by Penny Jordan
‘You know I do.’ Her voice shook slightly.
‘Then come with me now.’
Taking her hand he led her slowly out of the room and towards the stairs. They climbed them side by side in silence, all the time her heart thudding heavily against her breastbone. Last night she had tormented her fevered brain with the erotic imaginings of this moment, never dreaming that when it came she would feel more frightened than aroused.
At the top of the stairs Saul stopped to look at her, his eyes dark and shuttered. What did he see when he looked at her? What was he really thinking behind that shuttered exterior? She reached out towards him, suddenly nervous and uncertain, her fingers brushing his arm. The sombreness in his eyes shattered, melting in the heat that sprang to life within them, his arms came round her, lifting her, his mouth hot as it touched her throat.
‘Forget about this afternoon,’ he muttered thickly against her skin as he carried her into his bedroom. ‘Forget everything but how you feel about me and how I feel about you.’
He lowered her on to the bed, the mattress depressing slightly beneath her weight. He was using the room which had belonged to her parents, but no ghosts intruded on them as Saul slowly removed her clothes and then, without taking his eyes from her, his own.
The movement of his hands against her skin was music translated into feelings. Her mouth parted eagerly to the gently insistent pressure of his, her arms locking round him as gentleness gave way to passion.
His hand cupped her breast, his lips trailing most, tender kisses down towards it, delicately caressing the deeply pink tip until he felt her tense beneath him as she fought to subdue the fierce clamour of need within her that demanded more, much more from him than mere tenderness.
As though he knew how his delicacy was tormenting her his mouth opened over the hardened centre of her breast, his tongue arousingly abrasive as it stroked her sensitive skin. The tiny cries of pleasure she could no longer hold inside her chest seemed to fuel his passion as his mouth moved with fierce need from one aroused nipple to the other and then to the moist valley in between, trailing a line of hungry kisses from her breastbone down to where the delicate swell of her womanhood was covered in fine, silky hairs.
There he stopped, registering the shudder rippling through her, the thumb of the hand he had curled possessively round her thigh softly stroking against her skin as he raised his head to look into her eyes.
She wanted to tell him that he was rushing into intimacy too fast but the soft movement of his thumb against her flesh was sending conflicting signals to her brain, overwhelming shyness and shock, making her breathe with odd, jerky little movements that mirrored the hurriedly uneven rise and fall of his chest.
He moved, releasing her abruptly, only to pull her down into his arms, his mouth moving urgently against hers, as he muttered thickly, ‘Make love to me, Lucy. Show me that you want me as much as I want you.’
In his thick, almost incoherent plea she recognised the insecure boy he had been that summer twelve years ago, fearing rejection and mockery, and her arms tightened convulsively around him, all her love for him welling up inside her as she touched her lips adoringly to the side of his throat and then more wantonly as she felt his uncontrolled response.
He possessed a sensuality she had never dreamed existed, never even known before, teaching her the pleasure that came from the movement of his tongue against her skin, and the pleasure she herself could take from caressing his in the same way, feeling the hard muscles contract beneath his flesh as she touched the warm skin of his chest.
‘Torment me, would you?’
His voice was thick with pleasure as he growled the words mock-threateningly, his hands sliding possessively over her back until they cupped the rounded fullness of her bottom, pulling her against and into the hardness of his thighs.
The sensation of his aroused body moving seductively against her skin while she herself was not allowed to move was tormentingly erotic, and although Saul pretended that the frantic wriggling of her upper half as she fought to break free was angering him, it wasn’t anger that gleamed out of his eyes as his head bent and his mouth captured the peak of one soft breast.
Feeling the drag of his teeth against her supersensitive skin, Lucy moaned, throwing her head back and arching her spine so that her body moved eagerly against his, her head thrashing wildly from side to side as she fought to subdue the aching need burning through her.
She felt Saul’s hand against her thigh and then shuddered convulsively as he stroked her moist, eager flesh with tenderness and skill. A fierce spasm of pleasure gripped her, and she cried out despairingly to Saul, gripping his shoulders in her frantic need to feel him deep inside her.
Her eyes tightly closed, her body rigid with the aching need she was fighting to control, Lucy felt him move, cool air shafting momentarily against her skin and she shuddered with relief, anticipating the heated weight of him between her thighs, his body joining hers, filling it.
Only it wasn’t the male weight of Saul’s body she felt moving against her, but the skilled and delicate stroke of his tongue as it adored her body in that most intimate of all lovers’ embraces.
She cried out against this intimacy—her mind shocked by it even while her body voluptuously enjoyed it. Her hands reached down to push him away, and then curled protestingly into the dark thickness of his hair. But it was too late to push him away, too late to do anything other than give in to her body’s shameless response to the pleasure he was giving her.
She was still trembling when he took her back in his arms, tucking her head beneath his chin and rocking her gently as he soothed her shaky limbs.
‘I wanted to feel you inside me,’ she protested tearfully, her voice thick with remembered delight.
She heard him laugh deep in his throat, his breath tickling her ear as he whispered,
‘And you most certainly will. That, my darling cousin, was merely our prelude!’ She felt him frown against her skin as he added softly, ‘For a woman of twenty-five you’re deliciously inexperienced.’
