by Diana Palmer
It was a long time before he lifted his head, and he clearly liked what he saw when he looked at her. “I’d like to have you on the beach, just the way I dreamed of.”
She flushed to the roots of her hair at the image that had haunted her all day, too.
His hand moved over her soft breasts. “You’re very pale here,” he said. “I’d like to teach you the delicious pleasure of sunbathing nude. Swimming nude.”
“You do,” she said without thinking, her voice breathless sounding.
He lifted his head, smiling slowly. “Yes. You’ve watched me sometimes at night, from your kitchen window, haven’t you?”
The flush got worse, but she didn’t look away. “I was curious,” she confessed softly. “There was moonlight once, and you came out of the water very close to the cottage … I never knew a man could be beautiful.” She faltered, blushing furiously. “I didn’t think you’d know I was watching.”
He brushed his mouth over her eyes. “I knew,” he murmured. “I don’t mind if you look at me.”
She was still trembling when he got to his feet and pulled her up with him, slowly retying the straps at her shoulders.
“You look loved,” he said unexpectedly. He brushed her tangled hair away from her damp face, then turned away to pick up his shirt.
To Elissa’s amazement, her hand reached out to protest when he started to put it on.
He looked up in surprise, then gently drew her hands to him. “Go ahead. Indulge yourself.”
“You don’t mind?” she asked, savoring his hair-roughened skin with hands that had never known a man’s body.
“Mind? Not in the least,” he returned. “Come here. I’ll teach you how.”
She hadn’t known there was a right and wrong way to touch a man, but with his hands showing her how, urging her mouth to his skin, teaching her what excited him, what pleased him the most, she felt her confidence grow, and with it a new sense of womanly power. She didn’t protest, not even when he guided her hands and let her experience him in a way she’d never dreamed of.
Finally he emitted a low groan and slid her arms around his waist.
“Sometimes I forget how innocent you are,” he said in her ear. He bit it, laughing softly, and his cheek nuzzled hers. “You make me forget,” he whispered. He drew his mouth across her cheek, then raised his head to search her eyes. “You shut out the world while I’m holding you.”
He kissed her gently then, and she understood. She blotted out his hunger for Bess—that was what he meant.
But I love you, she wanted to say. I love you, and I want so much more of you than this. Two years of friendship, and it had never occurred to her just how necessary he’d become to her, just how possessive she’d become of him. Nothing he’d done to her was unwelcome. She realized she could lie with him and give herself and live on it for the rest of her life, despite all her hard-won principles. Was that lust? Or was it the natural hunger for oneness, for total knowledge?
With his mouth still over hers, she frowned and opened her eyes, only to find his eyes open and watching her. Her heart went wild. His tongue penetrated her mouth, his hands came up under her breasts, and she couldn’t sustain the look a second longer. She closed her eyes with a hungry moan, and he kissed her deeply, thoroughly, before finally releasing her and putting her from him. She straightened up and smoothed out her dress as best she could.
“Don’t brush your hair,” he said when she reached for a brush on his dresser just as they were about to leave the room.
“Why not? I must look a mess.”
“Because I want her to see you like this,” he said gruffly. “With your mouth swollen and your hair in a tangle and your skin glowing. I want her to know that we’ve been making love.”
“That’s cruel,” she whispered.
“I have to be cruel, don’t you see? My God, Elissa, he’s my brother,” he groaned.
“Yes, I know.” She stood in front of him, reaching up to smooth away his frown. She smiled gently, drowning in new fantasies, brimming over with her new knowledge of him, new memories to put under her pillow and cherish.
“Too bad you’re such an innocent,” he said with a sigh.
“What would you do if I weren’t?” she teased gently.
“I’d take you into my bed and work Bess out of my system with a vengeance,” he said honestly. “And I could, with you. I’ve never wanted anyone so much in all my life.”
“I wish I could let you,” she replied. “I think I’d like sleeping with you, King. Lovemaking is more beautiful than I ever realized.”
