Instantly the tension between them became unbearable, Bridget’s awareness of Nicholas leaping to new heights as if in direct response to his awareness of her. The longing tearing at her was atrocious. She felt faint with it, swaying slightly as she stood there, desire a fever in her blood that set her flesh on fire.
‘Nicholas…’ She gestured helplessly with the hand that still held the comb.
He stirred, a reckless, almost blind expression passing over his taut features, but then she saw him master whatever had caused it.
‘Go to bed, Bridget,’ he advised her sharply.
‘But I ought to help clear—’
‘Sita can manage,’ he cut in urgently as she indicated the living-room in which they and the Bhandaris had been having coffee. ‘Go, Bridget, and this time lock your door. I mean it!’
She went, although she was no longer sure for which of their sakes he demanded it.
She didn’t lock her door, though, and when a very bad-tempered Nicholas came banging on it, prior to flinging it open and switching on the light, shocking her out of the troubled sleep it had taken her so long to achieve, it was clear that seduction was far from his thoughts.
‘Your family are obviously no better than my sister at working out time-differences.’ He was furiously disgusted. ‘I thought it must be some emergency, but apparently it’s your damned birthday and they’ve waited up to ring you. I’d only just bloody fallen asleep. Hurry up!’
‘Oh! I’m sorry—’
Bridget was contrite, but excited too at the prospect of talking to her family, and she sat up, just remembering to keep the thin cover pulled up, because she had taken to sleeping nude in the Delhi heat.
She gave Nicholas a helplessly pleading look, realising that he too must be naked beneath his short blue robe, and, guessing what was wrong, he scowled and half turned away while she reached for her own black and green striped robe and put it on.
‘Not that phone,’ he stopped her irritably, seeing where she was headed after leaving her room. ‘I locked up that part of the house for the night. The one in my bedroom.’
‘I’m truly sorry they woke you, Nicholas,’ she offered breathlessly.
‘Just make it short,’ he snapped, frowning. ‘I’d like to get some sleep before morning.’
The small soft light beside his bed was on, the bed itself still warm as she sank down on to it, causing her to hesitate before picking up the receiver, because it was his warmth, inducing a weak, fluttery sensation in the pit of her stomach.
Nicholas hadn’t followed her in, so she was able to speak to her parents without distraction, promising to pass on her father’s apologies to him, after first explaining who Nicholas was and why he was here.
She was talking to her older sister, who was spending the night at home, when he entered the room, giving her an impatient look as he sat down beside her on the edge of the bed.
‘Frances, we’d better stop, this must be expensive,’ Bridget suggested hastily, seeing the deliberate way Nicholas had begun to drum his fingers on his thigh.
‘Just let Rosie wish you a happy birthday,’ Frances insisted, relinquishing the phone to their eighteen-yearold sister.
Bridget’s responses became vague as Rosie talked. Nicholas was too disconcertingly close, too unnervingly exasperated by the time the call was taking, and she could hardly concentrate on what was being said to her.
She jumped as he reached across her to switch out the light and, when her eyes had adjusted to its absence after a second or two, she discovered that the light of a Delhi dawn was stealing into the room.
Casting Nicholas a regretful glance, at first she saw only his annoyance, but beneath that surface expression lay something that shocked her. His face bore the marks of sleeplessness, fatigue shadowing the sockets of his eyes and dragging at his skin, while there was a tense, nervy look about his mouth.
‘My dad says sorry for waking you,’ she told him quickly, when the call finally came to an end and she had put down the receiver.
Nicholas shrugged.
‘Next time you talk to him you can tell him I’m sorry I snarled at him.’ He gave a breath of sardonic laughter. ‘I could have been apologising for a lot worse, remembering the last time you were in here.’
For once Bridget didn’t blush, or react directly in any way, too caught up in guilt and concern.
‘Anyway, I’m sorry too.’
Nicholas shrugged a second time, dismissively. ‘It’s a special occasion. Twenty-two, Bridget?’
‘Yes.’
