‘Maybe I find you too attractive,’ he murmured, his eyes veiled. He trailed his finger along her spine and she felt her body begin to melt.
This time when he bent to kiss her her answer to his question was there in her response. He held the sides of her head with his hands, pushing her back.
‘I want to hear you tell me that this is what you want,’ he whispered roughly into her ear, and she felt the tingling of his warm breath with a shudder of deep excitement.
‘It’s what I want,’ she said, in barely a whisper. It’s what I have wanted for so long now, she could have added. It’s what I’ve wanted all my life.
He swept her up and carried her towards the bedroom, kicking open the door with his foot, and this time when he lay her down on the bed there was naked desire in his eyes.
He hadn’t bothered to switch on the bedroom light, but he had left the door to the small sitting room open so that the light filtered into the room from there, giving the bedroom a shadowy, mosaic feel.
‘You’re so damned young,’ he muttered, and she anxiously wondered whether this marked the beginning of a retreat.
‘I’m not,’ she denied. ‘I’m not young and I know what I’m doing.’
‘Oh, I’m not talking about your age,’ he said. He was sitting next to her, and he placed his hands on either side of her supine body, so that she was in a cage. She reached out and put her hands on his arms.
‘What, then?’ she asked, trying to be calm, already trying to step over the pain of his leaving, if that was what he was going to do.
‘You’re very ingenuous,’ he said. ‘Not at all what I imagined when your father first described you. Oh, you have the social savoir-faire that comes to a woman born into wealth, but underneath you’re like a child.’
‘And you’re so experienced,’ she said huskily. ‘You sound like an old man, but you’re not, are you?’
‘Sometimes I feel as though I am.’
‘Old and with a string of lovers behind you?’ She made herself laugh, but she wasn’t laughing inside. Inside, her heart was twisting with jealousy at all those imaginary lovers that had passed through his life.
‘Not a string,’ he murmured, stroking her face with his finger, tracing the contours of her cheek-bones, her eyebrows, the outline of her lips. His touch was light and feathery, and she knew that her breathing had quickened and that the strings deep inside her were becoming more urgent.
‘I’ve never made a habit of moving from one warm body to another.’
‘No?’ she asked, lowering her eyes.
‘No.’ He laughed under his breath.
‘But I’m sure you must have had countless offers,’ she said.
‘Oh, countless. Any more questions?’ He laughed softly again, then bent to kiss her neck and she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him towards her.
If there were any more questions, she couldn’t think of them. Come to that, she couldn’t think of anything at all. Thinking was proving to be beyond her.
He pushed up her shirt, pulling it over her head, then he stood up and she watched, feverish, as he slowly took off his clothes, never taking his eyes off her face, enjoying her frank appreciation of his body.
Whatever he had said about not having had a string of lovers, there was no doubt that she was watching a man well-versed in the art of making love.
His nudity made her gasp with sudden, wild yearning. Physically he was perfect, as lean and muscular as an athlete, even though she knew that he didn’t do any exercise—he didn’t have the time.
He slipped onto the bed next to her, but before she could begin removing her long skirt, he asked, ‘Are you protected?’
‘Protected? Protected against what?’ She couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. What should she be protected against? The only protection she could think of was when she had started travelling abroad at the age of six and had had vaccinations.
‘What do you think?’ he murmured. ‘Pregnancy, of course.’
‘Of course.’ Her brain engaged and she said swiftly, ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Good.’ Even as he said that he unzipped her skirt and she wriggled free of it, but when she went to slip off her lacy underwear he put his hand over hers and said roughly, ‘Not yet.’
Not yet? It was agonising having any clothes on, even underwear. She wanted him so badly.
He lowered his head against her breasts, sucking them, playing with them, rolling her nipple between his fingers, then he moved his hand lower, against the flat planes of her stomach, and she parted her legs with a little groan of pleasure.
When he cupped her underneath the briefs with his hand she felt her body shudder, and she moved spontaneously against him, moaning as his fingers found the moist depths of her femininity.
But he wouldn’t let her reach that pinnacle of satisfaction. He slowed the rhythm of his strokes and slipped off her underwear, then guided her hand to his throbbing masculinity.
She turned on her side to face him, but he gently pushed her flat, bending over her so that his exploring mouth could follow the seductive path of his fingers. His tongue teased and she closed her eyes, feeling her body lift to regions which she had never dreamt possible.
When he finally entered her any momentary pain was swamped by her sheer need for him, and the mounting rhythm of his movements sent her spinning at last beyond imagination, beyond thought.
In fact, thought processes only began once again when they were lying next to one another. Did the earth move for you too? she wanted to ask him. Did lightning strike? All those clichés which she had heard about and read about now seemed to possess an accuracy which she would never have thought possible. Was physical attraction this strong? she asked herself, vaguely perturbed.
She didn’t ask him, though. In fact, she said with utter banality, ‘What time do you leave tomorrow?’
