Double Dealing

by Jayne Castle

  Gabriel thought about that kind of loyalty. Eric had claimed he’d trust his sister with his life. The embers glowed on the hearth for a few more minutes as Gabriel followed the path of his own logic to its ultimate conclusion.

  He wanted that kind of loyalty for himself.

  With an unfathomable hunger, Gabriel realized abruptly that he longed to possess Samantha’s loyalty. He wanted to be able to say he could trust her with his life, his fortune, his honor.

  His large, competent hand curled into a fist as it rested on the tattered arm of the chair. In return for those invaluable gifts he was prepared to protect her. He would keep her safely out of the clutches of men like William Oakes or Eric Thorndyke. Her first loyalty would he with Gabriel Sinclair. After that fact was established in her head, she would no longer be vulnerable to others.

  The wave of possessiveness and masculine hunger rolled over him in a pounding fury, leaving behind a cold determination that was shocking in its intensity. He had known he wanted Samantha, had realized he wanted to guard her from the dangers her own impulsive nature would lead her into, but he hadn’t admitted until now just how completely he wanted to claim her.

  He wanted to be able to sit at the dinner table and casually announce with absolute conviction that Samantha owed her loyalty first and foremost to him, Gabriel Sinclair. Then he would tell mooching half brothers like Eric Thorndyke to get lost. Samantha was no longer vulnerable to men who would take advantage of her.

  Loyalty. Nerve. Trust. He’d married once without taking any of those qualities into consideration. He’d married for other kinds of reasons entirely. Thoughts of Glenna stirred up a few ashes in his mind now, but no glowing embers. It was difficult to feel any warmth for a woman who’d demonstrated no bonds of courage or trust.

  What Glenna had going for her had seemed enough at the time. She was a beauty. Gabriel remembered the sight of her undressing for bed, her long black hair falling down the length of her slender back as she brushed it in front of the mirror. Green eyes that reminded him of a cat had watched him in the mirror, reflecting Glenna’s knowledge of what her naked image did to him.

  Yes, they reflected her awareness of her own sensual beauty, but those eyes had never mirrored a passion of her own; merely a pleased satisfaction at the knowledge of her power. Gabriel allowed himself to luxuriate in the memory of the undisguised desire and need which had blazed in Samantha’s eyes that night in California. His body grew warm just at the thought.

  Glenna’s charms were only skin deep. Gabriel had soon grown frustrated and then bored with the games she played in bed. After a while her beauty had no longer commanded his body’s reaction. By the time the political and social disaster had engulfed his father, there had been little left of the marriage to Glenna. She had taken quick action to avoid being caught up in the widening ripples of the Sinclair family financial calamity and ensuing social humiliation. Weston Sinclair’s political career had been destroyed. Glenna had felt no loyalty toward Gabriel who, by the mere fact that he was Weston Sinclair’s son, had been involved in his father’s scandal. She had left town the day the first headlines had hit the newspapers and had filed for divorce from the sanctuary of her parents’ Boston home. Gabriel had been too busy trying to deal with disaster to bother fighting for a woman who owed her loyalty to no one but herself.

  The factor which had always been missing in his relationships with women, he realized, was commitment. He supposed he couldn’t really blame a woman for not wanting to commit herself completely to a man, especially a man such as himself. His mouth tightened. But that didn’t lessen the fact that he wanted that kind of commitment from Samantha. He was proud enough, egotistical enough, uncompromising enough, to go after it.

  She had only whetted his appetite with their night of lovemaking. Now he ached for a far more thorough commitment. He wanted her to give herself completely, no strings attached.

  Which, when you thought about it, was one hell of an unlikely possibility, given the fact that Samantha Maitland had been raised to be an independent woman who didn’t need a man. How was he supposed to go about asking this creature of nerve and dash and energy to yield herself to a man who offered a plodding sort of protection in return?

  He got the distinct impression that Samantha wasn’t even interested in being protected. She was far too accustomed to standing on her own two feet. She’d fight any man who tried to tell her she needed him.

