by Helen Brooks
‘Blue.’ She held onto the bedclothes like grim death.
‘Deep blue or light blue?’
‘Deep blue.’ A deep, violet blue actually, with black lace round the top of the camisole and bordering the splits in the side of the shorts, which came almost to waist level. Enough to protect her modesty should the worse happen, but only just. She wondered if he could hear her heart banging.
His grunt expressed satisfaction. ‘Like your eyes.’
Another few moments went by before he murmured, ‘I forgot to ask, do you snore?’
She could hear the amusement in his voice and tried to match his tone, although with her nerves as taut as piano wire it wasn’t easy. ‘How would I know? I’d be asleep if I did, wouldn’t I?’
‘And your previous boyfriends have never complained?’
It threw her and she hesitated just a fraction too long before she said, ‘No, no they haven’t,’ even as she asked herself why she hadn’t come right out and admitted she hadn’t slept with a man before. It had been the perfect opportunity.
The answer was there immediately. She didn’t want him to think any less of her. In his world of sophisticated and cosmopolitan women, a twenty-seven-year-old virgin would be an oddity at best and a freak at worst. She wasn’t ashamed of what she was, it was her choice after all, but nevertheless…
Aware his stillness had a different quality to it, and with the air so charged it almost crackled, she hoped against hope he’d let the conversation drop. The silence lengthened, quivering like a living entity. After what seemed an eternity to Rachel’s fraught nerves, it was almost a relief when he said softly, ‘Rachel, have you slept with a man before?’
She was so glad it was dark. Wrinkling up her face in an agony of embarrassment, she waited until she knew her voice wouldn’t tremble. ‘No.’ She opened her eyes wide.
He swore softly, which didn’t exactly help the way she was feeling, but immediately said, ‘Sorry. Really, sorry, but I just didn’t see that one coming.’ A brief pause ensued before he spoke again. ‘Is it because you’re frightened of sex?’
She hadn’t thought it could get any worse but she supposed logically it was the next obvious question. He was clearly wondering if she’d been abused or something. Rachel swallowed. ‘No, nothing like that, I’ve just been waiting—’ she knew this was going to sound absurd to a man like Zac ‘—for the right one, I suppose. The one I want to spend the rest of my life with.’
There was an even longer pause. Then his voice came softly and with a thread of something she couldn’t put a name to. ‘That’s one hell of an effective chastity belt.’
Which translated as saying he wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole now. She squeezed her eyes to stop the tears from falling. What was she crying for anyway? This was absolutely the best thing, wasn’t it? He was going to disappear out of her life in a couple of weeks and if she’d given herself to him, how would she feel when he left?
She thought she’d done pretty well in disguising the tears, it was pitch black in the room after all, but after a minute or so, when she’d surreptitiously wiped her eyes with the back of her hand a couple of times, he suddenly said, ‘You aren’t crying, are you? Hell, Rachel, tell me you aren’t crying.’
She couldn’t answer, not without breaking down completely and howling like a banshee, which would be the final humiliation.
She heard him groan and mutter something under his breath that sounded very much like a string of oaths, and the next moment she found herself gathered against a hard male body as he cradled her against him and began stroking her hair in a soothing, rhythmic caress. ‘It’s OK, sweet Rachel, it’s OK.’ His voice was soft and tender, the mockery she’d feared absent. ‘Don’t cry, honey. I’m not going to hurt you.’
She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t that, that she was crying more for what she was missing along with a hundred and one other things she couldn’t put a name to, but held close to him like this she couldn’t say a word. Her cheek was resting on his broad chest and her fingers had curled involuntarily into his body hair; she could hear the steady thud of his heart and his skin smelt of shower gel. Heaven on earth…
‘Your hair still carries the scent of apples,’ he said above her head, huskiness in his voice. ‘Apple blossom on a spring day, fresh and beautiful and sun-kissed. You’re beautiful, Rachel, but you don’t quite believe that, do you?’
