A Little Seduction Omnibus

by Penny Jordan

  Dee gave him a quick look, warily conscious of the irony beneath the seemingly sympathetic words.

  ‘Perhaps he is a little bit old-fashioned,’ she responded with quiet dignity, all her protective instincts coming to the fore as she sensed Hugo’s unspoken criticism of the father she loved so much. ‘But I would much rather have a father like that—a father I can look up to and admire...and trust, a man of...of compassion and...and honour...of integrity—than someone...’

  Her voice became suspended with emotion at the thought that she and Hugo might already be on the verge of a quarrel, but immediately Hugo soothed her, gently stroking her hand as he apologised. ‘I’m sorry... I shouldn’t have implied... I guess I’m just jealous...’ he told her whimsically. ‘And not just of your trust fund...’

  Of course that made her laugh, as he had intended it would, and she was secretly pleased he kept on holding her hand as they walked down the street together.

  He hadn’t said exactly where they were going, but Lexminster was a relatively compact city, and after the revelation about her trust fund she was reluctant to suggest that they could take her car to their destination.

  Later, when she discovered the cavalier attitude Hugo had to driving-he had learned to drive in an ancient Land Rover on his grandfather’s estate and further honed his ‘skill’ driving across the dry, mud-scarred ribbed and ridged empty riverbeds of the drought-ridden area where he had done his voluntary work—she would be glad she had not been subjected to it on their first date.

  It was a late November evening, with just a warning that frost might be in the air later. The autumn had been fine and dry, and the leaves were still at the delicious stage of rustling pleasurably beneath one’s feet when walked on, their scent evocative and slightly pungent on the clear air as they walked down the tree-lined main street of the city.

  The restaurant Hugo had chosen was a small Italian family-run place, down a narrow side street, and Dee fell in love with it and the family who owned and ran it the moment they walked in.

  They greeted Hugo like a member of the family, Luigi, the burly grey-haired patron, punching him genially on the shoulder and then wincing in mock pain and shaking his arm.

  ‘He is built like an ox...like a bull,’ he amended, with a laughing look in Dee’s direction.

  Of course she blushed, and of course Bella, his wife, tutted and protested that Luigi was embarrassing her, smothering Dee with warmly maternal concern and protection as she assured her that she was not to take any notice of Luigi’s poor attempt at humour.

  ‘What? You mean to say that you do not think of me as a bull?’ Hugo teased Bella, lifting his arm and tensing his muscles in a mock display of male strength.

  ‘Aha, it is not the size of this muscle here that counts,’ Luigi warned him. ‘Is that not so, cara?’ he asked his outraged wife.

  Dee listened to their byplay with a mixture of delight and self-consciousness. Luigi was barely her own height, and Bella was even smaller, both of them plump and round and very obviously well and happily married. So much so that it was impossible for Dee to take offence at Luigi’s references to Hugo’s sexual machismo. He was as proud of him as though Hugo had been his own son, as proud of Hugo’s maleness as though it had been his own, and it was a simple and honest pride, with nothing offensive or prurient about it.

  ‘She is bella, very bella,’ he told Hugo approvingly, after he had subjected Dee to a thorough and very malely appreciative visual inspection, his eyes twinkling as he made this report to Hugo.

  ‘She is indeed, and she is my bella,’ Hugo retorted warningly.

  It was the start of one of the most magical evenings of Dee’s life.

  She ate and drank with an appetite that was totally unfamiliar to her. Hugo, she noticed, whilst he enjoyed his food and his wine, was careful not to drink too much nor to allow her to do so, and she acknowledged that she loved his protective attitude towards her. It made her feel so...so safe, so cherished...so loved.

  So loved.

  There was no doubt in Dee’s mind that she was in love. She had been in love from the moment Hugo had picked her up off the gravel, she suspected, and it was the most intoxicating, the most exciting, the most life-enhancing emotion she had ever experienced.

  It was late when they left the restaurant. The promised frost had become reality, sparkling on the ground and the trees, vaporising their breath as Dee gave a small gasp at the cold shock of it against her face.

  ‘It’s so cold,’ she protested as she huddled deeper into her coat.

  ‘Mmm... Come here, then,’ Hugo told her, wrapping his arm around her as he drew her as close as he could to his own body.

  Happily nestling close to him, Dee laughed when he tucked his hand into her pocket.

  ‘Aha...all you really wanted to do was to keep your hand warm in my pocket,’ she teased him.

  ‘Wrong,’ Hugo corrected her huskily. ‘All I really want to do is to keep all of you warm in my bed, with my body...my hands and my mouth. Has anyone ever made any kind of love to you, Dee? Has anyone ever touched you...kissed you...?’

  ‘Of course they have,’ she squeaked indignantly. Just because she was a virgin that didn’t mean she was totally sexually ignorant.

  ‘In my last year at school I went to loads of snogging parties...’

  She could see the little puffs of white air appearing from Hugo’s mouth as his body gusted with laughter.

  ‘Oh, snogging parties... That wasn’t exactly the kind of kissing I meant. What I meant was, has anyone kissed you...intimately, caressed your body with their mouth, explored you with their hands and their tongue, made you...?’

