by Robyn Donald
With it went any pretensions to modesty; at last she would know what this man offered, and she wanted it so much she didn’t care about tomorrow. She whipped off the black scrap of cloth and tossed it in the same general direction as Michael’s chain. His betrayal meant nothing now. This was more important.
In a hoarse, uncertain voice she said, ‘You’re beautiful too.’ She shaped his shoulders, fingers pressing into his skin in a slow, tactile exploration. ‘And I’m not perfect—I’m just a woman, Jake.’
His hands smoothed from her throat to the first gentle swell of her breasts, sending chills throughout her.
Still in that dark, feral voice, he murmured, ‘No, you’re not just a woman. Never just a woman. You’re more woman than any man has a right to expect. Or even hope for.’
And he kissed her.
Momentarily she panicked, dimly aware through the erotic fog that clogged her brain that she had to tell him he was wrong—she didn’t have what it took to satisfy a man. A warning thundered in the back of her brain, because sex with Jake was going to change everything—for the rest of her life she’d be tied to this memory.
And then he kissed her breast, his mouth discovering the acutely sensitive aureole, and sensation exploded through her, violent, piercing, sweeping every coherent thought before it in a tide of riotous excitement.
He picked her up and deposited her on the bed, looking down at her with gleaming eyes as he stripped off his trousers and then hers. Shocked and disturbed by the intensity of her emotions, Aline stared mutely at him until he came down beside her, big, dominating, a man to die for—a man to fear on some fundamental level.
And then every cowardly fear was banished by the heat of his body, by the skilful, ruthless caress of his hands, his mouth, the slick slide of skin against skin while he taught her more than she had ever known about making love.
Aline learned that each square inch of her skin was available for pleasure, that the pleasure could contract to a single, exquisitely unmerciful point of need until she had to stifle moaned pleas for an unknown satisfaction.
As he kissed her, as he touched her and claimed her, as his mouth took possession of her body, she learned that his scent changed when he made love. One glance lost her in the fiery glitter of his eyes; his expression of hard desire told her that she was returning him the same anguished pleasure he was summoning in her.
But when at last his lean, knowledgeable hand reached the most intimate part of her, seeking yet subtle, she stiffened.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ he soothed, although a rasping thread through each word warned her he was losing the battle for control.
‘I know.’ But she couldn’t stop herself from stiffening again as his fingers slid into her.
Moonlight flooded into the room—silver and darkness, the heat from his body and the cool night air, the scent of the sea and…
‘Jake,’ she muttered, hungry for something more, arching into him.
‘Yes,’ he said simply, and rolled her beneath him, entering her with one fierce thrust that linked them—linked them for ever, she thought dazedly as her body stretched to accommodate his, as the heated sensual anticipation transmuted into something wilder, something she could no longer control.
Forcing up heavy eyelids, she saw the harsh contours of his face above her, the black glitter of passion in his eyes, the lips drawn back in a rictus of unbearable pleasure.
She surrendered to it, moving against him, enclosing him, and he thrust even deeper, reaching beyond her body and into her soul, the part of herself she’d always kept separate.
A choked cry strangled in her throat; afire with need, she lifted herself against him in mute pleading, and he gave her what she longed for, at first slowly, as though afraid of hurting her, and then with an increasing, unsparing intensity that tossed her over some precipice and into a firestorm of sensation.
Dimly she heard him groan, felt him drive into her with such ferocity that it tossed her higher into ecstasy if that was possible, and then she fell into freefall, languidly coming down in a softness of after-haze, locked against the heat and power of his body.
Breathing heavily, he turned on his side, a long arm pulling her into him.
‘Sleep now,’ he said.
Aline’s last thought was that now Michael was truly dead to her.
The moon was still sailing serenely high in the sky when she woke. For a moment she froze, but memory flooded back, and she smiled through lips a little tender from Jake’s kisses, and stretched a body aching mildly from his slow, skilful, passionate possession.
