by Penny Jordan
‘No, I’ll drive,’ Dee told him firmly. ‘Where are we going?’
When he told her she gasped.
‘You’ve booked us a room at the De Villiers Hotel—but, Hugo, that will cost a fortune.’
‘No, not a room,’ he contradicted her.
Dee looked at him. She knew his zany sense of humour by now.
‘Not a room... What, then? A wooden seat in the grounds?’ she asked warily.
‘No, not that.’ Hugo laughed. ‘I’ve booked us a suite,’ he told her quietly.
‘A suite...’ Dee squeaked. ‘But Hugo, the cost...’
‘Mmm...I know; I hope I’m going to be worth it,’ he told her, straight-faced, making her dissolve into giggles.
The hotel wasn’t very far away, just a few miles the other side of the city, a beautiful Edwardian house set in its own grounds which had been converted to a very prestigious hotel. Dee had been there once—with her father, when he had taken her out for a birthday lunch. The food, the room, the service had all been first-class, and Dee had felt truly spoiled and treasured.
It was a favourite with local brides, not for their receptions so much as for their wedding nights. Rumour had it that the discreet addition of a Jacuzzi to the bridal suite had resulted in totally blissed-out couples pronouncing fervently that they were most definitely going to come back.
At the thought of the bridal suite and its Jacuzzi Dee suddenly felt very hot, and slightly dizzy.
‘You haven’t...it isn’t...you haven’t booked the bridal suite, have you?’ she asked Hugo faintly.
He laughed again.
‘No, I haven’t,’ he reassured her, adding, tongue-in-cheek, ‘We don’t want everyone to know what we’re going to be doing, do we?’
‘You mean to say they won’t?’ Dee responded dryly.
He hadn’t booked the bridal suite, but what he had neglected to tell her was that all of the hotel’s four suites possessed their own Jacuzzis.
As Hugo told Dee later, he just wished he had had a camera for that unforgettable look on her face as the porter swept into the room and then opened the door to the large en suite bathroom with a theatrical flourish.
‘How could you?’ she whispered to him once the porter had gone. ‘It makes me feel that we’re being so...so obvious.’
‘One of us certainly is,’ Hugo agreed, with a rueful glance down at his own body.
Dee closed her eyes. She gave up. Just what did you do with such a man?
Hugo soon showed her, adroitly locking the door and then going over to uncork the bottle of champagne that was chilling in an ice bucket.
‘I’ve ordered us a cold supper,’ he told Dee. ‘But first...’ He poured her a glass of champagne and handed it to her. ‘To us...’ he toasted her solemnly.
A little shakily Dee lifted her glass to her lips and took a sip. Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, alongside her excitement she could feel a definite twisting thread of shy, virginal self-consciousness, she acknowledged.
‘We’ll never drink all that,’ she told Hugo unsteadily, looking at the large bottle.
‘Not from these,’ he agreed, putting down his glass. ‘Shall I tell you how I intend to drink it?’ he whispered as he came towards her and removed her own glass before taking her in his arms. ‘I intend to pour it over your naked body and lick every droplet off you, drink every last bubble, and then I shall...’
He should have sounded ridiculous, but somehow he didn’t; somehow she was reacting to what he was saying, the picture he was drawing in her mind and on her senses, with a frantic little shudder that made him groan and start to kiss her with uninhibited passion.
He had just started to unfasten her top when they heard the door. Cursing, he released her and went to open it. It was the waiter with their supper, and Dee knew that as he wheeled in the table her face was as pink as her champagne. The meal Hugo had chosen was everything that a romantic meal should be. Dee couldn’t imagine how much it must have cost him. Lobster, her favourite tiny wild strawberries, hand-made chocolates, the kind he knew she had a passion for, all of it washed down by carefully chosen wine—even if Dee only sipped at hers. Hugo, she noticed, did the same.
‘Satisfied?’ Hugo asked her softly, when Dee had eaten the last of the chocolate truffles.
