Forbidden Affair: The Bold and the Beautiful

by Amy Andrews

  To be fair, he’d have never guessed she’d been celibate for over a year. Sure, she’d made much of leaving the old Steffy behind but Steffy—old or new—was a sensual woman. It was a crime that someone hadn’t been showing her how much. “We don’t have to do this, Steffy,” he said, looking into her eyes as he started to pull away.

  He probably wouldn’t die from sexual frustration. Probably.

  “No!” Steffy said, grabbing his magnificent buttocks with her hands and clamping down tight with her thighs, refusing to let him move. “I want to. I just … wanted you to know. It sounds silly, I know that it’s not possible but, in some ways … I almost feel like a virgin again. I feel … new.”

  Bill kissed her, deep and tender, reigning in his raging need as he assured her with his long, slow kiss that he understood. That she had chosen him. And he was humbled.

  “Thank you,” he whispered as his lips drifted to her cheek, her eyes, her nose.

  Steffy’s heart felt like it had grown to take up all the space in her chest as he trailed gentle kisses all over her face. “Make love to me, Bill.”

  Bill brushed his mouth against hers. “Yes,” he said.

  Their gazes locked and Steffy made sure she kept her eyes wide open as Bill nudged against her then slid deep inside her, hot and hard. She gasped as he eased right in to the hilt, her back arching, her teeth digging into her lower lip.

  “You okay?” he asked, his gaze earnest, his voice so husky with restraint it actually curled Steffy’s toes.

  “Amazing,” she whispered. “Again.”

  Bill kissed her then, kissed her as he gave her what she wanted. He moved out and in again.

  “Again,” she demanded against his mouth, wrapping her arms tight around his shoulders.

  He pushed in and she gasped. He pulled out and she whimpered.

  “More,” she said.

  Bill gave her more. And more. The pace inexorably picking up until she was panting and demanding.

  “Don’t stop,” she muttered, her voice husky. “Don’t you dare stop.”

  Stop? Bill was so hard and so turned on the whole building could fall down around them and he still wouldn’t stop. He’d found heaven in her arms—there were worse ways to go.

  Steffy reveled in Bill looming over her as he stroked into her. He felt good and hard and solid, and she loved clinging to the broad expanse of his shoulders as he rocked them both to another plane.

  He’d long since given up kissing her, and buried his head in the curve where her shoulder met her neck, and she could tell from the tremble in his arms and the low groan with each thrust that he was building as steadily as she was.

  A buzz started behind her belly button. Slow, gentle ripples undulated to a hundred different pulse points, spreading the buzz. Each thrust intensified the ripples until the buzz became a murmur, contracting through muscles and nerve fibers until it became a mighty roar.

  Steffy gasped as her body was smashed with electric intensity, drumming her feet against Bill’s naked buttocks. “Yes,” she cried, digging her nails into his back.

  Bill groaned. “God … Steffy … yes …”

  “Bill … Bill … Oh God … yes. I’m … I’m—”

  And then she couldn’t talk. She couldn’t think or form a coherent thought as a tsunami of sensation wiped all higher functioning from her brain. She could only feel, as Bill’s long, guttural groan and desperate cry of, “Steffy!” flung him into the stratosphere with her.

  They held on as popping lights and tentacles of pleasure stroked and flayed in equal measure, tossing them around and suspending them in a state of unbearable ecstasy until it released them in an exhausted heap, where all they could do was breathe and embrace the fading mist of pleasure.

  “Please tell me we’re going to do that again,” Bill gasped as he rolled onto his back long moments later, pulling her with him and tucking her into his side.

  “I think that may be impossible to repeat,” Steffy murmured with a smile, her eyes fluttering shut as a heavy malaise invaded her bones and she drifted off to sleep.

  *

  They made love twice more through the night. The last time, a small aftershock rattled the ground beneath them as they climaxed and Bill asked, “Did the earth move for you too?” as they lay gasping.

  When Bill woke in the morning, Steffy was still plastered to his side, her head on his shoulder, her leg draped over his thighs and, despite the numbness in his arm, he dropped a kiss on her head in gratitude. He wasn’t sure if Steffy was going to have doubts in the clear light of morning as another day of being trapped stretched before them. He hoped not, because he had no doubts. No regrets. He was one hundred percent in and he would spend every second they had left letting her know it.

  It hadn’t escaped his notice that she hadn’t said the L word last night. He’d lain himself bare, told her he was falling in love with her, but she hadn’t reciprocated. Sure, she’d said, “Make love to me.” But that wasn’t the same thing as “I love you.”

  Steffy had been hurt and she’d been trying to reinvent herself, he knew that. He figured she probably didn’t want to go too far, too quickly with him. With anyone. She’d been in love with Liam for a long time and she’d come back from Paris to be a better person. And he knew that she needed time to do that, time to love herself, first.

  He could be patient.

  But he wasn’t going to let her back away from this either. He wasn’t going to let her put Liam or their work relationship or their age difference or any other obstacle in his way.