He was no longer beside her; startled, she sat up. It took only a moment to find him, a dark silhouette out on the terrace, staring across the sea, big and dominant and alone. She’d wanted to coil herself around him, gently woo him into wakefulness, but he had removed himself from that temptation.
Her smile fading into poignant regret, Aline swallowed to ease her dry throat.
No, she didn’t want to talk to him now; she felt fragile, disconnected from her real self, on the cusp of the past and the future. She’d drink a glass of water in the bathroom and then she’d pretend to be asleep.
Quietly she got up; warily keeping an eye on that brooding figure in the moonlight, she tiptoed across the room to the door leading to the walk-in wardrobe and bathroom.
In the bathroom, dimly lit by the lovers’ moon, she drew a glass of water and drank it down. It eased her throat, but not her sore heart, or her sense of fate in the balance. You’re letting him get to you, she scoffed silently as she negotiated her way back.
Once in the bedroom she cast a quick glance at the open windows, frowning when she realised that the deck was empty. And the bed. Movement down by the water’s edge revealed Jake standing on the sand, still looking away from her. Her breath locked in her throat. Naked, with the moon’s loving light pouring over his dark head, outlining every sleek, sculpted muscle, every long, rangy line of his lithe body, he looked like some primeval god from the dawn of time, a physical dream of all that was male.
Aline took an involuntary step towards the window. Her foot hit something and she twisted and fell, thinking, I should have picked up my shoe! as she landed heavily. Pain exploded through her head; she lay supine for a few seconds before it eased back to a dull ache, then crawled back to the bed, pulling herself into it before sleep claimed her.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE dream dwindled, evaporating swiftly into bleak nothingness. Engulfed by sorrow and desolation, she buried her face in the pillow in an attempt to reject the day.
It didn’t work. After a few moments of formless grief she lifted her head and opened wet, reluctant eyes.
Open curtains allowed sunlight to spill into the room in golden swathes. Big and sparsely furnished in a cool, subtle palette of sand and toffee and cream, the bedroom looked across a lawn onto a curved beach the exact colour of the tiles on the floor.
Narrowing astonished eyes against the final blur of tears, she stared at the sea, restless in the early-morning sunlight that glittered along the waves like a fringe of diamonds.
She had never seen the room before.
Or the beach.
Slowly, cautiously, she turned her head. Just in her line of sight on the tiled floor lay a pair of shoes—low-heeled, black. One stood upright, the other on its side a little distance away, as though the owner had kicked it off.
Or as though it had dropped from a dangling foot…
The warm weight across her shoulders moved. Stunned, she jerked around to meet lazy golden eyes in a hard-hewn, handsome face—a face she didn’t know.
Her horrified mind skittered away from the implications as he smiled, a slow, sexy smile that dried her mouth and set her pulse-rate soaring. ‘Good morning,’ he drawled in a rough early-morning voice.
‘Who are you?’ she blurted, disgusted with herself for sleeping with a man she didn’t know.
He froze. Tension danced like a razorblade across the silence as
that purely male smile hardened into something like cruelty. Thick black lashes hid his amazing eyes while he stretched a magnificently naked body with the ease and grace of a large predator. Heat from his skin blasted hers. Pulses thudding, she realised that she too wore no clothes.
The sheet tightened over her bare skin as she jack-knifed away to perch stiffly on the edge of the bed, huddling the sheet around her.
Her unknown lover sat up, revealing broad shoulders and so much tanned skin her blood pressure shot through the roof.
At least she had excellent taste in men, she thought numbly.
Incredibly good-looking, with an angular face that had probably fired a million feverish feminine fantasies, he lounged back against the pillows. ‘I don’t know whether to be resigned or furious.’
Although no emotion shaded his deep, intriguing voice, she sensed anger simmering beneath the words, and some pointed instinct warned her that this man’s anger was not to be taken lightly.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said stupidly, shocked and frightened because her mind was completely empty, as though she’d sprung full-blown to life that morning, in this bed…
His straight black brows rose. In a tone underpinned by mockery, he said, ‘It’s usually taken as a sign that a man has failed to perform adequately if his lover wakes up crying.’ He waited for her to say something, then added on a taunt, ‘Not that you seemed to be worrying about anything missing last night.’
