Only Gayle was in the dark about the joke, and to Nikki’s intense relief neither man chose to enlighten her. The blonde woman didn’t seem to notice the lack, however, her well-bred expression filling with surprise as she stared at Nikki.
Pride won out; she managed not to colour, and by her frankness and a miracle of timing an undeclared cease-fire seemed to be a unanimous conclusion as the mood of the room lightened considerably. Even Gayle’s hostility became less overt as she addressed Nikki in conversation for the first time with a hint of civility, though the sharp calculation in her eyes never dissipated. Nikki was so relieved tensions had eased that she didn’t even mind that they moved into the rear lounge for coffee and liqueurs.
Harper poured the coffee himself, which was already waiting on a Victorian mahogany table inlaid with gold and ivory. He handed cups to Gayle and Gordon first, then brought Nikki’s over to her. She took the china saucer carefully, and murmured a subdued thanks with her gaze downcast. Watching that her coffee didn’t spill wasn’t an excuse. She was so disturbed by the odd, relentless way Harper had moved towards her that her fingers were dangerously unsteady.
He did not go back to retrieve a cup for himself. Instead he stood in front of her as she hovered near the French doors, which were open to the warm, dark evening. Nikki turned her head and stared out to the night, wishing with all her frenetic heart that she could escape from this intolerable situation.
“Look at me,” said Harper softly.
She shook her head as if in negation, resignation, then threw it back and raised her gaze to his face, drawn like a helpless moth into the dark flames of his eyes. She was dumbfounded. How could she have convinced herself that all the lowering tension had dissipated? Relations had eased, politeness restored, but Harper still contained in his tight, strong body the powder keg that Gordon had lit with a match.
The china cup in the saucer she held rattled audibly. Without taking his ferocious stare away from hers, Harper reached out and wrapped one hand around her wrist. It steadied her and shackled her, his hot, calloused palm rasping along her sensitive skin.
“Of course, you know how close I came to losing control this evening,” said Harper pleasantly. God, but he was furious.
She set her teeth, breathing in short, shallow pants. “I had no part in the game Gordon was playing,” she told him, and was inordinately proud at achieving an edged calm.
“Don’t you think I’m aware of that?” His taut mouth, shaping the sharp words, held a smouldering fascination for her. She stared, unable to look away, as a sweet, burning liquid weakened the muscles of her body and threatened to drown her. “I know how you don’t like to play mind games, but my God, if you had encouraged him, I think I could have killed you both!”
Anger fused incandescently inside her, born of passion and outrage. Her eyes flared up, locked with him, and she whispered, “What a convenient, useless warning since you and I both know that it can’t change the inevitable!”
Harper’s breath whistled in a sibilant hiss, and he looked as if he could have struck her. He gritted, “You take too much for granted!”
“I have taken nothing except a chance!” she flashed. “I dressed this way, tonight, for you, but I have no power over your reaction and I cannot help it if other men might be attracted by what they see! And if you refuse to take what’s offered, you have no right to prevent someone else! That is what’s inevitable, and I am not sorry your pride is offended by the thought that you might have to compete for something for once in your life!”
Still he fought it, trying desperately to clamp restraint on the marauding fury that devastated all reason and consideration, and her eyes widened with a sudden, stricken sense of understanding. She knew now why she had entertained so many doubts about Harper at first, and it wasn’t wholly because of her past experiences.
The two sides of Harper’s personality—his aggressive ruthlessness and his gentle patience—were essentially incompatible, eternally straining at one another. If he was filled with rage that evening, most was turned against himself for his primitive and uncontrolled reaction that evening. Now the two sides were being pulled apart in living torment.
“You don’t know what you’re asking of me!” he grated out, half gasped, averting his harsh-boned face in rejection.
But, oh, now she did, and despair crushed down on her. Her eyes and face filled with it as she acknowledged defeat and stepped back from the conflict. She said quietly, even gently, “I know that by trying to protect me from yourself you have protected me too well.”
