by Penny Jordan
It whistled through the air, biting into Justin’s pale soft flesh, drawing an almost inhuman scream of pain from the young man’s throat as he tried desperately to protect both himself and his lover.
The shock of what was happening held Jake motionless until he heard Justin’s scream. Fury galvanised him into action, and he leapt forward, snatching the whip from their grandfather, his strength far superior to that of the older man as he wrenched it out of his hand and then threw it the length of the stable.
‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’ Richard Fitton accused him bitterly, ignoring Justin and turning on Jake, his face congested with blood as he almost stammered in the intensity of his fury. ‘My grandson, a damned sodomite, and you knew… Get out!’ he demanded thickly. ‘Now… both of you. I never want to set eyes on the pair of you again.’
In the corner of the stable Justin was whimpering with pain and shock, while his lover cowered beside him. Without giving them another look, Richard Fitton walked out into the stableyard.
‘We can’t leave…’ Justin whimpered, appealing to Jake. ‘There’s nowhere we can go…’
Jake focused blindly on him. It hurt him that he should feel this welling of resentment and anger against his brother… How could he have been so stupid? He must have known the risks he was taking.
There was blood oozing from the welt across his buttocks and he was crying brokenly, and Jake, who had withstood many a worse beating without a murmur, felt tears stinging his own eyes… He felt Justin’s pain and yet at the same time he felt a strong sense of revulsion. He knew what Justin was, but the sight of him naked in the arms of his lover angered him… And not just angered him, but sickened him as well, he acknowledged as he felt the nausea burn his stomach and knew he had to escape from the stable before he betrayed himself completely.
Because of that need to escape, he didn’t focus properly on what Justin was saying, and, desperate for fresh air… for solitude… he said curtly, ‘Don’t worry about it… By tomorrow the old man will have forgotten he told you to go…’
He saw from the relief in Justin’s eyes that he had said the right thing. Privately he doubted that their grandfather would ever forgive or forget, but now wasn’t the time to tell Justin so. Despite his scholarship, Justin was heavily dependent on their grandfather for the allowance he gave him… an allowance which, though grudging, the old man considered to be Justin’s right as his eldest grandson and heir.
Wanting only to be alone, unable to face the thought of either drawing his grandfather’s fire or of giving Justin the comfort he knew his brother craved and needed, Jake headed for the horsebox and said curtly that he ought to deliver it back to its rightful owner.
As he got in the driver’s seat, Justin’s lover scrambled into his clothes and said jerkily to him, ‘Hang on a few minutes, will you?’ Then, ‘I think I’d better leave,’ he said awkwardly to Justin, who had followed him to the door of the stable. ‘I’ll just go and get my things…’
Jake knew he shouldn’t blame him, and that probably, had the circumstances been reversed, Justin would have behaved in exactly the same way as Leo, but he couldn’t help the fierce surge of resentment on his brother’s behalf that burned through him as he watched, cold-eyed and unhelpful, as Leo Saunders loaded his hastily packed case into the horsebox and got in beside him.
Jake drove him to the station in silence, refusing to respond to any of his attempts to make conversation. He knew that the other man was not his brother’s seducer, nor indeed his first lover, and that it had probably not even been his idea that they should make love in the stable, but because Justin was his brother, because he loved him and had all his life protected him, he couldn’t deal with the situation logically, and found that by the time he had dropped his unwanted passenger off outside the station he was feeling as violent towards him as their grandfather had been towards Justin.
Reversing the horsebox, he drove far too dangerously and far too fast down the narrow country lanes, heading for the home of the man who had loaned it to them.
He was a relative newcomer to the area, a businessman who had bought up a small local estate, which he ran as more of a hobby than anything else.
The small Queen Anne house had received the attentions of one of London’s most prestigious interior designers… the gardens had been meticulously planned and redesigned to provide the perfect backdrop for the house, and Jake’s mouth twisted bitterly as he drove down the immaculate drive, so very different from the drive at Fitton Park.
Here everything breathed order and wealth… when Jake drove the horsebox to the rear of the house, the courtyard was empty apart from a brilliant red Porsche car and a girl standing beside it.
She was a stranger to Jake, a smart, pert-looking girl with a narrow waist and generous breasts. She looked him over with frank curiosity as he got out of the Land Rover, surveying him slowly without the slightest degree of embarrassment.
He hadn’t seen her at the hunt; she was wearing not riding clothes but a longish suede skirt that made the most of her narrow waist and a silk shirt that showed quite plainly that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
‘If you’ve come to collect someone from the hunt, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong house,’ she told him assessingly. ‘They’re all over at Colonel Walters’s.’
Her accent was pure Sloane Ranger, her teeth sharp and white.
‘I’m not here to collect anyone,’ he told her curtly. ‘Just to return the box…’
Interest quickened in her eyes. ‘My father isn’t back yet. Why don’t you come inside and wait for him…? I could run you back later, if you like…’
He hadn’t given the fact that he had no means of getting home a thought in his urgent need to escape from the stable and its almost tangible emotions.
He didn’t want to go back, he acknowledged. He needed time before he could cope with what was waiting for him there.
