by Penny Jordan
Now, though, he couldn’t harm anyone any more. Not her father, not Beth, not anyone. It was over.
She frowned in bewilderment. She was in her bedroom, but she had no recollection of having walked upstairs. Hugo was closing her bedroom door.
‘Dee, is there someone I could ring—a friend you’d like to have here with you?’ Hugo was asking her.
Immediately Dee shook her head, cringing mentally at the very thought of having to explain to anyone.
‘I just want to be on my own,’ she told Hugo shakily. ‘I just want to be left alone.’
She felt most peculiar, oddly light-headed and so cold still. She wanted to crawl beneath the covers of her bed and lie there. She didn’t want to see or speak with anyone.
She was only a few feet away from the bed, but for some reason as she tried to walk towards it her feet felt almost too heavy for her to lift. The bed wavered and dipped as she tried to focus on it, the floor tilting. She gave a sharp cry of protest and another softer one of shock as suddenly Hugo was next to her, supporting her, holding her.
Holding her!
Dee closed her eyes, longing flooding through her—a longing that was so intense, she could feel it in an actual physical inner pain. With her defences down, shot to pieces, the mantra she had taught herself, that Hugo belonged to her past and love was something she had learned to live without, no longer had the power to work, even if she could have remembered it.
Suddenly she was a girl again, longing for the security of her lover’s arms, wanting him so much, aching for him so intensely.
‘Hugo.’
As she whispered his name she wrapped her arms tightly around him, closing her eyes, ecstatically breathing in the scent of him.
‘Hugo.’
She turned her head, desperately seeking his mouth with her own.
She heard him say something, her name, a plea...a sound. It didn’t matter.
His hands were cupping her face, his lips, his mouth responding to the hungry passion of her own.
Once, a lifetime ago, they had kissed like this as hungrily and needfully as this, unable to take the time to draw breath properly, their hearts thudding in rapid unison, the passion between them building to such a pitch that it was almost too much to be endured.
Once, a lifetime ago, she had already experienced this need to lose herself completely in him, to be absorbed totally into him, to become somehow a part of him, so that the two of them were one indivisible whole.
Frantically Dee clung to him. She had lost him once, just as she had lost her father. Her father was lost to her for ever, but Hugo was here, alive, warm, real.
Passion—the kind of passion that allowed nothing to stand in its way, that swept down like an avalanche, swamped like a tidal wave, burned a path like a forest fire—gripped her, filling her, leaving no room for anything else.
She might as well have been blind, deaf and dumb for all the attention she paid to the logical warnings of her brain.
She heard Hugo groaning, and her senses recognised the sound, receiving it, registering it and interpreting it. Her hands slid feverishly down his back, past his waist, spreading against the hard masculine shape of his buttocks, pressing him into her own body just as when, long ago, that soft little groan had been a signal and an invitation for her to touch him in just that way, a sensual message from him that he wanted her to touch him, that he wanted her to show that she was responding to his desire for her and that she welcomed his arousal. So now Dee responded to it as such, trembling a little in the ferocity of her own passion as she felt the unmistakable hardening of his body.
‘Dee...’
His voice was low, raw with longing, liquid with need, roughened by a soft burr of warning.
‘Yes. Yes, I know,’ she whispered back to him between the hungry kisses they were still exchanging.
‘Undress me, Hugo,’ she begged him. ‘Quickly, I can’t wait.’
As though to prove her point, she started to tug at her own top, moaning a little in frustration when he didn’t immediately come to her aid. Hugo had never been the kind of lover who had allowed their lovemaking to drift into a stale routine, a familiarity that meant that he no longer had to court her, and automatically she abandoned her attempts to remove her own clothing and turned instead to the much more exciting task of removing his, tugging frantically at the buttons on his shirt, muttering little absorbed sounds of protest as her fingers refused to work fast enough to satisfy her urgency.
‘Hugo, help me,’ she demanded feverishly. ‘I want to see you, touch you...taste you... Hugo...’
She gave a small gasp of satisfaction as the button she was tussling with finally came free exposing the upper half of his chest. Impatiently she tugged at another, and then another, so totally absorbed in her task that she wasn’t fully aware of the sudden tension that gripped Hugo’s body and the way he drew in his breath in a swift, sharp gasp. His skin was slightly darker now than she remembered it—his time spent in the field was responsible for that, no doubt—and the muscles beneath his skin were somehow more solid, heavier, stronger, just as the silky sprinkling of dark hair she remembered as being quite light was now thicker, different, somehow far more dangerously masculine and exciting.
Since she was not in the habit of studying men’s bodies, and since there had been no intimate relationships in her life since Hugo had left it, she had no way of comparing him with any other man, but Dee knew instinctively that his body, at once both so familiar and yet at the same time so pulse-racingly different, was a kind of body that very few men of his age possessed. Wonderingly she touched the soft hair that shadowed his skin, and then very deliberately followed the line it made down the length of his torso.
‘Dee.’
The hoarse explosive sound of protest he made shocked her into stillness. Questioningly she looked up into his eyes.