She had no desire to prolong this terrible evening. She turned away from Harper, whose hand fell nerveless to his side, and carefully set down the coffee she had not drunk. Both Gordon and Gayle, having settled in quiet conversation at the other end of the room, looked at her strained, set face in sharp curiosity.
She gave them a brittle little smile and said simply, “It’s late and I’m tired, so I’ll say goodnight now.”
They echoed the goodnight, the other woman cool and reserved, Gordon with a slight edge of concern. Nikki couldn’t bear to look at Harper as she exited the room without fuss, but the other two did. All they saw, however, was a blank, unrevealing statue.
The hot tears came as she climbed up the stairs, not in a weak cascade but slow and hard. She had seen it; from the very beginning she had seen it, but had not understood. Harper’s passion was bound up inextricably with his ruthlessness, his driving ambition, all the powerful, dynamic emotions that were pitted against the gentler side of the man. He could not separate them and he would not offer her the dangerous side; whenever they had broken down the barriers between them in shrieking fury and desire he had always built back the restraints, just as he had kissed her so explosively last Sunday and yet had managed to walk away.
Well, this time Nikki had walked away. This time she was the one to look on him in grief and pity and say, “No more.” She did not need to know if she had the power to break down that resistance of his. Everything inside her would only mourn the destructiveness. She longed, pined, ached, needed for him to come to her of his own free will, and had to come to bitter terms with the realisation that he would not.
She entered her empty, dark room, which seemed so hot and airless that she crossed over to her balcony door to throw it open. The fresh, cool breeze was like a shock of icy water thrown in her face, and she wrapped her arms around her body with a shivering sob. Maybe Harper was big enough, mature enough, wise enough to be able to offer her only the gentle side in friendship, but she didn’t think she was big enough to take it. And she didn’t think she could live without it.
She turned her thoughts to the desolate consideration of leaving Oxford. It had to come sooner or later. She had proved not only that her hands were healed enough for survival, but that now they could work again. Nikki turned away from the open door and wandered through her shadowed room at random. She couldn’t leave tomorrow, for it seemed somehow too rude to break up the weekend, but she could ask Harper for a ride back to London on Sunday night. But what about Charles? How could she say goodbye to those trusting dark eyes, that clever little face?
Misjudging the placement of the furniture, she blundered into the side of the wardrobe and just leant there, turning her face into the corner by the wall.
“You need,” said Harper in a quiet voice from the balcony, “someone with a great deal more kindness than I could give you.”
Both shock and pain flayed at already raw nerves. He couldn’t have hurt her more if he had deliberately tried. She gasped, her streaked face sliding along the wall, and snarled, “Get out!”
But both footsteps and voice sounded closer. Harper walked around the corner of the bed. “You need someone who won’t interfere with your career, who won’t be so jealous of that all-consuming absorption that drives everything else out of your mind when you work.”
“God damn yo
u!” she sobbed in anguish, and shoved the white knuckles of one hand against her distorted mouth. How much more completely could he reject her? She didn’t know, but this was destroying her.
He was almost behind her. He was—Two hands like thunderbolts descended on to her quaking shoulders, and turned her roughly so that the room spun and her breath left her in a soundless gasp. “You need someone with the strength of character to take your innocence patiently,” he groaned, and a ragged shiver rippled through his body. “Oh, Nikki, help me!”
She broke and cried it out loud. “I need you!”
He hauled her into his arms, driving his mouth down hard over hers. She could feel the imprint of his teeth behind his lips the instant before they opened and savaged hers apart; he moved one big hand behind her head and compulsively drove his tongue into her like a spear.
She erupted into white heat. She was in an agony she could not end, wrapping her arms around his neck, piercing herself on his mouth, his body, his hands. The sound that shuddered from him was animalistic; he arced his head back with a gasp as she plunged her fingers into the satin pelt of his hair.
