by Penny Jordan
This time there was no pretending to herself that what she was feeling was just an aberration, that what was happening was something outside her control that she didn’t really want. She was responding to him, kissing him with a starving hunger she couldn’t even try to hide, responding to the fierce, demanding pressure of his mouth in an answer to its question, in a manner as old as time itself… Wanting him, needing him, loving him so intensely that the ache inside her body was an actual physical pain.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t… It isn’t right,’ she tried to whisper to him between frantic kisses, but both his hands were cupping her face now, his mouth biting hungrily at hers as she felt the rapid thud of his heart and the aroused tension of his body.
‘Of course it’s right,’ she heard him whisper back rawly. ‘What isn’t right is that we should be standing here like a couple of teenagers when… Let me come home with you, Abbie. There’s so much we need to say to one another—so much we need to—’
‘You mean we still haven’t talked about Cathy’s wedding?’ she asked him dizzily.
She felt dazed, confused almost, by the speed with which things had happened. Her brain told her that she needed time, but her body had more urgent demands and pressed close to Sam’s, feeling its every movement, knowing that already he was aroused and that…
‘That is one thing we have to discuss,’ Sam agreed throatily, ‘but not what I had in mind. You do realise, don’t you,’ he warned her, ‘that if we stay here very much longer, if I hold you like this much longer, it isn’t going to be a question of whether we make love, but where? And my preference, as you may remember, has always been for a large, comfortable bed and the privacy to explore and enjoy your body, somewhere where—’
‘Sam, stop it,’ Abbie demanded breathlessly. ‘You can’t…you mustn’t. How can this be happening?’ she asked him in bewilderment. ‘It isn’t… I don’t…’
‘It’s happening because, no matter how much we might try to deny it cerebrally, our bodies, our emotions still need and want each other…’
‘No,’ Abbie tried to protest, but she knew she was wasting her breath. Right now there was nothing…nothing she wanted more than to feel Sam’s naked body above her, around her, within her.
‘Abbie, if you don’t stop looking at me like that, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?’ she heard Sam groaning in warning.
‘We could…we could go back home…to my house,’ she agreed tentatively, aware both of the other couple’s interest in them and of her own growing sense of excitement and urgency.
‘But,’ she added quickly, ‘just…just to talk about Cathy and the wedding, that’s all.’
‘Whatever you want,’ Sam agreed, but the look he gave her as he gently helped her into her car said that he knew exactly what it was that she wanted, and that he wanted it as well, and that it had nothing to do with discussing any plans for Cathy’s wedding.
It wasn’t until she had actually driven home, parked her car in her drive and seen the lights of Sam’s car as he pulled in behind her that the full meaning of what she had invited struck her. But by then it was too late. Sam was getting out of his car, and as she followed suit and stood waiting for him her body was seized by a flood of weakening emotions that made it impossible for her to move. Fatalistically, she watched him walk towards her, knowing that it was too late now to stop what had been set in motion.
As Sam reached her he touched her face gently and then took her house keys from her nerveless fingers, holding her cold hand in the oddly reassuring warmth of his as he unlocked the door and then, almost tenderly, urged her inside.
Just inside the kitchen she paused, her voice husky and hesitant as she pleaded, ‘We don’t really need to talk about…about the wedding now, do we? After all, Cathy and Stuart haven’t even set a proper formal date yet.’
‘Second thoughts?’ Sam asked her softly.
Abbie couldn’t pretend not to know what he meant.
‘That was…that was the whole purpose of our meeting,’ she reminded him shakily.
‘It was, I agree,’ Sam replied semi-cryptically. ‘But…’
‘But what?’ Abbie demanded, reminding herself that she was an adult and that attack was supposed to be the best means of defence. She was no longer a woman who could allow herself to take a passive role in a relationship, or in life itself.
‘Do you really need to ask?’ Sam derided her gently. ‘Didn’t what happened between us earlier make it obvious?’
‘Nothing happened,’ Abbie denied hastily, hurriedly finding some measure of release from the tension gripping her by going to fill the kettle, an automatic action which common sense warned her was not a logical or wise thing to do when she was desperately regretting allowing Sam to come back with her and wishing that he would leave.
‘Oh, no? Tell that to my body,’ Sam drawled self-mockingly, and then made her heart stand still and panic explode inside her as he added devastatingly, ‘And your own. After all,’ he went on quietly, ‘whatever else went wrong between us, whatever other mistakes I might have made, sexually, things were…
‘Do you have any idea what it felt like?’ he demanded, the harshness in his voice shocking her. ‘To sleep alone in the same bed where only hours before you had lain there with me, making those soft, keening sounds of pleasure you always made when we made love, making those delicious, satisfied little gasps that meant that you wanted me. Have you any idea of what it felt like, waking up in an empty, cold bed without you beside me… reaching out for you and not finding you there? Did you know that in the night, in your sleep, you used to snuggle up next to me, curling your body just as tightly as you could into mine, as though you couldn’t bear to break the contact with me? I used to lie there watching you, enjoying the pleasure of knowing how completely mine you were and how much I loved you.’
