by Penny Jordan
Obediently Beth did as he suggested. There was something dangerously sybaritic about being here like this with him. The heat from the fire was slowly relaxing her tense muscles whilst the candlelight spread soft, sensuous shadows across the darkening room. Outside the light was already fading, the afternoon giving way to early evening as the storm clouds continued to darken the sky.
‘Where did you get this?’ Beth asked Alex as he opened the hamper.
‘The hotel,’ he informed her promptly. ‘It’s all cold, I’m afraid...’
Beth could have told him that for some reason she was no longer really all that interested in food, but a self-protective instinct made her refrain from doing so. If she did Alex might be tempted to ask just what more compelling appetite had taken its place, and she was very much afraid that she might be tempted to tell him.
‘Chicken?’ Alex asked her, holding out a tender portion towards her.
Uncertainly Beth looked at it.
‘It’s good,’ Alex encouraged her, taking a bite out of it and then offering it to her, commanding her softly, ‘Bite.’
Unable to drag her gaze away from his, Beth did as he instructed, nibbling delicately on the chicken and then tensing as Alex reached out his free hand to push a stray lock of her hair off her face, his fingers just brushing against her mouth as he did so.
There was something almost shockingly sensual about what they were doing, about being fed by him like this, about knowing his fingers were so close to her mouth as he held the chicken and she bit into it, and the temptation to eat the meat with a deliberately erotic female show of the hunger she felt for him was something that Beth had to fight to control.
‘Enjoy it,’ Alex said softly to her, as though he knew what she was thinking—and feeling. ‘An appetite for food is like an appetite for love...meant to be savoured and enjoyed—indulged! That’s how I want to make love with you,’ he told her rawly. ‘Slowly and thoroughly, with every touch, every caress a feast of pleasure and indulgence.’
She was, Beth suddenly discovered, trembling so hard that Alex must be able to see and feel it.
Had Alex brought her here on purpose, to make love to her, to seduce her? If he had...if he had, he couldn’t have chosen a more romantic setting, Beth acknowledged as Alex threw what was left of the piece of chicken on the fire. Whilst it sizzled in the heat he removed a bottle of wine from the hamper and uncorked it, pouring it into two glasses.
‘To us,’ he told Beth, handing her one of them and raising his own in a toast.
It was red and full-bodied, and it hit Beth’s empty stomach in a warm rich wave that heated her blood, raising her temperature and lowering her resistance.
Having taken another gulp of it, she put down her glass and automatically ran her tongue-tip over her lips. In the firelight she saw Alex’s eyes darken fiercely. He held out his own glass to her and told her softly, ‘Drink.’
As she bent her head and took a sip he watched her, and then very deliberately and very slowly he turned the glass round, so that the place where she had drunk was facing him, and then equally deliberately he raised the glass to his own mouth, drinking from exactly the same spot she had drunk from. It was a simple enough gesture, and also a very explicit one. Beth could feel her heat, the response, the awareness, surge through her body in a jagged sensation as fierce and primitive as the lightning outside.
‘It’s you I’m thirsting for...hungry for...’ Alex told her rawly.
He put down his glass and reached for her, cupping her face as he had done earlier in the day and covering her mouth with his own, his thumb probing the softness of her lower lip, his tongue sliding into the access he had made for it and entwining softly with hers.
And the heat engulfing Beth had nothing whatsoever to do with the fire, nor the sweet film moistening her skin anything to do with the rain hammering down outside.
She did try to be strong, to cling to sanity and reason, reminding herself mentally that it was just desire, just sex, a physical appetite—that was all it was, all he was. But beneath her fingertips she could feel the heavy thudding of Alex’s heart, and Alex himself was urging her to free his body from the restrictive captivity of his clothes, guiding her to buttons and fastenings which, with his help, seemed to come free with almost miraculous speed.
