by Robyn Donald
‘Open the door, will you?’ he asked, the deep, cool voice without expression.
She did so, and went ahead of him into the conservatory where the frangipani held its cream and gold flowers up n huge panicles. Behind the hills to the west, the sky glowed scarlet and gold and a glaring orange.
‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight,’ Jacinta said, because she couldn’t think of anything else and she had to break that silence. ‘Dean’s going to be disappointed.’
Paul waited until she’d sat down before asking, ‘I gather it hasn’t rained.’
‘Several showers, but not enough. Dean says you haven’t enough grass to see the stock through if this turns but to be a dry summer.’
‘The long-range forecast says it will be a dry summer.’
She put down untasted the glass of lime and soda he’d given her; she didn’t trust herself to carry it to her lips without spilling it. ‘What will you do?’
She’d exchange a few meaningless pleasantries with him and then make an excuse and go to bed. She could control the fizzing excitement in her blood for that long. She wouldn’t make a fool of herself.
‘We’ve already started to sell stock,’ he said. ‘And we have dams and springs—we should come through in a reasonably good state unless it doesn’t rain until next May. How’s your finger?’
He hadn’t turned the light on and the burning sky edged his-profile with flames.
‘It’s all right,’ she said vaguely, steadying her hand to reach for her glass. She downed half the cold liquid, and iccuped.
Paul lifted his glass to his lips. He didn’t drink much. What’s been happening while I’ve been gone?’
‘Nothing much,’ she said. It sounded a little bleak, so she added, ‘Well, not a lot. I found a seagull on the beach with a broken wing, and Fran and I have been looking after it...’ Her voice died away. After a moment, sht asked, ‘Did your trip go well?’
‘Very well.’ He almost drawled the words.
Had he seen Meriam Anderson in Los Angeles?
‘I’ve got something for you from Laurence Perry,’ he said, answering her unspoken question.
Her heart shivered within her. ‘Really?’ she said politely.
He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it over Jacinta opened it and looked down at the print, blinking at the woman curled in voluptuous abandon amongst a huddle of gold and orange and rust, arms and neck gleam. ing in the torrid light of summer, a veil covering hair the same colour as Jacinta’s. Essentially naked beneath the orange veiling, the model slept in front of a shimmering sea.
‘Good heavens!’ Jacinta said.
‘What is it?’ Paul spoke softly, yet such was the implici authority in his tone that she handed the print across to him.
‘Ah,’ he said after a quick survey. ‘High Victoriana One of Lord Leighton’s mock-classical affairs, I’d say.’
The sun dipped beneath the horizon and the afterglow—echoing the colours in the print—throbbed for several seconds before beginning to fade into night’s serene dimness
‘Laurence thought I looked like her,’ Jacinta said, ‘bu it was just my ginger hair and the colour and draping o: the san.’
‘No, there’s a definite resemblance.’ Paul’s gaze moved slowly, deliberately across her face. ‘The colouring, of course, and that straight, very English nose. And the innocent mouth. Judging by the pose and the clothing, imagine the artist intended that innocence to be deceptive.
Jacinta ignored the cynical note. ‘It was sweet o: Laurence to track it down for me.’
‘He’s a nice man. And he thought you were charming. He spoke without expression, yet when he went on pleasantly, ‘But then, most people are kind to you, it seems,’ she felt the hairs on the back of her neck lift.
To give herself time to cast about for another, less contentious thing to talk about, she picked up her glass and sipped more of the lime and soda, circumspectly this time.
Setting the print down beside a small parcel on the side-table, he asked, ‘How’s the book coming along?’
‘I’m writing,’ she said cautiously. ‘It’s more fun now that I’m not sticking so closely to a prescribed storyline, but it’s much more scary, and it takes longer. I’ll have a better idea of where I’m going with the next one.’
‘So there’s going to be a next one?’
‘I—well, yes, I think so.’
‘Where are you planning to send this one?’