‘Happy birthday,’ he congratulated her rather grimly.
‘Thank you. You said…you’d only just fallen asleep,’ she recalled slowly, her eyes troubled as they rested on his dark face. ‘Why did it take you so long?’
‘Why do you think?’ he retorted flatly.
‘Then…’ Bridget shifted so that she was sitting half turned towards him, and she lifted a slightly trembling hand to the side of his face, liking its roughness against her smooth palm.
She heard him inhale sharply, and a second later his fingers were curling round her wrist.
‘You mustn’t, Bridget.’ His voice was strained. ‘Really, you mustn’t.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered achingly, the troubled look beginning to clear from her eyes. ‘I must… I think we must.’
‘Oh, God, Bridget, if you do this I’m not going to be able to—’ Nicholas broke off as she continued resisting his attempt to take her hand away from his face, and after a moment his fingers loosened their hold, sliding from her wrist to her elbow in a compulsive caress.
‘It doesn’t matter. I want you to,’ she insisted, with a little catch in her voice. ‘I want you—oh, I want you!’
Touching him, she was barely capable of rational thought, but it no longer mattered. Her decision was already made, if she even had a choice when she loved Nicholas so much, and he was torturing himself, perhaps becoming obsessed, because he wanted her but believed he shouldn’t have her. If they made love, it would be over for him; he would be satisfied and know peace again.
It would never be over for her, of course, but that didn’t count any more, and she would have had— something!
‘You’ve got to stop this! Stop it now, Bridget,’ Nicholas was urging her intensely. ‘I can’t—’
‘I can’t either,’ she confessed brokenly.
She had pulled herself closer to him, her hands smoothing the edges of his robe back from his chest and sliding inside to his shoulders. She felt the muscles tense as she ducked her head, kissing his throat quickly, unable to stop once she had started, her lips moving on to his chest, applying kiss after loving kiss.
Nicholas shuddered and his arms came round her, enfolding her in a strong, warm embrace. Bridget lifted her head, wanting his mouth now, and he caught his breath as the movement brought her long straight hair into contact with his bare chest, a weightless silken caress.
He cradled her against him for a moment. Then his lips found the shaking softness of hers, their two mouths merging, the kiss heated and sensual, promising passion but still tender.
Ending it, he caught her face between his hands, smoothing the dark hair back from her temples and then doing it again and again as he stared at her with smouldering eyes.
‘Do you even know what you’re doing?’ Urgently, his voice had fallen to little more than a whisper. ‘Do you, Bridget?’
‘I want you to show me!’ she pleaded emotionally, almost sobbing. ‘I want you to help me to give—to give you something! So it’s… the same for you. Equal.’
The look Nicholas gave her was incredulous. Then he muttered something under his breath, and claimed her mouth again in a long kiss that seemed like a commitment of some kind, strong and sure and so deeply questing that she felt as if he was seeking something other than their mutual physical pleasure.
She was shaking violently by the time it ended, utterly his already, heart, body and soul. Without a thought, she loosened the
belt of her robe and twisted out of it, then reached for the belt of his as he eased her back to lie on the bed.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, and in another second he too was naked and lying beside her, sensitively giving her time to measure him with her eyes.
‘Oh, you are so beautiful!’ Bridget exclaimed happily, meeting his eyes after a while.
Nicholas gave a brief, uneven laugh. ‘You’re the beautiful one. Darling, I didn’t want this to happen, but I can’t stop it now.’
‘I don’t want you to,’ she declared passionately, moving in to him with sinuous grace.
She had asked him to help her, but she swiftly discovered that there was no need for instruction, that in taking pleasure she gave it. She had never dreamed that she could make him gasp and groan with so much ecstasy under her hands and mouth. Nor had she imagined herself sighing in such unbroken rapture as his hands stroked every inch of her body, as if it were the most precious thing in the world, and when his mouth followed erotically where his delicate fingertips had been she found herself moaning, lost, revelling in sensation but even more awed by his delight in her.