Something in the way he was looking at her, in the dark sombreness of his eyes which matched the starkly melancholic tone of his voice, filled Abbie with a mixture of achingly painful emotions. His words brought back feelings she had kept hidden. Not just from others, but from herself as well. Because she hadn’t been able to bear to acknowledge that she felt them. Instead she had focused and held onto her anger, needing it to sustain her, to cling to, because if she hadn’t…if she had allowed herself to acknowledge those other feelings, those other pains, she just wouldn’t have been able to survive.
And now Sam was forcing her to remember them, forcing her to acknowledge a pain so intense and so overpowering that she instinctively fought to withdraw from it and deny it, panic flooding through her as she turned to face him like an animal at bay, crying out bitterly, ‘No, you did not love me. If you had you would never have doubted me, never have believed that I’d been unfaithful to you. You talk about how you felt. What do you imagine your rejection…your accusations did to me? You didn’t love me. You couldn’t have done. You…’
‘Abbie, you’re wrong. I did…’
She had said the wrong thing, done the wrong thing, Abbie recognised as Sam crossed the distance between them, taking hold of her upper arms as he spoke urgently to her.
‘No. No, you didn’t,’ she denied. ‘You couldn’t have done…’
She knew he must have heard the panic in her voice, and her whole body started to tremble as he demanded, ‘Why do you say that? Why is it so important to you to believe that I didn’t love you? I freely acknowledge that the worst, the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life was to deny my own child, but the last thing I’m going to do now is to compound that betrayal by lying about the feelings, the love I had for you.’
‘It wasn’t love…it was just sex,’ Abbie insisted frantically.
‘Just sex… For you, maybe,’ Sam told her quietly. ‘But not for me…never for me. Was that it? Was that why you were able to walk away from me so easily, Abbie—because it was only sex so far as you were concerned?’ he asked her bitterly.
To walk away from him so
easily. Abbie just managed to catch back a sob of mingled anguish and hysteria. If only he knew… If only he knew just what she had suffered…just how much damage had been done—how hard it had been for her to go on without him. The only thing, the only person who had kept her going had been Cathy…the knowledge that she had to be strong, that she had to survive for Cathy’s sake. And even then…
She shivered, remembering the stern warning the doctor had given her that if she didn’t start eating properly and looking after herself better she was in real danger of losing her baby. That had been in the early weeks after the break-up, when the very thought of food, never mind the sight and taste of it, had made her feel acutely nauseous. When all she had seemed to do was to cry and mourn the loss of her love, and when all she had wanted was to escape from the too heavy burden of her heartache and misery… And this was what Sam called easy…
Easy. Even now, after all these years, the muffled echoes of her old pain still rumbled threateningly in the distance, making her want to cower and shiver, to hide herself from the devastating effect of that threat like a small child cowering in terror from the first warning rumble of thunder. But she wasn’t going to let him see that—no, not for a minute. Her pride wouldn’t allow her to. Tilting her chin, she made herself look at him with forced calm.
‘I suppose it must have been. After all, at that age it’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? And I was after all particularly inexperienced and naive,’ she added disparagingly. ‘Sex and love, so far as I was concerned then, were the same thing…’
‘But now, of course, you do know the difference. Is that it?’ Sam challenged her grimly.
As she heard the suppressed anger in his voice Abbie looked up at him, her heart jolting heavily against her ribs at the look in his eyes. Somehow, somewhere, she had made a misjudgement, and a bad one, she recognised. But it was too late now to regret or recall what she had already said. She could only go on, or give in, and she certainly wasn’t going to do that.
‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ she agreed coolly, her voice only giving the smallest betraying tremble as she tried to pull herself free of his grip. ‘It would be a rather odd thing if I hadn’t, don’t you think?’ she added for good measure. The last thing she wanted to let him guess was that there hadn’t been any man in her life since him, that when she woke up in the night, her body aching, her bed empty…
‘Good, then you’ll know exactly what this is, then, won’t you?’ she heard Sam saying to her as, instead of releasing her as she expected, he tightened his hold on her, drawing her back against his body, lowering his head towards her own.
Desperately Abbie tried to turn her face to one side, to avoid and escape what she knew was going to happen, but Sam anticipated her, releasing her arm and holding the side of her head and face instead, his palm against her jaw, his fingertips in her hair as he held her still.
The feel of his warm breath against her face made the whole of her body tremble in self-betrayal, her vocal denial of what she knew was going to happen a small, explosive sound that held more panic than any real insistence, Abbie recognised.
‘Which does your experience tell you that this is, Abbie?’ Sam demanded savagely against her mouth.
‘I know exactly what it is,’ she threw equally fiercely back at him. ‘But you can’t—’
‘If you know, then I don’t have to make any excuses for myself, do I?’ Sam interrupted her thickly. ‘And, since I can’t deceive you, there isn’t any point in any pretence between us, is there…?’
Abbie tried to tell him that so far as she was concerned there wasn’t any point, any reason for there to be anything between them any more, but as soon as she opened her mouth Sam covered it with his own.
A shocking feeling of pleasure and familiarity swamped her, and Abbie felt her body respond to the demanding pressure of his mouth.