  Frantically Dee covered her ears, torn between excited shock and self-conscious chagrin that he had to explain to her so graphically just what he meant. She knew what he was describing, of course, had even wondered in her most private intimate moments just how it would feel to have a man, her man, make love to her in such a way, but she had never dreamed that she would walk down a public street whilst he, that man, teasingly described to her an act which she had assumed was something a man only did for a woman if she was very, very fortunate or very, very loved.

  ‘Do I take it that that’s a no?’ Hugo asked her, still laughing, but Dee could hear the rusty betraying note in his voice, and she could see the way he was looking at her. She might not be sexually experienced, but she was no fool. Hugo wanted to touch her, caress her, taste her, in the way he had just described, and unless she had got it wrong he wanted to do it very, very badly indeed and very, very soon...like now, in fact. Her heart started to thud. She felt dizzy with excitement and the euphoria-inducing realisation of her own female power.

  ‘Oh, it’s going to be so good for us,’ Hugo groaned as he drew her into the shadow of a convenient side street and swept her promptly and expertly into his arms. Not that Dee was attempting very much resistance, and she didn’t offer any either a few seconds later, when he slipped his hands inside her coat and wrapped his arms around her body so tightly she felt she could hardly breathe. Their kiss was everything that a first kiss should be—tender, exciting, passionate, their mouths eager and hungry, their bodies urgently hungry for the feel of the other. But even though Hugo had put his hands under her coat, a little to Dee’s surprise he made no attempt to do anything more than simply hold her.

  ‘I daren’t,’ he told her gruffly, his voice muffled between kisses as though he could read what she was thinking. ‘God knows I want to, but if I touch you now... Remember what I said to you this afternoon?’

  ‘About...about making babies...’ Dee responded shakily.

  ‘Don’t. Don’t even say it,’ Hugo groaned as he moved his body even closer to her own, swiftly unfastening his own coat. Dee could feel his hard arousal. Immediately her own body quickened, revealing a capacity for sexual responsiveness whic
h she had never guessed she possessed. The nature and the intensity of the ache raging through her shocked her, and yet it excited her as well.

  Her fellow students’ lusty comments about sharing their beds and their bodies with Hugo slipped warningly into her mind, and instantly she was seized with such a strong surge of female determination and possessive jealousy at the thought of someone daring to try to take away her man that the primitiveness of her emotions bemused her.

  ‘What is it...? What’s wrong?’ Hugo asked her. He had buttoned up her coat and was smiling tenderly down at her as his hand cupped her face, and his forefinger firmly tilted her face up to his so that he could look into her eyes.

  ‘I was just thinking about something one of the other girls said and how jealous it was making me,’ Dee responded honestly.

  ‘What girl?’ Hugo asked her, puzzled. ‘There is no girl, and I promise you,’ he added, his voice dropping huskily, ‘I shall never give you any cause to be jealous. I would never, could never, do anything to hurt you. There is no other girl.’

  ‘No,’ Dee agreed, smiling up at him. But she still couldn’t resist murmuring mischievously, ‘Still, I’m glad that I don’t have a twin sister...’

  ‘What?’

  She laughed and shook her head, refusing to explain. There was no way she would ever want to share Hugo with another woman, in bed or out of it. No way at all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THEY HAD BEEN going out together for over a month before they finally made love, although Dee knew that no one who saw them together during those early weeks would have believed it.

  Dee hadn’t said anything about either her running into Hugo or having dinner with him to any of her friends, but within a week, in the way that these things so often had of getting out, it seemed that everyone did know.

  It was only later that Hugo actually admitted that he had let it be known that she was his.

  ‘I had to do it. Just in case anyone else started to make a play for you,’ he defended himself.

  Dee shook her head, but by then she was too much in love, too deeply committed to him to protest very much. Those were heady days, exciting days, frustrating days too. Her doctor had warned her that it would be several weeks before she could rely completely on the efficiency of her birth control pill to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, and Hugo had announced very firmly that there was no way he wanted them to run that risk. He also wanted there to be nothing between them the first time they made love together. ‘And I mean nothing,’ he had repeated, with heavy sensual emphasis.

  Both of them had family commitments which would take them home and away from each other over Christmas. Hugo was going north with his parents, to spend Christmas and the New Year with his grandfather.

  ‘A huge quarrelsome gathering of our clan—quite literally,’ he told Dee wryly. ‘My grandfather insists that we stick to tradition, despite the fact that Montpelier House is a huge great freezing barn of a place that’s impossible to heat. My parents will have a row on the journey up there because my mother won’t want to go, and another on the way back because my father won’t want to leave. It happens every year. My elder sister’s children will cause complete havoc and chaos, and my younger sister, who doesn’t have any, will get all high-minded and sanctimonious about the way she is bringing them up, insisting that she’s spoiling them, and then they’ll both turn on me when I tell them not to be such idiots... I promise you, it’s dreadful.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ Dee told him enviously. She too would be spending Christmas with her own extended family. She and her father would be visiting the farm where he had been brought up and which was now farmed by his brother. Dee’s cousins would be there, and her aunts and uncles, and there was a good-sized group of them, but Dee and her father had always been a little on the outside of everything. Her father was something of an enigma to the rest of his family, and, whilst they loved him, they never seemed to feel totally at home or relaxed in his company, Dee had noticed, and that had rubbed off on her too.

