her words as she gazed limply and longingly into his eyes was pure feminine seduction and Jake had no defences against it.
‘Luce…’ he protested hoarsely. ‘I…’
‘Take off your clothes, Jake,’ Lucianna whispered to him. ‘I want to see you—all of you,’ she told him pleadingly, her face and then her whole body suffused by a tell-tale rosy glow as it reflected her inner shock at her vocal boldness, even if the words she had spoken were the truth and did reflect the longing, the need that was pulsing through her.
Just for a moment Jake hesitated, and then he saw the way she looked at him and the way her mouth trembled.
Very gently he laid her down on the bed, and then, slowly, he started to remove his own clothes, keeping his glance locked on hers, ready to r
egister the first millisecond that her expression changed, that she betrayed any desire to change her mind.
It never came, and when Jake’s hand stilled over the belt of his chinos Lucianna couldn’t quite prevent herself from giving a small feminine sound of protest and demand.
She had seen Jake’s body before, of course—well, most of it at any rate. As a child she had swum uninhibited with her brothers and Jake in the river that ran through both their properties, and it had only been after her disastrous experiment with her sexuality as a young teenager that she had become reluctant to join the others when they went swimming.
But she had seen Jake working in the field often enough with David, stripped to the waist, wearing an old, faded pair of shorts, and she knew already the broad outline of his torso with its soft covering of dark hair, although she had never before experienced this urge to reach out and touch it…touch him, to bury her fingertips, her mouth in its male softness and nuzzle the flesh it covered. And she had most certainly never before experienced this dangerous, heart-stopping, breath-stealing sense of aching sensual excitement and urgency as she waited for him to remove the rest of his clothes. The sexuality of a man’s body had never been something that had caused her any missed heartbeats in the past, and it had certainly never caused her to feel the way she was feeling right now.
As he removed the last of his clothes, Jake turned slightly away from her, but immediately Lucianna put out her hand to stop him, her eyes betraying her emotions when he obeyed her silent demand and slid them away from his body, allowing her to see the full maleness of him.
He heard her swiftly indrawn breath, saw the way her eyes widened, almost felt the compulsive shudder that gripped her body, but it was too late now to hide himself from her, and for some reason her soft, slightly shocked but totally awed ‘Jake’ caused a sharp flare of anger within himself and against himself that manifested itself in an unintentionally harsh retort.
‘What is it? What’s wrong? You’ve seen a man before, haven’t you?’
‘Not one like you,’ Lucianna told him honestly, her voice wobbling slightly. ‘Not like this!’
‘Oh, Luce….’ Jake said, torn between laughter and the sharp unexpectedness of tears as he reached out to take her in his arms and hold her comfortingly. He told her gruffly, ‘You’re not supposed to say things like that to a man. It gives us too big an ego,’ he explained, and then added with wry self-mockery, ‘Never mind what it does to us physically…’
‘Physically?’ Lucianna asked him puzzled.
‘I want you,’ he told her frankly, framing her face in his hands, ‘but you’ve never had a man before…and…’
Instantly Lucianna took umbrage.
‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.
‘You told me…or as good as,’ Jake told her dryly. And besides, he added silently, how could he tell her that everything about the way she was responding to him, unaware of just how strongly she was affecting him, pointed to her lack of sexual experience? But the man she really wanted wasn’t him, and he knew that even if she, no doubt caught up in the powerful flood of her discovery of her own sexuality, seemed to have momentarily forgotten it.
Lucianna looked at him.
‘But I want one now,’ she told him truthfully. ‘I want you, Jake.’ And before he could stop her she leaned forward and touched his body, touched him, her fingertips as delicate as a butterfly’s wing against his tautly aching flesh but as destructive to his self-control as a sledgehammer.
He heard himself groan, wanted to draw back from her, and yet, as though a part of himself were standing outside himself watching him, powerless to control him or what was happening, he reached out for her, kissing her mouth gently and then less gently. He caressed her body with his hands as he slowly removed the remainder of her underwear, following each caress with a string of delicate kisses which, in Lucianna’s now fevered imagination, wove a covering for her as airy and delicate as a cobweb and yet at the same time was as fiery as though he had encased her whole body in a sheet of burning desire.
As she felt him circle her navel with the tip of his tongue, she cried out tormentedly to him, instinctively arching her body, offering it…offering herself to him in the age-old, timeless language of feminine desire.
Jake trembled as he gripped her hips with his hands and tried to still her sensual writhing, as unsuccessfully as he tried to subdue his own response to it. And when he felt her innocently fighting against his constraint and trying to open her legs in pleading invitation he knew there was no way he could resist her any longer.