Shamed colour burned her skin as he stretched out a muscular arm to touch the drying tearstains at the corners of her eyes, sending a reckless throb of sensation through her.
‘So why these?’ he asked with cool, sardonic courtesy, his eyes turning metallic at her helpless flinch. On a flinty note he said, ‘Cut out the maidenly embarrassment, Aline. It isn’t necessary.’
Aline. Was that her name? It meant nothing.
Panic clawed her and she began to shake as he finished mercilessly, ‘You’ve been married. And last night you were everything you could be—erotic, lusty and more than willing. You made love to me with a far from virginal fervour.’
The faint emphasis on the word ‘me’ echoed ominously. His words jumping and jangling in her head, she fixed on the most important. ‘Married?’
His ruthlessly beautiful mouth twisting, he said, ‘If you’re conscience-stricken because you’ve been unfaithful to the saintly Michael, let me remind you he’s been dead for almost three years. It’s time you let him go.’
She shook her head, searching through her mind for memories of a dead husband and finding only echoing, empty caverns. ‘Who are you?’ she asked again, her words strained and desperate.
Contempt gleamed in his half-closed eyes. ‘Stop it now—it’s not working,’ he said softly, lethally. ‘I’m the man you made love with last night, the man whose arms you slept in.’
Unable to meet that probing gaze, she dropped her face into her hands. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she blurted unevenly, trying to flog her aching brain into producing a memory. When it remained obstinately and terrifyingly empty she wailed, ‘I don’t even know who I am. I don’t know where this is. I don’t know—I don’t know anything!’
In the taut silence the mattress dipped, and in spite of herself she peered from the fragile refuge of her fingers. Her breath stopped in her throat as he strode across the room.
He was huge, she thought frantically. Well over six feet, with shoulders wide enough to hide behind and a lean, poised athlete’s body stripped of every ounce of superfluous flesh.
Scratches scored those muscled shoulders, that powerful back. In spite of the blank nothingness in her mind, she knew she’d put them there in an extreme of ecstasy, just as she understood that the mild, sensuous ache in her body was the result of making love, that the taste in her mouth was his, that the scent of the bedclothes was an erotic mingling of male and female.
Appalled, she felt heat gather in her stomach, sing through her in mindless recollection as he disappeared through a door. It seemed that her body had a memory separate from her brain, a physical understanding of their lovemaking, and wasn’t shy of showing it—in fact, she realised sickly, it was readying itself for more.
Ashen-faced, she watched as the door opened again and the man who’d made love to her came back in, a dark green bath towel fastened in a knot at his hips. Like a bronzed statue, he was so stunningly perfect as a male, so dangerously disturbing, that Aline’s heart almost juddered to a stop.
‘I should have realised you’d come up with something like this,’ he said, the scorn in his tone shredding her shaky composure even more. When he walked across to the bed she forced her shoulders to remain straight, her chin to tilt at a defiant angle.
‘For your information,’ he said coldly, his eyes sliding with insulting thoroughness over her face and her bare shoulders, ‘I am Jake Howard, and, just in case your mind really was so overwhelmed by last night that it can’t function yet, you are Aline Connor.’
Frowning, she tasted both names, turned them over in her mind, her nerves tightening as they summoned nothing. Closing her eyes against the hideous rush of panic, she dropped her head in her hands, shielding her face from his ruthless scrutiny.
‘You can stop playing games,’ Jake Howard said curtly. ‘Last night you made love to me with your eyes and your mouth and your hands, with every subtle movement of that elegant body. Last night, Aline, you knew damned well what you were doing. You asked me to make love to you—’
Humiliated, she clamped her hands over her ears.
Lean fingers prised them away and he continued inflexibly, ‘If I didn’t satisfy you, then say so; don’t hide behind a stupid charade that wouldn’t take in a child. It’s too late for regrets—you made the decision.’