He reached down over her hips to grasp her dress and pull it up, and she was so far gone into the mating urgency that she didn’t even comprehend the meaning of the sound as it ripped. His mouth had left hers to travel unsteadily along her cheek, his rough voice a furnace blast on flinching skin. “You could grow to hate me for this.”
“You fool!” she groaned, as his fingers connected with the bare skin of her waist and jerked uncontrollably at the erotic contact. She tried to get at the buttons of his shirt, but they were too close together and her hands shook too much. She nearly cried in frustration and instead bent hungrily to lick at his neck, stunned by his unique taste of human salt.
“God!” He writhed as if in pain and yanked her head away, and though her lips formed a puzzled, anxious query she never got to ask it as he took her mouth in primitive, unassuaging appetite over and over again.
She was as helpless as a dandelion puff in a howling storm of sensation. When she felt the slow but unmistakable indications of his withdrawal, she leaned weakly against the wall behind her and made a faint, uncomprehending sound of hurt. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do this to her again and just leave.
He gave her a swift kiss. “Shh, darling,” he whispered hoarsely, a large, dark presence that moved and shrugged to the sigh of clothing being discarded.
She couldn’t have been more tipsy had she been stark raving drunk, and without his support she slid down the wall until she was in a crumpled heap at his feet. Her ripped dress had slid back down into place; she yanked it off and threw it away just as his shirt billowed down over her head. Nikki wrapped her arms around it and greedily crushed the warm, scented material to her face.
Above her sounded an unsteady laugh. “Where the hell did you go?”
“Here,” she murmured dreamily, lifting her arms towards him like a child as he bent, slid his arms underneath her and picked her up. Both of them reacted audibly to the electric contact of bare, hard flesh to flesh. She shuddered as his whole wide chest rippled and flexed when he strode towards her bed and laid her down gently.
He ran those long hands over her body, sliding calloused fingers over the bare tips of her nipples, along the slim ribcage now thudding wildly, and with an effortless whisper of frictional silk he stripped away her tights and she was naked.
Then he came down on top of her, hard and hot and heavy, and he grew to know her with his lips and his hands, every inch of her body. He suckled at her breasts and rubbed the moistened nipples with the balls of his thumbs, purring deep in his throat when she cried out at the unbearable sensitisation. He taught her all the pleasure points with exquisite, unrelenting tenderness that levelled her inside, then built her up to a suspense which only he understood, only he could see to conclusion.
Then he gently parted her legs, and brought forth an explosion of flowering, moist pleasure where before there had been only a desert, until at last she jerked and sobbed out, “Stop—stop now!”
Harper smiled into the darkness, turned his face into the quivering muscles of her soft, vulnerable stomach and whispered, “No.”
God, she was in torment. It was too much pleasure, too much love she felt for this hard, gentle, fiercely voluptuous man, and her tortured breath dragged in a thickened throat, and she tried to scream, but it came out in a reedy, urgent gasp. “I can’t take this!”
“Oh, yes, you can,” he told her melodiously, only she was dying from it, but then her body convulsed, and rippled, and shook so that she thought she would never stop, and he rose from lying alongside her to come between her innocent legs and meet with that gossamer barrier, taking it from her forever.
She groaned, a long, descending note, at the incredible experience, and, misunderstanding, he stroked the sides of her damp face with his big hands and whispered raggedly, “Shush, shush, it’s gone.”
How strange he sounded, almost grieving, as if he would take her pain along with everything else, and her arms tightened fiercely around him as she echoed on an incredulous gasp, “Gone? Ah, Harper, it was nothing compared to this!”
His body moved in a silent exhalation of air as her words drove into him like shimmering arrows, and he lay with his head beside hers in supplication as he moved and moved with the force of a tidal wave, ascending, racing, arcing, diving down until he broke in her, the wave crashing upon an unknown shore.
