by Lynne Graham
‘But I’d have made it my business, ma belle.’
Although she knew she should not, she looked up at him. The smouldering intensity of his dark golden gaze set off every sensual alarm bell she possessed but she moved not an inch. Indeed, she felt incapable of moving. For almost four years she had concentrated all her energies on being a loving mother to Jake and studying for her degree at art college. She had had to push herself very, very hard to cope as a single parent and a student, who also needed to work a part-time job. There had been little space for dating in her gruelling schedule, but then that had not really been a sacrifice when no ordinary male could dislodge Christien from her mind. Christien with his black hair falling over his bronzed brow, danger flashing gold in his stunning eyes, not a single note jarring the sheer, riveting perfection of his hard, all-male beauty. Christien, the ultimate of impossible acts to follow.
Dry-mouthed, she settled her focus back on the real live male in front of her. ‘Why do you want to make me your business again?’
‘I don’t know.’ A rough, humourless laugh was dredged from Christien. ‘It’s madness…but I’m still here.’
It shook her that Christien should say it was madness to be with her again and yet stay. He was mere inches from her, drop-dead gorgeous and virile and, that close to him, she felt boneless.
‘You should leave—’
‘Should but won’t.’
‘Is that a threat or a promise?’ she whispered.
‘What do you want it to be, mon ange?’
His presence was both threat and promise and she knew it. She had never stopped wanting him, had never learned to hate him. How could she when she understood the very forces that had ensured they stayed apart? The enormity of the tragedy that had engulfed their families that summer had shattered the tenuous remains of their relationship.
‘What do I want?’ She wanted him, only him. It was a truth that was rooted so deep in her that even pride could not make her deny it. ‘Take a guess…’
Eyes shimmering hard and bright, Christien snatched in a ragged breath. He reached out and lifted her right off her feet and up into his arms in a demonstration of confidence and unapologetic masculine strength that made her feel weak and wanton and dizzy.
He took her mouth with stormy hunger and pried her lips apart to ravish the tender interior. A violent shiver of response racked her. Her heart hammering, she stretched up to him to deepen that connection. It felt so good she was instantly, helplessly addicted to her own craving for more. He pinned her up against the wall and his tongue plunged and withdrew between her readily parted lips with fierce, driving hunger.
Wrenching her stinging lips from his with a mighty effort, she shut her eyes, fighting to maintain even a shred of restraint. ‘The whole world’s spinning,’ she mumbled.
In an almost clumsy movement that bore little resemblance to his usual sure, fluid grace, he peeled her back off the wall and clamped her to his big, powerful length. He held her tight, so tight she could barely squeeze air into her constricted lungs.
‘I’m sorry…I feel out of control,’ he grated.
Her arms linked round him then and a smile like the sunrise started inside her where he couldn’t see it. This was the guy who rarely took more than one glass of alcohol because feeling anything other than in total command of himself was anathema to him. To make him feel out of control even momentarily was an achievement of no mean order and to hear him confess it was a joy.
‘I’m never in control with you,’ she whispered back with neither resentment nor pleasure, just acceptance that that should be the case.
Christien felt light-headed with a triumph as old as time itself. She was his, she was still his. He was not a guy who reasoned in what he believed were primitive sexist terms and he had never felt possessive around any other woman. But she was different and, with her, he was different too and that was a conundrum he had never wasted any time agonising over. He set her down in the bedroom where an old Anglepoise lamp burned on an upturned box next to the bed. He did not think of himself as imaginative but he was already picturing the bare room furnished with the kind of pretty feminine clutter she adored.
Eyelids sensually lowered over his dark golden gaze, Christien treated her to a fierce, intent appraisal that fired her very skincells with awareness of her womanhood. ‘I take one look at you and I’m so hungry for you I’m in agony,’ he confessed huskily, sinking down on the edge of the bed and drawing her forward to stand between his spread thighs.