  With a decisive surge of resolute energy, Gabriel thrust aside the printouts and got to his feet. Out of habitual caution he checked the screen on the fireplace, closing it properly, and then he walked through the living room, turning out lights in order.

  When he reached the staircase, he started up the steps with a firm, steady pace that reflected his own inner decision. He knew he had a battle on his hands taming Samantha on an intellectual level, but his body remembered all too well that he had already gained her physical surrender. He could at least give himself the satisfaction of having that much again. His pulse began to pound heavily as he contemplated Samantha’s room at the top of the stairs.

  In the darkness Samantha lay very still, listening to the sound of Gabriel’s footsteps on the staircase. For an hour and a half now she had been shifting restlessly in bed, her tension too great to allow for sleep. She should have been exhausted after being up most of the previous night. She was exhausted.

  But the thought of Gabriel Sinclair’s presence in her home was more than enough to keep her awake. He wanted her. She had seen it in his eyes the moment she had opened the door, had felt her own reaction to the desire in him.

  It was crazy, idiotic, to lie here wondering if he would try her door or go on down the hall to his own room. What was the matter with her? She had barely regained some small edge of control in their precariously balanced relationship. How incredibly foolish it was to even think about succumbing once again to the undeniable attraction which had flared between them.

  Damn it, she thought, sitting up to pound the pillow into a more comfortable shape; everything was getting so complicated. What would Vera say if she saw the emotional chaos her daughter was in because of a man?

  That thought hardened Samantha’s resolve. She was a fully adult woman, in charge of her life and of her revenge. Furthermore, she had her hands full at the moment helping Eric out of his mess. She had no business lying anxiously awake like some primitive woman a cave awaiting the arrival of the male animal who owned her.

  That image was ludicrous enough and sufficiently mortifying to restore her tension-distorted perspective. Cave woman, indeed! Samantha smiled grimly to herself and flopped back down on the abused pillow.

  At precisely that instant Gabriel’s steady footsteps in the hall came to a halt, and Samantha’s door opened.

  Samantha lay blinking in the shaft of light which angled across her bed and silently cursed old houses with bedroom doors which no longer locked because the keys had been lost. She didn’t dare move. The atavistic reaction which causes a hunted creature to freeze at the approach of the predator seemed to have a hold on her muscles.

  Gabriel stood filling the doorway, his face in impenetrable shadow. His solid physical presence overwhelmed her senses, and Samantha remembered the way she had once let herself cling to him.

  “Gabriel?” she finally managed faintly, gathering the courage to try and break the ancient spell with a prosaic question. “What do you want?”

  He moved into the room and shut the door behind him, leaving them both in deep shadow. “Some answers,” he replied, coming slowly, inevitably toward the bed. “But most of the questions can wait until morning.”

  She looked up at him, trying to see his expression. He was a dark angel standing there beside her bed, half threat, half promise. “If the questions can wait,” she dared softly, her blood racing in her veins, “then why are you here now?”

  “The questions can wait, but I can’t,” he said simply. Then he calmly sat down on the edge of the bed and
began taking off his immaculately polished shoes.

  The very mundane, very routine action finally jarred Samantha out of her near-trance. “Gabriel!” she hissed, levering herself up on one elbow and clutching the sheet to her throat.

  “I told you. I can’t wait.” He tugged of one shoe and began unlacing the other.

  “Damn it!” she snapped. “You can’t just walk into my bedroom and start undressing as if we’ve been married forty years. I’ll yell for Eric if you don’t behave yourself We’re business partners, Gabriel Sinclair. Not lovers!”

  “We were lovers before we finalized the business side of this arrangement,” he drawled gently, setting the shoes very neatly to one side. He began unbuttoning his shirt. “As far as I’m concerned, nothing has changed with the first part of that arrangement.” He hung the shirt carefully on the bedpost of the old fourposter bed, standing up to take off his slacks. “I want you, Samantha. And I’ve been remembering the way you wanted me. I can’t get the thought of it out of my head.”

