by Penny Jordan
Fate was a funny thing, he decided as he locked the car and started to retrace his steps.
* * *
Harriet didn’t hear him enter the suite. In fact the first she knew of his presence was when he walked into the bathroom to find her lying back in the whirlpool bath, with only her head above the mass of bubbles which had already spilled over the sides of the tub.
‘Matt,’ she whispered weakly. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done, but I think these bubbles are getting a bit out of control.’
‘That’s what happens when you play around with things you don’t understand,’ Matt heard himself answering thickly.
Did she have any idea what she was doing to him? As she tried to sit up foam clung to her skin and then slid from it, revealing the creamy swell of her breasts. ‘I can’t switch the whirlpool jet thingy off.’
‘You’d better get out, then, and let me try.’
‘It would be much easier if you got in,’ Harriet told him softly. ‘And much more fun!’
Matt stared at her, but although she flushed slightly she didn’t look away from him.
‘You do know what you’re saying, don’t you?’ he demanded, before stressing, ‘What you’re inviting…?’
Mutely Harriet nodded her head, and then told him brightly, ‘The hotel is awfully well-organised, Matt. They even provide condoms.’ She stood up in the bath. ‘Help me out, please.’
‘I thought you wanted me to get in with you?’ he reminded her huskily.
Matt closed his eyes, exasperated with himself for his own lack of self-control. What the hell was he doing? But it was too late to back out now. Harriet was looking at him, her eyes glowing and an expression of radiant expectancy on her face.
‘Oh, Matt!’ she whispered. ‘I do want you to make love to me so very, very much. You will, won’t you?’
CHAPTER SEVEN
HARRIET gave a small gasp as Matt lifted her body out of the bath. ‘Your suit!’ she protested. ‘You’ll be soaked… Mmm.’
If he didn’t care about his suit, then she wasn’t going to worry about it! Not when he was kissing her like this.
He should not be doing this, Matt warned himself. But somewhere deep down inside himself he knew that there was no way he could not. Some foolish, stubborn part of him refused to relinquish its passionate belief that if only he could show Harriet what real love—his love—was like, then she would recognise how much she wanted it, and him, and how little she wanted Ben.
Harriet hardly dared allow herself to believe what was happening. To believe that it was Matt who was holding her and kissing her. But her body had no time for such foolish hesitations. Her body was far, far too busy showing its appreciation of the sensual pleasure it was enjoying, and what was more it was demanding that Harriet threw every bit of her emotional and cerebral energy and concentration into actively participating!
And why should she not do so, when it was so very, very much what she wanted?
Eagerly she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her naked body as close to him as she could, returning the hard, demanding pressure of his mouth with a kiss of fevered longing. Delicately she ran the tip of her tongue along the line of his mouth, tracing it, probing its defences. She lifted her breasts and the urgent thrust of her body brought a sensually erotic friction to her nipples with each unchoreographed and instinctive movement it made.
Matt had always prided himself on his self-control, but now he realised that it had never previously been truly tested, that all other sensual intimacies had barely touched the surface of what uncontrollable need actually felt like. The feel of Harriet’s tongue tip innocently mimicked and mirrored the most intimate kind of man-to-woman penetration; the hard points of her stiff nipples were hot stabs of pleasure burning against his skin with every writhing movement of her body. These were all guided-missile assaults on a defence mechanism which in the past had known little other than the equivalent of a mild attack with a handheld catapult.
Even the erection he could feel straining against his clothes had an unfamiliar dimension to it—not so much in size, or even intensity, but in something that went way beyond that. A sort of spiritually physical homing need, Matt recognised to his own grim shock.
So this was physical love. This savage, untameable hunger that would break down every barrier between them until they were perfectly united as one. This seeking, aching drive to complete himself within her.
What he felt was both primitive and spiritual. The most basic of man’s desires and the most elevated, straining together to form an emotional and physical hunger that held him helpless in its grip.
Harriet could feel how aroused Matt was, and beneath the immediate kick of her sweetly pleasurable excitement she could feel the rhythmic pulse of her body’s answering response.
Impatiently she tugged at his shirt, her skin starting to flush with betraying heat.
How long was he going to make her wait?’
Somehow her love-hungry thoughts had become achingly impatient words, whispered against Matt’s mouth as she tried to steal the intimate kiss she was longing for.
And when he heard them Matt felt the last of his self-control being dragged away with them. He gripped her bare arms firmly and eased her away from his body, ignoring her small moaned protest. When she tried to reach out to him he tugged her hands down and held them carefully with one of his own, whilst he started to undress himself impatiently with the other.
‘Wait…just wait,’ he told her thickly, his molten grey gaze holding the dark liquid passion of jade.
When he tugged off his shirt he felt the shudder that jolted her through his own body, like an electric shock. Her already prominent nipples flared into irresistible dark-flushed temptation.
Harriet shuddered again when he looked at them, and somewhere inside his head the need to experience how she would react when he gave in to the craving to have her breasts inside his mouth struck him with such force that he had dropped to one knee and begun lapping at first one and then the other with fierce urgency before he could stop himself.