Was that why he was still so very special to her? Tabby asked herself. His ability to look at her with a wondering appreciation that suggested that she was an incredibly gorgeous woman when she herself knew that she was just an ordinary one? A marvel made all the more striking by the simple fact that Christien himself was very much in a class of his own? Even in well-worn jeans and a beige cotton sweater, he exuded exclusive cool and bred-in-the-bone sophistication. He possessed that degree of pure masculine good looks more often seen on a movie screen. Men of his ilk usually gravitated towards classically beautiful women, but she was wildly, humbly grateful that something she couldn’t see and couldn’t begin to understand had brought him to her instead.
Vulnerable and almost dazed by the intensity of her own emotions at that instant, Tabby looked back at him. ‘Christien…?’
‘You’re very lovely, ma belle,’ he said thickly, reaching up to tug the band out of her naturally curly caramel-coloured hair.
‘I’m not—’
‘Shush…’ He finger-combed her hair down onto her taut shoulders, leant forward to let his tongue penetrate between lips as sweet and inviting as juicy strawberries.
She shivered and leant into that kiss, knees wobbling under her, hands suddenly coming down to steady herself on his long, powerful thighs. The swollen tightness of her nipples hurt. The very thought of his expert hands on her made her tremble with eagerness and already she was way beyond rational thought or restraint.
‘Please…’ she heard herself say.
‘I want to take my time…I’ve pictured this too often,’ he murmured roughly.
Mesmerised, she stood there, gazing into gorgeous golden eyes shaded by luxuriant black lashes longer and more luxuriant than her own. Just like Jake’s, she conceded, and her throat tightened and she knew that she would have no choice but to tell him about his son now. Intimidated by the thought, she blanked out her mind.
Reaching up, Christien brushed the camisole straps down over her slim forearms, baring the proud, creamy swell of her breasts. The fabric caught on the taut rosy peaks. On fire with wanting, she felt her nightdress fall to her hips and he vented an earthy groan of bold appreciation.
‘Stop looking at me like that…’ she gasped, racked by shamed embarrassment for the terrible hunger that kept her standing there, exposed and desperate for his touch.
‘I can’t…you are exquisite,’ Christien ground out, hauling her to him and closing his mouth to a pouting pink nipple.
All the breath pent-up inside her escaped in a startled gush, her soft lips parting, her head falling back, sweet, intense sensation thrumming through her in a heady tide while the moist heat at the heart of her quickened. His hands on her rounded hips, he roved from one stiff, sensitive bud to the other and she whimpered in response to urge him on. There was only him and what he could make her feel, and what he could make her feel drove out all else.
Long fingers shaping and moulding her tender breasts, he took her lush mouth again and again and the hard, male urgency of his plundering kiss wiped her out. She clung, gasped, felt the nightdress fall away and cried out low in her throat as he let sure fingers explore the slick, wet flesh between her thighs. She was trembling, utterly seduced by the screaming demands of her own body. He brought her down on the bed and stood over her while he hauled off his sweater with something less than cool.
‘Ciel…I forgot how it feels with you, ma belle.’ Dark colour accentuating his proud cheekbones, he stud
ied her with raw intensity.
‘I’ve never forgotten.’ Tabby was deliciously, wickedly aware of the size and the strength of his big, powerful body and the hard ridge of male arousal jutting below the tight jeans he wore left her weak with wanting. Belatedly conscious of her own nudity and the golden eyes flaming hungrily over her, she curled her legs up and he gave her a slashing smile of wicked amusement.
She could not take her eyes off him. His lean bronzed torso bore a triangular pelt of black curls across his pectorals. He was powerfully muscled but as sleek in movement as an athlete. His stomach was washboard-flat and dissected by a silky furrow of dark hair. She watched him unsnap his jeans, skim them down to reveal boxers and long, hair-roughened thighs and the shame of her own excitement almost overwhelmed her.
‘You make me crazy for you…’ Christien groaned, his rasping, sexy accent sending an evocative quiver down her spine.