“I’m glad you think of it that way, and not as something to satisfy a passing physical urge,” he said. “Ideally it is an act of love. With you,” he added quietly, bemusedly, “it feels like it. I don’t understand….”
She drew in a slow breath and went to turn the radio off, flushing at the reason it had been turned on. She looked across the room and found him watching her.
“There’s no need to blush,” he said quietly, once again reading her mind. “You did my ego a world of good—believe me. If it hadn’t been for our houseguests, I wouldn’t have given a damn if you’d yelled the place down.”
“It’s embarrassing to feel like this,” she whispered. “They’ll see….”
“Yes,” he agreed tersely. “Thank God.”
She couldn’t answer that. She opened the door and walked ahead of him.
Bess wasn’t there. Bobby looked up with a sly grin. “Bess has gone for a walk on the beach,” he murmured. He cleared his throat. “I guess you two settled your differences….”
Elissa blushed to the roots of her hair. King laughed delightedly and slid his arm around her. “It wasn’t anything serious,” he said, chuckling. “I’m sorry if we embarrassed you.”
Bobby shrugged. “Not me. But Bess is unusually sensitive, I guess.” He put down his pen. “She and I used to be like that, but she’s grown away from me. So many parties and teas and girls’ nights out—I hardly see her when I’m at home.”
“You might try spending more time there, now that you can afford to,” King suggested pointedly.
“I might. I think I’ll stroll out and join her.”
“We’ll make some coffee,” King said, and he led Elissa toward the kitchen.
“She was hurt,” Elissa said as she filled the coffeepot.
“I know.” His voice was deep and curt, and he was staring out the window at Bess watching the waves.
She plugged in the pot and went to him, touching his chest lightly where the shirt was unbuttoned. “And so are you,” she said gently. “I’m sorry. I feel as if I’ve failed you.”
“How?” he asked, smiling.
“I couldn’t give myself.”
“The hell you couldn’t.” He chuckled wryly, then linked his arms around her waist and looked down at her. “I stopped us. You didn’t. Not even when I mentioned pregnancy.”
She lowered her eyes to his chest. “I’m not so afraid of it.”
“Aren’t you?” He studied her. No, she didn’t seem to be. And he was shocked to learn that he wasn’t, either. That intrigued him. Shouldn’t he have been?
He turned to gaze out the window once more.
Chapter Five
“Are you sure Bess doesn’t want children?” Elissa asked abruptly, disrupting his disturbing thoughts.
He turned back toward her. “She says not,” he replied. Hands in his pockets, he leaned against the counter. “In the beginning, I think it was because she didn’t want to be tied down. Her mother had seven children.” He smiled sadly, remembering. “Bess was in the middle, but she did her share of looking after the little ones. She had a rough time of it, and so did the other kids, for that matter,” he murmured, remembering how Bess’s father drank and terrified the children. “Anyway, children don’t necessarily guarantee a good marriage. I’ve seen happy marriages destroyed by them.”
That sounded very private. “Have you?”
; He frowned. “My mother often said that she and my father were happy enough until I came along and spoiled things,” he said quietly.
“What a horrid thing to say to your own child,” Elissa muttered, her face taut as she arranged cups and saucers and cream and sugar on a big silver tray.
“My mother was a devoted socialite,” he said. “She didn’t much care for children. If my stepfather hadn’t insisted, Bobby probably would never have been born. Odd how things turn out. She was a vivacious, beautiful woman with a quick mind. And now she’s a shell of her former self.”
“Do you visit her very often?”
“As often as I can,” he said. “She doesn’t know me, of course.”
She studied his hard face while the coffee finished perking, thinking how difficult his childhood must have been. She felt a burst of sympathy for the boy he had been.
“It wasn’t that rough,” he said after a minute, clearly reading her expression. “Besides, it was an incentive to show them all what I could do. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that revenge has produced a hell of a lot of successful men?”