When passion took over from tender sensuality, she was with him; there was no need for him to delay or wait for her. What was happening to her made her both overjoyed and confused, the sweetness and the piercing need, the strangeness and the sense of rightness, the discovery that she could give pleasure and stoke desire as well as feeling both herself.
The room was filled with a pale pearly grey light by now, as she gasped frantically beneath his possessively caressing mouth and heard him gasping under hers.
A moment came when he drew away from her, saying, ‘Wait! There must be no risk to you.’
‘Can I do that for you?’ she requested shyly. ‘How ?’
‘Here.’ He showed her, and pressed a kiss into the hollow of her shoulder. ‘Oh, Bridget, so sweet, to make even such a practical moment a shared one and beautiful for me. You are the loveliest, most generous person I’ve ever known.’
He held her hand for a moment before lifting it to his mouth, kissing her palm first and then her fingers. Then, as he moved over her, she ran her hand down the length of his strong spine, revelling in his almost frenzied ripple of response.
‘Ah, Nicholas, it’s now, isn’t it?’ she prompted lovingly, her shadowy eyes fixed to his taut, passionate face.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he breathed intensely.
‘I don’t think you really will,’ she reassured him confidently, aware as he must be, now that he was parting her thighs, of her body’s eager readiness to accept him.
‘Bridget!’
Her brief moment of pain seemed appropriate to the rite, the sound she made sharp, yet soft too, and the shock to her body was swiftly absorbed by the greater ecstasy it found in holding his at last. The mystery had become knowledge, yet still a miracle as she went with Nicholas, her heart ablaze with love, mind filled with blinding white light, to their shared, simultaneous collision with nirvana, those gasping moments of knowledge in a kind of immortality that was both life and death.
‘Hold me now,’ she commanded him emotionally when it was done, and tears lay on her face, and Nicholas did, soothing her into sleep with his own peace, communicated to her with murmuring voice, calm embrace and pacifying hands.
When she woke up, the bright light of true morning filled the room and she was alone in the bed, but it was some sound made by Nicholas, coming through the door dressed in jeans and a casual shirt and carrying a tray, that had roused her.
‘Breakfast in bed,’ he announced, smiling at her as she sat up. ‘Or what passes for breakfast for you, and I wish I had earned that smile, but Sita made the coffee and even poured the fruit juice.’
‘But the rose?’ she prompted gently, seeing the creamy white rose the tray also bore as she took it from him.
‘That’s for happy birthday again, Bridget—and with feeling this time,’ he added with another smile, adjusting the pillows for her so that she could sit comfortably, and then handing her her robe and steadying the tray for her when he saw her glance uncertainly down at her bare breasts. ‘Yes, put this on.’
It seemed incongruous to be disconcerted by his eyes on her nakedness now, after the intimacy they had shared, but the memory was making her feel a little shy, and yet at the same time more confident than she had ever been in her life.
‘Thank you for my birthday present,’ she ventured shakily, and saw his eyes go to the rose. ‘No, that too, but I meant… before.’
‘That was your gift to me, darling,’ Nicholas replied simply, holding her eyes, but then his tone grew teasing as he continued, ‘You do realise that it was you who seduced me, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose I did in a way,’ Bridget conceded, with a pleased little smile that made him laugh.
‘And aren’t you proud of yourself?’ he prompted, with indulgent amusement.
‘Surprised too, though,’ she confessed, touching the delicate petals of the rose with a fingertip as he seated himself on the edge of the bed, and then looking at him again, her expression vulnerable. ‘Why this rose particularly?’
‘It seemed appropriate to you. Should it have been a red one?’ His tone had suddenly grown hard and almost accusing. ‘What do you expect me to do, Bridget? Tell you I love you? Is that what you want to hear?’
‘No, I don’t want that,’ she responded slowly, trying to work out what she did want and touched by incipient despair as she saw how closed his expression now was in denial of her need to know what he was really feeling.
‘And your…curiosity is now satisfied?’ Nicholas prompted harshly.