His body ached for the sweet, feminine warmth of hers so much that he was already shuddering under the impact of trying to control it, and as for the emotional impact she was having on him…
It was no good; what was to happen was inevitable, as inevitable as night following day, moon following sun, but first…
Her eyes closed, her hands balled into small, hard fists of agonised need as she cried out against the strictures of aching desperation that possessed her, Lucianna had no awareness of what he intended to do until she felt his hands on her thighs and then the softness of his hair against her skin. And by then it was too late…too late to be shocked by the intimacy of the caresses he was bestowing on her, too late to even think about trying to stop him, and certainly too late to stop her body’s sweetly voluptuous, ecstatic response to the touch of his lips, his mouth, his tongue, caressing first her belly and her thighs and then the most intimate, hidden, secret part of her.
The sensation building inside her was so unfamiliar to her, so overpowering and unfamiliar, that she instinctively cried out Jake’s name, but by the time he realised what was happening to her it was too late; the sharp, pulsing contractions of her orgasm were already convulsing her.
The shock of experiencing so much intense emotional and physical sensation was too much for Lucianna to bear, and her body started to tremble, her eyes filling with hot tears.
Instinctively, Jake reached out to take her in his arms and soothe her in much the same way he had soothed her when she had been a small child, holding her close, rocking her gently, brushing away her tears.
‘What—?’ Lucianna started to ask him tearfully, but then stopped.
‘You’ve had an orgasm,’ Jake told her.
‘I know that,’ Lucianna informed him indignantly glowering at him as she saw the way he was looking at her. Didn’t he think she knew anything…?
‘Good…then you’ll be able to recognise your second one, won’t you?’ Jake challenged her softly, and before Lucianna opened her mouth to protest he covered it with his own and started to kiss her. He whispered to her thickly, ‘That was nothing…Just wait…you’ll see.’
‘I don’t want to…’ Lucianna told him truculently, and then, surprisingly, discovered that, on the contrary, she most certainly did; she wanted to very, very much indeed. And within a very short space of time she was telling Jake just how much she wanted to…just how much she wanted him, all of him, deep, deep inside her, moving in her the way he was doing right now, carrying her with him with every powerful thrust to that special magical place she had so recently discovered, that place, as she cried out to him, she so desperately needed. Only he could take her.
As she cried out his name Jake reached his own climax, and as he felt the pulse of his orgasm within her Lucianna was dizzily aware of just how pleasurable that small betraying pulse was, of how much her body enjoyed the feel of it, of him, within her. Drowsily she snuggled deeper into his arms.
Carefully Jake smoothed the duvet over Lucianna’s still sleeping body. He had already picked up her discarded clothes and carefully folded them before dressing himself and now it was time to go before Lucianna herself woke up and realised just how much he had betrayed the trust she had placed in him.
Jake was under no illusions. The intensity of her sexual response to him had been activated simply by her discovery of her own femininity and had nothing whatsoever to do wit
h any desire for him. How could it when he already knew she believed she was in love with John?
It would have been easy, in the aftermath of their shared intimacy, to use his own experience and her lack of it to convince her that her response to him meant that she cared for him—loved him—and God knew he had been tempted, sorely tempted. But how could he have lived with himself if he had done so? He couldn’t have. He couldn’t steal from her her right to own her own sexuality and her own emotions.
To him, loving her meant allowing her the freedom to be her own woman, and to make her own choices. But it would be a long time, a hell of a long time—if ever—before he could blot out of his dreams the sweet scent and feel of her, the warmth and softness of her, the sound of her ecstatic cries as she reached her orgasm, the small keening sounds of urgency and need she had made in her desire for him. A long time? He would never forget. Never. Broodingly, he gave her sleeping form one last look before finally turning to leave.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘LUCE, are you all right?’
Lucianna jumped and then flushed, gnawing anxiously on her bottom lip and avoiding meeting Janey’s kind, concerned eyes as she lied, ‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine.’
‘You haven’t forgotten that Jake is expecting you to go over there this morning, have you?’ David asked her, stressing, ‘When he rang earlier he said it was very important that he saw you.’
‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ Lucianna said hollowly. Forgotten? How could she when…? But right now she dared not even let herself think of all the reasons why she could not possibly forget and what she could not forget, not when she knew the tell-tale signs of her own thoughts would be clearly visible in her eyes and on her flushed skin for her astute sister-in-law to see.