She didn’t know what she believed at this moment, only what she felt, and that was the stirrings of a desire so powerful it took her breath away. His muscled body was hard and strong, its male angles and planes alien but so right. She wanted to stretch out on him, melt into him, feel him envelop and touch and enclose her. She wanted to feel him inside her, loving her.
‘This guy you were involved with, the one who let you down so badly, don’t let him spoil your life.’ She felt him nuzzle the top of her head and instinctively lifted her face. For a split second she felt him stiffen and then his lips claimed hers, firm and warm and seductively sure. His mouth played with hers, teasing her into a response that amazed her, or would have done if she had been thinking clearly. As it was, the more intimate the kiss grew, the more she abandoned all reserve.
The darkness, the soft warm bed, his hard masculine body and what his lips and hands were doing to her swept her off into another world of touch and taste, a place of sensual excitement where everyday life didn’t exist. She kissed him back because it seemed good and natural and what she’d been waiting for all her life without knowing it.
When her head fell back a little, Zac rained soft burning kisses on her chin and the exposed line of her throat, his hands cupping her breasts through the thin silk and stroking her engorged nipples. She gasped, and Zac took advantage of her open lips to return to her mouth, his tongue running riot with her heightened senses.
He caressed her with exquisitely controlled sensuality and a pleasure totally unfeigned, the soft pads of his fingertips injecting needles of sensation until she was aflame and the kiss had deepened to a kind of consummation. He pulled her more completely into him until she could feel every inch of his arousal, but then almost immediately pushed her away, flinging back the covers and moving to sit on the side of the bed.
‘Zac?’ she whispered tremblingly, still in the throes of desire. ‘What’s wrong? Have I done something wrong?’
‘Give me a minute.’ His voice was hoarse.
She lay still, unable to believe for a moment or two he had stopped, the ache in her body so strong it took all her will not to reach out for him. Slowly the desire was replaced by hot humiliation. How could she have encouraged him—and that’s what she’d done, she thought in an agony of shame—to make love to her when she knew this could be nothing more than a passing fancy for Zac? He hadn’t pretended he loved her or even that he was going to be around for a while; he’d been brutally honest from the start in making it clear this was a one-off trip and nothing more. And she had…
She shut her eyes tightly at what she’d done. If he hadn’t stopped, they would have been fully intimate—she knew that as well as he did. But he had stopped. She wanted to squirm with embarrassment and pain. He hadn’t wanted her as much as she had wanted him; he had been able to control his mind and body and prove he could take her or leave her—literally.
After what seemed an eternity she felt him move but he didn’t lie down again, sitting up in bed as he drew the covers over his legs. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said quietly. ‘It seems where you’re concerned, my control isn’t what it should be.’
‘It—it was my fault.’
‘Hardly,’ he said wryly. ‘I knew the score, you’d just made it plain how things are with you, and I let…’ he drew in a long shuddering breath ‘…the situation escalate out of control.’
Rachel drew in a long breath herself. She felt a bit better that he’d obviously had a struggle to stop.
‘I didn’t intend—’ He stopped abruptly and from the way he moved she was sure
he had raked his hand through his hair. ‘No, that’s not true. When we turned off the light I did intend to sweep away your defences. I was arrogant enough to presume this guy who’d let you down had soured your view of the male sex and I guess I thought I was the man to bring you back into dating mode again.’ He gave a bark of a laugh. ‘I thought we’d have a good time together, that I’d heal a few hurts. But when you told me you were a virgin—and why—that changed things.’
Now she did squirm.
‘I don’t want to be the one who takes that away from you, Rachel. Not when I can’t offer you anything real in return.’
Well, that was telling her anyway, she thought with a sudden flash of anger. No dressing it up. The anger provided welcome adrenalin. ‘You’ve always been very honest,’ she said stiffly. ‘And I’ve known all along you’re only in England for a short time. You made that clear from our first meeting.’