‘I haven’t thought yet I’ll have to do some research.’
He picked up the parcel from the table. ‘This might help.’
Although it was wrapped, Jacinta could tell by both look and feel that it was another book. Gripping it in her lap, she stammered, ‘You’re very kind, but really you shouldn’t be buying me books, though I’ve read the last one so often I just about know it off by heart.’
“This one isn’t a how-to—it’s a listing of publishers and what they’re looking for.’
‘Thank you,’ she said again, looking down at the packet on her lap. Lamely she added, ‘I’m sure it will be very helpful.’
‘I hope so,’ he said negligently.
The darkness in the room gathered, seemed to thicken. Jacinta’s pulses thrummed so loudly she thought he must be able to hear them. She unwrapped the book, very aware of Paul leaning back in the chair, as though the trip had sapped even his vitality, long legs stretched out in front of him, the glass he’d barely touched turning slowly in his fingers.
Mesmerised, she watched the tiny flashes from the heart of the crystal. Her gaze wandered up from the glass to his face, shadowed now, and the pale blur of his hair. Something deep and terrifying blossomed within her, growing to fullness in a second. The door to that different destiny, the world of love, clanged shut behind her, sealing her off from the old familiar life, changing her with inescapable relentlessness.
This, she thought suddenly, is not just love; Paul is the only man I’ll ever love like this.
The very banality of the words emphasised them, gave them weight and purpose. Until that moment she’d been playing with the idea of love and passion, skirting it with ambivalence, but between one second and the next she knew that for her there would be no other love.
And even as she shrank back—because if Paul was the only man for her then she’d always be alone—she accepted the bitter knowledge. Her mother had loved her father until she died; his name had been on her lips as she drew her last breath.
For the first time she understood—and understood, too, why her mother had always said that having a daughter had been the one thing that went right in her life. If she could have Paul’s child she would love it and care for it..
But for her there would be no child. And that was a burden, a grief she couldn’t deal with now, not when the shock of discovery was still piercing her heart.
She waited until she’d regained the control she needed to say with a careful, remote precision, ‘You must be tired. I am too, so I’ll head for bed now.’
‘Goodnight.’ He got to his feet as she did, and stood aside courteously, then bent and picked up the print Laurence had found for her. ‘You’d better take this,’ he said, holding it out.
She took it, but her hand was shaking and their fingers touched.
Paul said between his teeth, ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ and the vivid scrap of paper fell unnoticed to the floor as he pulled Jacinta into his arms.
Yes, she thought exultantly, and with mindless hunger she tilted her face. When he bent his head and took her seeking mouth she met his kiss like a flame.
Heat raged through her, setting her alight until she thought she could feel sparks shooting from her skin. But when his mouth crushed hers the quality of her response altered. Just as intense, just as cataclysmic, sensation ran slow and lazy and languorous through her, melting her bones and seducing open the gates of her will-power.
Lifting his head, he said thickly, ‘Jacinta, I’ve wanted you ever since I saw you.
In Fiji I couldn’t sleep for wondering what your pretty mouth would feel like under mine...’
Dazzled, she sighed, and he took what he wanted, filling her with his taste, male, dark and mysterious, overwhelming her with expertise, summoning her hidden wildness in response to his passionate mastery.
When at last the kiss ended they were both breathing erratically, and he surveyed her tender mouth with eyes that were narrowed and lit from within, purposeful and determined on conquest.
Desire clutched at her heart; everything inside her deliquesced, to be remade anew by that intent gaze. In a soft, tentative voice she said his name, loving the sound of it on her lips, shaping her mouth to his liking, to her need.
‘Paul,’ she breathed again, fascinated by the blue fire that ringed the dilating blackness at the centre of his eyes.
Once more she readied her mouth for his erotic plunder, but this time he kissed beneath her ear, and while he showed her how fiercely sensitive that spot was his hands slid up into her hair and he pulled her head back gently, so that he could kiss her jaw, and the corner of her mouth, then down the length of her throat to the throbbing hollow at its base.
