Ruthless Passion

by Penny Jordan

  The orgasm that engulfed her left Davina trembling and tearful, embarrassed at what it had been necessary for him to do for her, and yet at the same time overwhelmed with happy relief that he had done so.

  Later, as she sat curled in his arms while they finished the wine, he told her firmly, ‘Never be afraid to tell your lover what you want from him sexually, Davina. A man wouldn’t be, and you, as a woman, as his partner, have an equal right, an equal need to enjoy fulfilment and to reach orgasm.’

  He smiled a little as he saw the way she flushed.

  ‘Does it embarrass you when I talk so frankly? It shouldn’t. Why is it that human beings find it so comparatively easy to be physically intimate and yet so hard to tell one another vocally about the pleasure they want to give one another? Very few of us are mind-readers. Every lover that ever existed wants to know that he or she is giving pleasure.

  ‘It’s one thing to know that a woman is responding to you, to see it in her eyes and in her body, but when she tells you how she feels when you do this …’ He bent his head and gently licked her bare breast, covering her nipple with his mouth and suckling on it, while she tensed and gasped, not just at the unexpectedness of the gesture but at her body’s swift reaction to it.

  ‘You see,’ he told her as he released her. ‘I can tell from your physical reaction that my touch pleased you. But if you were to whisper to me that you loved the feel of my mouth against your skin, that it made you ache with pleasure and need to have me caressing you that way …’

  His voice had grown rough and husky, and just the sound of it made her shiver, her body suddenly fiercely aroused.

  ‘Let me show you,’ he told her thickly. ‘Come here and kiss me, Davina, and I’ll tell you how good it makes me feel when you do.’

  * * *

  It was almost light when she finally left him, refusing his offer to drive her home, knowing that it would mean he would have to walk the five miles back.

  ‘This isn’t the end of it for us,’ he told her as he kissed her. ‘It’s just the beginning.’

  ‘But we don’t … we don’t love one another,’ Davina protested, shivering a little in the cold pre-dawn air, the words more a shocked acknowledgement of her own ability to enjoy him so intensely physically than because she expected or wanted any denial of her comment.

  ‘We are not “in love”,’ Matt corrected her. ‘But with this kind of pleasure there is always love, of a kind. You must have felt it when we touched one another. I know I did.’

  He kissed her again.

  ‘There’s only one person whose love should ever be really important to you, Davina, and that’s your own,’ he told her.

  It took her a long time to truly understand what he had meant, and she didn’t really do so until their affair was over and he had gone and she recognised what a truly wonderful gift he had given her, not just in showing her the reality of her own sexuality, but in giving her the ability to value and appreciate her own self.

  They were together for the whole summer. Fate was kind to them and aided them in keeping their relationship a secret. Gregory was too engrossed in his own affair to concern himself with what she was doing, and her father, totally unexpectedly and uncharacteristically, announced that he was going to retire and spend a couple of months in Scotland golfing.

  Later, when she looked back on the summer, Davina was often awed and faintly incredulous when she remembered how quickly and startlingly intensely her sensuality had developed.

  Matt was intuitive as well as knowledgeable about her sex, and he encouraged her to explore her own sexuality as well as his, the desire he expressed so openly and freely for her giving her the self-confidence to lay claim to her own desires.

  And then, in October, she began to notice a change in Matt. Sometimes he seemed to withdraw mentally from her and he was oddly edgy and tense.

  She had always known that their affair must end, and because she had learned now to be honest with herself and with her needs and her emotions she recognised that Matt could never be wholly satisfied with the kind of life that most appealed to her. She was no traveller, no wanderer. She wanted roots, security, permanence.

  At the end of October Matt told her that it was time for him to leave.

  ‘Owen doesn’t really have a job for me any more, and if I stay much longer …’ He looked at her, and then touched her face. ‘I’m more tempted than you know to take you with me, Davina, but my life wouldn’t be right for you, and sooner or later …’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Will it make it better or worse if I tell you that I love you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Better,’ Davina told him shakily, and then added ruefully, ‘And worse.’

  They both laughed; something else she had learned to enjoy and share with him.

  ‘Don’t stay with Gregory,’ Matt urged her. ‘We both know that ultimately I couldn’t give you the things you need, but Davina, somewhere out there there is a man who can. You’ll never find him if you stay married, and you deserve to find him. You need to find him, not just for yourself, but for him and for the children the two of you will have together.’

  They had one last night together, a feast of celebration of all that they had shared and a fitting way to end their affair, Davina thought. She knew already how much she would miss him, but that knowledge did not cause her to despair. She had learned so much with him, grown so much.

  Leave Gregory, he had told her, and she knew that he was right, but she also knew that Gregory would not let her go easily. He could not afford to. And her father was wholly against divorce, violently disapproving of it. He would certainly not support her.

  But why should she need his support? She was an adult, fully capable of directing and controlling her own life, of making her own decisions. With her father back from Scotland, fussily critical and demanding, she had little time to mourn Matt. It was only at night when she was in bed alone—she and Gregory had permanently separate rooms now—that she allowed herself the luxury of remembering, of conjuring up in the darkness the touch of his hands and the warmth of his mouth. She missed him, yes, but she accepted his going because she had always known that he would go.