‘Early,’ he replied, stroking her hair. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’ She swept her hand along his side and wondered whether he would miss her. She thought not. He might not believe in casual sex, but that didn’t mean that he considered her his destiny, did it? That didn’t mean that he loved her.
She felt a momentary jolt of shock. What had love to do with anything? she wondered, trembling. Nothing? Or everything?
‘What happens when you get back, Oliver?’ she asked hurriedly, feeling a bit like someone whose boat had capsized and who was trying desperately to clamber back on, and he frowned.
‘What happens about what?’
‘About us?’
His eyes narrowed but he continued stroking her. ‘I run my business; you work for me; we make love.’
‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Nothing in life is simple,’ she said, and he gave her a slow, amused smile.
‘You sound like an adult now,’ he murmured.
She said in a sharper voice than she had intended, ‘I am an adult.’
‘Then as an adult you should know how it stands between us without my having to spell it out. I’m not looking for commitment.’ There was a hard edge in his voice when he said that.
‘Just fun.’
‘It’s a philosophy you should be well acquainted with.’
She couldn’t begin to put into words how ill acquainted she was with any philosophy of the sort. She might have spent months avoiding responsibility and having fun, but none of it had involved sex.
‘I guess so,’ she said lightly, and was it her imagination or did his body relax? ‘Was it just fun with Imogen?’
‘Imogen was—is—a very special person,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘On paper we were the ideal couple, which just goes to prove that nothing in life is a certainty. We were on the same wavelength, our experiences had been pretty much the same, we were made from similar moulds, you might say—but in the end it wasn’t enough.’
‘Are you bitter about it?’ she asked, but tentatively, because she felt rather than knew tha
t at any point when he decided that her questions were none of her business he would switch off.
‘Why should I be bitter?’ And again there was that hard edge in his voice. ‘It happened. And, like all experiences, I’ve learnt a lesson from this one.’
‘Which is?’ She had no idea why she bothered to ask the question, because she knew what he was going to say even before he said it.
‘That marriage is something for other people.’ He laughed, but there was no humour behind the laughter. ‘Now, aren’t there more interesting things we could be doing, apart from talking?’
He cradled her breast in his hand and her body made the decision before her mind even had time to think about it. She sighed, nodding languidly, and this time when he laughed there was warm amusement there.
‘You’re a passionate little creature, aren’t you?’ He aroused her nipple into hardness, and she needed no asking to take his manhood in her hands, to tease him as he was teasing her. When hunger began to replace the lazy amusement in his eyes she felt a surge of power that she could do this to him.
Their love-making this time round was slow and easy, and less one-sided. They built each other up with caresses that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
Where did this wanton passion spring from? she wondered, but she knew the answer to that one. The answer had been lurking just out of reach, but always there—the uninvited guest waiting to come in. Now the guest had entered, and Francesca knew with shuddering certainty why she had made love to him.
Underneath the physical pull was something stronger, more powerful, less manageable—a burning love, a dark fire that would not go back whence it came. She could have fought against simple desire, but what weapons did she have against what she was feeling now? And did she, she wondered tremulously, want any?
She lay on him, letting her full breasts hang temptingly to his mouth, smiling when he caught one provocative nipple and began suckling on it while his hands gripped her waist, almost encircling it completely. When she eased her body onto him she found a rhythm of her own and arched back as the rhythm took her again and again to sexual fulfilment.
It was only later, when he said that it was time for him to go, that she looked at the clock by the bed and saw that it was after midnight.
‘I’ve got to pack,’ he said, standing up. He looked at her. ‘I’m going to have a quick shower. I’d invite you along, but if I did I’m not sure I’d make it out in time to do any packing at all before I leave.’
She smiled drowsily and lay back, hearing the distant sound of the shower going and letting her thoughts take their course, stray wherever they wanted to.
He didn’t want commitment. That should have sent her spinning into despair and regret, but it didn’t. How could she regret what had happened between them? All he wanted was uninvolved fun, and, much as she craved something way beyond that, part of her had already decided—when, she couldn’t say—that she would take what he was offering, because the alternative was to walk away from him and she didn’t know if she could do that.
In the end she would be hurt. That was as inevitable as day following night, but at least her pain would come in the wake of something which she had spent her life waiting for.
Maybe, she thought, if she hadn’t slept with him she could have walked away, but now she had given too much.
She looked at him as he emerged out of the shower, drying his hair roughly with a towel, and just wished that he wasn’t about to disappear from the face of the earth—or as good as anyway—for three weeks. Three weeks was such a long time, but it couldn’t be helped.
He was opening a subsidiary and it would need time to get sorted out, he had told her. The preliminaries would have to be done by him, because when he worked he worked to a level of perfection which he couldn’t trust anyone else to achieve.
That, she knew, was why he had done so well in life. He never took short cuts and he never accepted anything less than the best. Was that what had finally made things fail between him and Imogen? She watched as he slipped on his clothes and wondered whether he had expected that relationship to attain a level which was out of reach.