Her colour rose, but Dee still managed to meet his eyes as she told him boldly, ‘No, and I shan’t be until...’
‘Until...?’ Hugo pressed as she stopped speaking.
‘Until I can feel you inside me,’ she whispered on a sudden rush, but now she couldn’t quite manage to sustain that eye-to-eye contact. Not that she needed to. Hugo had already left his seat and was swooping down on her, practically lifting her off her chair as he took her in his arms.
‘Oh God, Dee, you don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ he told her rawly, and as she felt the emotion surging through his body Dee realised properly, for the first time, just what a strain the last few weeks must have been for him, and just how much control he must have been exercising over his own desires and needs.
‘Come here. Come here,’ he whispered urgently to her, even though she was already there in his arms, and his words were a soft chant of tender love as he cupped her face and started to kiss her. ‘Mmm... You taste of chocolate,’ he murmured appreciatively as he tasted her mouth, testing her reaction.
‘And you taste of—’ She started to tease back, then stopped, her eyes darkening with a passion she made no attempt to hide as she told him huskily, ‘And you taste of you, Hugo, and it’s the best taste in the world...the only taste I could ever want. You are the only man I could ever want, and I want you so badly. I want to touch you, hold you, taste you...’
She heard him groan deep down in his throat, a male purr of tormented longing. She lifted her fingers to his throat and touched it, feeling the vibration of the noise he was making against her fingertips. She loved the feel of his skin, the feel of his body. She loved it when she closed her hand, her hands, around him and felt the satisfying hard swell of his body as he reacted to her touch.
‘Both hands?’ he had teased her, the first time she had wrapped them lovingly around him.
‘Mmm...but you do wonders for my ego. One will do, Dee...’
‘One will do,’ she had acknowledged. ‘But it feels so good to hold you like this, with two...’
‘I can’t argue with that,’ he had agreed throatily, but he had still been laughing a little at her.
He had stopped laughing, though, when she had held him still and bent her head to place a ring of shyly adoring kisses around the taut head of his erection.
Oh, yes, he had stopped laughing then.
Now, with the lights turned down low over the large, luxurious bed, Hugo undressed her slowly. They had been to bed together before, but this time, somehow, it was different...special...and the moment he stepped away from her he gave her a look so full of import that it made Dee shiver a little to read the message in his eyes. This was their night of commitment to one another, the final bridge to cross on their way to complete commitment, the final act which they had not yet shared.
They already knew one another’s dreams and one another’s hopes, they already knew what they were destined to be and to do—that together they would work for the benefit of mankind, that they would leave university to work together in the field, would marry before they left. Hugo was so idealistic—even more so, in some ways, than she was herself. He believed passionately in what he wanted to do and he was totally and utterly committed to it. To deny him the opportunity would be like cutting off one of his limbs, only worse.
‘There’s so much we can give them, so much we can put back into a culture, a country, that in the past we’ve only taken from and destroyed, and there’s so much we can learn from them. They have so little in materialistic terms,
but they have their pride and their dignity—their heritage.
‘My father doesn’t approve of what I’m planning to do, you know, and neither does my grandfather, but it’s something I have to do...I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t,’ he had told her passionately, and Dee had known exactly what he meant. His idealism only made her love him more, even whilst she knew that it would also mean that there would always be a small part of his heart and his emotions that did not belong totally to her.
He was very like her father, in that his pride in his own beliefs ran very strongly in him. Very like her father.
‘It’s your turn,’ Hugo whispered to her now, as his tender glance caressed and reassured her. Very carefully Dee started to undress him, her fingers trembling not with nervousness but with the intensity of her suppressed and aching longing for him.
‘No, that’s cheating,’ she protested huskily when, without waiting for her to finish, he leaned forward and started to nibble the side of her neck, his hand cupping and stroking her naked breast. Dee closed her eyes as she felt her body’s reaction, going still as she tried to stem the fierce hot tide of it, rising not so much up through her body as washing fiercely down through it, to that place where the sheer pressure of it forced into life a fierce, tumultuously beating pulse.