  And then, less than a month after Matt had gone, her father suffered his first stroke. In the months that followed, as she nursed and cared for him, Davina was forced to accept that it was not now possible for her to divorce Gregory.

  The doctor told her that her father was unlikely to make a full recovery; he had become irascible and so demanding that Davina was the only person he would tolerate around him. His body might have failed him but his brain was still sharply keen and there seemed to have arisen a deep resentment between her father and Gregory. Davina, as the buffer between them, suffered the worst of their mutual aggression.

  Trying to maintain some form of calm and peace was more exhausting for her than having to nurse her father and run the house, and cravenly she often wished she had had the foresight to announce her desire for a divorce before her father had had his stroke. Now it was impossible for her to leave … to escape.

  With care, there was no reason why her father should not live for many more years, his doctor had told her cheerfully, and those words had snapped tight her prison gates, trapping her inside them. She could not leave her father and she could not divorce Gregory; not while her father lived.

  Drearily she acknowledged that it was unlikely that Gregory would divorce her. Why should he? He enjoyed the financial security their marriage gave him. If he ever managed to gain full control of the company it might be a different story. She had heard him trying to persuade her father to give him a majority shareholding, but her father had refused. Not out of concern for her or her future, Davina recognised, but out of resentment and spite, out of his desire to ensure that he maintained some form of control over Gregory.

  ‘Why the hell doesn’t he just die?’ Gregory had demanded viciously after a particularly violent argument with him, but in the end Gregory himself had barely survive
d her father by more than a year.

  And now, with both of them gone, she had the freedom she had once craved, or at least she would have had it had it not been for Carey’s.

  Freedom. Did anyone really have it? Davina wondered as she dragged her thoughts wearily from the past.

  That man this evening, did he have it? There had been a solitariness about him, an aloneness, but somehow it had been a solitude that spoke of a certain grimness and austerity rather than the carefree warmth she had always associated with Matt.

  So why had he so immediately and so alarmingly reminded her of Matt? Surely not just because he had touched her body?

  The thought disturbed her. Why should his touch, the casual, clinical touch of a stranger, have anything to do with Matt, her lover, a man with whom she had shared every sensual intimacy? There had been nothing sensual about that man tonight. On the contrary, however, her heartbeat jerked unevenly as though in betrayal of her self-deception.

  There had been something; something which her body had recognised even if her brain refused to accept its existence.

  She moved uncomfortably, physically shying away from her own thoughts, disliking the idea of her body’s being sexually aware, however briefly and subconsciously, of that of an unknown man, irritated and alarmed by this sudden unwanted reinforcement of her sexuality.

  Perhaps it was some kind of displacement effect, she decided grimly; her friendship with Lucy and her own moral code made it impossible for her to respond to Giles’s as yet undeclared desire for her, so perhaps she had somehow become over-sexually aware of that man tonight as some form of compensation.

  Or perhaps she was simply using his unwanted intrusion as a means of deflecting her attention from the far more serious problems she had to contend with. Like the future of Carey’s and those who worked there. The union officials had made it clear that they were anxious to know what was going on, and she couldn’t blame them, but both Giles and the bank had warned her that, once she publicly admitted that the company could not continue in business for much longer, she would find it even harder to find a buyer. For that reason Giles and the bank had warned her that she must keep up the pretence that the company’s future was secure.

  Davina hated imposing that kind of deception on the workforce. They had a right to know what was happening, to have the opportunity to look around for other jobs.

  Not that they were likely to find any. There was no other major employer in the area, which was why Carey’s had been able to get away with paying such low wages and imposing such poor and sometimes dangerous working conditions on its employees, Davina recognised. Guiltily she closed her eyes. She had been appalled when she visited the factory after Gregory’s death to discover just what conditions their employees were working under.

  When she had in all innocence and outrage questioned them she had been informed grimly by one of the foremen that he had complained on any number of occasions in the past to Gregory personally about the physical danger of their working conditions, never mind the aesthetic unpleasantness of them.

  Davina had flushed with mortification as she listened to him. She was as much to blame as Gregory, she decided. She should not have accepted his ruling that he was the one running Carey’s, nor his insistence that his business and his personal life were to be kept strictly separate and that that included her having nothing whatsoever to do with the day-to-day running of the company.

  She had her dividends and her shareholding, and that was all she needed to concern herself with, he had told her dictatorially, and because she had hated the uselessness of arguing with him she had weakly allowed him to have his way.

  She ought to have been stronger, more insistent … she ought to have been more concerned; she ought simply to have been far more responsible, and it was no good making excuses for herself now by going over and over all the reasons why she had just never realised that in taking the easy option for herself she had wantonly condemned many, many other people to Gregory’s domination and abuse.