In the firelight his body possessed a magnificence that seemed to echo the feudal ancestry of the castle. He might have been some powerful lord and she a helpless victim of his fiery passion for her, of their mutually fiery passion for one another, Beth amended dizzily as she recognised how eager she was for Alex to return the favour she had done him and help her to become free of her own clothes.
Unlike her, though, Alex seemed to need no extra assistance. Beth shivered on the spasm of sharp expectation that gripped her when Alex’s hands cupped her naked breasts, her nipples surging excitedly against his palms.
Hot, drenching shudders of excitement raced through her body. Alex was the furnace to which the raw molten material of her desire was drawn.
Slowly Alex removed her clothes, his gaze drinking in the sight of her naked, firelight-washed body. Beth felt as wanton and wild as though she were some long-ago earthy and elemental woman, sure and knowing in her awareness of her own sexuality and desirability.
The pride, the pleasure she felt in her own body as Alex sensuously absorbed the sight, the touch, the scent of her, watching her, stroking his hands over her skin as he shaped her, breathing in what he told her was the unforgettably precious sweet Beth-scent of her, totally banished any self-consciousness or doubt she might have felt.
Here, in the shadowed darkness of this fortress castle which had, over the centuries, seen all the worst and all the best of every human passion, it seemed to Beth everything she felt about herself and about Alex was reduced to its purest and most basic components.
She was a woman; he was a man. She wanted him, ached for him, needed him, and she could see the corresponding intensity of his need for her both in his body and in his eyes.
He might have been her lover returning to her from the heat of battle, their coming together a fierce celebration of the fact that he was still alive; she might have been the virgin bride of the lord of this domain, giving herself to him in a solemn rite of passage.
Before them, in this place, there must have been so many, many earlier lovers, and Beth could almost feel the echoes of their loving echoing the heavy thud of her own heart.
‘Have you any idea how much I’ve wanted to do this?’ Alex groaned as he took hold of her hand, placing it palm to palm against his own, lacing his fingers with hers and then lifting their clasped hands to his mouth whilst he kissed her ring finger.
Against her will Beth felt her own emotional reaction to what he was doing. This was the embodiment of her most private romantic dreams. This was how she had always imagined that a lover, her chosen lover, would cherish and desire her. A lover who would be both humble and held in thrall to the intensity of his desire for her and yet, too, the master of it, and of her.
‘I fell in love with you the first time I saw you,’ Alex was telling her huskily.
Love at first sight.
Beth’s heart gave a dizzying lurch. It must be the wine that was making her so dangerously tempted to believe him, that was making her want to believe him.
‘We hardly know one another,’ she protested in a whisper.
‘I know I want you,’ Alex returned. ‘I know I love you. I know that your body quivers with pleasure when I touch it so.’
His fingertips trailed liquid fire down her breastbone and over her belly before curling and tugging erotically, gently, on the soft tangle of curls below. As he released them Beth exhaled a long, shaky sigh that ended in a sharp gasp as his fingertip moved lower, finding the delicate cleft of the soft flesh that protected her intimacy. Like the petals
of a flower opening to the sure touch of a nectar-seeking bee her body started to respond to his touch.
‘And I certainly know what you’re doing to me.’ Alex’s voice groaned thickly in her ear. ‘Feel it, Beth,’ he begged her. ‘Feel me!’
A little hesitantly at first, but then with growing confidence, Beth spread her hands across his chest, closing her eyes in sensual pleasure as she absorbed the silken heat of his skin. Almost of their own volition her hands moved downwards, beyond the taut arch of Alex’s ribcage and over the male flatness of his belly, so masculinely different from hers with its soft curves and sweetly feminine flesh. Very gently, as though just to reassure herself that she hadn’t imagined it, Beth moved her hands upwards again, resting her fingertips on the solid rectangle of muscle that formed the male shape of Alex’s tough, firm stomach. He wasn’t overly muscular, a gym freak whose muscular development was too exaggerated to be truly desirable; he was just right, Beth acknowledged inwardly—perfect...