She saw the hesitation in his eyes and smiled coaxingly.
‘Come on… it will be ages before Daddy gets back. I’m all on my own here and in need of a bit of company.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘God, I hate the country, don’t you?’
Without giving him a chance to reply, she swung round so that the soft suede flared round her hips and lovingly outlined the curves of her buttocks, and, without even realising what he was doing, Jake found that he was following her.
They went into the house via the rear entrance, into a kitchen almost as cavernous as the one at Fitton Park, but far, far better equipped.
A small, plump woman eyed them both disapprovingly as they walked in.
‘I thought you said you were going out, Miss Saffron,’ she complained. ‘It’s my night off, you know, and if you want something to eat—–’
‘Stop fussing, Belle,’ the girl drawled arrogantly, and then, ignoring her, turned to Jake and took hold of his arm, pushing open the door with her free hand so that as they passed through it the softness of her breast was pressed against the hard muscle of his forearm.
The sensation disturbed him; he wanted to pull away, but pride wouldn’t allow him to do so.
‘Are you hungry?’ she asked him softly and suggestively once she had let the door swing closed behind them. ‘Because if so…’
She gave a small giggle, and Jake realised that the dizzying, provocative scent he was breathing in came from her, and that the way she was rubbing her body against his arm was not accidental at all, but perfectly deliberate.
He was not totally inexperienced, although his contact with the opposite sex had been limited to half a dozen or so fumbled exchanges at various Christmas parties.
He had, up until now, been warily cautious about his own sexuality. Initially there had been a need to prove that he was not like his brother, but once he had realised that he felt no desire at all for any kind of sexual relationship with his own sex, he had realised that what mattered to him most was his own ability to feel at ease with himself rather than any need to prove t
o others that he was rampantly heterosexual.
After the various school holidays he had listened closely to the inevitable sexual boastings of his contemporaries, but as yet the awkward and hasty fumblings with girls’ clothing, while they giggled and protested, came nowhere near affording him the satisfaction he got from masturbation.
Up until now the arousal of his body had been caused by his own actions, and he stopped dead in the corridor as she rubbed against him and for the first time his body responded violently and uncontrollably to the stimulation of someone else.
There was enough light for her to see what had happened to him, and she obviously felt none of his embarrassment, because she looked openly at him and then, lifting limpid eyes to his face, stretched out her hand and pressed it caressingly against him, saying huskily, ‘My goodness. I think we’d better do something about that, don’t you?’
The shock in his eyes made her laugh.
‘What’s wrong?’ she taunted. ‘Not frightened that Daddy might come home and find us, are you?’ She gave a tiny, dismissive shrug. ‘He won’t. He’ll be far too busy bonking the Colonel’s wife to care what we’re doing…’
There was an acid bitterness in her voice that Jake was still too young to wholly define. What he did know was that this girl was both bitter and unhappy, and that on closer inspection she was older than he had first supposed… probably at least twenty-one to his seventeen.
In fact Saffron Howard was twenty-five, although she knew she looked younger. She was also on the point of getting engaged to a very dull but rich young man whose father was something in the City, and for the sake of propriety and the future of her marriage she had been forced to limit her sexual activities exclusively to the partner who was going to be her husband.
Sexually Christopher bored her out of her mind. Once they were married she had no intention of being faithful. Christopher would make her an ideal husband—rich, indulgent, very much in love with her… She would be able to wind him round her little finger, but right now the ache between her thighs was far more important than her impending marriage, and every feminine instinct she possessed—and she possessed more than her fair share—told her that this silent boy-man would be able to more than adequately assuage it.
She took him upstairs to her own suite of rooms. Jake wasn’t stupid. He knew very well now what she wanted from him.
Normally he would have withdrawn from the situation, but for once his customary caution was overruled by his need to find something to stop him thinking about that scene in the stable.
There was a raw, burning anger inside him… a pain that wouldn’t let him go… and mingled with that pain a guilt that he had somehow let down both his brother and his grandfather… And oddly, despite the old man’s behaviour towards him, he was unwillingly fond of him, finding it far easier to understand Richard Fitton’s attitude and beliefs than Richard Fitton could understand his grandson’s.
Saffron’s suite of rooms consisted of an over-prettily furnished sitting-room, crammed with chintz-covered furniture in pastel pinks and blues, and matching curtains caught up with an over-abundance of bows and tassels; a bedroom decorated in the same style and, if anything even more chintzily feminine, her bathroom and dressing-room.
It was the sitting-room to which she led Jake, offering him a dainty little armchair in front of the open fire.
‘Good, Bert’s left plenty of logs,’ was her only remark as she invited him to sit down. ‘He and Belle think they can get away with murder with my father… He spoils them rotten… Just as well it’s their night off, though,’ she added suggestively.
A fierce thrill of sensation went through Jake as she trailed her fingers down over his thigh, and his body leapt in obvious response to her touch. She laughed softly, and made a sound in her throat not unlike a cat purring before digging her nails almost painfully into the hardness of his arousal.
She was leaning towards him, her breasts virtually on a level with his mouth.