He pulled her back to him. He made a praiseworthy effort to be cool, seductive and slow the pace with some seductive kissing, but her tongue twinned with his and he shuddered against her and ground his aching shaft into her pelvis with a raw growl low in his throat. Suddenly she was flat on the bed and he was devouring her with a wild, ravaging kiss. Her hunger went rocketing up the temperature scale and she rose up under him and sobbed his name below his marauding mouth, back arching in an agony of longing as he worshipped her breasts with his lips and his teeth.
‘Please—’
‘If I don’t wait, I’ll blow it,’ Christien grated in raw warning.
‘No…you won’t.’ She would have told him anything.
‘Oui…just like the first time, like a stupid, overeager kid, I’ll hurt you!’ Fabulous bone structure rigid, Christien glowered down at her as he struggled to maintain a grip on his fast-shredding control.
‘That wasn’t your fault.’ Tabby pressed her lips to his strong jawline in a soothing gesture as natural to her with Christien as living. ‘It was my first time and I should’ve told you but I was too embarrassed.’
Christien blinked. Her first time? When they met she had been a…virgin? One hundred per cent innocent, pure and untouched? And he hadn’t noticed? He was stunned by the belated awareness that somewhere deep down where he had had no desire to probe he had always had that suspicion, but had never taken it out and faced it before. Why not? Was it possible that he had been reluctant to accept that amount of responsibility?
‘Christien…?’
Golden eyes haunted by rare guilt, he steeled himself to back off, but her small hands were sliding into his hair, shaping his skull, and he looked down into luminous green eyes and fell victim to their enchantment instead. The drugging collision of their mouths ignited the hunger to a frantic fever again and her desperation only increased when he probed the hot, satin sensitivity between her thighs. She was in sensual torment, arching up to him, begging for more with every fibre of her being.
‘I need to be inside you…’ Dark blood delineating his hard cheekbones, Christien dragged her under him.
He plunged his swollen member into her damp, heated core and thrust deep. Sensual shock momentarily held her still. She could feel him stretching her and it had been so long that her own excitement was almost unbearable. His pagan possession thrilled her to the depths of her wanton soul. Her blood roared through her veins and her heart thundered as he drove her into his stormy rhythm. She was flying higher than she had ever flown and then she was crying out his name and her body was jerking, convulsing, breaking apart in a sweet, sweet rush of ecstasy. It felt so good, so wonderful it almost hurt and a surge of tears stung her eyes. His magnificent body shuddered over hers and she clutched him tight in the aftermath. It was as if she had been in suspended animation for almost four years and had suffered a sudden revival. She was in shock.
Christien emerged from the wildest, hottest orgasm of his life and struggled just to breathe again. He rolled over, carrying her with him, and stared down at her in a daze, pushing her tumbled honey-coloured hair back off her flushed, oval face with a lean brown hand that he noticed was trembling. That shook him even more.
Tabby drank in the musky, sexy scent of his damp skin and revelled in the familiarity even as a little voice shrieked inside her that she had just committed an act of insanity.
Christien pressed his lips to her smooth brow and rearranged her slight body over him. ‘Once is never enough with you—’
‘Don’t be greedy,’ she teased, snuggling into him like a homing pigeon, determined not to think about what she was doing.
‘I should have guessed that you were a virgin when we met,’ Christien breathed, for he was only just beginning to disentangle that startling reality from the miasma of misinformation with which he had deliberately fenced his memories of her in the intervening years.
‘You didn’t want to know…you thought it might commit you in some way,’ Tabby whispered abstractedly. ‘I told myself you hadn’t noticed but I was really just trying to explain what I wasn’t old enough to understand.’
It had been almost four years since Christien had been treated to that amount of blunt honesty and his even white teeth momentarily gritted together. As a rule women wrapped up the unpalatable truth around him and never ever voiced it. ‘It wasn’t like that…’
Of course, it had been, Tabby reflected painfully. She had been besotted, out of her depth and trying to be something she was not and he had taken what all young, virile males were programmed to take: sexual conquest of a willing woman. Everything that had happened between them had been inevitable according to their sex, right down to her having fallen head over heels in love and him having got bored with her.