“I suppose so. Is that why you’ve never married? Because of your own childhood?” she persisted gently.
He sighed. “Oh, Elissa,” he murmured, smiling. “You’re one of a kind, honey.”
“I just wondered,” she said.
He watched her pour coffee into the elegant floral china cups, thinking how sweetly domestic she seemed at that moment. She could cook like an angel, she looked exquisite in anything she put on, she had a gentle and loving nature, and physically she made the top of his head fly off with the uninhibitedness of her response to him.
“If I ever married, I suppose it would be you,” he said unexpectedly.
Her hand trembled, spilling coffee. She put the pot down with shaky fingers and reached for a dish towel to mop up the mess.
“That was unkind,” she told him.
“I meant it, in fact,” he said lazily, moving closer. “There’s not much hope of marriage in my life, with things the way they are. But I think I could enjoy living with you. You’re quiet and amusing, and I covet your body.”
He was openly leering at it, in fact, and she burst out laughing. It was a joke, of course. After all the time she’d known him, occasionally it was still difficult to tell when he was joking.
“I covet yours, too, but I’m not that kind of girl,” she reminded him primly.
“That doesn’t stop you from looking out windows at nude men at night, I notice,” he said, tongue in cheek.
She threw up her hands. “Well, if that’s the attitude you’re going to take, I’ll find some other nude man to ogle!”
“What was that?” Bobby asked from the doorway, laughing. Behind him, Bess was glaring at them both.
Elissa flushed. “Now see what you’ve done? Your brother will think I’m a voyeur.”
“Well, aren’t you?” King grinned.
She handed him the tray. “I hope you drop it on your foot,” she said sweetly.
“Vicious woman,” he muttered. “Open the door, honey,” he told Bess.
Bess flushed, and the two of them exchanged a look that made Elissa want to throw herself off a building. Fortunately, Bobby had gone ahead and didn’t see it. Elissa wished she hadn’t. King might want her body, but what she saw in his eyes when he looked at Bess was something she’d have died for. It was a sweeping kind of hunger, mingled with tenderness.
Bess curled up on the sofa to drink her coffee, pausing now and again to glance at Elissa, who knew that everything she and King had done probably showed in her lack of makeup and tangled hair.
“I hope we’re not intruding by staying here tonight,” Bess said quietly. “But the hotel was so crowded, and you’re much closer to the airport than we were, way up in Ocho Rios.”
“You’re not intruding at all,” King replied. He glanced at Elissa. “Elissa will need tonight to pack and get the cottage squared away, won’t you, baby?”
“That’s right,” she said. It was hard to talk when he called her “baby.” “And I’d better get to it if we’re leaving in the morning. What time is it?” she added, rising.
“You’ll need to be ready by eight,” he said. He got lazily to his feet. “I’ll walk you home,” he said with a meaningful smile. “Don’t wait up,” he told the other two.
“I need an early night myself,” Bess said coolly. “I expect I’ll be out like a light in no time.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Bobby muttered over his paperwork. “I won’t finish before dawn, at this rate. I guess you wouldn’t care to help?” he asked Bess.
Her eyes widened. “Me? Heavens, I can’t add one and one.”
“Too bad,” Bobby said. He seemed about to say something else, but he shrugged and bent his head again. “See you in the morning, Elissa.”
“Sleep well,” she told them, clinging to King’s hand as he led her out into the darkness.
He lit a cigarette and smoked it during the short walk to her cottage, not saying a word. It was a warm, pleasant night, even with the misting rain around them.
At the back step of her cottage, he ground out the cigarette. “I’m sorry about this trip, but I couldn’t think of another way to do it that didn’t involve you.”
“It’s all right. I’m not doing so well with the new designs, anyway. I’ll let them go for a week or two and touch base with some of my contacts back home.”
“You still live with your parents, don’t you?” he asked.