When he came to stand by the bed he bent down and kissed her lightly on her forehead—a goodbye-and-sweet-dreams kind of kiss that made her smile.
‘I’ll be in touch every day,’ he said, and she nodded.
‘What shall I do if I run into a problem I can’t handle?’
‘Send me a fax. If it’s really urgent I guess I can return, but I’d rather get this thing over and done with, without breaking off in between.’
She desperately wanted to ask him if he would miss her, but already she knew what questions were permissible and which ones weren’t, and that one was definitely in the no-go zone.
He left quietly, and she lay in bed for a long time, awake and empty, thinking that she would never be able to sleep, but eventually she did.
When she awoke the following morning it was nearly ten o’clock and, after some internal debate, she decided to take another day off so that her ankle could heal up completely before she went in.
It seemed strange when she did make it into work the following week to be in that office on her own. She had become accustomed to listening out for him, to knowing that he was close by.
After three days she realised that the only thing that kept her going was his daily phone calls. Then his voice seemed to bring him into the same room with her.
‘Missing me?’ he had asked lightly down the line the day before.
She had laughed as lightly as he had spoken and said, ‘Of course! There have been a lot of queries I would much rather you had dealt with.’
She wasn’t going to show him how deep her feelings for him ran, even in the occasional passing remark, and a small part of her optimistically hoped that in time fun would develop into something else. She didn’t like dwelling on the thought that it might not, that he might tire of her the way a child tired of a toy that had outlived its welcome.
You didn’t have to be a genius to know that any relationship that existed solely on sex would eventually run out of steam, and as far as he was concerned sex was the only thing that drew him to her. She certainly was not his ideal woman the way Imogen had been, and if that had failed what chance did they stand?
But she avoided thinking along those lines. Instead she told herself that nothing in life was beyond reach, not if you tried hard enough.
She was clearing her desk to go home, two weeks after he had left—each day mentally ticked off on her calendar—when Helen walked into the office.
Francesca had not seen the other girl for quite some time—at least five weeks or so—even though she occasionally met her in the cloakroom, which served two floors. At times like that she made obligatory polite conversation, because bad atmospheres were not a good idea in an office environment, but that was all—a ‘Hello, how are you? Oliver will have that stuff you phoned about for you later today,’ and then a quick escape.
Now she looked at the other girl warily, keeping her hands busy with her tidying, letting it be clear that she was about to leave so that Helen would not invite herself into conversation.
It didn’t work. Helen looked at her with her hard eyes and said brightly, ‘How are you coping without your big, bad boss?’
‘Fine.’ A bit more meaningful tidying.
‘Rumours have been floating around the building about him…’ Helen picked up a pen and scrutinised it.
‘Really?’ Francesca answered, her body tensing even though she kept her voice casually uninterested.
‘Really.’ The pen was deposited and Helen gave her a long stare.
Her face, as usual, was heavily made up, which made her eyes look even more alarming, and she was dressed inappropriately in a very short black skirt and a long-sleeved top which left precious little to the imagination. The etiquette of office dressing had obviously passed her by, because Francesca had never seen her in anything that did not look as t
hough it should be worn in a nightclub instead of at a desk. No doubt the men appreciated that, and no doubt Helen didn’t object in the slightest.
‘Rumour has it that he and his girlfriend are no more.’
‘Is that a fact?’ The casualness in her voice was slipping a little. She didn’t want to discuss any of this, not at all.
‘Sure is. Rumour also has it that the reason they hit the rocks was because she found someone else.’
‘Oh? People shouldn’t believe everything that’s said.’
‘Seen, actually. At a nightclub. With some fair-haired guy.’
‘Fair-haired guy?’ Francesca asked sickly. She was beginning to sound parrot-like, she knew, repeating everything as though she were hard of hearing. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Friend of a friend. I kind of wished that I had been there. I can’t imagine Miss Imogen High and Mighty living it up, can you?’
Yes, Francesca thought, I can.
‘This friend of a friend knew someone who knew the guy she was with. Vaguely. Rupert something or other. Old flame of yours, I believe.’
The heavily made-up eyes were slits, and Francesca nodded without saying anything. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that Rupert had not been in touch with her for weeks. It hadn’t crossed her mind because there had been so much else there filling it up.
Now she remembered the last time she had seen him, when he had mentioned in passing that he was having woman problems. No wonder he had felt reluctant about going into details. How could he have when the problem was a bit too near home for his liking?
‘I wonder how Oliver took it?’ Helen asked herself.
Without thinking Francesca said, ‘He didn’t seem too crushed.’ The minute the words were out she felt herself go bright red.
‘He’s been confiding in you?’
‘I have to go now, Helen. Was there anything else you wanted?’
‘He’s not the sort to confide, not from what I’ve seen of him. So how come you know about his personal life?’ She followed Francesca to the coat rack like a bloodhound on the scent, and Francesca kept her head averted, putting on her coat. Eventually, though, she had to turn round, and when she did Helen asked sharply, ‘Have you slept with him?’
To Tame a Proud Heart Page 8