‘I can’t remember,’ she whispered, trembling in his grasp, her entreating eyes lifted to his. ‘I can’t remember last night, I can’t remember my name or my job, I can’t remember anything at all.’ Before she had a chance to rein it in, her voice soared perilously high, perilously near to a total loss of control. She swallowed and clamped her mouth tightly over the hysteria that threatened to burst from her. Blinking furiously, she fought to stay calm.
Jake Howard let her wrists go as though they contaminated him and stepped back, his brows meeting above the blade of his nose, the beautiful face stern and uncompromising. ‘You must be pretty desperate to try such a banal trick. See if a shower helps.’ His tone changed into cool irony. ‘Although you might want to forget last night, you know damned well that I took with intense enjoyment everything you offered.’
He waited while colour flamed through her face, and added with brutal assurance, ‘And you did offer, Aline. You offered—and you gave—everything I asked for. You enjoyed making love with me. That’s what the problem is, isn’t it? You gave me more than you wanted to, so to save your pride you’re embarking on this shoddy pretence of losing your memory.’
‘I’m not pretending,’ she shouted. ‘I don’t lie.’
‘How do you know that if you’ve lost your memory?’
She gave him a shocked look, but the gleam in the brilliant eyes sent her glance darting sideways. ‘I don’t—know,’ she whispered, yet was somehow sure that she didn’t take refuge in dishonesty.
His wide shoulders lifted in a contemptuous shrug. ‘This seems a very selective form of amnesia. I don’t know much about it, but I think it’s usually caused by physical trauma to the head.’
Before she could stop him he ran long fingers through her hair and over her scalp. He wasn’t rough, but she licked her lips nervously, too conscious of the strength in those lean fingers.
And bitterly, terrifyingly conscious too of her involuntary response to his touch, even when his fingers probed a tender spot close to her temple.
When she flinched he parted her hair and looked closely. ‘The bruise is more dramatic than I expected—you must have hit yourself harder than you thought. But as you said yesterday it’s still n
ot much of a bump,’ he said mockingly, releasing her and straightening as he stepped back. ‘Is that what gave you the idea for this ludicrous charade, Aline?’
Fiercely resentful of his effortless domination, Aline stiffened her spine, refusing to let him see how terrified she was.
‘It’s certainly not enough of a bump to cause concussion,’ he continued relentlessly. ‘That leaves alcoholic amnesia—a blackout, in other words. You had one glass of champagne at the christening party.’ Irony pulled his mouth straight. ‘Yes, I was watching you. It’s a habit I seem to have acquired lately. A single drink, followed by another two, drunk very slowly several hours later with food, wouldn’t black out memory. It wouldn’t even be enough to temporarily sap your will-power.’
Heat burned her skin again, but she kept her gaze fixed doggedly on him.
‘Have you got a headache?’
She bit her lip. ‘A slight one,’ she admitted.
He went on in an insultingly reasonable tone, ‘Probably not enough sleep.’
Cold with anguish, she said in a shaking voice, ‘I don’t remember how I got this bump. I am not trying to deceive you.’ But inside she was crying, Am I that sort of person—lying, manipulative, cowardly? Surely not?
Pinning her down her with those cold predator’s eyes, Jake went on judicially, ‘Of course, intense emotional trauma is a possibility. You’ve been a devoted widow for almost three years—no lovers, not even a mild flirtation, so I’m told.’ His eyelids drooped. ‘What did I say? Ah, have there been lovers? Are you just very discreet, Aline?’
Even as she tried desperately to cling to it, the faint trace of a thought disappeared into the void from which it had come. Tears threatened to clog Aline’s throat, but she squared her shoulders and chin against the crackle of danger in the air and said stubbornly, ‘I can’t remember.’
He paused, tigerish eyes glinting with some emotion she couldn’t fathom. Harshly he said, ‘Well, remember this. You agreed to come here, and last night you were the one who made the moves.’ He nodded across the room to a chair. Startling against the cream upholstery, tossed by some casual hand, was a black bra, silkily transparent. On the floor lay another small pool of material and a pair of trousers.