‘It was…and you got bored—’
His long, lean length had turned very tense. ‘I didn’t get bored…you went off with the lout on the Harley.’
‘I didn’t—’
Christien lifted her off him and dumped her down onto the mattress by his side. ‘For once in your life, tell the truth—’
Infuriated, Tabby sat up. ‘I am telling the truth!’
‘Where is the bathroom?’ Christien demanded.
‘Downstairs.’ Tabby compressed her lips, green eyes fiery. ‘I went out for a ride with Pete, and Pippa and Hilary were with his friends on their bikes. It was just a night out and nothing happened—’
‘Ciel! Don’t give me that! I saw you snogging him in the village…little slut!’ Christien suddenly shot at her with a passionate fury that took even him aback and was a far cry from the cool he preferred to show the world.
Tabby froze while Christien sprang out of bed and hauled on his jeans. She remembered that as she’d clambered off the motorbike that evening Pete had leant forward and kissed her before they’d parted. It had lasted only a second and she had not wanted to shoot him down in flames in front of his mates and hers by making a three-act tragedy out of something so small.
‘You saw that…’ she gasped in genuine horror. ‘Oh, no!’
Unimpressed, Christien sent her a sizzling look of derision. ‘Did you do it on the bike with him the same way you laid yourself across the bonnet of my car for me?’
‘Don’t be disgusting!’ Tabby launched at him in a rage of quivering mortification and then she fell still again, agile brain working fast. It was like a missing piece of jigsaw puzzle suddenly slotting into place for her. But unlike with the average jigsaw that missing piece had changed the whole picture. Taken in isolation, what Christien had seen must have looked damning. During that week, he had been away in Paris and he hadn’t been in touch and then he had seen her kissing someone else.
‘Why on earth didn’t you confront me?’ Tabby slung at the lean bronzed back heading down the stairs.
‘You think I would lower myself to that level?’ Christien shot back at her in disbelief.
Tabby almost screeched her frustration out loud and raced in his wake.
Christien emerged in shock from his brush with the primitive plumbing facilities. ‘There is
no place to wash!’ he condemned with incredulity.
‘There’s a sink and a geyser that gives hot water…I want to talk about Pete—’
‘So that was his name…’ Christien snarled. ‘You tart!’
‘Stop it!’ Tabby launched at him. ‘My friends were there and so were his and it was broad daylight. I went for a spin on his bike…that’s all. That stupid little kiss you saw was all that ever happened between us!’
‘You think I am about to believe that?’
‘Why not? I didn’t kiss him back but it didn’t even last long enough for me to push him away…it was innocent. I was nuts about you—’
‘And the biggest liar in Europe!’ Christien countered with crushing effect.
She paled and then flushed beetred with guilt for it was unanswerable. ‘But not about that,’ she persisted tautly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone with any other bloke and you should have known that. But then maybe you did and you just needed another excuse to put me out of your life.’
Christien swore in French but he had stilled too and doubt was touching him for the first time. Back then he too had believed she was too keen on him to stray. However, at the time newly aware of just how young she actually was, he had also known just how short-lived a teenage infatuation could be.
‘Then you got the ultimate excuse to stay away, didn’t you?’ In Tabby’s anguished gaze was the terrible memory of their meeting like strangers in the hospital waiting room thronged with those whose lives had been damaged by Gerry Burnside’s drunk driving and for ever shadowed by the lost lives of those who had not survived that night.
Gerry Burnside had driven round a corner on the wrong side of the road and he had crashed the four-wheel drive head-on into Henri Laroche’s Porsche. Tabby’s stepmother, Lisa, had been the only adult who had not been in her husband’s car and she had been having hysterics in the waiting room. Pippa had been shattered by the death of her mother and waiting to hear how the emergency surgery on her father had gone. Hilary and her little sister, Emma, had been huddled together, bereft of both their parents. Jen’s mother had been badly injured as well and Jen had been praying for her survival.