by Penny Jordan
‘And even more luckily, the gash in your head, although messy, was little more than a surface wound,’ the doctor interrupted. ‘We’ve stitched it for you which is one of the reasons you’re feeling so groggy—after-effects of the anaesthetic. Some people are more susceptible to it than others, but you’re also suffering a degree of concussion from the blow. Didn’t anyone warn you about the folly of walking alone in New York?’
There were several formalities to be gone through before the hospital would release her, but at last Emma was free to accept Drake’s help out into the open air. The Mercedes limousine he took her to was vaguely familiar. It belonged to their host Drake explained when Emma checked slightly. They were staying with an American associate of his while he conducted some business negotiations with him, he further told Emma once they were all in the car.
‘That’s right,’ Emma was told by the American who joined them in the car and who Drake told her was their host. ‘We were in the middle of a meeting with my lawyers when we got the news. I’ve never seen Drake so uptight in all the time I’ve known him.
Emma was instantly remorseful. ‘Oh I’m so sorry,’ she apologised… Drake was frowning, and at first she thought it was because she had upset his day, but his mind must have been on other things because he simply shrugged and asked her how she was feeling. In point of fact she was feeling almost light-headed, and muzzy. It seemed so strange to have lost part of her life. She knew who she was; she knew she had a father and a newly married sister, Drake was familiar to her although she couldn’t remember how they had met or how long they had known one another, and yet she knew that she loved him and that the thought of being parted from him even for one night was almost unbearable.
She listened to Giles talking to her on the drive back to his house, telling her that there was no point in panicking and that her full memory would return in due course.
The house was vaguely familiar, which was reassuring, but the way in which Giles enquired as to his wife’s whereabouts sent prickles of alarm racing down her spine, which she couldn’t explain.
Drake had insisted on carrying her inside. To judge from the reaction of her senses to being in his arms, they could not have known one another long Emma judged hazily; such intense sexual excitement at merely being held against his body, feeling the steady beat of his heart did not suggest a long-standing relationship. She wanted to question him but felt too tired. Tomorrow they could talk, she thought sleepily as he opened a door and carried her over to a large double bed.
‘Don’t fight it,’ he advised her, pulling back the cover and then tucking it round her. ‘They gave you a shot to make you sleep. Best medicine in the world.’
As he tucked the cover round her, he turned to leave and Emma reached out to detain him, clutching his arm. The look in his eyes as he gazed down at her was one she found it hard to define. It was a combination of pain and a certain wry self-mockery she was at a loss to understand.
‘Stay with me,’ she pleaded, ‘I feel so strange and disorientated…’ She essayed a brief smile. ‘Am I always this clingy…? Somehow it doesn’t feel like me.’
‘It isn’t,’ he assured her with a wry smile. ‘In fact you’re almost infuriatingly independent, hence today’s contretemps.’ He disengaged her fingers and stood up.
Emma frowned. ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’
‘Are you sure you really want one?’
It seemed a strange thing to say to her and Emma was puzzled by it. ‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?’
Before he could answer there was a brief tap on her door and Giles walked in. ‘Sorry to interrupt but there’s a transatlantic call for you Drake.’
‘I’m coming now,’ Drake responded. ‘Try to sleep and I’ll come up and see you later,’ he told Emma, as he walked across to the door.
For some reason that comment worried her, but before she could discover why, sleep was washing over her in unavoidable waves, dragging her down into its warm darkness.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EMMA woke up dry-mouthed and tense, disturbed by a confused and somehow frightening dream, whose details she could not remember but which left her feeling unhappy and confused.
Her room was in darkness and she fumbled for a lamp switch, crying out in alarm as she knocked something off the bedside table. As she started to scramble out of bed a door was thrust open sending an oblong of light to illuminate the room.
‘Emma, are you all right?’
She felt almost weak with relief at the sound of Drake’s voice.
‘Fine,’ she assured him shakily, ‘just a mild case of blind panic. I woke up and couldn’t remember where on earth I was for a second.’