She hadn’t realised she had said the soft, satisfied words of praise out loud until she heard Alex growl and tell her, ‘You know traditionally what happens when you praise someone like that, don’t you...?’
‘Mmm...it makes their head swell,’ Beth murmured back absently, and then realised, from what Alex was doing with her hand as he took it and placed it very deliberately and very intimately on his own body, just exactly what he’d meant.
‘Mmm...and mine is getting very swollen,’ he told her emphatically, although he scarcely needed to make any verbal emphasis of what was now patently obvious to her.
Beneath her fingertips the reality of his body, his maleness, his arousal, made her own flesh quiver excitedly. She wanted him...so much...wanted him...needed him...had to have him...
‘Soon...soon...’ Alex whispered to her, as though he recognised just what she was feeling.
He kissed her mouth, and then her breasts, gently releasing himself from her hands as he eased her down on the cushions beside the fire. Arching over her naked body in the firelight, he seemed to Beth to be the embodiment of male sexuality, of man himself. He kissed her belly and her muscles quivered, her body quickening as his hands swept downwards, parting her thighs.
Beth had a small mole high up on the inside of one thigh. She saw Alex looking at it, her body tensing as he bent his head and slowly kissed it. Deep inside, the secret female heart of her turned liquid with longing. Very gently Alex reached out to the soft flesh that protected her sex. Beth felt the breath leak painfully from her lungs. Carefully at first, and then more strongly, Alex began to touch her. Excitement exploded through Beth’s body as it began to respond rhythmically to Alex’s erotic caresses. When his lips and then his tongue started to follow the same path as his fingers Beth moaned a femininely protective protest, but her body’s hunger was far, far stronger than any social conditioning or preconceived ideas of female modesty. Nature had already preordained, preprogrammed her body’s reaction to what Alex was doing to it.
Beth gasped under the weight of the feelings gathering and coalescing inside her. It was like the climb up towards the highest, most savagely exciting, most dangerous ride she had ever gone on in her whole life. Inexorably she was being pushed towards the top, the summit, her mind and her body tight in panic at the thought of the terrifying freefall into eternity that would come once that summit was crested, even whilst she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it, nothing she should do to stop it, urged on as she was by something stronger by far than any mere act of mental will on her part.
Somewhere, someone was moaning: a frantic, keening sound of need that was almost primitive in its intensity. But Beth didn’t realise that she was listening to herself until she heard Alex talking to her, soothing her, promising her in between the hot kisses he was pressing all over her naked body that soon he would satisfy her, soon he would fill her, soon he would give them both what they so desperately yearned for.
As he reached her breasts she could feel his hardness pressing down against her body. Her hips writhed hungrily against him, her whole body quickening as he sucked and then bit softly at her nipples. Beth cried out, but not in pain—unless her longing for him could be classed as such. Her whole body trembled, her hips lifting, her legs wrapping possessively around him as Alex stroked her body into eager acceptance of his.
He felt so good, so strong...so right, with her muscles clinging lovingly to him, drawing him deeper and deeper into the soft, welcoming heat of her body.
She heard him groan and cry out a protest that he couldn’t wait any longer, that she was too sweet, too hot, too responsive for him to hold back, and then his carefully slow thrusts became an urgent fast-paced rhythm that took him deeper and deeper inside her, carrying them both to the edge of the vortex and then spectacularly carrying Beth right over and beyond it, to a place where the whole world, the whole universe dissolved in a physical and emotional display of pyrotechnics that she felt could have rivalled the birth of the world itself.
Now Beth felt she knew what drove and inspired the world’s greatest artists; now she discovered, quite simply, she just knew.
Alex was holding her in his arms, his heart thudding wildly against hers; her breath was just beginning to slow down, and she wept a little with emotion as his body slid smoothly from her and he held her tightly and kissed her.
‘Now do you understand just why I love you so much?’ he demanded thickly as he kissed her again, more slowly and lingeringly.
