by Susan Napier
'Don’t you want to?' she asked, her normally husky voice made even deeper by her tense throat.
‘I think it's very evident what I want.' He glanced down at her feet in his lap with a twisted smile. 'But I'm not a foot-fetishist—to get it I'd need to be lying between your thighs rather than your heels... unless of course you're a particularly gymnastic lover...'
'Jack!' Just when she settled into her vamping role, he shocked her back into prudery.
'Well, darling, you did ask...' And to her further shock he grasped her ankles suddenly, lifting them from his lap and parting them far enough to make a space for himself as he turned in one lightning-swift motion to brace himself over her. He lay, his hips aligned with the hem of her skirt, which was pulled taut between her sprawled legs, his powerful arms caging her as he laughed into her flushed face.
'What's the matter, chérie'? Bitten off more than you can chew?'
‘I'd certainly like to bite you,' she burst out, temper mingling with a riot of desire.
His eyelids dropped. 'Mmm, exciting... you did that once before and I found it quite violently erotic. This time, though, I want you to take my clothes off first...'
Elizabeth's eyes widened, appalled and fascinated by the feverishly escalating indecency of the conversation. Not even in her most shamefully abandoned moments with Ryan had she invited such an explicit ravishment of words... but then Ryan had always been intent on controlling her fervour, rather than feeding it. He had never openly praised her body, preferring more cerebral compliments, and he had been a silent, serious lover. He had never confused her by blowing constantly hot and cold, always maintaining an elegant evenness of temperament that Elizabeth had adoringly tried to pattern herself on.
Ryan had been an intellectual whereas Jack was very much a decisive man of action, a fighter and a gambler, definitely not the kind of man that Elizabeth would normally contemplate any kind of relationship with, no matter how attractive. But the situation was most emphatically not normal, and although she could not afford to become involved with him it was necessary that he think she might. For a while at least she must give in to the forbidden allure of a dangerous liaison. And anyway, a little voice murmured in the wicked depths of her brain, after this abortive holiday was over she would never see him again. Whatever happened between them, no one but the two of them would ever know...
Elizabeth's breathing shortened in the knowledge of what she was thinking, her limbs felt heavy suddenly ... languid and weakly passive. Her hands, which had been clutched nervously to her breast, slid limply to her sides, palms opening beside her almost bare shoulders. She waited, curious, to see what he would dare do next...
'Do you know what the first rule of the game is, according to Ovid?'
Elizabeth had to moisten her lips to allow her dry mouth to work.
'No.' How could he expect her to worry about the wafflings of a centuries-dead Roman poet when she could feel the rise and fall of his chest lightly tantalising her breasts?
Jack shifted, his hip wedging against her inner thigh as he took his weight on one arm, and lifted the other to run his finger over her damp mouth as he told her with a lazy sexual arrogance, 'Women can always be caught.'
Elizabeth was wildly aroused but she wasn’t entirely lost to her female pride. 'So can men,' she countered huskily.
'So we can. So I suppose it boils down to who is more eager to do the catching in each individual case. Who is being caught here, Beth? You, or me?'
She vaguely sensed some trap that she needed to be wary of. ‘I don’t know, maybe we both are,' she said vaguely, as she wondered how different his hard mouth would taste when flavoured by champagne.
'So you see us as equals, then? I like that. It means fewer recriminations later,' he murmured cryptically. The hand moved from her mouth to lightly encircle her throat, then it tunnelled under the nape of her neck to pull at the pins that held her sophisticated hairstyle in place.
'The smooth swept-back look doesn’t suit you,' he told her, as he fanned the dark, rippling waves across the white leather behind her head. 'You should let your hair flow loose and untamed... like your body. There wasn’t a man there tonight who didn’t look at you in that scrap of black silk and want you. But you only looked back at one. Me.'
His eyes were dark with a triumphant satisfaction that made Elizabeth quiver. 'And you didn’t put on that sinful dress and shrug off several hundred thousand francs just because you wanted to talk, did you, Beth? That's the kind of dress a woman wears when she's feeling reckless, not when she wants to impress with her honesty. So what is it you really want from me tonight...?'