Racked by delight, she trembled. An inarticulate murmur broke helplessly from her throat, and he smiled.
God, she thought, appalled for a sane moment by her happiness, what pleasure to feel this man’s smile against my skin!
His hands lingered through her hair until she moaned with the pleasure of it, then skimmed her shoulders, and it was no longer happiness she felt, but something thunderous and uncontrollable, a compulsion that demanded satisfaction.
‘Jacinta,’ he said, his voice impeded and oddly hesitant as he took the crushed rose from her buttonhole and dropped it. ‘So sweet and summery and fragrant. What was it Shakespeare asked? “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”’ His laughter was husky, almost raw. ‘Certainly more lovely, but I think he might have got the temperate part wrong, thank God.’
Afterwards she’d think that he’d wielded the instrument of his voice like a weapon, disarming her completely, but at the time she could only respond helplessly to its magnetism.
And then his fingers cupped her breasts. Jacinta shivered, and her head fell back, and the strength seeped from her.
Slowly, murmuring his appreciation, he slipped open the buttons down the front of her shirt, the swift, sure movements of his fingers a delicious torment. Lifting weighted eyelids, she watched the concentration in his face and the pulse flicking in his jaw, and knew that whatever happened she was not going to regret this.
The calm good humour was gone; it had only ever been a mask that hid the hunter, the predator, from the eyes of the world. This man knew what he was doing, held his goal firmly in mind.
And yet she wasn’t afraid, for this was Paul and she loved him. Although fierce determination sculpted his face, she knew intuitively that he wouldn’t be brutal, or exploit her untutored ardour. He would take, yes, but he would give in equal measure.
So when the front of her shirt fell open and he unclasped her bra and pushed both shirt and bra down her arms, she shrugged free of the cloth and lifted her arms and put them around his neck.
‘Not so quickly,’ he said, eyes kindling. ‘Let me look at you.’
That was harder to deal with; she felt the track of his gaze across pale skin and to her astonishment the apricot centres of her breasts stiffened and sprang forth, and he laughed softly. Before she realised what he was going to do he bent and took one in his mouth while moving a thumb smoothly, persistently over the other.
She knew the mechanics of lovemaking. But no one had ever warned her that such gentle suckling could kindle lightning in her cells. Shuddering, fighting to keep her lashes from drifting down, she looked at the golden head against her breast and felt her womb contract in a fierce, involuntary spasm.
‘Paul,’ she said soundlessly, but he heard her and straightened, that splintering fire incandescent now around the dark pupils of his eyes.
‘Yes,’ he said, and this time there was no sweet summer wooing in his words, nothing but a stripped desperation that was infinitely more exciting.
Jacinta gasped when he picked her up. Cradled by iron muscles, made speechless by the sheer primitive force of his actions, she said, ‘I’m too heavy!’
‘No,’ he said harshly, ‘just right for me.’ And certainly he showed no signs of strain as he carried her down the hallway.
His bedroom door was ajar; he kicked it wide and went through, shouldering it closed behind him, and walked across the shadowy room to put her on her feet beside a big, four-poster bed.
Jacinta stumbled slightly, and wailed, ‘I’m so clumsy,’ when he grabbed her and supported her.
‘You’re not,’ he said, his voice soothing yet shot through with a turbulent rasp that fired her blood anew. ‘Don’t worry.’
She stared up into eyes so blue and so blazing she thought they scorched her skin. ‘I’m not,’ she whispered. ‘Worrying, I mean.’
Laughter glinted a moment in the sapphire depths. ‘Then would you like to undress me?’ he asked gravely. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time imagining how your hands would feel on me.’
Until that moment she’d always assumed that making love was something a man did to a woman. Now, dazzled by the idea of sharing, she nodded, and undid the buttons on his shirt. Tentatively she spread her hands over his heart, feeling the silky abrasion of hair against her palms, the unsteady, driving pulse.