She tensed in his arms, and as though he knew what she was thinking he added, ‘I’m not fishing, Lucy. Whatever happened in the past is past, but it’s a tremendous boost to a man’s ego when he knows he’s given a woman a pleasure she’s never known before.’
She didn’t ask him how he had known, but shivered a little, wondering what he would say when he discovered… But, no, she wasn’t going to think about that now. It wasn’t important, hadn’t he just told her so?
If she had been inclined to believe that his comment that they would make love had merely been made in jest, she soon realised that she was wrong.
The exhaustion which had gripped her in the aftermath of pleasure turned to languor beneath his slowly seductive kisses, and languor to a fine-tuned desire that increased in urgency as his hands caressed her skin—surely now more sensitive even than before to the slow drift of his fingers.
She in turn caressed him, thrilled and almost a little frightened by the maleness of him and the desire she could feel pounding through his body.
This time she had no need to cry out how much she needed him. He seemed to sense exactly the right moment, moving tantalisingly over, then within her, almost teasingly at first, until he felt the fine tension gripping her body. Then he moved differently, making her gasp in surprised shock. The same shock was registered in his eyes as well she saw, as her own opened wide, but already that sharp, unexpected pain had faded, giving way to urgency and the clamour of her senses. Instinctively she kept him within her, wrapping herself round his body, feeling the faint shudder of desire that seized his muscles, and his shock, like hers, gave way to need, desire escalating between them until it reached an unbearable pinnacle to shatter like fragile glass against the pressure of an almost unreachable high note.
This time he didn’t wrap her in his arms. Instead, leaning up on one elbow to study her face, frowning slightly, his voice terse, he asked, ‘Why didn�
�t you tell me?’
After his earlier words this was not the reaction she had expected. Avoiding his eyes she shrugged and said quietly, ‘It didn’t seem important.’
‘Important enough,’ he responded drily. ‘There can’t be many twenty-five-year-old virgins around.’
His words hurt and to cover her hurt she said flippantly, ‘And now there’s one less.’
‘Why did you let me make love to you, Lucy?’ he asked coldly, without responding. ‘Did you think it would convince me that you weren’t lying about Neville? Will you tell him about this?’ he added before she could speak.
Her body went cold, chilled both by what he was saying and the distant, unemotional tone of his voice. It seemed impossible that they were having this conversation. Less than three hours ago he had been telling her he loved her and now he was acting almost as though he hated her. It was because of her virginity, she thought bitterly… Because he didn’t love her at all but had simply wanted her, and had been shocked to discover that he was her first lover. No doubt he was scared that she would expect some form of commitment from him, so he was trying to freeze her off in this despicable way.
‘Why should I want to discuss what happened between us with Neville?’ she asked him coldly. ‘He’s my business partner—nothing more.’
The moment she voiced the lie she wanted to retract it, but Saul was looking down at her with burning, bitter eyes, his mouth curling into biting contempt as he said thickly,
‘So you were lying. You were in league with him all the time. And this was just a way of softening me up wasn’t it, Lucy? Wasn’t it?’
He was shaking her now, his fingers biting painfully into her upper arms.
‘You always were easily fooled, Saul,’ she told him icily. ‘I had to tell you what Neville had planned when you said you’d overheard us, but of course, I’d never any intention of changing sides. How on earth could you raise the money to fund such a project?’
‘And money of course means everything to you. I should have known that from the start… all that soft soap about regretting what your father had done. No doubt you were right there with him, planning every step. Well I’ve got news for you, my dear cousin. I could buy and sell this place a hundred times over.’ He saw her expression and laughed savagely. ‘Oh yes, that shocks you, doesn’t it and you don’t want to believe me, but it’s true, I assure you. My stepfather is a multi-millionaire; and what I didn’t tell you before was that, when he and my mother married, my father agreed that he could adopt me legally as his son. Now that he’s retired I run his business empire for him, and I’m a wealthy man in my own right, from what I’ve learned from him, Lucy. So you see, my dear, you’d have been much better off casting in your lot with me. What a pity you were so impetuous and so greedy.’
‘But then you knew that all along, didn’t you,’ she said wildly. ‘Right from the start you…’
‘I wondered what you’d be like,’ he agreed curtly, ‘but you’re wrong about one thing. I’m obviously a lot more gullible than I knew because for a while there you had me convinced. I came very close to falling in love with you, Lucy. Too bad I had to overhear that conversation today, otherwise you could have had my millions to play with instead of Neville’s thousands. Now get out,’ he told her brutally, turning his back on her. ‘I’m going to go and have a shower—I want to wash the scent and feel of you off my skin before it pollutes me. When I come back I don’t want to find you here. Oh, and you can tell your cousin that he’s got absolutely no chance of buying this place… no chance at all. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes when you do, Lucy. He looks like a man who has a cruel streak to me.’
He got off the bed and walked towards the door, pausing to turn round and demand thickly, ‘For God’s sake, what is it about him that you can’t resist? He doesn’t even want you—any fool can see that… He hasn’t even made love to you… But then having done so myself, I can see why. At least cerebrally it was satisfying—knowing that I was cheating you just as much as you were cheating me.’
