Georgie heard herself mumble something but she was too busy watching him as he lounged indolently by the door to think coherently. There was something very real and yet very unreal about the situation. The sooner he headed downstairs to work, she thought, flustered, the better off she would be.
She flopped back onto her pillow the minute he had left the room.
It was later than she had first imagined. Nearly seven o’clock and already, in the space of only a short while, beginning to grow lighter. Without it looking fishy, she could conceivably start getting dressed and be out of the house by eight to feed the chickens and start working on some of the costumes, then maybe pop over later in the morning, perhaps stay for lunch. Didi knew that she was very busy with school activities. Christmas was just around the corner and there was always a flurry of things that needed doing before the school holidays began. She had made sure to warn her that there would be bits of the weekend when she would have to disappear. Tactfully, she had omitted to mention just what these bits were and how often they would occur.
But for the moment…
She hurried down to the bathroom, as quietly as she could, so that she could wash her face and swish her mouth with toothpaste, in the absence of a toothbrush. She wondered whether she should start carrying a little holdall every time she stepped foot out of her house, working on the assumption that she would inevitably end up stranded wherever she went and would therefore need a change of clothes, a toothbrush and some make-up.
It would be back into the clothes she had worn the evening before, face scrubbed clean, her blonde hair loosely gathered into a pony-tail.
The room was already beginning to warm up, which meant that Pierre must have advanced the heating. The entire house had been re-plumbed at the time of purchase and the central heating worked like a dream, unlike hers, which clattered noisily into life with the same reluctance to do its job as her car.
With her back to the door and safe in the knowledge that Pierre was sitting in front of a computer somewhere in the cottage, probably now totally oblivious to his surroundings, Georgie stripped off her borrowed nightwear and began sorting out her clothes, first checking to see whether the snow was still falling. It was, but less aggressively than the night before. She should be able to make it back to her place provided her car co-operated.
She turned away from the window, her mind chewing over the problem of how she could beat an exit without it appearing indecently hasty for someone who should be joined to her new-found love at the hip.
And there he was. She hadn’t heard the door being pushed open, hadn’t even been aware that she had left it very slightly ajar, not wanting the click to rouse Didi who needed her beauty sleep more than she cared to admit.
Shock raced through her, taking away her instinct to shield her naked breasts. She just stood there, her mouth parted, her hands limply at her sides. He was carrying a tray on which were two mugs of coffee and some toast.
He walked in and the freeze-frame shattered. Georgie covered her breasts, cheeks bright red with anger and sheer mortification.
‘What are you doing up here?’ she yelped. ‘You’re supposed to be downstairs! Working! You said so!’
‘I said nothing of the sort.’ Pierre rested the tray on the bed, then straightened up. ‘I’ll look away if you want to put something on, although it’s a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Anyway, it’s not as if I haven’t seen a naked woman before…’ But not this one. Oh, no. He had done his damnedest to make his voice as neutral as possible, but he felt as if he could see right through those protective hands trying to shield her nudity, see right through to the vision that had confronted him when he had walked into the bedroom.
She was as slim as he had expected and her breasts small and pert, tipped invitingly with rosy nipples that had made his powerful body surge into immediate response.
Nothing like any of the women he had dated in the past, who had, without exception, been taller and more curvaceously built.
She had the sort of body that exquisitely matched her personality—young, girlish, somehow innocent.
He turned away, frowning at his own dramatic response to her, waiting while she stuck on her shirt and skirt, the whisper of clothes telling its own story of someone trying to get dressed as quickly as was humanly possible.
Eventually he turned round to find her in the same position but this time fully clothed, arms rigidly folded. She had pulled back the curtains and thin winter sunlight gave the room a cool, spectral greyness.
‘I told my mother that I would bring her breakfast in bed. I didn’t go downstairs to work. I went to make some coffee and toast.’
‘You should have said!’
‘You mean asked your permission?’ He strolled towards her. ‘You’re trembling like a leaf,’ he murmured, putting his hands on her arms and feeling her stiffen under him. A feeling of being utterly out of his depth and liking it rushed through his body, leaving him shaken and disconcerted. Her skin was as soft as a peach.
‘Get off,’ Georgie mumbled wildly, but her body wilfully refused to take evasive action. Instead, she remained standing still with her fingers biting into the soft flesh of her arms while his hands on her continued to sear her skin.
Pierre ignored her protest. It was meaningless anyway. Her voice might be telling him to leave her but her body was singing a different song.
And he, to his bemusement, felt as randy as a teenager. ‘Why?’ he asked softly, ‘Is that what you really want me to do?’
‘Yes!’ Georgie said weakly. ‘Of course it is,’ she added, frantic to convince herself as much as him.
Pierre undid the pony-tail and pushed his fingers into her hair and Georgie drew in her breath, partly shocked by the gesture but mostly floundering in confusion, hopelessly trying to figure out what to do and to actually do it.
‘You have beautiful breasts.’ He bent and nuzzled her face with his mouth, which elicited a moan from her. ‘Can I touch them?’