He was much too lucid for her to answer that question just yet. Elizabeth shifted slightly within the cage of his body, her stockinged leg rubbing against his.
'Don’t you know? And I thought you were a perceptive man,' she taunted huskily. The fingers of one hand curved nervously into her palm as she reached out with the other to trace the hard curve of his jaw. Then, imitating his action of a few moments ago, she slid her fingers into his hair and raked it loose from the narrow black band.
His eyes narrowed to silver slits as his head moved down until he was just a kiss away. 'You want me untamed too, Eliza-Beth? You have decided to stop fighting yourself and seek the pleasure that you know I can give you?'
Such beautiful, breathtaking arrogance. Damn it, didn’t he ever stop asking questions and just accept...? Elizabeth's impatience burst the bounds of her control and her hand flattened against his scalp, tugging him that last, precious inch.
He didn’t taste any different, only better, the flavour of him melting over her tongue, the first sip only exacerbating the hunger that drove her to wind both arms around his neck and twist her mouth under his, needing the co-operation that was strangely lacking. Oh, God, was her desperate eagerness turning him off? She tensed as the old feeling of shame impinged on her consciousness.
As if her wavering doubt communicated itself to him Jack suddenly threw off his passiveness and took full command of the intimate embrace, his hand cupping her jaw as he plunged his tongue into her mouth, biting and sucking at the soft innermost recesses with a gentle savagery that utterly shattered her former notions of what a kiss could be. His hair, freed from her fingers, curtained their joined mouths, shrouding them in a private world of cleanly fragrant darkness.
'Oh!' When his mouth broke away from hers she was bereft, but only until she felt the warm, moist progression down the arch of her throat to the V of her collarbone. She sighed with pleasure as the brush of his mouth was accompanied by the silky stroke of his hair, like the stroke of a fur glove on her sensitive skin.
'You like that, chérie?’ He marched a little string of kisses over the twin swells of her breasts, just above the line of black fabric that hid their full splendour from his view. Elizabeth arched slightly, fighting the restriction of the tight skirt that trapped her extended legs outside his, yearning for more. He re-traced the kisses, this time taking small, stinging bites of the rosy flesh.
'Oh!'
‘Is that all you can say?' His voice was thick with teasing passion at her wordless cry. 'For such a well read woman you're a very inarticulate lover, chérie. Don’t you want to tell me what you're feeling, what I should do?'
‘I didn’t realise you needed instruction,' Elizabeth gasped shakily as he licked and sucked at the tiny red marks his teeth had grazed upon her skin. Inside the black silk her breasts felt unbearably hot and tight, the nipples chafing against their luxurious wrapping. Why, oh, why wouldn’t he touch her properly ... as he must know that she needed to be touched? She was afraid that if she tried to use words she wouldn’t be able to stop, that the helpless tide of her feelings would flood away with her. Soon she would make him say the words that she had planned to seduce from him, but for now she just wanted to steal something for herself... She couldn’t tell him, but she could show him...
Her eyes deepened from violet to indigo as
she fiercely attacked the pearl buttons of his shirt, operating purely on touch as his bent head masked her sight, his skilled mouth still rousing her aching frustration.
'Easy, darling,' he murmured, as she tried to pull the edges of his shirt apart before it was fully unbuttoned. 'Here, let me.' He knelt to shed his cuff-links and peel off the offending garment, grasping her by the waist and holding her still as she would have arched up painfully to press herself against his hair-roughened chest. 'You predicted I would lose my shirt tonight, didn’t you, chérie?' he stated with gravelly satisfaction as he looked down at her lush body. ‘I wouldn’t have objected to playing if I'd known you meant it so literally.'
'Please...' Dizziness swam in her head as she pleaded for deliverance. His grip on her waist was so tight that she thought she was going to faint, his fingers wrapping around her back to splay across her bare skin, his thumbs pressing into her belly, testing its firm resilience, causing a scalding heat to pool there.