  He loved her. He was in.

  Bill shifted a little to ease the numbness and tingling in his arm. Steffy stirred, muttering something, and kissed his shoulder before sleepily rolling onto her side. Bill took full advantage, rolling on his side too, sliding his arm onto her belly and scooping her into him, wrapping his chest around her and bending his legs in behind hers.

  He dropped a kiss on her shoulder and smiled when she sighed and said, “Good morning.”

  “Are you awake?” he asked, his mouth against her skin.

  “Not as awake as you are,” she murmured and he shut his eyes as she squirmed her butt against a part of him that was very awake.

  “Mmm,” he said kissing her again. “That feels good.”

  “What?” she asked, squirming again. “This?”

  Bill chuckled, enjoying the sensation. “Keep doing that and there’ll be trouble.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “That’s what I was hoping. Do you need a written invitation?”

  Bill’s breath caught in his throat at the frank suggestion in her eyes. “No ma’am,” he said as his hand slid slowly north from her belly.

  And that’s when they heard the wail of a siren getting closer and closer.

  Bill’s hand froze as Steffy’s head rose off their makeshift bed. “That’s really close, isn’t it?” she said, looking over her shoulder at him, her heart beating a mad tattoo in her chest.

  Bill withdrew his hand and sat up. He could hear car doors slamming and distant voices. “Yes,” he said. “Really close.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment. “Get dressed,” he said, grinning down at her. “We can’t make our appearance in public after being trapped inside a collapsed building looking like Adam and Eve.”

  Steffy grinned back as Bill got to his feet. It had been a surreal thirty-six hours. If anyone had told her a week ago this—any of it—was going to happen, she would have laughed hysterically. But an earthquake really had hit and she and Bill really had been trapped in a collapsed building together and survived to tell the tale.

  And they’d really become lovers in the process.

  She wondered how many magazines like Eye on Fashion would want their story and how much they’d pay to get an exclusive—a Forrester heiress and a media mogul.

  But not her new and improved Eye on Fashion. She looked down at her arm; Bill’s written contract was still mostly visible despite
the activities of the night.

  Bill reached for his jeans and Steffy temporarily forgot their urgency as she admired the long, lean lines of him. His muscles were magnificent, so beautifully delineated he could have sat for any of the great artisans who’d sculpted athletic naked men out of marble.

  Bill smiled at her as he climbed into his jeans. “Come on,” he said as he zipped up. “We should be over there—” He jerked his thumb to the rubble behind him. “—waving the flag around and yelling to get their attention.”

  He threw her jeans at her and they landed on her head, temporarily blocking her view. “Hey,” she protested as she pulled them away. But he was already pulling his T-shirt over his head. “I was enjoying the view,” she grumbled.

  Bill held out his hand to help her up. “Now it’s my turn.”

  Steffy was hauled to her feet, straight into his arms. And when he swept her into a passionate kiss, she didn’t protest, nor did she protest when his hands came to rest on her naked butt and he squeezed. She just wanted to pull him back down again and have one last time with him. One last time before they went out into the real world.

  Where things weren’t so black and white.

  A voice interrupted their kiss. “Hello? Anybody here?” Other voices joined in too, calling for survivors.

  Bill broke away and slapped her bottom playfully. “Get dressed,” he murmured. “I’ll go flap the flag and make some noise.”

  Steffy nodded, turning to pick up her jeans. She watched as Bill gingerly untethered the bottom of the pipe and pushed it gently through the hole.

  “Here! Down here!” he yelled, cupping his other hand around his mouth to direct the sound upward. Steffy jumped a little as the noise reverberated around their rubble kingdom, loud after the eerie silence of the last couple of days.

  “Stop,” someone from up top called and then, “I heard something, I heard a voice. Get the dogs and the equipment.” There was more yelling back and forth, still distant, before Bill heard: “Hello? Hello, where are you? Call again.”

  Bill was hoping they could see the flag but one of his worries had always been that the destruction was so great on the outside that the flag would be obstructed by debris they couldn’t see from underneath.

  “Here,” Bill called again, his hand still cupping his face. “I’m waving some pipe through a hole in the rubble. It has a flag attached.” Bill pushed the pipe higher into what he hoped was free air, and twirled it, so the flag would flutter about and be easy to see.

  “There! There!” a voice exclaimed.

  Bill grinned, turning to face Steffy. “They found us,” he said. Except Steffy was only half dressed, standing in her jeans with no top and no bra. “Mmm,” he leered, “I like. But I think you’re going to need some more clothes for when they thread the fiber-optic camera in.”

  Steffy, who was inspecting the bedding for her bra, glanced at him, her belly heating from his frank appreciation. “How do you know that?” she asked. “About the camera?”

  Bill shrugged. “I watch the news.”

  Steffy made a frustrated little noise. “What the hell did you do with my bra?”

  “I don’t know. I was a little busy at the time checking out what was inside it. I tossed it somewhere.”