‘The thing is, Rachel…’ He hesitated, then went on, ‘I’m not looking for what you are. I’ve done the commitment thing once and once was enough. More than enough. I don’t want to be in that kind of situation again.’
Oh, yeah, she thought waspishly. The old ‘I need to be free to play the field’ argument. A completely up-front attitude so any woman foolish enough to fall for him had no come-back when he said goodbye. No tears, no regrets, no recriminations. A different approach from the one Giles had but still at heart the same selfish meme-me perspective. How did she manage to find these sorts of men? she asked herself as hurt sliced through her. Or did they find her? Did she have some sort of aura that attracted the shallow, don’t-give-a-damn types? ‘I understand,’ she said tightly. ‘And you don’t have to explain to me.’
‘You don’t and I do,’ he shot back so swiftly it made her jump. ‘I was married once and it didn’t work out. We…’ He stopped again, taking an audible breath. ‘No, I need to start from the beginning. I met Moira when I was eighteen and she was seventeen. Two kids, that’s all we were. Ten months later we were married because a baby was on the way. By that time we knew the thing between us had burnt itself out but neither of us wanted her to have an abortion, neither did we want the child growing up without both its parents. Rightly or wrongly, we’d agreed we’d provide a stable home for our child but be free to see other people as long as we were discreet. Crazy, looking back, but like I said we were young and crass.’
He’d been married? Rachel was unprepared for the way the news affected her, like a hard punch in the solar plexus.
‘Even in the months leading up to the birth, I knew it wasn’t going to work. She was my wife and that had changed things somehow. The thought of her seeing someone else or me having an affair had become…unacceptable. Moira pretended to agree; she was pregnant and clearly not looking around anyway. Then Josh was born after a long labour that suddenly went terribly wrong.’
There was a moment’s screaming silence. Rachel found she was holding her breath.
‘There were complications,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘He had the cord round his neck four times and no one had known. He never took breath. He was perfect, beautiful, but he never had a chance.’
This time when he stopped Rachel stared into the darkness in horror. She felt gut-wrenchingly sorry for Zac and disgusted with herself and the assumptions she’d made. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said chokily, putting out a tentative hand. She found his arm, felt his muscles bunch beneath her fingers. ‘That’s terrible.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
His voice was flat, wooden, which said only too clearly that it could have been yesterday as far as he was concerned. Rachel couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t horribly inadequate to the situation.
‘On top of Josh’s death, the birth had revealed Moira had a heart condition—a bad one. A few weeks after the funeral she had a heart transplant, but it didn’t work as well as some and she was…not exactly an invalid, but not completely healthy either. But she had a good life, meeting her friends for lunch and shopping and generally indulging herself. Of course, in view of her illness, there was no way I could broach the matter of a divorce and she didn’t seem to want one. Life went on. After two years I was beginning to feel I was going mad—trapped in a loveless marriage, playing the nurse rather than the husband when I was home from work, putting up with her rages when she blamed me for getting her pregnant, which had made her ill. She rarely mentioned Josh, it was as though he had never existed, but I put that down to the way she was dealing with her grief. Everyone copes in different ways.’
‘You don’t have to say any more if it’s too painful.’ Rachel squeezed his arm. ‘Really, Zac, there’s no need.’
As though she hadn’t spoken, he continued, ‘Two years to the day she had the transplant, she had a massive heart attack while lunching with a friend of hers. She died within minutes. At the funeral I met the friend. His name was Jack. Their affair had been going on for some months and apparently there had been someone else before him. She’d told him I was violent and used to knock her about—apparently I’d said I’d kill her if she ever left. He didn’t even know she’d ever had a son, and I still don’t know if she ever loved or grieved for our baby. Maybe she blamed him too for making her ill. But he was just a little boy.’
‘Zac, I—I don’t know what to say.’ At some point he had moved his arm from her fingers and now she didn’t know what to do, whether to reach out to him again or remain still.