  “Gabriel, I mean it. I’ll call Eric.”

  “You don’t need Eric to protect you anymore, honey. You’ve got me. I’ll take care of you.” He stepped out of the slacks and folded them precisely across a nearby chair. “I know you don’t think you need me as anything except a silent partner, but I can make your body need me.” With one lean fingertip he flipped a tendril of hair from her shoulder. “I’m a patient man. I can wait for all of it.”

  Samantha’s eyes widened as he stood before her, unselfconscious, magnificently naked. Why did it have to be this man? After three years of wary aloofness toward all males, why did all her defenses collapse at his feet? She did feel like the primordial cave woman of her imagination. She had to break the hold he had on her senses before it was too late.

  “No, Gabriel, I won’t let you do this to me!” She flung the sheet aside, scrambling toward the far edge of the bed in a flurry of tangled nightgown and disarrayed hair. She wasn’t fleeing from a pleasant physical attraction. She was running from the chaotic depths of a passion which mystified her. Better to stay clear of it rather than risk being engulfed again as she had been that first time.

  The bed behind her gave beneath Gabriel’s weight. Just as she reached the unpromising safety of the opposite edge, his hand closed in a huge, gentle manacle around her wrist.

  Again, as she had that night on the beach, Samantha had the impression she had been chained to granite. A sense of inevitability overloaded her normal thought channels, blocking out coherent protest or angry diatribe.

  “Samantha, I need you. I’m going to make love to you tonight because on this level, at least, you belong to me. Don’t fight me, honey. Please don’t fight me!”

  He yanked her quite gently down onto her back. She sprawled on the sheet beneath him, violently aware of the extent of his arousal. He was a man of such powerful, uncompromising passion, she thought dazedly. And he had the power to tap an answering level of passion in her. Samantha stopped struggling, not only because it was useless against his rocklike strength but because she had known tonight was going to be like this the moment she had opened the door to him this afternoon.

  Carefully he pinned her wrists on either side of her head, lowering himself across her body until his chest crushed her small, soft breasts. She saw the dark glitter of intent in his eyes, and then his mouth was on hers. The groan of aroused hunger which emanated from deep in his throat caught at her senses.

  The musk of his body filled her senses as Samantha surrendered her lips. It was a heady, tantalizing scent, every bit as primitive as the sexual need in him. Against her thigh she could feel the unyielding pressure of his hardening body. His tongue thrust forcefully into her mouth, establishing a rhythm that presaged the cadence of another kind of penetration.

  “Oh, Gabriel, Gabriel!”

  “Did you really think I’d go quietly to my own room tonight, witch?” he growled, trapping her writhing legs with his heavy thigh. He nibbled hungrily along the line of her throat, one hand moving down her body to the point where her hiked-up nightgown revealed the curve of her hip. His incredibly sensitive hand clenched into her flesh and then moved aggressively to the shadowy tangle of hair between her legs. “My God, woman! How can you pretend not to want me when you’re already warm and wet and waiting?”

  Samantha shivered uncontrollably as he stroked his fingers into her heat. She was burning for him. How could she deny it? Convulsively she used her free hands to clutch at the hard, bronzed shoulders above her, and her lower body arched against his hand.

  As soon as he felt her response, he withdrew his probing fingers, leaving the damp, satin flower between her legs unsatisfied and aching with desire. She moaned and sank her teeth lightly into his shoulder. “Touch me again, Gabriel. Please touch me like that again.”

  “How do you want me to touch you, sweetheart?” he taunted coaxingly as he removed the tousled nightgown. He bent to catch hold of one budding nipple with his mouth, circling the dark aureole with the tip of his tongue. Samantha felt the fire flaring in the pit of her stomach and gasped aloud. “Take my hand and show me how you want me to touch you,” he repeated more urgently,

  “Gabriel!” His name was a small cry of protest against the boldness he asked of her and a plea for him to end the torment.

  “Show me,” he invited once more, his voice as heavy with passion as the rest of him. He spread his hand across her stomach as his tongue continued to tantalize her nipples. “I only want to please you, sweetheart.”