“Well, there’s been no reason not to,” she reminded him. “They’d be hurt if I wanted to live alone in Miami, and New York is pretty far away. We’ve been close all my life.”
“I wouldn’t know what that kind of closeness was,” he admitted. “I like Bobby well enough, but we’ve never been really affectionate. I’ve never felt that way about any of my family.”
“I’m sorry, because it’s a special feeling.”
“I suppose it is.” He bent and brushed his lips carelessly over hers. “I’ll go for a walk before I head back. Don’t answer the phone for the next hour, in case Bess calls to see what’s going on over here.”
She tugged at his shirt sleeve as he turned. “I could make you some hot chocolate,” she said shyly.
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed its warm palm. “I could take you to bed, too.”
She looked up at him in the light from her kitchen. “King …”
His face went taut. “Elissa, I enjoy making love to you. I could make a banquet of your body. I even like you. But if I seduced you, what would we do?”
She blinked. “I don’t understand.”
He cupped her face in his hands. “Listen to me, little one. Sex is a loaded gun. Once you have it with someone, it involves you in ways you might not realize. I can’t become involved with a virgin.”
“After the first time, I wouldn’t be a virgin,” she reminded him.
He sighed angrily. “After the first time, you might wish you still were,” he said bluntly. “You’ve been raised to think of sex as a sin outside marriage. How are you going to feel about yourself and me if I let that happen? Besides which,” he added, “there’s always the risk that you could get pregnant. And that’s a complication neither of us is ready for.”
She smiled wistfully, shaking her head.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“I was just picturing you, your first time with a woman, going through all that with her,” she said on a grin.
He cocked his head a little and smiled slowly. “My first time,” he said in a loud whisper, “was so damned fast she hardly knew what was going on.”
Her face slowly went scarlet, and he laughed. “Did you expect that the first time is always good for a man?” He grinned. “Men aren’t born knowing how to make love. It takes experience to make bells ring and the earth move. After my first fumbling attempts, I had to work up the courage even to try again.”
“I can’
t quite imagine that,” she mused, smiling.
He nuzzled his forehead against hers, sighing. “Funny, I can tell you things I’ve never told anyone else,” he murmured. “I must feel safe with you.”
“I feel safe with you,” she echoed. “That was why I latched on to you at the very beginning. You never tried to put the make on me.”
“Until now,” he corrected, lifting his head to search her eyes. “Are you sorry I didn’t let things go on as they were?”
“No,” she said almost at once. “Even though I can’t imagine lying with any other man like that, I know I’d have let you do anything you wanted to,” she admitted, “and I would have gloried in it. I don’t even have enough pride to refuse you. It’s too wonderful.”
His eyes narrowed in pain, and his hands tightened on her oval face. “You shouldn’t be quite that honest,” he teased gently. “I’m only human. I might lose my head one night.”
Her lips parted on a soft sigh. “I’ll bet you’re very good in bed,” she whispered shyly.
“So I’ve been told,” he said, laughing. His hands caressed her shoulders. “Look, we have to stop talking about sex,” he murmured, “or we’ll both be in trouble.” He sighed. “What a mess. What a hell of a mess.”
“It will all work out,” she said. She stood on tiptoe to touch her lips to his eyelids. They closed tremulously, and she drew her mouth over them, amazed at the sudden stiffening of his body, the catch of his breath. She drew away, but his hands caught her waist and held her there.
“Don’t stop,” he breathed roughly. “I like it.”
“Do you?” She repeated the soft little caresses, then instinctively smoothed kisses over his thick eyebrows, his lean cheeks and high cheekbones, down to his very sensuous mouth.
He was breathing rapidly, and she liked that. She remembered what he’d said to her that first time, driving her wild, and with her lips poised near his, she whispered, “Open your mouth.”
It was like setting a match to dry wood. He seemed to go up in flames. His arms lifted her, crushing her against him, and his mouth invaded hers with a sensuous insistence. He was trembling, and his loss of control inspired both fear and wonder in her.