Her hands trapped behind her back, Matt’s tongue laving her exquisitively aroused nipples, Harriet shuddered more under the liquid surges of pleasure that ran through her.
Pulling her hands free of Matt’s grip, she started to finish the task he had begun, tugging frantically at fabric and fastenings until she could feel the heat of his flesh beneath her hands.
The tug of his mouth on her breast drew a sharp, wild cry from her lips and she raked his flesh with her nails, unable to stop herself from reacting to the needs he was feeling.
She could feel it gathering swiftly inside her, like a fast-flooding river, channelled into the place where its intensity would set in motion a cataclysmically powerful reaction.
Fear spiked and shook her; the swift race might prove too fast to be properly harnessed. As though he sensed it too, Matt swept her up into his arms, kicking aside the tangle of his clothes, and carried her into the bedroom.
In its shadows Harriet could almost see the beat of his heart beneath the golden sheen of his skin. Wonderingly she raised her hand to it, her fingertips measuring each thudding, driving beat, knowing already with the most intense emotion and physical anticipation that soon that driving power would be replicated and intensified within her own body.
Matt could feel the strain on his own self-control as he placed Harriet on the bed. Things had gone too fast, and for him too far now, for the slow, gentle voyage he had intended.
Harriet lay on the bed and looked up at him. She was shockingly close to her orgasm…too close.
In her mind’s eye she could see the foil wrapper of the condom she had secreted away in her handbag, which was within reach beside the bed.
A surge of explicit heat tightened sharply inside her. Deliberately and determinedly she opened her legs, and looked directly into Matt’s face.
The dark tide of colour that surged through his face as his arousal strained towards
her only heightened her own.
Boldly she touched her own body, biting down hard on her lip as she felt the immediate tense contraction, her gaze fixed fiercely on Matt’s as he shuddered violently in response.
‘Now, Matt… Oh, please, now—now…’ Her words were lost, crushed beneath his mouth as his hands shaped her. She could feel the thick, hard throb of him against her thigh and her fingers reached blindly for him, discarding as they did so the foil wrapper she had been clutching.
Somewhere, outside himself and the ferocity of his driving need, Matt registered and recognised it, automatically responding to his own inbuilt set of unbroken rules.
Harriet, clinging to the edge of a place she couldn’t bear to let herself be swept from, heard the brief rustle and felt the chilling emptiness of where he had been. But before she could think logically about what was happening Matt was holding her, kissing her, entering her as slowly and carefully as he could whilst his whole body shook under the unbearable burden of his own self-control. She exhaled a delicious moan of joyous pleasure as she realised that her fantasies were going to be more than fulfilled.
The brief feeling of pressure, the sudden stilling of Matt’s body, were unwanted interruptions and delays. Instinctively she showed him this, moving fiercely and eagerly against him until he drove deeper and then more deeply still as she clung to him and urged him to take all that she wanted to give him, her body glorying in each new thrust.
Dear heaven, but she felt so good, so perfect, with her flesh enfolding him, holding him, gripping him. She moved deliberately against him, inciting him to plunge deeper.
Harriet could already feel her orgasm overwhelming her—tight, fierce bursts of sensation that echoed the pulse of life itself. She heard Matt shout out in exultation and the intensity increased to a frantic explosion of savagely powerful contractions that were a world away from anything she had previously experienced.
* * *
Held fast in Matt’s arms, still trembling between each jagged breath, Harriet felt herself fall from the euphoric haven she had been inhabiting through doubt and shock into the cold, unwanted world of reality.
Matt was renowned for his astuteness. How long would it be before he guessed how she felt about him? And when he did what was going to happen?
Harriet suspected she already knew the answer to her own question.
She would suffer the misery and the humiliation of being told that Matt did not want her love—and, worse, she would probably be banished from his life! She couldn’t bear to let that happen!
She must not let him guess how she really felt!
* * *
His chin resting on the top of Harriet’s head, Matt blinked fiercely. No one, nothing, had ever touched his emotions so intensely as what he had just shared with Harriet. It was true that love gave the physical act of intimacy between two people an extra dimension that took it into another world. He felt awed, humbled, fiercely and passionately completed, and equally fiercely and passionately determined that he was never, ever going to let Harriet go.
Surely she must have shared some of those feelings?
All his adult life he had protected his own deepest emotions, but now he knew that he had to tell Harriet how he felt, that he had to beg her if necessary to let him wipe the slate clean so that they could begin again—two people who could together touch immortality through their shared love.
He took a deep breath and began, ‘Harriet, why—?’
Immediately Harriet froze. It was happening already, the very thing she had dreaded. Matt was going to ask her why she had responded to him in the way she had, and then he was going to answer his own question by telling her that he knew she was in love with him.
She couldn’t let that happen.
‘I know what you’re going to say, Matt.’ She stopped him quickly. ‘But you’ve got it all wrong. The only reason I made… I did what I did was because I couldn’t think of any other way of convincing you that, contrary to your constant accusations, I am not saving myself for Ben.’
