by Penny Jordan
The pounding of Harriet’s heart inside her chest was followed by an ache of longing that seemed to seep into every bit of her.
What would it be like to be loved and wanted by Matt like that? Well, whatever it was like she wasn’t going to be the one to find out, she told herself sharply.
Matt frowned as he glanced down towards Harriet. She hadn’t spoken since before they had left the restaurant—which was, he suspected, quite a record, since during the rest of the evening she had engaged in the kind of conversation that had left him reluctantly impressed by its range and depth. Matt wasn’t used to his dates having as keen an interest in world affairs as he did himself, nor in them being so comfortable and informed in debating them.
Just listening to Harriet gave the words ‘verbal foreplay’ a whole new meaning, he decided ruefully. Certainly he had never expected that he would find anything erotic in a vigorous discussion about the merits of a home-based workforce. But then he found just about everything about Harriet erotic. In fact, she fascinated him, infuriated him, and just about occupied every one of his waking hours as well as a large percentage of his sleeping ones. And that meant…
Harriet glowered at Matt as he suddenly and for no reason at all stood still right in the middle of the car park.
The couple by the car were still kissing.
Matt followed the direction of her gaze and tugged grimly on her arm so that she had to look away.
‘Stop thinking about it,’ he said curtly. ‘It’s not going to happen!’
Harriet could feel her face starting to burn with guilt and chagrin. Had he really guessed so easily how much she had wished that she were the one being kissed so passionately, and by him?
‘What makes you think I want it to?’ she demanded defensively.
They had reached his car, and as he unlocked it Matt gave her an oblique look. Her full lips were set in a constrained closed line and her green eyes were a mutinous jade.
He opened the passenger door for her, but as she stepped past him he encircled her with the car door and his body.
‘Of course you want it to. You’re in love, or you think you are. But Ben is not in love with you.’
Ben! Harriet went limp with relief and sagged against the car. Of course—he thought she was in love with Ben!
‘But that doesn’t stop you wanting to feel his mouth on yours, wanting to…’
The raw sound of Matt’s voice jerked her into defensive anger.
If she had been in love with Ben his last words would not have done her any good at all. As it was they were making her want to look at Matt’s own mouth as though she were magnetised by it! And not just look at it, she admitted longingly.
‘Have you ever thought of writing sex scenes for films?’ she asked him, with what she had intended to be sarcasm but which instead sounded more like breathless wonder, Harriet recognised in self-disgust as she scrambled into the car.
To her relief Matt refused to pick up her gauntlet, and started the car instead.
Half an hour later, as they drove through the down-at-heel area where she lived, Harriet could well imagine what Matt must be thinking. But she liked her small house, tucked in cosily with its neighbours, and she liked her long back garden even more.
As though he had read her mind Matt broke his silence to announce tersely, ‘This is a pretty rough area. Not one I would have thought safe for a woman living on her own.’
Yes, it was a bit of a rough area, and following an outbreak of violent incidents she felt increasingly worried about the fact that gangs of youths had begun to roam the local streets, and that if you possessed a car it was not considered wise to park it outside.
But the area still had a certain artisan quaintness about it, and—even more important to Harriet—her little house was affordable and within public transport distance of the office.
She also liked the fact that she had a local butcher and grocery shop, and that most of her elderly neighbours had been born and bred there and so were full of stories of how the area had once been. But now she was seeing it through Matt’s eyes, and what she was seeing made her feel both angry and uncomfortable.
Outside a local take away a gang of youths were scuffling and exchanging obscenities. Harriet could see the look Matt was giving them.
She felt obliged to defend them. ‘They’re only young.’
‘And that gives them licence to be foul mouthed?’ Matt challenged her. ‘Aren’t your family concerned about the kind of area you’re living in?’ he demanded.
Mutinously Harriet turned away from him, pretending not to hear. The truth was that her parents had been dismayed when she had shown them her new home—but she had managed to talk them around.