  ‘My brother has more in common with his livestock than he has with me,’ her father had once commented witheringly to her after a particularly sharp exchange between the two men. There would be jokes and party games at the farm, but Dee knew that she would not be able to throw herself into it as unselfconsciously as she would have liked because she’d be conscious of the fact that her father could not do so.

  The best bit of Christmas for her had always been the quiet shared hours she and her father spent alone together: the ritual attendance at church, the early-morning rising, the excitement as a child of her stocking, the comfort of the traditional cooked breakfast after their return from church, followed by the thrill of opening her proper presents. These days the present bit of Christmas was, of course, not quite so exciting, but she still enjoyed their small traditions.

  Her father was a keen swimmer. As a young man he had swum for the county, and this year Dee had been thrilled to find a book in Lexminster by one of his boyhood heros, a little-known Channel swimmer, which she knew he would be delighted to have. He also had a weakness for Turkish delight, which she had also bought him, and she had saved hard for an antique snuff box to add to his extensive collection.

  He would, she knew, give her a small parcel of shares—a gift and a test, for she was free to do what she wished with them, either keep them or sell them. All she had to do was use her own judgement to decide. The shares would be in unfamiliar companies: Australian mines, South American crops. Last year she had been spectacularly successful in her decision. The shares she had kept had increased their value two hundredfold. She would be hard put to it to better that this year.

  She missed Hugo, as she had known she would. After all, they had been seeing each other every day, and she was so very, very much in love with him—and he with her. What she hadn’t expected or been totally prepared for was the way his absence manifested itself in an actual physical ache of longing for him.

  Her father guessed that something was wrong, and Dee could hear the curt note of disapproval in his voice as he demanded to know, ‘What’s wrong with you, Dee? I hope you haven’t done anything foolish and got involved with some student...’

  Hugo isn’t ‘some student,’ Daddy, Dee wanted to protest, but something stopped her, warning her that her father wasn’t quite ready yet to admit another man into her life or her heart. In the last few weeks she had become far more aware of the vulnerability of the male ego. After all, Hugo could, at times, display an unexpected vein of jealousy against her father which both touched and amused her, making her feel so protectively tender towards them both that it made her heart ache.

  ‘He’s my father and you’re my...you’re mine,’ she had whispered reassuringly to him as she’d lain in his arms.

  They had been at his flat, untidy and strewn with papers and possessions. It even smelt different from her own all-female household, Dee recognised. Although they still hadn’t actually made love in the fullest sense of the words, there was very little that Hugo did not know about her body, nor her about his. It had shocked her a little to discover how easily and thoroughly he could satisfy her and she him without that final act of penetration, but that did not mean that she did not want it.

  Looking lovingly up into his eyes, she had teased the thick springy curls of his hair with her fingers. She loved the way it brushed his shoulder and her own skin when he kissed and caressed it. It felt so soft and yet so strong...so vibrant...just like him. She liked to bury her face in it and breathe in its scent, his scent. It suited him worn that length, made him look individual, gave him all the romantic appeal of a macho Renaissance warrior knight...

  They did, of course, speak to one another often over the Christmas holiday, and then, three days before they had arranged that they would go back to Lexminster, Hugo rang her.

  ‘I can’t bear it any longer,�
�� he groaned passionately. ‘I’ve got to see you.’

  ‘But it’s too soon. We said next Monday, and besides, you’re in the north and—’

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m here...back...’

  ‘In Lexminster?’ Dee gasped. ‘But...’

  ‘You can come to me, Dee,’ he told her softly. ‘Or I can come and get you... I don’t mind which, but I can’t spend another night without seeing you.’

  He could come and get her. Dee could just imagine her father’s reaction to that!

  As it was it was difficult enough convincing him that she needed to return to university three days ahead of the time she had already stipulated. He was huffy and a little distant with her, and Dee knew why, even though she tried to pretend that she was not aware of his reaction. No mention was made of Hugo, and Dee cravenly hoped that there would not be...not yet...not whilst their feelings for one another were so...so overpoweringly intense. She wasn’t ready yet to let anyone else into their relationship, not even someone as close as her father.

  As she drove away from him, for the first time in her life Dee knew that she was actually happy to leave her father behind. She loved him dearly, of course she did, but now there was a new male focus in her life; now she was ready to step from girlhood into womanhood, from the protection of her father’s arms to the excitement of Hugo’s. She had rung him to tell him that she was leaving and he was waiting for her when she arrived.

  ‘Don’t get out of the car,’ he told her as he hurried down the stone steps leading to her house, where he had been sheltering from the driving rain.

  ‘Don’t get out? But I thought you wanted...’

  ‘Oh, I do, I do,’ he assured her wickedly, with a sabre-toothed male smile. ‘But not here...’

  ‘Not here? But...’

  ‘I want this to be special...very, very special,’ he told her huskily, and then he urged her, ‘I’ll drive you...’