Her sharp, careless words hit Matt like blows, like acid-tipped arrows to his heart. He went completely still, and then moved away from her so brutally that Harriet felt as though he had physically pushed her away.
‘Thank goodness you were quick-thinking enough to remember the condom,’ she added chattily. ‘It was a wonderful experience, Matt, and I got so carried away that I would have forgotten.’
There! That should take care of any thoughts he had of questioning the intensity of her response, Harriet decided fiercely.
She waited for Matt to respond, but instead he simply got out of the bed and walked silently into the bathroom, firmly closing the door.
A pain like no other she had ever experienced filled her. It was so intense, so immense, that she couldn’t contain it. It felt as though it was weeping from her heart into her blood, seeping through her pores until every bit of her was saturated with it.
There was no escape from it and there never would be, Harriet acknowledged in anguish.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NUMBLY Harriet opened her fist and stared at the ring in the palm of her hand. Unable to bear its brilliance in the face of her own pain, she closed her hand again, so tightly that the stone dug into her skin.
She hadn’t seen Matt for over a week. He had left the hotel after they had made love without saying a single word to her, and she had discovered when she had arrived at work in the morning that he had been called away on some urgent business.
She had received a terse text message from him, demanding: ‘Wear the ring—I meant what I said’.
And of course she’d had to, for Ben’s sake! And now it seemed that everyone knew that she and Matt were supposed to be engaged.
Now at last it was Friday, and she had decided it was the last day of her working life with Matt. If she couldn’t endure the pain of her unwanted love when he wasn’t there then how on earth was she going to bear it when he was?
The tears threatening to pour from her eyes were as sharply painful as the diamond cutting into her hand.
‘Harry—there you are!’
She forced a smile at Ben came bounding up to her. ‘How’s Cindi?’ she asked him.
‘She’s fine. We’re both fine. In fact we’re over the moon,’ he confessed happily. ‘She’s finally accepted that she got it all wrong about you and me, and she’s taking me home with her to meet her family at the end of the month. But first we’re going to have a couple of days away together, so that I can follow Matt’s example and pop the question! I love her so much, Harry, but there’s no way I could have accepted her if she hadn’t been understanding about you and our friendship.’
Harriet’s heart sank further with every word he uttered. Everything Ben was saying confirmed what she herself had feared. She suspected that if she and Matt ‘broke up’ now, it would do irreparable harm to Ben’s romance.
But of course the truth was that she and Matt had nothing together to break up. She meant nothing to him. Nothing at all!
Tears filled her eyes. Frantically she tried to blink them away.
‘Harry?’ Ben queried, bewildered. ‘What is it? What’s wrong? I thought you were happy.’
It was more than Harriet’s savaged emotions could stand. To her own humiliation and disbelief she discovered that she had stared to cry.
‘Thank you, Ben. I will deal with this,’ Matt announced from behind them.
Both of them swung around in shock, neither of them having heard him come into the room.
‘Oh, Matt. It’s you! Good.’ Ben looked relieved. ‘Well, I’ll take myself off and…’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Matt told him grimly. ‘What Harriet and I have to say to one another is going to be said in the privacy of my apartment, and not here in the office!’
So far he hadn’t so much as looked at her, never mind addressed her directly, Harriet recognised, torn between a sweet, aching longing, unbearable pain, and total and absolute
misery.
He was looking at her now, though, pinning her with that ice-grey look of his whilst he held open the office door and said coldly, ‘Harriet?’
Reluctantly she started to walk towards him, preparing her verbal defensive attack as she did so.
And she didn’t wait to reach him to launch it. ‘There really isn’t any point in this Matt,’ she began, but to her shock he forestalled her, manacling her wrist with a hard, determined grip.
But it was still his touch, still his flesh on hers, and she was still oh, so achingly vulnerable to that.
Panic engulfed her like the cold, icy waters of a well she had fallen into and couldn’t escape from.
‘No! Let me go. You know—’
Immediately Matt swung around to face her.
He must have been working hard, she decided, because there was a sharper edge to his jaw, a leanness to his face, and the shadow of something in his eyes that suggested a hard, punishing week without proper meals or sleep.
‘I know what? How hot you are in bed?’ he taunted her savagely. ‘Do you want me to tell Ben that? What we have to say to one another needs to be said in private—unless you want me to go into explicit detail in public,’ he told her brutally.
Harriet felt herself sway as her body absorbed the shock of his open threat.
* * *
He hadn’t had a single second’s respite from thinking about her all week—which had defeated the whole purpose of setting up a rigorous diary of appointments to keep him out of the office, Matt acknowledged bitterly.
This morning, knowing he would be seeing her, he had been forced to admit that his need to do so had outstripped his pride by about one thousand to one.
He had even planned during his early-morning drive back how he could use the fake engagement he had created to build a very real intimacy between them—the kind of intimacy which, whilst a form of purgatory for him, would at least give him the opportunity to find some way to win her love.
And then he had walked into the office—his office—to find her with Ben!