He was gone; the door had slammed behind him, but instead of getting dressed she was still sitting up in his bed shivering violently, no longer trying to control the wild tide of tears flooding her eyes.
It was shock, she told herself numbly as she sought to dress herself and control her palsied limbs, shock that made her shake like this and believe that it was all a bitter dream. He could not have said those things to her—not Saul. But he had… smashing her dreams and her life, and it would do no good to tell him that he was wrong, so wrong about her feelings for Neville because he would never believe her now. And even if he did… He had come near to falling in love with her, he had said, but she didn’t believe that. He had suspected her right from the start; he had been waiting for her to make a mistake; and he had deliberately allowed her to think… to think that he cared about her, while all the time he had been waiting to trap her.
She was dressed. All she had to do was to walk out. It was the longest walk she ever made, and for ever afterwards she never knew how she managed to get back to the Dower House.
Once there she curled up in a chair downstairs, too shocked and distraught to even think of sleep. On her skin the scent of Saul remained elusive and tantalising, but she didn’t even have the energy to go upstairs and wash. She would never see him again. She was determined on that. She had too much pride… and too much fear, she acknowledged weepily. If she stayed, how could she stop herself from begging him to believe the truth? She loved him, but he had never loved her, she reminded herself. He had pretended to, yes, but that was all it had been: a pretence. Perhaps he had even come over here with the deliberate intention of hurting her, of getting back at her for his own pain all those years ago.
At last, exhausted and muddled by increasingly miserable thoughts, she fell asleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘BUT Lucy, what do you mean, you’re going away?’
She and Fanny faced one another across the drawing-room carpet. Fanny had returned from her holiday that morning, looking glowingly tanned and relaxed. In contrast she looked pale, and almost ill, Lucy recognised, but that scarcely mattered. What did was that she had to get away… from this house… from its too-close proximity to Saul, who fortunately she hadn’t seen since that disastrous evening ten days ago.
‘I mean I’ve decided I want to have a chance to write,’ Lucy told her. ‘I need peace and quiet to work, Fanny, and that’s impossible living here with you and the children.’
As she had anticipated Fanny looked both affronted and hurt, but she wasn’t going to allow herself to be dissuaded; she knew exactly what she was going to do.
She hadn’t wasted the days before Fanny’s return. A phone call to Beverley explaining that she wanted to be in London the better to do some research on her second novel—some of which was to be set in the city—had elicited the information that Beverley knew of a senior editor with another firm who had been seconded to New York for twelve months and who was desperately looking for the right sort of tenant for her flat—and one who would be willing to look after her Siamese cat.
A quick dash up to London and lunch with the other woman had convinced them both that they had found exactly what they were looking for. Lucy had enough money of her own to be able to live in the flat, if only frugally, without touching any of her capital—she was a first-rate typist and if need be could always augment her income in that way since she was determined not to touch a penny of Oliver’s or Tara’s.
She had even been to see Mr Patterson to explain her intentions to him, telling him quite firmly that she could not spend the rest of her life looking after two children who already had a mother.
If it turned out that Saul intended to keep the Manor House, which in view of his revelations about his wealth was entirely possible, then she was going to sell the Dower House, but she was keeping this to herself for the time being.
One telephone call which had given her a good deal of pleasure had
been the one she had made to Neville to tell him crisply and concisely exactly why his own plans were doomed to failure. He hadn’t been pleased, but his bile had barely touched her. She was beyond feeling almost anything now… beyond even the pain of Saul’s cruel rejection.
‘But Lucy… we need you,’ Fanny wailed.
‘No you don’t,’ Lucy responded reasonably. ‘You could always employ an au pair to keep an eye on the children, Fanny. Oliver starts school in the autumn and Tara’s no trouble.’
‘But this place is so isolated. I’ll be lonely.’
‘Then buy something closer to town,’ Lucy said reasonably. ‘I’m sure if you approached Mr Patterson he’d release enough of Oliver’s capital for you to do that.’
‘But Lucy, you don’t understand. Your father wanted Oliver to stay here… in what is his rightful home.’
‘Then my father should have made proper arrangements for him to do so,’ Lucy told her crisply, suddenly tired of the demands that were made on her in the name of duty. Her father had never really loved her, not as he loved Oliver, and why should she sacrifice herself in order to virtually bring up his son? She would go mad if she had to stay here much longer, haunted day and night by the memory of the way Saul had looked at her, tormented by memories of how he had touched her… seduced her into believing he loved her. She shuddered now, fighting to break free of the powerful mental images.
‘It’s all decided, Fanny,’ she went on firmly. ‘I’m leaving at the end of the week.’
As though she realised that she couldn’t be swayed Fanny went silent.
She would miss the children, Lucy acknowledged later in the week, surveying the growing pile of boxes stacked on the study floor. But she couldn’t stay here. So far she had been lucky—she had seen no sign of Saul. Only she knew how, during those first awful days, she had hoped to hear his car outside, his footsteps across the floor, hope slowly withering and then dying as the hours went by without any indication from him that it had all been some terrible mistake and that he loved her after all.