‘Dee!’ he said again, and then as he looked back into her eyes he stopped and groaned, closing his own eyes and then opening them again to tell her rawly, ‘Come here... If you’re going to torment me like that then I’m going to do a little tormenting of my own.’
His fingers were much defter on the fastenings of her clothes than hers had been with his shirt. It took him only seconds to remove her silk blouse and the bra she had been wearing under it. His hands were on the waistband of her trousers when she leaned forward and delicately started to nibble at his throat, tender little biting kisses of a type he had always loved.
As her trousers slithered to the floor his hands swept up, cupping her breasts, moulding and caressing them, the pads of his thumbs rubbing urgently over her already stiff nipples. Dee moaned his name and pressed her hot face into the curve of his shoulder, the urge to rake her fingers down the length of his back so strong that she had to fight not to give in to it.
The shock of the news of Julian’s death coming so hard on the heels of the even greater shock of seeing Hugo again had totally destroyed the protective walls she had built around her feelings, leaving her achingly aware of how much she loved him, how intensely she longed for him. They were so powerfully strong that she couldn’t find the words to express them. All she could do was to try to show him, smothering the hard warmth of his chest with her kisses, stroking the smooth flesh of his back, making small keening noises in her throat as he reciprocated and touched her.
Her body remembered every touch, every stroke, every fingerprint of his hands against her; remembered them and responded to them, her nails digging into his skin in frantic pleasure as he lowered his head and started to kiss the soft flesh of her breasts. Dee trembled from head to foot, unable to understand how she had been able to bear to give up such savagely sweet pleasure, how she had been able to live without it and without him.
The ferocity of her need made her moan in soft frustration as she tried to press her body clos
er to his and felt the thick fabric of his jeans rubbing against the softness of her own bare skin.
‘Hugo... Hugo...’ she protested.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she heard Hugo asking her thickly.
‘This is wrong,’ Dee responded passionately, her fingers plucking at his jeans. ‘I want to feel you. You, Hugo. I want to see you, touch you.’ Her voice started to rise a little as her feelings rioted out of her control. She could see Hugo’s reaction to her need in the way his eyes darkened, a dark red tide of male arousal colouring the taut flesh of his face.
‘You want me...you want this...?’ she heard him demanding thickly as he reached for his belt and started to unfasten it.
Once, long ago, as a young girl, she might have looked modestly away. But she was a woman now, not a girl, and Hugo was a man. Her man.
Her mouth was soft and red, swollen by the passion of their shared kisses, her eyes dark and filled with open longing as she followed the movement of his hands. Deep down inside her own body she knew how much she wanted him. She held her breath, her body tensing as he removed the rest of his clothes. The very maleness of him almost took her breath away. She had seen him like this before, of course, but for some reason the impact of him on her now was a thousandfold more dangerous than she could ever remember it being before.
Unable to stop the long, low sound of female need that escaped from her throat, she put her fingertips to her lips.
‘Don’t do that,’ Hugo warned her hoarsely, and then he was reaching for her hand, carrying her trembling fingers to his own mouth which he brushed softly against the sensitive pads of her fingertips. Dee felt her whole body turn wantonly liquid, and then begin to burn with shocking heat.
Very slowly and deliberately Hugo began to lick her captive fingertips, and then even more slowly to suck them. He was looking straight into her eyes, and even though she knew just what he could see in them, and how impossible it was for her to hide her reaction from him, she wanted him so much that it physically hurt—agonisingly so, so much so that she had to close her eyes against the hot burn of her pain.
‘Dee. Dee...don’t...don’t cry...please don’t cry,’ she heard Hugo begging her hoarsely, dropping her hand to cup her face and reinforce the intensity of his words with suffocatingly tender kisses that inflamed her even more rather than soothed her. Unable to stop herself, she reached out and touched him, her fingers trembling a little at first as they enclosed him. His flesh felt smooth and hot, the shape and texture of him so instantly and vividly remembered that automatically she was already caressing him, stroking him firmly and possessively, knowing just how he liked her to touch him and where. This was her territory, her love, her man.
‘Dee...’
She heard the warning in his voice but she was oblivious to it, totally lost in the fiercely sensual pleasure of caressing him.
‘Dee...’ Hugo warned her thickly again, when she failed to heed his warning. But Dee didn’t want to listen. She could feel Hugo’s hands on her body, hot and heavy, and their movement dictated the fierce pulse Dee could feel thudding against her stroking touch.
She was wearing a pair of tiny silky briefs, the merest wisp of fabric. She could feel Hugo tugging impatiently at them, but even without feeling them slither to the floor she would have known the moment she was free of them from the way Hugo suddenly sucked in his breath and the tension she could feel in his body.
He had once told her, both of them giddy, dizzy with satisfied passion, how much he loved the way the silky triangle of dark hair between her thighs so delicately hid the secret of her sex, and she had responded in kind, her eyes soft with love as she had compared the soft silkiness of her own body hair to the much thicker and more vigorous curls that surrounded his own sex. Now that contrast between them, which as a girl she had simply taken for granted, had an almost primitive effect on her senses. Now it made her feel intensely aware of his maleness, his potency, so much so that her body physically shook with the force of her awareness of him and of it.
