by Penny Jordan
‘I want you, Sophy.’ He murmured the words into her throat, sliding his hands to her hips, holding her bones almost as though he might crush them. She shivered and reached out to touch him, tracing the hard slope of his shoulder, pressing her mouth to his warm skin, gently biting the satin firmness of it until she felt the husky groan move his chest. He had thrown off the duvet and it was light enough for her to see his body. Strong and fully aroused, making her shiver faintly with awareness and desire. It was not the sexual act of possession she feared but her own inability to respond to it; the crushing sense of anticlimax and rejection she knew must surely come when Jon discovered...
‘What is it?’ His voice was gentle, teasing her slightly as he murmured against her ear. ‘Surely you have seen a naked man before?’
She hadn’t really—at least not as openly as she was seeing him—but it wasn’t that that held her spellbound in some sort of motionless trance. She swallowed and turned to meet his eyes. ‘Never one as male as you, Jon,’ she told him tremulously...and truthfully, watching his eyes darken and his mouth curl, as his finger traced the shape of her mouth.
‘That was a highly inflammatory remark, wouldn’t you say?’
She couldn’t respond because his mouth was touching hers, caressing her lips with tormenting slowness, until she was forced to wind her arms round his neck and arch her body into his with an impatient moan of need.
She was aware of his fingers biting deeply into her upper arms as he held her against him, just as she was aware of the hard arousal of his body moving against her own, but it was the fiercely draining pressure of his mouth she was aware of the most, the heated movement of his tongue as it sought her own. Desire, sharp and tormenting twisted in her stomach and she pulled her mouth free to whisper his name as she drew painful gasps of air into her lungs.
He was kissing her throat, her shoulders, nibbling at the tender flesh, trailing tormenting kisses down over the upper slopes of her breasts and then the valley between them. Her nipples were stiff, aching for the warmth of his mouth but he seemed determined to ignore them. Stifling a tormented moan, Sophy curled her fingers into his hair, guiding his head to her breast, her body arching up to his mouth in open supplication.
She felt him shudder and for one agonising moment thought she had somehow disgusted him, but even as she tried to pull away his hand cupped her breast, his mouth hot against her skin as he muttered into the creamy flesh, ‘Sophy...Sophy...this time I can’t be gentle.’ And then his mouth was tugging urgently on the coral hardness of her nipple, unleashing a cramping, burning ache low down in her stomach, making her sob his name and drag her nails against his skin as she felt the tiny shudders of pleasure radiate through her body.
There was an odd ringing noise in her head...a distracting sound she did not want to hear, a tormented sound of denial dragged from her throat as Jon abruptly released her.
‘The alarm’s gone off,’ he told her, sitting up slowly. He was breathing so hard she could see the rise and fall of his chest. Sweat clung to his skin. ‘Sophy...?’
Sounds from the next room silenced him. ‘Now obviously isn’t the time to say all that I want to say to you,’ he said wryly. ‘I suspect that any minute now you’re likely to be invaded.’ He reached for his pyjama bottoms pulling them on, his body still openly aroused. ‘As soon as we can we’re going to have to talk.’ He bent briefly and kissed her, just as the door opened and Alex came rushing in.
She stopped abruptly, staring round-eyed at them, demanding curiously, ‘What are you doing in here, Uncle Jon?’
‘I had a nightmare and your uncle spent the night with me,’ Sophy fibbed lightly, giving the little girl a smile.
‘Does that mean that you’ll always be sleeping together now, like real Mummies and Daddies?’ Alex enquired innocently.
Sophy dared not look at Jon. Would he want to sleep with her on a permanent basis...to make their relationship a physical as well as a legal one?
‘You’re not wearing a nightie.’ She had forgotten about that, and blushed guiltily. Jon, standing by the bedroom door was laughing and over Alex’s head her eyes met his.
‘Mummies don’t need them when they sleep with Daddies,’ he told Alex with a grin, sauntering out into the landing.
* * *
OF COURSE IT WAS too much to hope for that Alex would let the subject drop. She was full of it over breakfast, telling David all about it, and Sophy was conscious of a certain slightly adult awareness in David’s expression as he looked at her. ‘Married people should sleep together,’ he told Alex firmly.
Luckily Sophy was able to change the subject before Alex could continue it, reminding the children that they would be having visitors at the weekend.
It was on Friday that Jon’s friends arrived from Nassau, and on Saturday evening they were coming round for dinner. Sophy still wasn’t sure what she was going to serve. She felt very nervous about meeting them although she told herself there was no reason why she should.
An emergency call from one of his clients meant that Jon had to go out immediately after breakfast. His client’s offices were in London and he told Sophy before he left that he might not be back that night. She felt empty and very much alone when he had gone, almost as though a shadow had fallen across her day. If she had doubted that she loved him before, she didn’t do so any longer. It took a considerable effort to rouse herself enough to take the children to school and once she had done she found herself reluctant to go back to the empty house. Instead she drove into Cambridge and spent what was left of the morning glancing through cookery books in the library and trying to plan her dinner party menu.