One of the reasons she had returned home at the weekend had been to wave them off for her father’s lecture tour of America. Since her brother and his family lived in New York, Harriet knew how much her parents were looking forward to their visit, and being able to spend some time with their grandchildren.
‘Harriet…’ Matt began ominously, and then stopped as he turned into her narrow street and they both saw the police car and the ambulance, lights flashing, outside her elderly neighbour’s home.
Her own feelings forgotten, Harriet pressed her hand to her mouth in anxiety. Mrs Simmonds was in her late eighties, and had a fund of interesting stories about the past, but Harriet was aware that she had a weak heart and had taken to surreptitiously checking on the elderly lady every day in a way that meant that she did not hurt her pride.
‘Oh, no!’
‘What the—’
They both spoke at the same time, and Matt stopped his car.
‘It’s Mrs Simmonds,’ Harriet told him shakily as they watched two burly ambulancemen carrying the old lady into the ambulance on a stretcher.
A police officer was already approaching the car.
‘What’s happened?’ Matt asked.
‘I’m Mrs Simmonds’s neighbour,’ Harriet told him, and got out to join Matt and the policeman. ‘I know she has a weak heart…’
‘Some young thugs broke into her house,’ the policeman told them angrily. ‘Ransacked the place, they did, and made so much noise that someone across the street rang us. We don’t know yet how bad the old lady’s injuries are. She’s had a very nasty shock, so they’re taking her into hospital to keep an eye on her for a couple of days.’
‘Why would anyone break into her house? She doesn’t have anything to steal,’ Harriet protested, pale with alarm. ‘She…’
The policeman gave her a pitying look. ‘It will be a drug-related crime, miss. They get that desperate for it they’d rob their own grandmother—and often do—’
Harriet shuddered.
The ambulance was already drawing away, and the policeman turned to return to his own car and waiting colleague.
‘Right—that’s it,’ Matt announced as soon as both vehicles had gone. ‘No way are you staying here on your own! I’m going to give you two choices,’ he told Harriet grimly. ‘Either I stay here with you tonight or you come back to my place with me. I don’t care which choice you make, but let’s put it this way. I only have one bedroom!’
Harriet felt a jolt in her stomach as though someone had kicked her. One bedroom! Already her body was reacting to the sensual mental fantasy she was creating! What would Matt say if she told him she wanted the second option?
‘I mean what I say, Harriet!’ he said sternly, oblivious to the erotic meanderings of her wayward thoughts.
She wished! Oh, how she wished!
Her heart was bumping uncomfortably against her ribs—and not just because of the effect Matt was having on her.
Her own honesty compelled her to admit that the attack on her neighbour had shocked and frightened her. She was extremely apprehensive at the thought of spending the night alone, worrying that the attackers might decide to come back!
‘I don’t have much of an option, do I?’ she asked Matt, saccharine-sweetly. ‘But I warn
you my spare room is very small and has a single bed. A very small single bed.’
‘I’ll live,’ Matt answered laconically. ‘Give me your keys.’
Idiotically she handed them to him, her heart giving a funny little skip beat at the intimacy such an action suggested. And then it gave a much stronger kick as Matt’s hard, warm fingers closed around her own. Inside her head she had a sudden mental image of him enfolding her hand within his own and them sliding his fingers between hers, and inside her body she had an immediate and explicit surge of aching heat.
Hot-faced, she dragged away her hand and then berated herself mentally for being so vulnerable and weak-willed as Matt let them both into her small, cosy home.
And Harriet’s home was cosy. As cosy as a small, neat and warm little nest. Her little front room was painted cream, to match the cream rugs on the polished floorboards, and Harriet had made the curtains herself, in a natural woven fabric. Her log-burning stove was her pride and joy, a bargain buy from a scrapyard, and the small terracotta linen-covered sofa had been cadged from her parents and reupholstered for her as a moving-in present.
