by Robyn Donald
Eventually his arms loosed slightly. He said into her temple, “What do you want to do now? Eat?”
“I’d like to shower,” she said unevenly.
“I’ll get your case. The bedroom’s on the left, third door down. There are two bathrooms—pick the one you like.”
She chose the one with the huge spa bath and had to suppress a certain amount of pique when Nicholas didn’t come in. Perhaps he was giving her time to become accustomed to the situation. She knew he was intelligent and experienced, but she had expected authority rather than thoughtfulness.
A thick, white wrap hung on the door; she shrugged it on smiling a little caustically as she lifted her wet hair free of the collar. It looked like a million other white bathrobes, except that it was bound with satin and the heavy towelling was of superb quality. Money might not be able to buy happiness, but it certainly provided comfort.
And as there was absolutely no doubt that Nicholas’s salary wouldn’t pay for this sort of luxury and seclusion, he had to be using his inheritance. It seemed appropriate.
Because it looked as though Nicholas, like his father, was intending to set up a mistress. For a fleeting moment she wondered whether he wanted more than that; whether this was a prelude to a marriage proposal.
How stupid of her heart to leap so joyously! Love and respect were the only good reasons for marriage, and she didn’t love Nicholas.
And he was far too worldly to think that four days’ acquaintance and a powerful sexual attraction formed any basis for marriage. No, this was to be a romantic, slightly extended version of a dirty weekend, she thought, trying to cut it down to size.
Although she was going to give this time—and herself— to him, going to sate herself with his lovemaking until she no longer craved it, she wasn’t going to run the risk of ruining his career, which would happen if knowledge of an association with her became general. How happily Peter Sanderson would seize on such a piece of “dirt” to discredit Nicholas!
So before they burned their bridges she’d make sure Nicholas understood that this week was all they could have.
Which meant she should probably leave the cottage right now. If she was strong that was exactly what she’d do.
But she wanted this time with him so much she could feel the hunger lick through every cell in her body...
Unwinding the towel from around her head, she shook her hair back and opened a drawer in the vanity, searching for a hair dryer. Thank heavens her hair was easy to manage. She wanted to look perfect for Nicholas, wanted to give him a week he’d never forget.
Ten minutes later she walked hesitantly out into the bedroom. Nicholas must have been listening for her, because he came in from the deck, his hard face relaxing slightly when he saw her. Incredulously, she realized that he was not as confident as he seemed to be.
“I thought you’d probably prefer to unpack for yourself,” he said, “but I can get the housemaid over to do it if you want me to.”
“No,” she said a little shyly. “Nicholas, I think we should talk before we... well, before we do anything irrevocable.”
His eyes were watchful, but his mouth curved. “I’m glad you realize it is irrevocable,” he said gently. “What do you want to say?”
Convictions were much easier to express in the privacy of the bathroom; now, with his heated green-gold eyes fixed on her face, and only too conscious of her own mounting hunger, she was tempted to give up.
But a wintry kind of integrity compelled her to say, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I mean, I don’t want us to fool ourselves. Either of us. It wouldn’t be fair when...”
The tangled words dried on her tongue. Motionless, he waited with the forbidding patience of a predator, his rangy figure suddenly looming very large.
Tension sparked across the taut silence. Through the subliminal thunder of her pulses came the soft call of a bird from the woods outside and the distant tinkle of the stream as it fell down a miniature waterfall. Tiny beads of moisture gathered at her temples, across her top lip and between her breasts.
“When what?” he asked unhurriedly.
She swallowed. “When it can mean nothing permanent,” she said at last, each word a lash to her heart.
“Of course, you’re right,” he said quietly. “This is some ironic trick of the fates that’s caught us both in a sensual spell. It’s irrational and disturbing and bloody inconvenient, yet it’s overpowering—we both seem to be helpless against it. We tried ignoring it. It didn’t work for me.”