Hugo’s lips caressed her shoulder, her collarbone, and then moved lower, nuzzling at the soft curve of her breast and then the taut crest of her nipple before closing over that nipple itself. Dee made a fiercely guttural noise of throaty excitement, her fingernails digging into Hugo’s skin, but if he felt any pain he certainly didn’t show it. However, his slow, careful suckling on her nipple did, suddenly becoming an urgent, body-trembling erotic tug that made Dee groan as she buried her hands in his hair and held him passionately to her.
Somehow she was on the bed. Somehow Hugo was undressed. Somehow he had positioned her so that he could kneel between her splayed legs as he kissed her quivering belly. Now, with no need to control her longing for him, Dee could respond to him as she had so much longed to do, arching her spine and lifting herself to the tormenting lap of his tongue as he licked at the moist slickness of her body. There was no need for the champagne—her own desire had covered her skin in its own sweetly scented mist of arousal—but, wonderful though the touch of his mouth against her body was, it wasn’t what Dee really wanted. Not now. Not this time.
‘Are you sure you’re ready for me? Do you want...?’ Hugo asked her hoarsely as she reached for him, wildly begging him, eagerly demanding to feel him deep inside her.
‘Oh, yes, yes...’ Dee groaned longingly.
She couldn’t take her eyes off him, watching him as urgently, as hungrily as he watched her.
‘I’m afraid of hurting you,’ he confessed as he hesitated, but his body wasn’t afraid, Dee recognised, her eyes widening as she watched him lowering himself towards her. He looked so good, so...so ready...so—
She gave a little whimper of sound as she felt him rubbing himself slowly against her.
‘That hurt?’ Hugo asked her in concern.
Dee managed to laugh.
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘It hurts because it’s not...because I want you inside me...’ She gave a smothered gasp as she felt the first of the deep penetrative strokes she had so longed for, her eyes widening as she realised how well their bodies fitted together.
No way did the sensation she had of being filled, stretched completely, in any way approximate to any kind of pain, but the intensity of her pleasure was so acute that it could almost be described as a kind of special agony, a racking urgency, a pulsing, heart-jerking, driven compulsion that had her calling out Hugo’s name as she clung frantically to him.
It didn’t last long; both of them were too aroused, too wrought up emotionally and physically, for it to do so. Dee knew she had been virtually on the point of orgasm even before Hugo had entered her, and he had been almost as close to the edge of his own self-control.
Dee had barely felt the first quivering explosion of her own completion when Hugo cried out her name, the hot, fierce pulse of his ejaculation drenching her body with a fiercely sweet burst of pleasure.
She was, Dee discovered seconds later as she relaxed into his arms, crooning happily in delighted pleasure, making soft cooing sounds of love to Hugo as he held her.
‘It will be better next time,’ she heard him promising her as he smoothed back her hair and kissed her tenderly. ‘I’ll make it last longer and—’
‘Better...than that...impossible!’ Dee assured him blissfully.
‘Oh, Dee, Dee, is it any wonder that I love you so much?’ Hugo praised her adoringly. ‘I should not have met you, you know. You shouldn’t really have existed. I didn’t plan for this to happen. I wasn’t going to fall in love, and I certainly didn’t want to make the kind of lifetime commitment I want to make to you to any woman until I was at least thirty.
‘It’s just as well that you and I share the same ideals and the same ambitions. I don’t think I could have borne it if you’d been the kind of woman who expected me to stay at home and get myself the sort of job my father wants me to get. Something in the City that will make me a lot of money. I’m not going to be much of a catch as a husband, you do realise that, don’t you? Our children will complain and all your friends will think that you’re crazy to love me. Your father will quite definitely disapprove...’