Harriet could see Matt staring around the small room before following her into the kitchen, with its dining area in the conservatory addition.
Harriet had painted the cheap flat pack kitchen units herself, after bullying Ben to help her assemble them, while her dining room furniture had been junk shop finds which she had patiently restored.
As he looked around the comfortable kitchen, with its cream painted units and earthy-toned décor, Matt acknowledged that it took far more than an expensive designer to create a home—and, moreover, whatever it did take Harriet had it in spades.
To Harriet, though, his silent inspection of her small home spoke of arrogance and even possibly contempt. After all, she had heard all about Matt’s state-of-the-art expensive penthouse from Ben.
‘You don’t have to stay here,’ she told him fiercely. ‘It was your choice. Not mine. My home may not compare with yours—’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Matt stopped her grimly.
His rudeness momentarily silenced her.
What would Harriet say if he told her how much he had grown to detest the sterile bleakness of a place that not even the most charitable person could call a home?
Broodingly he roved around the kitchen whilst Harriet watched him resentfully. What was he doing? Trying to make the point that her small home made him feel confined?
‘Look, there’s really no need for you to stay here,’ she said. ‘I can always ring Ben and ask him to come over.’
Immediately Matt swung around. ‘Oh, yes, you’d like to do that, wouldn’t you? Like hell you will, though! Hasn’t anything I’ve said to you sunk in? The whole purpose of this…this…’
‘Farce?’ Harriet supplied bitterly for him.
‘This exercise,’ Matt continued, ignoring her, ‘is to put a barrier between you and Ben, not give you the excuse to invite him to share your bed!’
‘He would not be sharing my bed!’ Harriet protested, rushing into impetuous denial. ‘When he stays here he always sleeps in his own room.’
‘His own room?’
Harriet could understand the hard edge to Matt’s voice, but not the white line of tightly reined in emotion around his mouth.
‘I suppose you even sleep in the damn bed after he has gone, do you? Dreaming virginal dreams of sharing it with him?’
Now it was Harriet’s skin that blanched as fury and shock poured through her in a thunderous fall of ice-cold disbelief.
Turning on her heel, she headed for the door. But Matt got there before her, barring her way with the arm he stretched across it. He felt as shocked by what he had said as Harriet looked, but it was impossible for him to recall the words now.
‘Harriet, I’m sorry,’ he apologised gruffly. ‘I…I was out of order. I shouldn’t have…’
Harriet wasn’t sure she could trust herself to speak, so instead she put both her hands on his arm and pushed hard against it, to make him remove it from the doorway and let her walk away.
Which was a mistake.
A big mistake. As she discovered when, instead of giving way, his arm pushed hers back and then snapped around her along with its fellow, so that she was tightly bound against Matt’s chest.
‘Let go of me!’
Not only was her demand ineffectual, it was also muffled against Matt’s body, Harriet recognised weakly.
‘Not until you’ve let me apologise!’
Was he serious? Did he realise just how many apologies he now owed her?
‘For what?’ she asked him pithily, if somewhat breathlessly, and she tussled to put enough space between his flesh and her lips so that her own breath didn’t come bouncing back to her off his skin and, by some alchemic means, taste of him! ‘Insulting me or imprisoning me?’
‘I shouldn’t have made that comment about your virginity.’
Harriet went completely still, and then took a deep, shuddering breath.
As though he knew she was going to try and lie to him, Matt added quietly, ‘Ben told me.’
‘Ben?’
‘He thought it was something I should know… Just in case my intentions towards you weren’t serious. He may not love you as you want him to, but it’s obvious that he feels a…a certain sense of…of responsibility towards you.’
Matt discovered that he was having to battle with himself to make that admission. It would have suited his purpose far better had he been able to point out to Harriet that Ben had no feelings for her of any kind.
But Harriet was barely aware of the last part of his speech. All her concentration was focused on those three appalling words—Ben told me.