‘This really is the most wonderful fairy-tale place,’ Beth told Alex dreamily. ‘It has such a...a special atmosphere...’
‘Mmm...it certainly has,’ Alex agreed, with such a meaningful look at her that Beth could feel her face starting to burn a little.
‘The antiques alone...’ She started to babble a little self-consciously, all too well aware that Alex’s prime focus of interest right now was not the castle or its wonderful furniture, but her...
‘Well, if it’s antiques you like I shall have to take you to see my aunt’s apartment in Prague. It’s the family’s main home and I’d like to take you there, Beth, introduce you to my family. And besides, there’s something—’
He stopped. Something in his voice made Beth look a little uncertainly at him, some sense of foreboding, of a shadow about to be cast over her blissful haze of happiness.
‘My aunt has some of the most wonderful examples of antique crystal in the apartment, and I’m sure she’d be only too pleased to arrange for you to visit the factory and—’
‘No!’
Beth froze, suddenly wary, suspicion and anger replacing the sensual languor that had had her relaxing into Alex’s arms. Now she pulled away from him, all her doubts about him surging back. Julian, too, had used her vulnerability after the kisses they had shared to his own advantage, but Julian had at least stopped at mere kisses. Alex...
‘No?’
Alex, too, had withdrawn slightly, and was now frowning. ‘But the glass you said you liked in the gift shop is—’
‘Impossibly expensive,’ Beth snapped sharply at him. ‘And besides, I’ve sourced my own supply at my own price and—’
‘You mean the gypsies?’ Alex challenged her, his voice now just as sharply critical as her own had been. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you weren’t going to pursue that...’
Beth tightened her lips in silence and looked away from him, busying herself re-dressing.
‘Beth,’ Alex said warningly.
‘No,’ she told him shortly. ‘I agreed nothing. You said...’
‘So you still intend...’ He drew in a swift breath. ‘Beth, it’s far too dangerous...far too...’ He shook his head. ‘Believe me, they’re leading you on, deceiving you. This factory they’ve told you about, this mythical source of wonderful glass, is just that. It has to be.
‘Look,’ he told her softly, leaning toward
s her and taking hold of her wrists, shaking them gently as though to underline his point, ‘there are only a handful of factories that make such glass. I know because my cousins own one of them. It demands a special technique, a special skill...it’s...’
‘Please let me go,’ Beth demanded with stiff formality, her eyes burning with anger and pride as he reluctantly did so. Very deliberately she rubbed her wrists where he had held them, even though in reality they did not actually hurt.
She could see, though, from the dark surge of colour that burned his skin, that he was aware of what she was silently implying, and that she had touched a small raw nerve.
Good! He deserved it.
‘I know exactly what you’re trying to do, Alex,’ she told him crisply. ‘I’ve been there before, you see. Been lied to and deceived by a man who simply wanted to use me for his own ends. I’m not so much of a fool, you know. This is what all this...’ she waved her hand around the room and tossed her head scornfully in his direction
‘...has been all about. You deliberately targeted me, flirted with me...came on to me for the benefit you thought it would bring to your cousins’ business, the order you thought you could get. No doubt I’m not your first victim and I doubt that I shall be your last. But where I differ from the others is that I saw through you right from the start. You thought you were deceiving me, using me, but in reality I was the one using you.’
‘What?’
Beth stood up determinedly as she finished speaking and quickly fastened the rest of her clothes. As he stared at her Alex, too, scrambled to his feet but, oddly, his nudity, instead of rendering him foolish as it might have done another man, only served to remind Beth of exactly how she had felt in his arms, of exactly how he had felt inside her body. Angrily she tried to deny her own inner reaction, to deny what she was feeling emotionally.
‘Beth, you couldn’t be more wrong,’ Alex told her vehemently, ‘and I can’t understand why you should think...’ He gave a short, unamused laugh. ‘Believe me, the last thing I would ever do is pimp for business for my cousins. They hardly need it; they have virtually full order books for years to come, if you wish to know...’