He could see the hardness of her nipples pressing against her silk shirt. He could even see, through the fabric, the darkness of the areola surrounding them. He took a deep breath, the air rattling in his lungs. When she moved back from him, he felt dizzy and light-headed with arousal. His whole body pulsed with the intensity of it. He could feel himself, swollen and hard, pressing against the fabric of his jeans so that the pressure was almost painful.
As she stood back from him, her hands went to the buttons on her blouse. She unfastened them slowly, a catlike smile curling her mouth as she deliberately let the silky fabric slide down her arms so that only the top half of her breasts was exposed, the dark hardness of her nipples almost but not quite buried in the soft folds of silk.
Jake couldn’t take his eyes off her. He swallowed visibly, aching with excitement and apprehension.
Half of him didn’t really believe what was happening. It was as though this were a dream he had invented to stop himself thinking about the trauma of that scene in the stable.
‘What’s the matter?’ Saffron’s voice taunted him. ‘Never seen a woman’s breasts before?’
She laughed as he lied in denial.
‘What’s wrong, then?’ she whispered tormentingly against his ear, as her tongue shiveringly investigated the hard whorls of flesh, her breath making him shudder in a fresh paroxysm of pleasure. ‘If it isn’t that you don’t know what to do… perhaps it’s because you don’t like women…’
The taunt came too close to home, acting on him like acid applied to an open wound. He forgot his inexperience and awkwardness, reaching clumsily for her, spanning her ribcage with his hands while he buried his face in the provocative softness of her breasts… She made a tiny explosive sound which could have been laughter or could have been pain, taking his hands and moving them upwards from her ribcage to her breasts and then holding them there while she moved her body so that her nipples rubbed erotically against the palms of his hands. The sensation of her hard nipples moving sensuously against his flesh made pleasure burst through him, his body straining upwards to reach her, but she laughed and evaded him mockingly, whispering…
‘Ah, no, not yet. First you’ve got to show me that you know how to please a woman.’
And yet, while she denied him, her hand was deliberately caressing him through the taut fabric of his jeans, arousing the hard pulse within him to the point where he felt he was going to burst with the agony of what she was doing to him.
‘Not so impatient,’ she chided him. ‘There’s no hurry… Daddy won’t be back until morning.’
She was moving her body against him, rubbing herself sinuously against him. She made a soft purring sound in her throat and then bit sharply into his earlobe and complained throatily, ‘Come on… or do I have to do all the work myself?’ She felt him tense and moved away from him, watching him with mocking eyes as his skin darkened with excitement at the thought of what she was implying. ‘Ah, so that’s what turns you on, is it…?’
She had begun to realise that he was probably younger than she had first thought. His height and breadth of shoulder had initially deceived her, and now the sense of humour that was one of her major assets briefly lightened the fierce need burning inside her, and made her deride herself mentally, Trust you to find yourself the only man in a fifty-mile radius who’s probably still a virgin…
A virgin… There was something vaguely piquant about that thought… something that titillated and intrigued… She wondered what it would be like to teach him… to show him how… There was certainly nothing wrong with the equipment that nature had seen fit to bestow on him. She wondered wryly how old he was, and if there was a chance that what she was contemplating was illegal, and then banished the thought as the ache inside her intensified. She was pretty sure now that he was totally inexperienced, but because her own sexual drive was such that it often caused her to walk the very fine line that sometimes divided physical pleasure from physical pain, she didn’t let him know she had realised it.
‘I think we’d be more comfortable in my bedroom,’ she told him in that purring voice that raised goose-bumps all over his skin. ‘I perform so much better on a stage,’ she added obliquely, hiding her amusement when she saw that he had no idea what she meant.
Well, tonight was going to change all that. A virgin he might be, but that did not absolve him from paying for his initiation by learning how he could satisfy her… and learning that that was far more important than satisfying himself.
Numbly Jake followed her as she turned her back on him and walked through to the bedroom.
Here too a fire burned in the open grate… The bed was a four-poster, hung with chintz curtains, and beneath the cover, which she swished back, the bed was surprisingly covered in cool white linen.
She saw the way he looked at it and smiled wickedly at him.
‘What did you expect, black satin?’ She shook her head. ‘Linen is so much nicer… Come and feel.’
Idiotically, he did as she commanded, almost as though he were a puppet programmed to obey her commands, but he was barely aware of the cold crispness of the linen beneath his fingertips, because, as she stood next to him, she slowly and deliberately finished removing her blouse.
Her breasts were large and firm, the pigmentation of the areola around her nipples very dark in contrast to her creamy skin… Her flesh had a sheen which made him ache to reach out and touch it, and her nipples…
He found he had forgotten to breathe, and his chest constricted. He wondered what it would feel like to have her lying on top of him while he sucked hard on those hard nipples. The thought made him go hot and dizzy. She looked a little like a gypsy standing there with her bare breasts and her dark curls, her eyes sparkling with wanton amusement, the suede skirt clinging to her narrow waist.
Her legs were bare beneath it, and the pupils of his eyes dilated as he realised it.
She was tiny, barely five feet, he recognised absently as they stood together, the heat and scent coming off her body making him tremble.