'Please what?' he whispered, his hands moving obligingly from her waist to rest on her parted thighs, sliding slowly up under the taut black silk hem to stroke the borderline where stocking met tender satin skin.
'Oh!' She arched convulsively, forgetting the naive limits she had set for how far she would let him go, forgetting everything but the intense pleasure exploding through her senses, sending her nervous system into total overload.
'Please what?' His fingers pressed under the suspender straps, lightly tugging them in a way that pulled at muscles deep inside her abdomen. She felt hot and cold both at once and marvellously alive in a way she never had before.
'Oh, don’t-' she begged, as his marvellous hands moved away again and hovered, as if he was wondering what part of her to torture with pleasure next. She put her hands on his shoulders, feeling them thicken and bunch as she unconsciously guided him.
'Don’t what? Do this?' This time his finger hooked into the indiscreet slit in the centre of her bodice and created a wicked tension as he pulled, lifting her towards him. He bent and inhaled the fragrant heat that rose from between her breasts. Her eyes closed, her head fell back and his murmur was like tearing silk in her ears. 'Tell me... tell me everything you like, Eliza-Beth, every wish, every fantasy and I'll give it to you... all of it... anything, everything you want...'
'A-anything?' Elizabeth knew that there was a proper answer for that, something she was prepared to say, but then his finger exerted an ounce more pressure and she felt the ruffle on her bodice scrape one rigid nipple, exposing it to the cool night air. And his mouth... it was... soon he would... and it would be too late...
‘I don’t... I want—' Her mind struggled to reassert its ascendancy over the tumultuous revolution of her body, capable only of dealing in the simplest of one-syllable concepts. 'Time...'
His breath was exquisitely damp and hot on her swollen nipple.
'Time?'
The temptation to deny her brief return to sanity was almost overwhelming. The need for that moist, intimate caress was excruciatingly intense. ‘I.. .yes.'
'Time for what?'
‘I—I don’t remember...' Opening her eyes had been a mistake. He filled her vision, rearing over her—big, powerful, starkly aroused, his face raw with disbelief and a smouldering sexual anger. He was wild for her, she realised achingly, tenderly, and in a way that Ryan had never been. She would never compare the two men again.
'Jack—' She touched his cheek and he snapped his head to the side, and bit her finger.
'Ouch!' She jerked back and struggled to sit up. 'That hurt!'
'Let me make it better,' he growled savagely, grabbing her fluttering hand and placing her stinging finger in his mouth. He sucked strongly, rhythmically, and she shivered at the explicitness of the act that was designed to dominate rather than soothe.
'Better?' He let her go and smiled into her glazed purple eyes, a dangerous, feral smile that was still on his lips when he bent and did the same to her peaked nipple, pulling the bodice down so that he had complete access to the rosy ripeness, taking it roughly between his teeth and teasing it with his tongue before drawing it deep into his scalding mouth.
Her hoarse cry of shock and pleasure seemed to appease his desire to punish, for the powerful wet suction settled to a slow, leisurely suckling that was devastatingly effective at re-establishing his supremacy.
She was drenched with blinding delight as he paid equally lavish attention to her other breast and suddenly nothing mattered any more but pleasing him as he was pleasing her, loving and being loved as she had longed to be in her most secret dreams, fiercely and without inhibition, by a man who gloried in the violence of her strongly passionate nature.
But not completely mindlessly. As his fingers wrenched at the concealed zip in the side of her dress, Jack forced her to meet his hotly arrogant gaze.
'Yes?'
She blazed her answer at him. Even to ask was an unendurable delay. 'Yes, oh, yes...'
She raged like a storm in his arms, one that he rode in a triumphant frenzy of desire, tearing off their clothes as his body melted into hers, his groans and wild, erotic urgings spurring her further, faster, deeper towards the heart of the whirlwind that had turbulently engulfed them both. The first convulsive paroxysm of pleasure barely checked his extravagant pace as he pursued her from peak to peak until she cried out in an ecstasy of exhaustion.