He came to the side of her bed and eyed her thoughtfully. ‘And now you can?’
‘Just about.’ Her voice was rueful as she fought against the dizzying flood of awareness just having him standing close to her brought thundering through her veins. ‘But that’s as much as I can remember I’m afraid.’ She looked up at him and frowned as she realised he was wearing a robe and that he must have been in bed. As she looked at the door he had opened she realised it must belong to an adjacent bedroom and her frown deepened.
‘Something wrong?’
‘Why are we sleeping in separate rooms?’ The words were out before she could check them.
‘Don’t you know?’
His question threw her. Was it because their hostess, who she couldn’t remember and who she had not yet seen since her return from the hospital, disapproved of couples sleeping together before they were married?
‘Is it because Giles’s wife would object?’ she hazarded a guess.
‘That’s one reason.’
One reason? Emma shivered. Despite the warmth of the room and acting purely on primaeval instinct she said hesitantly, ‘Drake please stay with me tonight. Giles’s wife needn’t know.’ Her face flamed as he continued simply to look at her. ‘What I mean is if she disapproves of the fact that we’re sleeping together before we’re married, you could be back in your own room by morning. I just don’t want to be alone tonight.
‘If I come into your bed, it won’t be simply to sleep.’ The blunt warning was reassuring. For a minute she had begun to wonder if they had quarrelled perhaps.
‘I need you tonight,’ she said simply, not knowing how else to convey to him how much she needed the security and comfort of his warmth beside her.
‘Have we been lovers long?’ she asked shyly as he slid off his robe and pushed back the covers.
‘What makes you ask that?’
She had instinctively averted her eyes from the satin gleam of his shoulders, caught off guard by the tight spiral of excitement building up inside her; an excitement that was spiked with something approaching fear, an emotion akin to the sensation she had experienced as a child when doing something she knew she ought not to do. Quite ridiculous really. She reached out to switch oft the lamp and the light from it fractured against the diamond of her engagement ring.
‘Leave it on.’ Drake’s voice was rough, sending prickles of alien sensation across her tender nerve endings. ‘I want to see you when I make love to you, and no, we haven’t been lovers long, why do you ask?’
He was watching her so closely Emma felt sure he must be able to penetrate the protection of the bed-clothes and see the wave of colour washing up over her body.
‘It’s simply the way I react to you,’ she replied helplessly, unable to fabricate a lie.
‘Meaning?’
He was lying on his side, his head propped up on one hand, the soft glow of the lamp emphasising the tanned healthiness of his skin. She wanted to reach out and touch him but she felt too shy, inhibited almost. It must be something to do with her amnesia Emma thought uncertainly.
‘Meaning,’ he prompted again.
Groping to find a lucid explanation for sensations and emotions she could only half grasp herself Emma said hesitantly, ‘It’s just that I find you so… so sexually overwhelm
ing,’ she told him honestly, ‘almost shatteringly so. It unnerves me,’ she admitted. ‘It seems as though such a reaction is alien to my personality.’
‘In many ways it is. You’re a very private, independent person Emma, and I suspect that part of you deeply resents finding me “sexually overwhelming”.’ When he quoted her own words there was a gleam in his eyes that made her skin turn to goosebumps. She reached out to touch him and then withdrew, puzzled by her own behaviour, confused by the conflicting signals it was giving her. One part of her said touch him, love him, the other said don’t, withdraw, hide. Perhaps it was simply a side effect of her concussion and the anaesthetic, bringing to the fore emotions she normally kept hidden.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
His question caught her off guard, and she answered it honestly. ‘Because I want to touch you and yet part of me says I mustn’t.’
‘Ignore it.’ His breath fanned her skin as he bent over her, tracing the line of her jaw with tiny teasing kisses. ‘Ignore it Emma,’ he muttered hoarsely against her skin. ‘Ignore it and make love with me.’ His lips found the delicate lobe of her ear, his touch sending dizzying frissons of pleasure spiralling under her skin. Her fingers were stroking his body, exploring the hard maleness of his shoulders, her senses urging her to abandon herself to the rip-tide of pleasure surging over her. It seemed impossible to believe that she had felt this before; that she had touched him like this before and that he had touched her and yet she could remember nothing about it.