She shook her head. “Nor me,” she admitted.
Commanding as a raptor’s gaze, his eyes held hers. “So, because neither you nor I like being held in thrall like this, we’ll satisfy that hunger this week, exorcise the need, until we can see each other with some degree of clearheadedness. Is that what you wanted to say?” he asked.
That had been exactly what she intended to say. Why then, did it hurt to hear his deep voice delineating in such deliberate, dispassionate tones the boundaries of their affair?
Keeping close guard over her expression, she nodded. When she spoke her voice sounded even and unemotional. “Yes. I couldn’t have put it better.” She shrugged. “I want to be able to look at you and not feel this kick in my gut— not feel anything.”
Had she hoped to provoke him into some kind of avowal? If so, she failed, for his only answer was a long, unwavering look as he said with cool precision, “Then we both know where we stand.”
Only then did she realize how much she had wanted him to say that he had fallen madly, quixotically in love with her. His words, chosen with as much care as his diplomatic training could produce, were like small, lethal spears, killing hopes she hadn’t been aware of nurturing.
I do not love him, she told that unregenerate core of romantic fantasy that lurked inside her heart. Not now, not ever!
Swiftly, before she had time to change her mind, she said, “I’m not accustomed to this sort of thing, Nicholas. I don’t know exactly how to behave.”
Something fierce and feral flickered in his eyes, but he said without inflection, “I don’t make a habit of it, either. Now that we’ve established the ground rules, do you want something to eat?”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I had something on the plane.”
And then at last he moved, releasing his powerful body from the leashed, watchful stasis she found so intimidating. Mariel’s breath lodged in her throat. Her eyes, ensnared by the glinting golden lights in his, dilated.
When he spoke his voice was slightly raw, as though she’d breached his formidable self-possession at last. “Then perhaps you need a rest?”
Striving to retain some objectivity, she catalogued the sensations that assailed her—the shaft of lightning down her spine, the simultaneous meltdown in her bones, the heated heaviness that uncurled in the pit of her stomach and moved in languorous waves through her, robbing her of will and energy.
And yet a different energy, more primitive and basic than any other, began to throb through her, white-hot and consuming. Calling up her last atom of sanity, she touched her tongue to suddenly dry lips and said in a stifled voice, “Nicholas, I’m not on the pill.”
“I’ll take care of that,” he said, his gaze settling on her mouth as though it held the assurance of bliss. A lean forefinger found the throbbing little traitor in her throat. “I’ll take care of everything,” he promised, the words slow and deliberate. “Everything you want, Mariel, everything you need. Tell me and I’ll do it, I’ll give it to you...”
“I want you.” Unable to meet the brilliance of his glance, her weighted eyelids drifted down. She felt her mouth widen in a temptress’s smile, enduring as womanhood, more easily understood than speech. “All of you. Everything. That’s all I want.”
How long did they stand there, joined only by his hand across her throat? She thought she could feel his life force connect with hers from the warmth of his palm, the sensitive tips of his fingers.
; And then he made a guttural sound deep in his chest and pulled her into him, holding her fast against a body taut with need.
When she tilted her face in mute, unconscious invitation, he kissed her with the starving intensity of a man too long denied sustenance, an intensity she not only reciprocated but met and matched, opening her mouth eagerly for his passionate invasion, feeling the last stronghold inside her shatter and break beneath the overpowering impact of his sexuality and her own.
Lifting his head, he looked at her with blazing eyes, his face hard and demanding. “You are everything I need,” he said quietly.
And to her amazement he picked her up and carried her across to the bed, lowering her onto the coverlet. She wriggled to free herself of the robe, but he said, “No, let me,” and without haste pulled it from her, his eyes glittering with self-imposed restraint.
“Like unwrapping a present,” he said.
When she was naked, her body exposed to the heated intensity of his gaze, a tide of peach lapped up through her skin, because he looked at her as though she was the personification of all he’d ever longed for.