He rolled on to his side and pulled her body hard against him until her trembling eased, his skin as slick and moist as the leather beneath them. His breathing was ragged and harsh as he rubbed her tender back with his big hand, but when he finally spoke it wasn’t to utter words of love.
'Sex can be a formidable weapon, chérie, if you can wield it with the proper detachment. You can’t,' he added ruthlessly. 'You never will. You're too easily aroused—No!' He muffled her protest by smothering her mouth with a rough kiss. ‘I don’t mean in the sense of being promiscuous, I mean because your responses are too honest, you're too sensuous a woman to be cold and calculating, too honourable to be comfortable with deception—your feelings and emotions will ultimately always give you away.'
She shuddered with despair at the awful thought and he tilted her head with a firm hand under her chin so that he could see her face.
His voice gentled at her bewildered misery. ‘Is that why you suddenly got cold feet, Beth? Because you were afraid of the intensity of what you were feeling? But now you know that you have nothing to be afraid of with me as your lover. There need be no more barriers between us...'
Elizabeth guiltily avoided his eyes as she pulled out of his softened grasp and scrambled off the couch, hastily pulling on her panties and dress, stuffing her stockings into her small clutch-bag and smoothing out the creases in her skirt, wishing she could as easily straighten out her confused tangle of emotions regarding this man. Her body aching with sweet satiation, she couldn’t regret what had happened, but where did they go from here?
There was nowhere to go. He wasn’t asking for her love and she mustn’t offer it. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted anyone—or anything—before in her whole life. But there were too many strikes against them—not the least that he thought that she was honourable. The compliment made her ill when she thought about how she was abusing his trust, his honour.
He would hate her when he found out and hopefully the weight of his contempt would crush whatever foolish seeds their glorious lovemaking had planted in her heart. She flushed at the uneasy knowledge that in hiding the truth from him she was also trying to hide from herself...
She was so lost in her silent agony that she didn’t notice his curiosity sharpen at her transparently guilty expression and the dreaming sadness with which she attempted to banish the disordered evidence of their lovemaking. Slowly he followed her example, waiting until she was edging for the door before saying abruptly, 'How would you like to spend the day with me again tomorrow?'
His question was so far from what she had expected that Eliza
beth gaped at him. 'Tomorrow?'
'The day following this night,' he clarified limpidly.
'Tomorrow?' She couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. 'But... tomorrow aren’t you having lunch with your grandfather?'
It was said in tones of such riveting casualness that Jack almost laughed, except all of a sudden he was not feeling half as amused as he had a few moments before.
'So I am.' His voice was lightly musing, as if considering the matter.
Now Elizabeth knew how a prostitute felt. She had sold the temporary use of her body for this moment and now she had to force herself to take the unexpected opportunity for payment.
'Perhaps I could come with you,' she said timidly. ‘I mean, I'd be very interested in seeing the St Clair estate...'
'Yes, I remember you expressing your interest on the way over from the mainland,' he murmured, and Elizabeth discovered she was winding her fingers nervously in her hair. Hurriedly she put her shaking hands behind her back.
'However, I think I mentioned my grandfather's been ill. He's not up to meeting strangers.'
'Oh.' Say something, Elizabeth. Give him a pout and say, 'Darling, after tonight surely I'm not a stranger...'
Elizabeth's hands wrung nervously behind her back, wondering whether it was a good sign that Jack didn’t seem to be subjecting her to his interrogating stare. He was looking thoughtfully past her... in to the mirror that she had failed to notice on the opposite side of the room.
Finally Elizabeth forced herself to make the only decision she could. The honour of the Lambs had to come first. She might have fallen in love with Jack but she loved her family. She stopped wringing and firmly crossed the fingers of her concealed left hand.
‘I wouldn’t disturb your grandfather. I'd be happy to just have a look around the house and grounds...'
'Would you?' he murmured, still staring absently over her shoulder.
She crossed the fingers of her right hand, for extra protection. 'Of course.' She swallowed as his eyes suddenly swivelled back to her face. 'And it would mean we could spend some more time ‘I—together...'