  She wasn’t going to allow it to continue, though. In her desk at home was a document she had roughed out and drawn up herself, outlining all the improvements she considered essential to provide Carey Chemicals’ employees with not merely adequate but good working conditions, the kind of working conditions she would want to work under herself; the kind of working conditions that showed respect for their employees as human beings.

  Attention to the safety aspects of their work was at the top of her list, but there were other things on it as well: a decent canteen; clean, attractive rest-rooms and wash-rooms; better social facilities to engender a good relationship between company and employees that extended into leisure activities; and, most important of all, good crèche and nursery-school facilities for those employees with under-school-age children.

  Davina had said nothing of this charter to either Giles or the bank, but she was determined that she would not sell the company until she was sure that any prospective buyer was agreeable to putting her proposals into effect.

  She would rather sell the company for a pittance and secure these benefits for its employees than sell it at a profit to herself. It was, after all, the least she could do for those to whom she owed such a heavy debt of responsibility and neglect. However, she accepted that Giles and the bank were unlikely to share her views.

  No matter. They must learn to share them, she decided firmly. After all, the company belonged to her, and it was up to her now to stand firm, to be strong and determined on behalf of everyone who worked for her, if only to make up in some part for her weakness in the past.

  Matt had once told her teasingly that she had a very Calvanistic moral outlook: every debt to be repaid, every promise to be honoured.

  Matt. He had given her so much. Taught her so much.

  ‘You know now what it means to be a woman, Davina,’ he had told her before he left. ‘Don’t waste that knowledge, and most of all don’t waste your womanhood. Find a man who will love you as you deserve to be loved.’

  She hadn’t done so, of course. How could she? Her father’s stroke had kept her chained to Gregory and their marriage. Find a man … She laughed a little savagely. What she needed to find right now was not a potential lover but a buyer for Carey’s. Please God, let there be one. Not for her … but for all those who depended on the company for their living.

  The phone rang, the sharp, demanding sound sending a thrill of tension along her nerve-endings. She stared at it for several seconds before reaching for the receiver, glancing at the clock as she did so. It was late, gone midnight. Who could be calling her at this time of night?

  ‘Davina?’

  Her muscles tensed even harder as she recognised Giles’s voice. He was breathing slightly heavily, as though he had either been running or was under some kind of strain.

  ‘Giles.’ She said his name awkwardly, uncomfortably aware of the contradictory messages flashing from her brain.

  ‘Davina … I need to see you … to talk to you.’

  Her heart raced as she recognised the husky, aching need in his voice. She couldn’t allow him to come round now. Not while she was feeling so emotionally and physically vulnerable, not with her body still soft and aching slightly from her memories of Matt. It was too dangerous.

  ‘Not now, Giles,’ she told him huskily. ‘It’s late and I was just on my way to bed.’

  She could almost feel his disappointment, her fingers clenching as she gripped the receiver. Would it really do any harm to let him come round? He was obviously very distressed. Both of them were adults. She knew that he was married.

  Fiercely she pushed aside the shallow excuses, quietly saying goodnight and replacing the receiver before Giles could plead with her to change her mind.

  It was all his fault … that man tonight … If he hadn’t set her off thinking about Matt … remembering … She shuddered, folding her arms around her body.

  She wasn’t going to allow herself to be drawn into an affair wit
h Giles simply because her body was aching to be touched … to be loved; simply because tonight, when a strange man had held her, she had suddenly remembered exactly how it felt to be held by a man who desired her and whom she desired in return … was she?

  CHAPTER NINE

  MUCH to his irritation, Saul discovered that Davina James was still on his mind twenty minutes later when he pulled off the main road and into the quiet lane that led to his sister’s house.

  Christie had bought the sturdy four-bedroomed Victorian villa when she’d first moved from the city to Cheshire. It was on the outskirts of the small market town, it and its neighbours initially looking slightly out of place in their rural setting, their design being more in keeping with a commercial city environment than a country one. It would have been easier to picture them in a prosperous Victorian suburb of Liverpool or Manchester than out here on the edge of this very small town, but they had been built by a Victorian entrepreneur who had slightly overreached himself, thinking to follow the example of those who had so cleverly anticipated the effect of extending the railway system.

  In his case, the venture had not been a success, but the moment she saw the house Christie had pounced gleefully on it, announcing that with its proximity to the town centre and the surgery, its very large gardens, and the spaciousness of its rooms, plus its very reasonable asking price, it was exactly what she wanted. Saul, invited down to give her the benefit of his advice, had wryly pointed out that the reason for the low asking figure was undoubtedly connected with the vast amount of remedial work the house needed, but Christie had refused to be put off. The house had character, potential, she told him, ignoring his suggestion that something smaller and more modern with lower running costs might suit her better.

  In the event, Saul had to admit that the house did suit her. True, she had never actually got round to putting into effect all the renovations she had planned, but, as she had teasingly remarked to him the last time he had visited her, she had lost nothing by not rushing into modernising the house. The bathroom, for instance, with its plain white sanitaryware, was now back in vogue, as were all the original detailings such as the huge original fireplaces, the dado rails and cornices.