  “You only want to tease me,” she corrected a little savagely. “Gabriel, finish what you started. I ache so…!”

  “I always finish what I start.” He let the ball of his thumb travel through the tangled thatch of hair until it hovered just above the throbbing point of her desire. lust show me what you want.”

  Samantha thought she would go crazy with wanting. Desperately she arched her hips again, exultant when the action briefly brought his thumb to exactly the right place. “Oh, yes, yes!”

  But he withdrew his hand almost at once, seeming to take a blatant satisfaction in her pleading need. Through the haze of her mounting desire it dawned on Samantha exactly what was happening. Gabriel Sinclair was prepared to go on teasing her all night. He was going to make her pay for the attempt to deny her own attraction to him.

  “You’re punishing me!” she accused, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck and drawing his head close so that she could nip somewhat viciously at his ear. “You’re not a very kind man.”

  He groaned as she savaged his ear, a husky sound thick with masculine arousal. When her nails raked his back, he sucked in his breath, lifting his head just far enough so that she could see the warning glitter in his heavy-lidded eyes. “Being kind wouldn’t do me much good around you, witch. But then, kindness is not what I need from you either.”

  “What?” she hissed, her body’s reactions slipping out of her control as she responded to the dark intent in his eyes.

  “I need to hear you beg me to take you. I need to have you take my hand and guide it exactly where you want to be touched. I need to know that you know how badly you want me!” He punctuated each command with a light, stinging kiss on the soft undercurve of her breasts.

  And he wants to know I won’t be able to deny him again the way I tried to do this afternoon, Samantha thought wildly. But she was beyond worrying about the balance of power in this dangerous relationship. The future was the last thing she could think of now. There was only this burning need, this craving for the fulfillment he offered.

  “Damn you, Gabriel. Someday I’m going to–”

  “But not tonight,” he told her evenly.

  “No, not tonight… Touch me, angel. Here and here!” She felt the heat in her face as she grabbed his hand with an awkward desperation and led him to where she needed the feel of him. In the process she was made forcibly aware of the damp, flowing warmth between her legs, and the flush in her face grew hotter. He had a
way of forcing her to acknowledge her own earthy sexuality. It was both exciting and shocking. It was also a new experience. Her sensual encounters three years ago had all been conducted on a more sophisticated, more deliberately romantic plane. Drew Buchanan, bastard that he was, also made it a point to play the charming gentleman in bed. Samantha had never realized just how elemental the act of sex could be.

  Now the knowledge consumed her, stripping away any pretense or hope she might have had for keeping the encounter with Gabriel Sinclair on a light, not-to-be-taken- too-seriously basis. She gave herself to him once again in an act that she knew later would have to be labeled as surrender. At the moment it simply didn’t matter. The driving urge to satisfy and be satisfied overrode all caution. And there was no hope of disguising that urge.

  “Ah, Samantha,” Gabriel rasped against her flesh as he stroked and tantalized the softness of her. I think I would kill to keep you in my arms like this!”

  She heard the incredulity in his words and realized vaguely that he was as stunned by the level of their mutual passion as she was. Then she could think no more. He was sliding down her body, his warm tongue searching out the places his fingers had been thrilling.

  “Oh! Oh, my God, Gabriel!”

  Her thighs parted wantonly for him as he pushed them farther apart with his large hands. For excruciatingly exciting moments he drove her again and again to the brink of satisfaction, only to cease the delicious torment at the last possible instant.

  At last when she thought she could bear no more, he came to her, his heavy weight gliding up along her body like an irresistible ocean wave. His manhood forged a path through the petals of her flowering softness, and the answering cry in Samantha’s throat was silenced as Gabriel drank the sound of it from her lips.

  She was already so close to the edge that the slow, driving rhythm Gabriel established sent Samantha over almost immediately. She arched almost violently in his arms, felt the sting of his nails on her buttocks, and then gave herself up completely to the mindless climax of passion.