Never had Harriet wished more that she were the fainting type. Deprived of the opportunity for such an escape, she contemplated the effectiveness of a long, piercing scream—but abandoned it as pointless.
Instead she took a deep breath and said heavily, carefully spacing out each word, ‘Ben told you that I am a virgin?’
Did she realise how cute she looked, breathing heavily down her nose like that when she was angry? Matt wondered adoringly.
‘He was trying to protect you!’ Matt found himself defending Ben in a gesture of male solidarity, but then he saw the smouldering volcano of wrath that was burning in her furious gaze.
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure he was,’ Harriet burst out furiously. ‘After all, he’s been doing it ever since I hit puberty, when he told me that boys only wanted one thing! What is it about you men?’ she demanded in a wearily aggrieved voice. ‘Ben would run a mile if he found out that a girl he was dating was a virgin, but he expects me to…to feel grateful to him for preserving mine when… Oh, this is just too much!’ she exclaimed. ‘How could he do this to me? Doesn’t he realise that if you and I were in lo—Er, I mean, if we were seeing one another you would have discovered for yourself long before now that I hadn’t slept with anyone before?’
Discovered for himself? Long before now? Matt found that he was suddenly having a great deal of trouble breathing. To calm himself down he forced himself to play devil’s advocate. ‘Perhaps I’m so passionately in love with you that I’m prepared to wait?’
Harriet gave him a narrow-eyed look of open female contempt.
‘Because I want to make our first time extra special for both of us…’ he elaborated.
Hell, what was he saying that for? Matt cursed as his own body reacted immediately and openly to the intimate images his words were conjuring up.
Harriet could feel herself starting to tremble. No, not tremble. It was a small, delicious, erotic shudder of anticipatory pleasure that was galvanising her body, making her feel so sensuously boneless and weak that she couldn’t move a single muscle to prise her eager flesh away from the hardness of Matt’s body.
The hardness! Matt had an erection, and her body was savouring that knowledge as her hips ground hungrily against him.
A man could drown in the deep g
reen pools of Harriet’s gaze, Matt decided rawly, as his hands slid lower to lift her more tightly against him. His own gaze lowered from her eyes to her mouth, and all hell broke loose inside him.
Inside him—and somewhere upstairs inside the house, where the crash of splintering glass shocked through the silence.
‘Wait here,’ Matt commanded as he released her, but Harriet ignored him, following him as he took her stairs two at a time and then almost cannoning into him as he threw open the door to the small bedroom which overlooked the street. Harriet paled as she saw the broken window and the glass covering the bed and the floor.
Amongst the glass was a brick. Matt frowned and said, ‘Ten to one this is the work of those louts who attacked your neighbour. There’s no point in ringing the police at this time of night—we’ll do that in the morning. You’d better pack a case.’
‘What?’ Harriet shook her head vehemently. ‘Nothing is going to make me leave here. They might come back, and if the house is empty…’
‘Nothing?’ Matt queried meaningfully.
Harriet frowned in confusion, not following his train of thought.
She could see the impatient rise and fall of his chest as he breathed in and then exhaled.
‘No way am I leaving you here on your own. The other bed is covered with shards of glass which means that if you opt to stay here then I shall be sharing your bed!’
Harriet dropped her gaze hurriedly. Ben was always telling her that she had give-away eyes, and she did not want Matt to see the little gleam in them that said her body was reacting to his threat more as though it had been a promise!
Of course it would be impossible for him to sleep on her small sofa; it was too small even for her!
‘Don’t worry, you and your virginity will be perfectly safe.’ Matt deliberately injected an urbane, almost bored note into his voice.
Harriet swallowed hard on the small lump of disappointment clogging her throat. ‘But you said that if…’ Self-consciously she fell silent, leaving Matt to agree laconically.
‘If I was passionately in love with you it would be different. Yes…’ As Harriet turned away from him, intending to go and get something to clear up the mess, he added sardonically, ‘I suppose you have some crazy idea of saving yourself for Ben?’