‘No, he won’t,’ Dee denied. ‘He’ll admire you for what you’re doing—and it is admirable, Hugo, to want to help others. I couldn’t love you so much as I do if you were any way different from the way you are, and I certainly wouldn’t want to change you or the plans you’ve made.’
‘Mmm...it’s providential, isn’t it, that you’ll have completed your degree course just about the same time as I finish my Ph.D.? There’s no way I can make time to go back to working in the field until I finish it, but once I have, once we’ve both completed our studies... There’s so much I want to do, Dee. So very, very much...’
‘Mmm...I know,’ she agreed, and then added with sweet provocativeness, ‘You haven’t even touched the champagne, and then there’s the Jacuzzi... How long have you booked the suite for?’
‘Just tonight,’ Hugo told her ruefully.
‘Just tonight? You mean we’ve still got it for a whole twelve hours?’ Dee teased him, mock wide-eyed.
‘A whole twelve hours,’ he agreed, but he was mumbling the words a little because Dee was kissing him.
‘Then we don’t have a moment to waste, do we?’ she told him as she trailed her fingers slowly over his body.
‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ he agreed.
CHAPTER SIX
DEE woke up with a start. Her heart was pounding and her mouth felt dry. She had slept heavily but not refreshingly, almost as though she had been drugged, and as she lay in bed she was conscious of an unfamiliar reluctance to get up, almost a dread of doing so, as though by remaining where she was she could hold her apprehensions and low spirits at bay.
Unfamiliar? Not exactly. Not totally. There had been a period after her father’s death, a time once the urgency of the immediate calls upon her time and attention had slackened a little, when she had experienced a similar longing to crawl away and hide somewhere safe and womb-like. She had had to fight to overcome it, to tell herself that the decisions she had made had been right and necessary, to urge herself to go on. Resolutely she threw back the bedclothes and slid her feet to the bedroom floor.
Her bedroom was her own secret, special place, somewhere that no one else was allowed to enter. Not so much because it was a private sanctuary, Dee recognised, but because of what she knew it betrayed about a deeply personal side of her nature.
The walls were painted a soft washed colour, somewhere between blue and green, and the windows were draped in gossamer folds of creamy white muslin. Th
e same fabric fell from the ceiling and was gathered back softly at either side of her double bed, which, like the chaise longue at its foot and the comfortable bedroom chair by the window, was covered in a cream-coloured cotton brocade. The carpet too was cream. The whole ambience of the room was one of soft delicacy. A stranger looking into Dee’s bedroom and making a character assessment of her from it would have judged her to be soft and ethereal, a creature of fluid, feminine moods and feelings, a dreamy water sprite of a woman, whose sensibilities were as delicate and tender as the petals of the fresh cream flowers that filled the bowl on the pretty antique table she used as a dressing table.
As Dee showered and then dressed she acknowledged that the cause of her sense of wanting to curl up protectively and let the world get on without her for a while were the two completely contradictory forces lining up against one another for battle inside her head.
On the one side was her need to persuade Peter, without either alienating him or even more importantly hurting him, that it was time for him to step down from the foundation committee, and her knowledge that the best way to achieve that goal would be to win Hugo’s support, to actively court his help and approval of her plans, whilst on the other was her totally opposing need to have nothing whatsoever to do with him, to blot him completely out of her thoughts, her mind, her life, her heart.
Abruptly Dee stopped brushing her hair, her body convulsing in a small involuntary shiver.
She had fought that battle once, fought it and, she had believed, won it, inch by painful inch, hour by agonising hour. She put down her hairbrush and stared unseeingly into her mirror. She was afraid, she acknowledged grimly. Afraid of having to re-enter the long, painful time of darkness she had already been through once, afraid of what might happen to her if she allowed Hugo to come back into even the smallest corner of her life, and that was why she had been so reluctant to face the day.
Yes, she was stronger now than the girl she had once been, but then she had had the advantage of being motivated, driven by what she had considered to be almost a crusade; then she had had zeal and youth on her side. Now...