Something simple, she decided...and something cool. In the end she decided on salmon and cucumber mousse followed by chicken and avocado salad with a cheese board and home-made ice cream to follow. She would have to consult Jon about the wine. Jon...it was ridiculous how even the inward sound of his name had the power to arouse and alarm her. Why should he want her? She had no way of knowing...she could only accept that he did and be thankful for it.
* * *
THE DINING AND DRAWING rooms were not rooms that they normally used as a family, and Sophy grimaced faintly over their unappealing appearance. Jon had given her a completely free hand with the renovation of the house, but the weather had been so hot that she had not been motivated into making any changes. Now, with the dinner party imminent, she wished that she had. There was nothing wrong with the rooms themselves but they were furnished with clumsy, sale-room oddments and badly needed decorating. The only real improvement she could make was to fill them with freshly cut flowers and keep the lighting dim, she decided wryly when she had finished dusting and vacuuming both rooms on Friday morning.
There had been no phone call yet from Jon and while she was missing him dreadfully she was also apprehensive about his return. They needed to talk he had said to her, but what did he intend to say? Now that she had admitted to herself that she loved him, it seemed impossible that she had not known the truth before; that fierce jealousy she had felt when Alex had innocently told her about Louise for instance...she ought to have known then. But she hadn’t wanted to know. She had felt safer simply liking him; safer thinking of him as a non-sexual being. She had never even tried to look beyond the façade he presented to the world, because she had been quite content with that façade.
When he still hadn’t returned by midnight on Friday evening Sophy went to bed. She knew where he was working and had she wanted to do so she could have put a call through to him at any time during the day, but pride had stopped her. In the past it had always been Jon who rang her to tell her when he was due to return, and she was not going to cause either of them embarrassment by being the one to ring him now. She was painfully aware of what both Roy and Andrea had told her; that in the past Jon had been blatantly pursued by her sex and had apparently not liked it. She h
ad enough intelligence to guess that Lorraine’s virulent hatred was more likely to have sprung from Jon’s rejection of her than from the lack of skill in bed which she had accused him of—after all hadn’t she herself had proof positive that the latter simply was not true?
She shivered slightly beneath the duvet, her bed suddenly far too large and empty without Jon in it but she was not going to be like those others. She was not going to pursue and chase him. That was easy enough to say, she thought tiredly as she gave in to the urge to sleep, but it might be far harder than she envisaged to do.
* * *
‘WHEN’S UNCLE JON coming back?’
They were having breakfast in the kitchen—a leisurely, late breakfast as it was Saturday morning, and once it was over Sophy intended to devote the rest of the morning to preparing for the evening’s dinner party.
‘I’m not sure.’ She responded to Alex’s question as calmly as she could. She had been awake since seven o’clock, her ears straining for the sound of the telephone, but so far there had been no call.
Almost as though she had conjured the sound up by wishful thinking, the kitchen phone suddenly shrilled.
‘I’ll get it.’ Alex was out of her chair first, running to pick up the receiver.
‘Uncle Jon...when are you coming back?’ She paused and then held out the receiver to Sophy. ‘He’s leaving now but he wants to speak to you.’
Her hand was shaking slightly as she took the receiver from Alex.
‘Hello, Jon.’ She hoped her voice sounded calmer to him than it did to her.
‘Sorry I couldn’t make it back earlier.’
Was she imagining the constraint she thought she heard?
‘That’s okay. Was the problem more difficult to solve than you expected?’
There was an odd pause and then when Jon did speak his voice was slightly muffled. ‘Yes...yes, you could say that. I should be back by midafternoon.’
After asking her if there had been any urgent telephone calls he hung up. Now that he had rung she felt worse than she had done before. She felt as though a wall had suddenly sprung up between them, as though for some reason Jon was deliberately setting a distance between them.
The preparatory work for the dinner party kept her fingers busy but left her with not enough to occupy her mind, and by the time the mousse was chilling in the fridge and the ice cream was in the freezer, she had managed to convince herself that Jon was bitterly regretting ever having touched her. Everything that Chris had said to her was true. Jon found her just as undesirable as Chris had...
She kept herself busy, polishing the old-fashioned silver cutlery she found in one of the sideboard drawers, carefully washing china and crystal that she had also discovered tucked away in the sideboard cupboards.
She had bought an expensive white-linen tablecloth, deeply trimmed with lace, and Alex who had volunteered to help her with the silver polishing and then with the table, stopped to admire the rich gleam of the green and gold banded dinner service and the sparkle of the heavily cut crystal.
Fresh flowers brightened up the heaviness of the room and decorated the centre of the table. All she really had to do now was to prepare the salads and the chicken.
Alex watched round-eyed while she made the mayonnaise, leaving Sophy to reflect that she had after all gained something from her mother, for it was she who had taught Sophy to cook. She recognised now that she had absorbed a good deal of her mother’s housewifely skill almost without being aware of it.
At three o’clock Sophy heard a car stop outside. Instantly an explosive mixture of fear and excitement gripped her stomach. Watching Alex’s exuberant and totally natural pleasure, she wished for a moment that she too was free to welcome Jon back the way she wanted to but she had to be more circumspect, so she deliberately held back a little washing and then drying her hands, timing her arrival at the front door to coincide with Jon’s.