Georgie, beyond speech, didn’t say anything. She wanted this man so badly she was literally shaking from it. When did this happen? When did she hand over control of her mind to someone else? She felt his hand drop to her waist, slip underneath the loose-fitting top, the first of the many layers she wore in winter, rather than simply two with a coat.
‘I’ll take that as yes, then…’ He slipped his hand higher until it brushed the rounded underside of her breast. ‘No bra…was that because you were in such a rush to fling something on?’
‘This is crazy,’ Georgie struggled out.
‘What is? You forget how madly in love we are…’
‘We’re not madly in love…you know that…we just…we mustn’t…’
‘We just…we mustn’t…’ Pierre mimicked her with a low, sexy laugh, ‘but what if we want to?’ He had resisted for too long. He cupped her soft breast with his hand, kneading it gently and rotating his finger over her stiffened nipple. She was as turned on as he was! He could feel her melting against him, incapable of stopping what he was doing to her body.
It was just as well because he wasn’t sure whether he could stop if he wanted to, not now, not when he was hard and throbbing for her.
He unbuttoned the long-sleeved pale blue patterned shirt and spread it apart so that he could drink in the sight of her, as naked as when he had interrupted her in the middle of dressing, but this time she wasn’t wearing that panicked look of a rabbit caught in the headlights. Nor was she rushing to cover herself. But she was breathing quickly, and looking down, not meeting his eyes. He tilted her face so that she had to look at him.
‘Are you as turned on as I am?’ he demanded roughly. She looked as though, if only she could fight it, she would have walked away but she couldn’t. She was as helpless as he was to the charged electricity between them.
To think that she had slept with another man, had a two-year relationship with him! Walked into his outstretched arms of her own volition and not
because her body was obeying its own urgent demands, demands which she had neither invited nor wanted!
The blast of raging jealousy was as fast as it was furious.
‘Of course you are.’ His voice was thick with sexual gloating. ‘Like me touching you there? What about if I do this?’ He propelled her towards the padded window seat and she flung her head back with a wrenched cry of pleasure as he began to suckle on her nipple, drawing it into his mouth and teasing it with his tongue and his teeth. And her other breast was not free from his attention. No, he massaged that with his hand, making her squirm with shameless, wanton abandon.
The shirt trailed over her shoulders and her back was arched as she allowed her forbidden cravings to be satisfied. She half opened her eyes and watched, horribly turned on, his dark head at her breasts as he flicked his tongue on the sensitised tips.
There was something intensely masculine about his harsh, hungry love-making and, although it should have turned her off because she had always seen sex as something gentle and languorous, it perversely made her feel at her most feminine.
She wanted this big, powerful man on his knees before her, barely restraining himself as he lathered her breasts greedily with his mouth.
Her legs automatically parted and a soft noise, half sigh, half cry, escaped as he began pushing the skirt up, his hands traveling past her calves, past her knees until finally they were up around her thighs.
Every inch of her wanted this with a desperation that was terrifying and, Lord knew, she would have gladly given herself to him had not the knock on the bedroom door catapulted them both out of their little private world and back into the reality they had left behind.
Pierre sprang to his feet and Georgie wasn’t far behind, her fingers fumbling with the buttons of her blouse at precisely the same time as Didi poked her head round the door.
‘Oops, sorry, darlings…’ And she did sound very flustered. ‘I interrupted you…’
‘We were just…’ Pierre glanced over his shoulder to Georgie, whose face was barely visible behind the tumble of blonde curls as she stared down at her feet ‘…about to come…’ he left a fraction of a pause ‘…downstairs.’
‘Take your time.’ Didi was already closing the door and Georgie didn’t feel she could actually draw breath until that door was quietly shut.
What had she been thinking? Had she lost her mind?
‘This will never happen again,’ she told him quietly. ‘Never. Do you understand me?’
Pierre leaned against the wall and looked at her. Never? Was that a word that existed in his vocabulary? He inclined his head to one side, but didn’t answer and, without a word Georgie swept past him, out of the bedroom, leaving him to think that there were certain things that sounded very much like a challenge to him and challenges, he would have been the first to admit, had always been his private obsession.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS after nine before Georgie managed to escape. Even then, it was amid a flurry of complaints from Didi, who didn’t think that the Mini was anywhere near up to the job of delivering Georgie back to her house without developing some sort of terminal allergic reaction to the snow between Greengage Cottage and the village centre.
While Pierre looked at her thoughtfully from his position of superiority lounging against the kitchen sink with a dishcloth in one hand in an attempt to appear helpful, Didi did her best to persuade Georgie to hang on just for an hour or so and they could give her a lift back in the Bentley.
It had taken all her non-existent acting skills to turn down the offer while still managing to look as though nothing would have delighted her more, to edge towards the door without looking too desperate to get away.
But she had done it and now here she was, back in her own space and with the entire day to herself because Didi and Pierre were going on their shopping trip and wouldn’t, thank the Lord, be back until late afternoon.
The snow had stopped falling and, although it was still freezing cold, the skies were a bright, unbroken blue and the sun was glittering, already melting the blanket of white that had looked so pretty earlier on. Georgie quietly prayed that the cold, fine weather would continue, which would mean that their meal out at one of the local restaurants could go ahead. In a threesome, there would be no chance of anything getting out of control.