“I knew you would be like this,” he said harshly. “Siren and sorceress...’the depth and dream of my desire’... Mariel, beautiful, ivory, gleaming Mariel, I think I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”
He bent and kissed her throat, and then the soft contour of her breast. His mouth was so hot she thought his lips would leave marks like the golden kisses of a god, but all that stained her skin was the slow wave of colour.
For the first time ever she wanted to revel in the effect her body had on a man; with David she had been self-conscious, but now embarrassment was the furthest thing from her mind. In Nicholas’s eyes and hands and mouth there was nothing but hunger, an admiration that came close to awe and a passion so intense she felt scorched by it.
In a voice she barely recognized as her own she said, “This isn’t fair. You still have your clothes on.”
“Take them off, then.”
For a moment she froze, but although his face revealed an imperious authority, she discerned laughter in his eyes. Almost immediately, her breath stopping in her throat, she saw the laughter swallowed by need.
Trying to stop her hands from shaking, she reached up and slid the buttons of his shirt open, gazing greedily and with something of his awe at the expanse of copper skin she’d uncovered, fine-grained and sleek, lightly covered with hair in an age-old pattern. She pushed the fine cloth of the shirt back from his shoulders and lifted herself to kiss what she’d revealed.
It was then that she understood the full extent of her power over him. There was no disguising his sharp intake of breath when her mouth lingered on his skin, or the sudden increase of tension caused by her caress.
Astonished, she looked up. His eyes were agonized, his mouth disciplined into a hard, straight line, but when her wondering eyes met his he smiled and said on a harsh note, “It works both ways, Mariel. My mouth on your skin, yours on mine—and the foundations of the earth are ripped apart.”
She whispered, “I didn’t know,” and hesitated.
“Don’t stop now,” he said with gritted teeth. “I might just die with the torment, but don’t stop.”
When at last the shirt had joined her bathrobe on the floor, she looked at him with slumberous eyes and murmured, “You are so beautiful.”
He smiled. “I should be saying that.”
“No.” She trailed a finger down to where his chest hair narrowed into a point, followed the thin arrow toward his trousers. “I know I’m not beautiful, but oh, Nicholas, you are.”
“How can you look at yourself in the mirror and say you’re not beautiful? ‘All made of fantasy, all made of passion,’“ he quoted.
Infected by his taut expectancy, she shivered, her courage evaporating like rain in the sun. His hand covered hers as she went to withdraw it.
“Don’t pull away,” he said unsteadily.
It took all her courage, but eventually she managed to undo the zip and push his trousers down over his hips. Resting her cheek against his chest, she thrilled to the heavy pounding of his heart, and knew there could be no going back.
And then he whispered her name, and lifted her head and held her face between two strong-fingered hands and looked at her, the golden rays in his eyes submerged in a rush of purest green. His mouth was twisted.
“I knew the moment I set eyes on you that you were trouble. Blue-eyed, soft-mouthed, long-legged trouble,” he said, and laughed and kissed her, almost tenderly at first, and then with such power that she was swept away in a flood of eroticism.
In a moment she was on her back, her hands sliding across the heated skin of his shoulders, her body arched so that her hips pressed against his in an assertion as explicit as it was demanding.
“Yes,” he said deeply.
He tore his clothes off, revealing narrow hips and long, well-muscled legs, and a jutting member that proclaimed his readiness.
When Mariel gasped he smiled dangerously.
“We’ll fit,” he said, and bent over her, tasting the small dimple of her navel, his mouth lingering on her skin. “You’ll see—we’ll fit perfectly.”
He was right, but he made her wait before she experienced that perfect joining. In spite of the desperate compulsion of their mutual ardor, he took his time, lying with her in the silver-gilt fingers of the sunlight on the big four-poster bed and exploring, touching, telling her what he wanted, insisting she do the same.