‘You’re just the same. You haven’t changed,’ she heard Hugo whispering rawly to her. ‘And I’ve never forgotten—never.’
Unable to stop herself, Dee felt the first of her pent-up emotional tears splash down on the hand he had lifted to touch her.
‘Dee, what is it...? What’s wrong...? Oh, Dee. Dee, don’t, please, my darling. Please don’t cry,’ she heard Hugo begging her as he wrapped her in his arms and picked her up.
‘I’m not crying. I’m not crying,’ Dee denied. ‘I just want you inside me so much that it hurts, Hugo. Please don’t make me wait any longer...please.’
‘Dee. I can’t...I haven’t got—’
‘You can,’ Dee protested fiercely, reaching out to touch him. He was so strong, so ready for her. How could he say otherwise when she could feel how much he wanted her?
She pulled away from him and walked unsteadily towards her bed, climbing onto it and holding out her arms to him.
It seemed to take a lifetime for him to reach her, and another for him to join her, to take her in his arms and kiss her, slowly, almost reluctantly at first, and then with a hunger that was almost elemental, almost savage. But something within her responded to his urgency, something within her wanted it, she recognised, as his hand parted her thighs and his fingers found the moist readiness of her.
‘No, it’s not that I want. It’s you,’ Dee told him thickly. ‘I want you, Hugo, you...’
She cried out as he entered her. It had been so long, and she wanted him so much. Her body was so exquisitely sensitive to him that each thrust of him within it filled her with an almost unbearable surge of pleasure.
She had known him like this so many, many times before, and yet this was different, Dee acknowledged. This went beyond the satisfaction of a mere physical need, beyond the mutual pleasure of reaching a sexual pinnacle.
The urge to let herself reach the climax of her pleasure was almost unbearably strong, but something made her delay it; something made her urge him to thrust even deeper inside her, as deep inside her as it was possible for him to reach, because that way...
Unable to control her longing any more, Dee cried out in abandonment. Deep within her body she could feel the hot pulse of Hugo’s release, so deep within her body that she could feel her womb physically contract. A strange feeling filled her, an unfamiliar sense of giving in to fate, to a power stronger than her own.
‘Hugo.’
Lovingly she traced the shape of his mouth with her fingertip.
‘I never really stopped loving you, you know. I had to send you away, though, because of Dad.’ Fresh tears filled her eyes.
‘Dee, you can’t really believe that your father took his own life,’ Hugo protested as he kissed her and brushed them away. ‘I know that he and I didn’t see eye to eye, but there is no way, in my opinion, that he would ever have done something like that, no matter what kind of pressure he came under.’
‘Is that what you really think?’ Dee asked him uncertainly.
‘Yes, I do,’ Hugo confirmed. ‘Your father was a strong man Dee, a good man. He loved you far too much to do something that would hurt you.’
‘Julian Cox’s deceit humbled him, Hugo. Humiliated him. He had trusted him, believed in him. For him to have discovered that Julian had been using his patronage to steal money... Dad paid it all back, of course, but...’
Dee yawned deeply.
‘I feel so tired,’ she complained. ‘I still can’t totally believe that Julian Cox is dead, or that...’
She yawned again, more deeply this time.
‘Go to sleep,’ Hugo told her gently, leaning over to kiss her mouth.
Obediently Dee closed her eyes.
* * *
Hugo waited until her breathing told him that she was fast asleep before easing himself out o
f bed. Peter was due to see the heart specialist whom the doctor had called in this evening, and Hugo had promised he would be there with him.
There hadn’t been time for him to say to Dee all the things he had wanted to say. Her disclosures about her father had filled him with pain and pity. They had always been close, and he could understand how it must have hurt her to think of her father taking his own life, but despite what she had told him Hugo felt sure that his death had been a genuine accident.
It was strange how things worked out. He had come here today, driven by an impulse, a need so strong that no amount of logic had been able to prevent him from responding to it. Even though every bit of common sense he possessed had told him that he was a fool to even think of approaching Dee and telling her how he felt, asking her if there was any way she was prepared to give the love they had once shared a second chance, he had still felt compelled to do so.
What had actually happened between them was nothing short of miraculous. Dee still loved him. He was older now, and wiser too, and he could recognise that, much as he had loved Dee as a young man, there had been a certain selfishness in him, a certain single-mindedness which had driven him to pursue his own goals, his own dreams, and to expect Dee to make them hers.
Things were different now. It hadn’t taken him very long to discover that without Dee his ambitions, his dreams had become curiously unfulfilling. There had been the satisfaction of knowing that what he was doing was for the benefit of others, but there had also been the loneliness of living his life on his own. Not that he hadn’t had plenty of discreet and sometimes not so discreet offers of female companionship and love, but no other woman could possibly measure up to Dee.
He had told himself that, in choosing to put her love for her father above her love for him, Dee had been the one who was the loser, but when he had received the news that she was married and expecting a child he had known just which of them was the one to suffer the most.