In some strange way it made her almost greedy to absorb every sensation he aroused inside her, as though she was motivated by some deep-seated need to imprint them on her consciousness in a way which could never be erased.
She was still wearing her underwear and the gown they had given her in hospital—the same clothes in which Drake had carried her upstairs to bed on their return—and at the first touch of his fingers against her skin as he untied the robe she moaned with feverish pleasure, hungering for the feel of his hands and mouth against her skin with an urgency that assured her that whatever else she had forgotten she had not been mistaken in remembering how much she loved her fiancé.
As though in some way the small sounds of pleasure and need she made deep in her throat enticed and excited him Drake shuddered deeply as he released the catch on her bra, pushing back the duvet so that the lamp glow fell directly across the aroused curves of her breasts revealing skin the colour and sheen of mother of pearl tipped with rose pink crests.
It was impossible and unnecessary not to arch invitingly beneath the openly aroused caress of his eyes, the sound of her name, thick and slurred as though he had difficulty in enunciating it, causing the muscles in her lower stomach to contract achingly.
‘Kiss me.’
Her mouth opened eagerly and hungrily beneath the onslaught of his, spasms of pleasure rippling through her body when his hands cupped her breasts. She opened her eyes dizzily, feeling her own sensual response to the sight of his tanned skin against the paleness of her own. Like her he was naked, and her pulses leapt and jolted erratically as she looked down the length of their entwined bodies. She ran her fingers lightly down his spine and felt him respond, his teeth nipping the soft inner skin of her mouth, the smothered sound of pleasure he made as her hand moved from his spine to the hard thrust of his hip all the incitement she needed to shape the male firmness of his buttocks.
His reaction was instantaneous, his mouth leaving hers with a smothered sound of pleasure to ravish the tender curve of her throat, the light touch of his thumb brushing tormentingly across the aroused peak of her nipple an ache that could only be appeased by the moist dragging heat of his mouth and the erotic pressure of his teeth.
Emma cried out with pleasure arching feverishly beneath him, her nails raking the taut flesh of his back, her body on fire with desire for him. His tongue stroked her skin, teasing and tormenting; his hand splayed across the smooth skin of her stomach. She ached with an intensity that held her in thrall, and he was teasing her, Emma thought feverishly, her teeth closing protestingly on his skin and making him growl deep in his throat.
His hand moved lower, filling her with a sexual heat that burned through her veins like fire. Unable to stop herself Emma arched against him in supplication, gasping in aching pleasure when his hands grasped her hips lifting her and holding her against the aroused heat of his thighs. Without even being conscious of what she was doing Emma ground her hips rhythmically against him, crying out to him feverishly when his hands cupped her bottom and he moved thrustingly against her.
Above her his face looked dark and unfamiliar and a spasm of fear shot through her. Almost as though he sensed it, he stroked his tongue against her lips, teasing her with light kisses, slowing down the pace of their lovemaking, coaxing the wholly unexpected panic from her.
She reached out blindly to return his caresses, stroking him feverishly until he muttered her name thickly and moved against her in a way that commanded her response. The weight of his body against hers, the heat and pressure of his thighs, invoked a compulsion that couldn’t be denied. Emma cried out in a mixture of pain and pleasure as he entered her; the pain unexpected but almost totally lost beneath the intensity of sensations his possession aroused.
He filled her body, taking it and making it a part of his own until she was mindless with the ache of pleasure he was arousing, urged on to some peak she could sense was there, but was unable to reach. She felt the spasms contracting his body and knew from the way he cried out her name that he had reached that peak without her. Disappointment shivered through her; disappointment and a feeling of self-reproach, but before she could question it she could feel herself sliding deep down into heavy layers of sleep massed like thick clouds, supporting and comforting her, dulling the unfamiliar ache and stilling the quivering shivers racking her exhausted body.