I’m doing that to him, she thought, awed, flexing fingers until he startled her with a muffled groan. Eyes widening, she looked up. Although his mouth was controlled into a straight line, the contours were slightly swollen, and in the severe features she saw a stark hunger that matched hers. It should have frightened her but she wasn’t afraid. The secret pathways in her body moistened, heated.
‘You’re so strong,’ she murmured, surprising herself.
‘Is that what you like? Strength?’
Her hands slid beneath the fine material of his shirt to find the smooth swell of muscle along his shoulders, the sleekness of his skin only emphasising the male power hidden beneath it.
‘I suppose I do.’ Her voice was rich and full. ‘And beauty.’ She laughed a little in her throat. ‘And you are beautiful.’
Amazingly, colour patched along the broad sweep of his cheekbones. ‘So are you,’ he said, shucking off his shirt.
‘You don’t have to say that.’
He looked at her, his brows drawing together. ‘I don’t lie,’ he said, and kissed the place where her neck joined her shoulder, pulling a strand of hair over so that it curled down to meet the curve of her breast.
‘You light the night sky,’ he said, and this time she knew he meant it. His voice was implacable, almost fierce, and his hand moved slowly down to cup her breast again, the long fingers dark against the pale ivory of her skin.
‘All fire and light and heat, like flames in a dreary world,’ he said, and kissed her, his mouth hard and ravenous, as though he couldn’t get enough of her.
After that she followed where he led, a novice in the hands of a master, until at last she lay naked before him.
‘Flames everywhere,’ he said. When she blushed he smiled, the lazy, sexy smile of a man who knew that he was going to get what he wanted, and startled her by kissing her hipbone.
His mouth was warm and persuasive, and she had to remember to breathe, to drag air into parched lungs, because everything she’d taken for granted about her body over the years was now shown to be false.
Paul stood up and shed the rest of his clothes without ceremony, then came down beside her on the bed, slipping an arm under her head.
She lifted a solemn face and met the hard, consuming passion of his gaze. In his throat the pulse hammered rapidly. Jacinta rested her index finger on that small betrayal, then traced down the midline of his chest to one narrow hip and on to the powerful muscles of his thigh.
One finger gently separated her hidden folds; his mouth was still straight and firmly closed, his eyes masked by dark lashes.
Fire danced through her at the touch of his fingers, soon augmented by a conflagration that overpowered her, a remorseless, building, honeyed sweetness of wanting, an unmeasured compulsion that set the wildness in her free, so that she gasped his name and arced towards him, pulling him down, her hips moving erotically beneath him, her face absorbed and demanding.
Making love with Paul meant surrendering to her own desires so that the focus of her world narrowed to this bed, this man; nothing else mattered. Entirely lost in the sensuous overload, Jacinta spun into a region beyond time and place—a region where she and he were all that existed.
Slowly, skilfully, he brought her to such readiness that her hand on his skin shook, and she shivered and pressed herself against him, eagerly supplicant. Then, at last, he took her, sliding into the passage he’d prepared, both of them so still that the only movement was the tightening muscles in his haunches as he pushed into her.
Jacinta surged suddenly upwards, enclosing him and surrounding him, and the muscles in her legs gripped and held in the same primeval clasp as her secret, inner muscles.
‘Yes,’ he said, and took her breath away by driving home, and without waiting withdrawing and thrusting again, setting up an erotic rhythm that she soon picked up, meeting each thrust with an answering twist of her hips, her hands clenched across the expanse of his back as the muscles bunched and knotted and she went with him down that long, ravishing path to fulfilment.
At some stage she understood dimly that he was restraining himself, making sure he didn’t climax before she reached her peak, and although she loved him for his consideration she didn’t want that. She wanted him as lost in this wonderful experience as she was, unable to think of anything other than this miracle.