Her first thought was that he looked tired—far more tired than she had seen him looking before, and instinctively she reached out to touch him, withdrawing her hand as though it had been stung as she realised what she was doing.
‘You look tired.’ The words left her lips before she could stop them.
‘I could do with a shower...it’s no pleasure travelling at the moment—especially in a taxi without air conditioning.’ He bent down and picked up the overnight case he had put on the floor. ‘I’ll go up and get changed.’
‘Would you like a drink or something to eat?’
Jon paused at the foot of the stairs and shook his head. ‘No...I ate before I left.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Something he normally only did either when he was tired or when something was bothering him. Her love for him tugged at Sophy’s heart. She wanted to go up to him and wrap her arms round him but instinctively she was frightened of being rebuffed.
On Saturday afternoon Sophy made her weekly telephone call to her mother, something which was more a duty than a pleasure, especially when her mother still continued to make slightly disparaging references to Jon. For once though, she seemed uninterested in the subject of her son-in-law, rushing to tell Sophy the moment they had exchanged ‘hellos’.
‘The most shocking thing has happened—I can hardly believe it. Felicity has left Chris. Poor boy, he is absolutely devastated. He adored her, you know...spoilt her really. Of course I’ve done my best to comfort him. Girls do funny things when they’re in her condition but even so...’
Sophy listened while her mother poured out a good deal more in the same vein, inwardly thoroughly bored with the whole subject of Chris.
‘He may come over and see you,’ she told Sophy just as she was hanging up. ‘I told him you’d be delighted to see him. After all it’s a time like this that he needs his friends.’
‘Mother, I wish you hadn’t.’ Sophy was really angry but there was nothing she could do other than hope that Chris would have the sense to know that her mother was wrong and that Sophy was not likely to welcome him. She had sensed the last time she saw him that he resented the thought that she had found happiness with someone else and she had no wish to play the sympathetic listener to him. Shrugging in mild irritation she went back to her preparations for the meal.
Jon was outside with the children. Soon it would be time to call them in for their tea. She had got them a Walt Disney video to watch while they were having dinner and both of them had promised to be on their best behaviour. Not that they were ever particularly naughty, she thought fondly. Once everything was done she could go upstairs and get ready. Nervous butterflies fluttered in her stomach. She was dreading meeting Jon’s friends and being the object of their curiosity.
* * *
AFTER ALL HER apprehension about meeting Jon’s friends, Sophy discovered that they were a very pleasant, down to earth couple with whom she instantly felt quite at home. Mary-Beth confided to her over the salmon and cucumber mousse that she sometimes felt she must be the world’s worst cook and that even her ten-year-old daughter could make a better sponge cake than she did herself. ‘And doesn’t she just let me know it,’ she groaned with a smile.
Their two children, she explained to Sophy, were staying with her parents in North Carolina.
‘Harry has so many meetings organised for this trip that it just wasn’t worth bringing the kids with us. I can quite happily waste a few days shopping in London but the kids would hate that.’
She followed Sophy out to the kitchen when she went to get the main course, commenting as she walked in, ‘Jon says you haven’t had much chance to get to grips with the house yet. Of course, you haven’t been married very long.’
‘No,’ Sophy agreed with a grin. ‘And if it hadn’t been for the fact that the fault on the Nassau computer was relatively non-urgent, we’d have had to put the ceremony off completely.’
Mary-Beth�
�s eyes widened and she protested. ‘Oh, didn’t Jon tell you—and I thought it was so romantic too, but poor Harry was practically foaming at the mouth at the time—Jon refused to come out until after the wedding. He told Harry there was simply no question of him postponing it. Not even if it meant that Nassau would have to look for someone else. I must tell you that I was stunned. Jon’s a devoted computer man and always has been as long as I’ve known him. I was, however, delighted to discover that his work means far less to him than you. Fancy him not telling you.’
‘I suppose he didn’t want to at the time because he knew it would upset me,’ Sophy offered, trying to slow down the hurried racing of her heartbeat. Jon had done that. But why? Their wedding could have been put off...and why hadn’t he told her?
‘He’s obviously crazy in love with you,’ Mary-Beth continued. ‘We could tell that from the way he talked about you when he came to Nassau. Mind you there are some people who can never see a thing.’ She lowered her voice slightly. ‘One of the women who works on the Nassau project was really smitten with Jon. I told her he was married but she’s one of those super-intelligent females who always goes all out for what she wants. You’re lucky Jon is the faithful type, I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if he weren’t,’ Mary-Beth assured her frankly. ‘To be honest, sometimes Lillian worries me. I don’t know what it is...a sort of obsessiveness about her somehow, a facility to blot out everything but what’s important to her.’
‘Lillian.’ Sophy repeated the name lightly. ‘Jon mentioned her to me. He used her pool during his rest periods.’
‘Yes...I know.’ Mary-Beth pulled a wry grimace when she saw Sophy’s expression. ‘Look, you’ve got nothing to worry about...Jon’s crazy about you. He couldn’t wait to rush back home.’