Nikki was in a warm cave that moved when she moved, moulding itself to the contours of her body, and she sighed as she burrowed, sleeping, lulled by an ever-present rhythm thrumming in her ear. Her whole body was suffused with comfort and well-being, her awakening languorous as she turned under the heavy bed-covers, seeking her hard pillow of shoulder, the arm that had welcomed her all night and cradled her against him—
She bolted into sharp awareness, remembering last night even as she discovered Harper’s absence, a sweet echo of fulfilment, a numbing sense of loss.
She was alone in her bed, the room cold with fresh early morning air streaming through the open balcony door. The pillow beside hers still had the imprint from where Harper had lain, spiced with his scent, and she dragged it down to stuff it against her abdomen, curling around it to ease the empty ache.
It seemed that once she had embarked on the sensual exploration there was no stopping. What was the proper etiquette for the morning after lovemaking? she wondered miserably. Should she now be feeling so abandoned and forlorn? She was in love with him, so hopelessly, inextricably tangled into emotional and physical love, and she knew she couldn’t pretend to light-hearted affection when next she saw him; she could only, helplessly, be herself, and it felt like failure.
A shadow fell across the doorway, and her black head lifted. Harper checked when he saw her. “Oh—you’re awake already,” he said, his face breaking into a delighted smile. “I was only gone five minutes. I went to get my robe and some wood from the bin in my room—yours isn’t stocked. This bedroom’s so seldom occupied, the fireplace isn’t used much. Are you cold, darling?”
Nikki shook her head as she cleared her throat, sinking deep into the bed until only her great blue eyes peered at him over the edge. Her heart stirred with tenderness and passion at the sight of him, grey hair tousled, the change in his face remarkable from the stress-stern visage from yesterday. His shoulders were broad under the casually belted terry robe, a dark sheen of sprinkled hair across the taut muscled chest. Yesterday he had looked impassive, stamped with authority and hard-angled; today he was the version of a younger man, and he was beautiful.
I love you, she almost said, but she held it at the back of her teeth, for even she knew that they were in the full, palest flush of new sharing which had yet to face the rigours and trials of real life, and she was too afraid.
He set the fire, lit it and as it began to pop and hiss in the hea
rth he straightened from his crouch in one lithe upsurge, quickly moving to shut the balcony door as he slanted his quick dark gaze over one shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
Her uncertain blue eyes widened, but she answered with some spirit, “Did I say anything was?”
“Did you have to?” he returned, coming back to the bed, so overwhelming to face in the light of day as he casually threw back the covers and draped his long form beside her.
She could never resist him. Even as he reached for her she was melting towards the embrace, and she buried her face into his chest where the bathrobe parted, muttering, “It’s so stupid.”
He ran his hands down her bare back, dark gaze following the path of his fingers along the curves and hollows of her pale skin, and his voice was very soft. “Tell me anyway.”
“Well,” she said simply, muffled against him, “I woke up and you weren’t here.”
He made a crooning sound of compassion, turned her over and kissed her softly, but somewhere in the middle of it the tempo changed, heightened, deepened, and drugged them both. At last he pulled away and fell back on the pillows, while Nikki objected to the withdrawal symptoms and came after him.
Harper lay at peace, face upturned, profile etched by the early morning light. She curled around his shoulder, looking her fill, and other than his hand wandering idly along the curve of her hip he remained passive. She ran her fingers over his face, not very gently, feeling the straight rivulets marking the sides of his eyes and mouth. He sighed, dark eyes hooding, and lifted his face to the touch; and she fastened on to the hair at his strong nape, leaned over and brought her lips down on his to invade him as hungrily as he had invaded her last night, and his arm fastened around her hips like an iron vice.
They collided in each other’s mouth as if they were fighting a duel, and she leaned on his chest and on her forearms, running her fingers down to span the width of his columned neck. He reached and lifted her right off the bed at the waist, and she gasped at how effortlessly he did it, and he brought her over him until she straddled his torso, all the time watching her face as it flooded with surprise and comprehension, his hooded eyes gone erotically ferocious.
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