She woke up in the night comforted by the warmth and presence of Drake beside her, curling her body into his and snuggling up against him. She had thought that he was asleep but he murmured thickly, ‘Keep on doing that and neither of us is going to get any sleep tonight.’
His voice brought her fully awake, a vivid sensation of self-disappointment sweeping over her as she remembered their lovemaking. She felt as though she had failed not only him but herself as well. She wanted to talk to Drake about it but something held her back.
‘What’s wrong?’ He seemed to sense instinctively that she was restless although she hadn’t moved.
‘You tell me.’ Her voice was faintly self-derisive but instantly he picked up on what was distressing her. His arms came round, curving her more intimately into his body.
‘Emma, we ought to talk,’ he began slowly. ‘There’s something…’
‘Wrong with me?’ she concluded for him bitterly. ‘Do you think I don’t realise that. I can’t understand it.’ Her body ached and she moved restlessly, ill at ease with herself. Were she and Drake experiencing sexual problems; had he concealed the truth from her? Could that be the reason they had separate rooms?
‘Something wrong with you?’ She thought he sounded faintly stunned but was at a loss to understand why. She could feel him tense against her and then suddenly the tension went as he said in a different tone. ‘Ah yes… I think I understand. There’s nothing wrong with you Emma,’ he told her softly.
‘Then why?’
‘Shush…’ The warmth of his mouth against hers silenced her protests his skilled hands soon coaxing her body to abandon itself completely to him. This time their lovemaking was slower paced, more sensual than urgent, her body responding to his caresses as indolently and instinctively as a flower opening to the sun.
‘Still think there’s “something wrong with you”,’ he teased with lazy amusement as she floated down from the stars he had taken her to.
She was too dazed and satiated with pleasure to respond, content simply to lie in his arms and let sleep claim her.
* * *
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��How do you feel this morning?’
Drake was dressed; frowning slightly as he looked down at her. ‘Okay,’ Emma assured him.
‘No signs of returning concussion. No further memory lapses.’
‘None at all,’ Emma responded, remembering with perfect clarity the pleasure of his body possessing hers. This morning she felt languorous and lazy, content to simply lie and doze like a satisfied cat. It was an effort simply to move.
‘Stay in bed this morning,’ Drake advised her. ‘I’m going with Giles to see his lawyers. We should get every thing tied up and then this afternoon…’ he broke off as a uniformed maid walked into the room carrying a breakfast tray. ‘See you later,’ he told Emma, bending to kiss her cheek. ‘We’ll talk then.’
Talk? What about, Emma wondered curiously sensing that the words concealed some hidden emphasis. Although losing her memory was only a temporary thing it was intensely annoying, almost depressing in some ways. Still there was no need to panic. Drake could tell her all she wanted to know and they had been most definite at the hospital that her muzziness and confusion was unlikely to last more than forty-eight hours.
Too restless to sleep she got up and showered. The morning stretched emptily ahead of her. She missed Drake. This feeling of insecurity she was suffering from must be something to do with her concussion she mused as she did her make-up.
She saw the door opening in the mirror and her heart thudded violently with pleasure as she anticipated Drake’s early return. But it wasn’t Drake who walked into her room, it was a vaguely familiar woman.
‘Well, well, no need to ask how you are this morning. Drake’s a first-rate lover, isn’t he?’
Bianca! Memory returned with a sickening thud as Emma recognised the other woman.
‘It won’t last though,’ Bianca told her, ‘Drake will use you for as long as it suits him and then he’ll go on to the next woman. That’s his way.’ She glanced down at Emma’s engagement ring and laughed tauntingly. ‘Oh, I know all about that. Drake is using you to hide the truth from Giles. He doesn’t want Giles to know that we were once lovers, and would be again if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s so desperate to conclude this deal. He might have deceived you, but he can’t deceive me.’ She laughed again. ‘Drake would never involve himself with a woman like you for real, you’re not his type.’