Hurt darkened her eyes. ‘Do you really believe that’s what it was?’
He was silent for several seconds before admitting, ‘No, I know it wasn’t. As I’ve just said, it was your very special gift to me—’
‘And yours to me,’ Bridget inserted softly.
‘Yes.’ Pausing, he searched her face intently. ‘But that’s all, Bridget. I’ve got nothing more to give you.’
‘Nothing more you want to give me,’ she corrected him achingly.
Nicholas shrugged. ‘Whatever. Nothing that will be any good for you. So there can’t be anything else. Do you understand?’
‘You really mean do I accept it? Yes, Nicholas, I do,’ she affirmed tautly, ‘as long as this is your personal choice, and not some decision you’ve made on my behalf.’
‘It’s what I’ve decided—what I want,’ he asserted.
With a sigh, Bridget accepted it. His cynicism went too deep for him to put any faith in whatever feelings he might have for her, or in what he must know she felt for him.
‘Then… all right,’ she agreed jerkily.
He took the hand that was nearest to him, holding it lightly and looking down at it almost absently.
‘It will be easier, for both of us, if there’s nothing more at all,’ he murmured, as if assuring himself that he had made the right decision, and raised his head to meet her unhappy eyes again. ‘Anyway, I’ll be out of Delhi until next week—I’m leaving later this morning— and your time here must nearly be up?’
‘I’m booked on a flight leaving on Saturday night,’ she admitted.
‘Then we won’t see each other again,’ he realised, his hold tightening on her hand.
‘Are you relieved?’ she enquired mockingly.
‘Yes, I think I am,’ he confirmed sardonically.
He was probably justified, Bridget reflected. If he was around, she wouldn’t be able to resist making an importunate nuisance of herself. Her fingers stirred against his and his dark face tightened.
‘Nicholas—’ Bridget stopped, because there seemed nothing else to say.
‘Will you be all right?’ he asked.
‘Well, these things don’t last, do they?’ she taunted a little bitterly.
‘You’ll feel better when you’re back in England getting on with your normal life,’ Nicholas predicted gently,
releasing her hand and rising abruptly. ‘Goodbye, Bridget… No, I’m not even going to kiss you. It’s over.’
With those ruthless words, he turned and left her. Realising that he probably wanted his room back if he needed to pack for wherever he was going, she hastily drank the fruit juice and some of the coffee before retreating to her own room, leaving the tray behind but taking the rose with her.
She was waiting for him in the hallway when he appeared with the same small piece of luggage he had used on their trip to Agra and Rajasthan.
‘What do you want now?’ he demanded tautly, eyes sweeping over her dark green top, straight chalk-coloured skirt and low-heeled court shoes, and then coming to rest on her face, already untidily framed by the strands of hair escaping from the French braid she had woven in such a hurry, afraid of missing him.
‘A better goodbye,’ Bridget insisted in a soft rush, nervous but determined. ‘The other one was—wrong! We gave each other something—something good, so our parting should at least be… friendly.’
‘Ah, you mean we should shake hands?’ Nicholas derided, putting his luggage down. ‘I’m in a hurry, Bridget.’
‘Oh, forget it.’ She gave up the idea but held on to the only hope she had. ‘Then I just want to remind you that I’ll be here until Saturday night.’
‘Bridget—’
‘I think I might be allowed to make a nuisance of myself just once, Nicholas,’ she said quickly, hearing the note of urgent protest.
‘I’ve nothing more to give you,’ he snapped.
‘Oh, you’ve already given me more than you know, I think,’ she informed him shakily.
‘Such as what?’ he prompted warily.
Bridget gestured helplessly. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. You’ve made me…believe in myself. As a woman, I mean.’
Suspicion was suddenly narrowing the grey eyes. ‘And just what do you think all this new confidence is going to do for you, sweetheart? Enable you to go home and seduce Loris, now that you know how it’s done? Or perhaps you’re planning to practise on Methven?’
Sophisticated Seduction Page 16