At first she kept her eyes closed, her lips sealed except for kisses. David had been a silent lover; Nicholas’s demands that she tell him her most secret fantasies seemed an intrusion, but he coaxed responses from her, gentling her with his hands and his mouth and his tone until she began to answer.
Oh, God, he was skilful, a conqueror in a war where both sides won, an expert in the art of reducing a woman to shaking, shivering helplessness, so completely at his mercy, so greedy for what only he could give her that Mariel would have followed him anywhere, with her heart in her hand.
He made himself master of her body, but he insisted that she in turn make herself utterly familiar with his. When at last she was sobbing for him, wanting only that one thing he had promised her, the complete satisfaction of the hunger that ripped her composure into shreds, there was not an ounce of restraint left in her.
Wild-eyed, she gloried in the beads of sweat across his brow, the subtle prominence of the bones of his face, and was fiercely glad that his studied consideration had been vanquished by an overwhelming, consuming craving. At least she was not the only one so affected; Nicholas, too, was desperate for this, starving for it.
And then he moved, and she arched again, taking him in, enclosing him, her whole being glorying in the sensations as he pushed home.
Shuddering, she tightened her muscles instinctively, drawing him farther up, clamping so that he couldn’t withdraw.
“No,” he said in a strained voice, “don’t do that, Mariel, don’t...”
But she couldn’t stop herself, and instantly he responded, driving into her in a rhythm that sent the waves of sensation surging out from her centre, increasing in strength, building with each movement, each deep thrust, until eventually she fell into an implosion of delight, of rapture, of joy so piercing she couldn’t control her choked cry.
Nicholas laughed and flung his head back. Never before had Mariel seen a man in the throes of ecstasy; her eyes darkened even further as the fierce angularity of his features dissolved into ferocious pleasure.
She couldn’t catch the words he groaned as the rigidity of his body eased into lassitude, into satiation. Hips and thighs locked together, heart beating against heart, she held him against her, wonder and astonishment and a lazy, languid repletion thickening her blood into honey, until he lifted his head and turned onto his side, taking her with him so that she lay half over him, her head on his shoulder.
What can I say? she thought in a sudden foolish panic. Than
k you? How stupid, but I can’t just lie here. I used to tell David that I loved him, but that isn’t appropriate for Nicholas. What do you say to a man who has shown you the sun?
“There’s a Spanish proverb: Take what you want, says God, and pay for it,” Nicholas said quietly. “If it’s true, I have hell waiting for me sometime in the future.”
She shivered. “Life doesn’t even out like that,” she said. “Life is chaotic, without order. Dreadful things happen to wonderful people, and terrible people die at a ripe old age.”
“So you don’t believe in karma, or that what you sow you’ll reap.”
“Not really.” She thought about it for a moment. “I suppose I believe that you have to do the best you can,” she said slowly, watching the sunlight dance through the open door, “and leave the rest to the power that runs this universe.” A yawn stretched her mouth. Covering it, she mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Don’t apologize for things you can’t help. Why don’t you go to sleep? Or would you like a shower, or something to drink?”
“A drink would be nice.”
When he’d gone she lay thinking, trying to impose some order on her own personal chaos. Nothing had ever been like that before.
Nothing.
And in her inner heart she knew it was all wrong. She had loved David with all her heart, and he had loved her—oh, not enough to put her ahead of his career, but that didn’t alter his emotions. He had been a tender and considerate lover, and she had enjoyed making love with him.
Nicholas didn’t even pretend to love her; he’d spoken of satisfying a need, a wild, uncontrollable lust that he could appease only by indulging it.
She had hoped for a future with David, but right from the start she’d known that there was no future for her with Nicholas. She knew and accepted that the attraction between them was purely physical, a matter of hormones and chemistry, the primal desire of a healthy woman of breeding age for a virile man of high standing. Darwin had called it natural selection, the mindless urge to reproduce, to produce babies who were fit and strong and would keep the race going.