This was no tentative wooing kiss such as a new lover might give; this was the kiss of a man who felt he had no need for any preliminary skirmishes—the kind of kiss that was permissible, acceptable, only between established and very passionate lovers, Abbie acknowledged dizzily as she tried to withdraw from the sensual intimacy of Sam’s kiss and discovered, with heart-numbing pain, that not only was he preventing her from doing so but her own body was also aiding and abetting him.
How could her lips be clinging so wantonly to his? How could they be opening, softening, her tongue shyly meeting the much more rhythmic and far deeper thrusts of his? How could her body be quivering, melting, yielding so obviously and so easily beneath the silent demands of his kiss?
His kiss… It wasn’t just a kiss he was imposing on her wretchedly vulnerable and traitorous senses, it was…it was…a seduction…a passion…a possession of breathtaking magnitude and barefaced daring, Abbie acknowledged shakily as Sam drew her even closer to his body. His hands slid down over her back, shaping the curve of her waist, her hips, cupping the soft roundness of her buttocks as he…
Beneath his mouth she gave a small moan of protest, her whole body shuddering in shocked reaction as he responded to its awareness of him with an even deeper and more explicitly sensual thrusting of his tongue, matched by the increasingly urgent movement of his hips—his groin against the vulnerable softness of her own body.
She was literally trembling helplessly from head to foot, Abbie recognised, totally incapable of controlling or concealing her physical reaction to him. And that was just the outer sign of her physical awareness of him… just the tip of the physical iceberg he had aroused within her—if iceberg was the correct term to describe a feeling that was generating so much heat.
How long was it since her body had experienced that instantly and dismayingly familiar throbbing ache? That wanton driving urge to press herself even closer to him, to match the movement of his body with some equally sensually explicit movements of her own, to…to reach out and touch him, to press her lips against his skin, to the damp hollow at the base of his throat where the tiny beads of sexually generated sweat collected, to stroke her fingertips through the soft darkness of the body hair that darkened his chest, and all the while to feel her own excitement and urgency increasing in time to match his whilst she teased him…
While she teased both of them with little, little strokes and licks, watching the increasingly open throb of the pulse at the base of his throat, knowing that its urgency was matched, more than matched, by the equally powerful and far, far more openly erotic pulsing of another part of his body, knowing that when she finally lowered her head and teased that place…that part…with the tip of her tongue, in the same way that she was his throat, he would be completely unable to hold back his moan of anguished pleasure in what she was doing.
Inwardly, secretly, her own desire would be fed and multiplied by the sense of power in her womanhood that it gave her to know how much she could arouse him, how close to the edge of his self-control she could drive him, how intense the degree of pleasure she could give him just by the delicate brush of her lips and tongue…
How long? Too long…too long…
Abbie heard herself moaning helplessly in need, her body held in thrall to the powerful pull of her dangerous memories, overriding the protective mechanism of her brain as it struggled to stop what was happening to her. Instinctively she moved closer to Sam, her hips mirroring the movement of his, her hands sliding up over his shoulders and then down over his back, feeling the hard-packed muscles, still surely as strong and taut as they had ever been, his waist just as narrow, his buttocks…
Abbie could feel the heat engulfing her as her hands, her fingers, ignoring the shocked recoil of her brain, dug into the deliciously hard muscles, kneading with familiar erotic intimacy. What was it about that part of a man’s anatomy that made it such a pleasure to touch and hold onto?
The same instinct that made a man seek out the soft warmth of a woman’s breasts? Abbie wondered in dazed, sensual bemusement as Sam, almost as though he had read and then acted upon her own thoughts, c
upped hers in his hands, caressing them gently at first and then, as her mouth opened eagerly beneath his in uncontrollable and uninhibited pleasure at the way he was touching her, more urgently, more possessively. Abbie started as she felt her nipples stiffen in overjoyed response to his touch.
How was it that her body was so immediately, so overwhelmingly responsive to his touch? Especially when, in all the years they had been apart, she had been so sure, so convinced that when he had destroyed their love he had destroyed her desire for him, her ability to respond to him as well. After all, how could she be physically aroused by a man she didn’t love…couldn’t love? How could he still want a woman he believed had deceived him…a woman he couldn’t trust?
How could either of them now be here like this—together—their bodies as urgent and hot for one another as they had been all those years ago? Wanting the other with all the impatient, hot-blooded eagerness and desire she remembered and had tried so hard to forget. But now, added to that youthful eagerness, there was a sharp-edged hunger…a knowledge that came from maturity and a full awareness of themselves and their sexuality.
The shy young teenager who had so gladly allowed Sam to help her to explore and get to know her own sexuality had been replaced by a woman of equal sexual potency, Abbie recognised, an active and not a passive partner in love’s sensual dance. A woman whose desire was suddenly so strong and all-consuming that she herself was taken totally off guard by its demanding power.
She could feel Sam starting to release her mouth, his tongue withdrawing from its intimacy with her, and immediately she made a low sound of protest deep in her throat, closing her lips around it and sucking sensually on it, her teeth biting passionately at his bottom lip as she felt the violent surge of response jolt through his body.