‘You don’t need to say anything. I merely wanted to make you understand that commitment and marriage and a family is a route I’ll never go down, that’s all. I can’t…’ He paused and she knew the iron control had slipped for a second. ‘I can’t go there,’ he continued huskily. ‘That’s why it would have been wrong of me to destroy the dream you have of giving yourself to the man you intend to share the rest of your life with.’
She ought to be feeling grateful to him that he hadn’t acted as Giles would have done in the same circumstances. And she was; in a way she was. But another part of her was stirred with such a tremendous sense of loss it was making it difficult to think. She didn’t understand why this man had got under her skin from the moment she’d laid eyes on him, but he had. And her response to him was cerebral as well as physical, much as she would have liked to explain her weakness away as merely sexual attraction. Everything had slotted into sharper focus since Zac had come into her world and the power of his attraction was frightening. It would have been frightening even if he had wanted her in the same way she wanted him—
The thought caused an explosive full stop. How did she want Zac? Deep in her heart, how did she want him?
The answer came with terrifying simplicity: for ever.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, she berated herself in the next instant, her hands clenched into fists under the duvet. Even without his corrosive history, someone as handsome, as striking as Zac would never be seriously interested in a woman like her. Long ago she’d faced the fact she was only average—average height, average build, average face. And she had been grateful for even that after a childhood of being the ugly duckling.
‘Have I upset you? I didn’t want to do that.’
His voice was deep and husky and she wished she could see his face, even as she knew she’d die if he turned the light on and read what surely must be in her face. Swallowing over the hard, painful lump in her throat, she whispered, ‘I’m upset for you, for what you must have gone through. But I repeat, you’ve always been very honest with me, Zac.’
‘Not really.’ It was rueful, even self-derisive. ‘If it’s truthfulness we’re majoring on here, I’ve wanted you from the first moment I laid eyes on you—wet, windblown and incredibly antagonistic to the supposed burglar ransacking your home.’
Rachel’s heartbeat surged into a frantic rhythm.
‘This weekend was going to be a full-on seduction to get you warm, willing and wanton in my bed.’
Bull’s-eye in every regard, then. She couldn’t help but smile�
�it was either that or cry, and she didn’t intend to shed any more tears that night.
‘Rachel? Say something,’ he said into the lengthening silence. ‘Anything to put me out of my misery.’
Like what? ‘I’m sorry the weekend hasn’t turned out quite like you planned,’ she said with weak sarcasm.
‘So am I.’ His voice exuded a low sensuality that would have made her weak at the knees if she hadn’t been lying down. The tone changed as he added, ‘But it needn’t be wasted, need it? If I promise to behave myself, we can still have a good time.’ He hesitated for only a moment. ‘I like being with you, Rachel. More than I’ve liked being with someone for a long, long time. Do you believe that?’
Speaking from the heart in a way she wouldn’t have been able to do but for the blanketing darkness, she said, ‘No.’
‘No?’ His voice was so surprised it was almost soprano. Then in a more normal tone, he said, ‘That’s the wrong answer.’
‘It’s the honest answer and we seem to be going for honesty tonight.’
‘OK. Still on that theme, why is it so unlikely I want to be with you more than any other woman?’
She might have known he’d go for the jugular. Picking her words carefully and vitally aware of the male body inches away from hers, she said, ‘I’m nothing special, Zac, and you’re a man who must be used to beautiful women.’
‘Forgetting for the moment that beauty is only skin deep and it takes the whole woman—body, soul and spirit—to hold a man, you’re one hell of a beautiful woman, Rachel. What you see when you look in the mirror is clearly different from anyone else, but take it from me, you turn men on without trying.’
Now he was being kind. And she clearly hadn’t been able to make him lose his head or she wouldn’t still be a virgin right now. Deciding the conversation needed to be steered elsewhere, she decided to state the obvious. ‘From the weather reports tonight it looks like we’ll be snowed in for the weekend so it would be silly not to make the best of it. So we carry on as friends?’