When she thought about what had happened, she actually had to lean against something and close her eyes.
Not only had he touched her, but she had wanted him to, had virtually begged him by surrendering all attempts at self control. Had she even protested? She couldn’t remember.
She threw herself into a frenzy of activity. She cleaned her house from top to bottom, which left her pleasantly exhausted by lunchtime, and then she began work on patching up the Santa Claus costume, which was in threads after years of use by old Mr Blackman, their regular Father Christmas who visited the kids at school and did his ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’ act, complete with sack of toys that the parents bought making sure that nothing was more expensive than a couple of pounds. He would be on display in a few days time and the white beard was beginning to look a lot worse for wear, like a rug that had been walked on too many times. With the telly blaring in the background, she could effectively lose herself in the minutiae of patching and darning and sprucing up.
Not that the images of Pierre touching her didn’t penetrate the ferocity of her concentration. They did. His mouth at her breasts, his hands touching her, that glorious feeling of wanting to surrender to an unstoppable force. It had been like nothing she had ever felt before. Stan had been a gentle lover. Pierre, on the other hand, had overwhelmed her, turned her into a person she barely recognised.
She had been expecting to hear from Didi at some point and she did. At five-thirty her telephone rang and Didi, obviously on a high after a successful shopping trip with her son, barely sounded like the flat, lifeless woman she had been less than a fortnight ago. Her words were tripping over each other as she described the beautiful lunch they had had at one of the local hotels, the fantastic tea of fresh scones and clotted cream, the shops they had gone to in search of presents and Christmas tree decorations. Georgie tried to picture Pierre shopping for presents and Christmas tree decorations and found that she couldn’t, although, really, thinking about it, her assumptions of him had been crumbling fast. How was she to know whether he adored tramping through shops before regaining his energy with a couple of hearty scones and cups of tea? Where were all those useful categories into which she had-pigeon holed him? Where was the good-looking but essentially boring, humourless, condescending workaholic? Nowhere much in evidence, thereby proving conclusively, she thought, that she was rubbish when it came to deciphering people and, more importantly, the opposite sex.
Furthermore, where was she? Where was the fun loving, good natured girl who had been so sure of being in control of the situation she had impulsively and foolishly generated? Where were all her reliable feelings of healthy antagonism towards him? She certainly hadn’t been feeling too antagonistic that morning as she had succumbed to the massive sexual power she had never suspected him of having.
‘The weather has cleared up beautifully.’ Didi was now chattering merrily away. ‘So we thought we’d go to Chez Zola as planned. Terribly formal compared to yesterday, I know, and if you’d rather we just stayed in—’
‘No!’ Even in the safety of her home, Georgie could feel nervous, prickly perspiration break out and she cleared her throat before continuing. ‘No, I think it would be nice for us all to have a meal out. I’m dying to hear all about your day…it’s been such a long time since you’ve ventured out shopping, Didi…’ And this, she reminded herself, was what it was all about: Didi recapturing that spark that had disappeared from her life over the past few months.
‘Oh, you don’t want to hear me going on, Georgie…’
Georgie, with a sinking heart, detected something of a girlish giggle. ‘Of course I do!’ she said brightly. ‘Pierre and I can…can a
lways catch up…um…later…’
‘Of course you can! Well…’ Georgie heard her ask Pierre for timings and she shivered at the deep timbre of his voice as he indistinctly said something in the background, then Didi was back on the line, ‘we’ll pop across for you at about seven. A little early, but no point risking more poor weather by being out too late!’
Georgie couldn’t agree more. She wanted to be firmly tucked up in her own bed tonight.
Meal at seven. Surely it wasn’t asking too much to be back home and shutting her front door by ten?
With that optimistic thought in mind, she dressed, unusually for her, in something more sophisticated than she was accustomed to wearing. Actually, the only sophisticated outfit in her wardrobe. A long-sleeved, figure-hugging dress in deep burgundy and, instead of her usual flat, sensible, weatherproof Doc Martins, a pair of high heels, which might not be practical for the weather but were certainly essential Chez Zola footwear. She had never been to the restaurant, but she had heard enough about it to know that the casual look would not go down a storm.
‘Nice outfit,’ Pierre said as she opened the door to him and began sticking on her black coat. ‘Shame about the woolly hat.’
‘I don’t intend to wear it in the restaurant,’ Georgie snapped.
She had braced herself for seeing him but was still, idiotically, taken aback by how supremely sexy he looked, dark coat casually flapping open to reveal a crisp white shirt and dark trousers. Every bit of her felt horribly alive and alert to his presence, a fact she disguised under a scowl as she defensively yanked the woolly hat a bit lower.
‘And you’re wearing shoes.’
‘I usually do!’
‘Of a workmanlike variety.’
‘Yes, well, they happen to be very useful in my kind of career! It’s not practical to do playground duty in a pair of kitten heels!’
‘Now, now,’ Pierre chided. ‘Snapping isn’t very romantic behaviour with your lover, is it?’
Bedded at the Billionaire's Convenience Page 9