  “Tossed?” she said, shoving her hands on her hips. “That’s part of a two hundred-dollar French lingerie set.”

  Bill was drawn to the enticing swing of Steffy’s bare breasts. She looked very Wonder Woman standing there all cranky and affronted. He grinned. “God bless the French.”

  “You okay down there?” The voice was right on top of them now. “How many are you?”

  “You better find it quick,” Bill said. He watched her for a second as she whirled around frantically before he turned back to the hole where the flag was. “Two of us. We’re both fine,” he assured. “We’ve had food and water and neither of us are hurt.”

  Some rubble loosened up near the hole and dust fell in a fine mist down over him. “Be careful,” Bill warned sharply, stepping back a little, preparing to return to Steffy if needed. The last thing he wanted was for their rescuers to be the ones to bring the whole building down. “There’s been a lot of mini collapses,” he said. “I don’t know how stable it all is.”

  “Back! Back!” someone ordered. “Careful, it could be unstable.” And then: “We’re going to get you out of there but we need to make sure we do it safely so it could be a few hours, alright?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “We understand.”

  “What are your names?” the voice asked.

  Bill glanced at Steffy. The authorities would figure out soon enough that Steffy Forrester and Bill Spencer were caught in a collapsed building together and then the press would get hold of it. This guy didn’t need to know all that.

  “Bill,” Bill said. “And Steffy. She’s my—” He looked at a now dressed Steffy and quirked his eyebrow. He didn’t want to presume and he didn’t want to piss her off. When she shrugged he decided to be bold. “She’s my girlfriend,” he said, refusing to look away from her as he said it. Feeling encouraged when she didn’t protest.

  “I’m Chris,” the voice said. “I’m part of one of the emergency urban search and rescue teams.”

  Bill looked up again. One of the teams? “Is it bad up there?” he asked.

  There was a slight hesitation before Chris answered. “It’s a mess,” he confirmed.

  Bill nodded. He didn’t want to know any more details. The true horror would be revealed soon enough.

  “We’re going to thread some fiber down that has an inbuilt camera,” Chris said. “We’ll be able to check you’re okay and we can look at what’s down there so we can work out the safest way to get you out, okay?”

  “Okay,” Bill said. “Ready when you are.”

  *

  “So … I’m your girlfriend, huh?” Steffy said five hours later as both she and Bill were standing in the doorway again, well back from the area that the urban rescue guys had decided was the safest to start excavating the rubble to ensure their extraction.

  They could hear the sounds of digging—hand-to-hand stuff, not with tools—but they both knew the process could still take a while as their rescuers needed to shore up the edges as they went.

  There hadn’t been much chance to talk as they’d worked closely with the team up top. Now there was nothing more they could do but stay out of the way and wait for the men and women on the outside to do their thing.

  “I hope so,” Bill said carefully.

  “Aren’t we a little old for that?”

  Bill smiled. “Don’t you mean aren’t I a little old for that?”

  Steffy smiled too. “No, I don’t. I just meant … we’re not teenagers, you know.”

  Bill nodded. “I know. What should we call ourselves?”

  Steffy shrugged. “Lovers?”

  Bill liked the sound of that word—a lot. But lovers implied simply a physical relationship and he wanted more. “I like that,” he said. “It has a nice ring. But it’s a bit unusual to introduce you in polite company as my lover.”

  “Not in France it’s not.” Steffy smiled.

  “Well, maybe we’ll go live there,” he teased.

  Steffy thought that sounded like the best idea she’d ever heard. “Oh, yes,” she said, suddenly excited at the thought. She threw her arms around his waist, placing her head on his chest, her ear to his heart, soaking in the steady, reassuring thud of it. “Let’s do that? Can we do that?”

  Bill laughed. “Hey,” he said, sliding his arms around her too. “You still worried about Liam?”

  Steffy glanced up at him. “Loving you is complicated.”

  Bill’s breath caught in his throat. “Loving me? Does that mean what I think it means?”

  Steffy frowned. “Ah … yeah. What do you think it means?”

  Bill drew in a calming breath. “You never said you loved me last night. I told you I was falling in love with you and you never said anyth
ing.”

  “Oh.” Steffy thought back over their conversations. She’d thought she’d said it about a thousand times. But maybe “make love to me” and “don’t stop loving me” and “love me again,” hadn’t been specific enough.

  “I’m sorry … of course I do.” She slid her arms around his neck. “I love you, Bill Spencer. I’ve been trying to pretend these feelings I’ve been having are just lust and the result of a year of abstinence, but they’re not. You’ve saved my life and I’m not just talking about in the last couple of days. You get me. You’ve let me be who I needed to be. You didn’t tell me I couldn’t or I shouldn’t. You helped me find myself. And you held me all night when I was so frightened down here, and you loved my proposal, and when I look at you my heart does this little giddy-up and swells so big in my chest it feels like I can’t breathe or I’m having a heart attack or something, like I could die from it.”

  Relief surged like a drug through Bill’s veins and he felt giddy. “I know,” he said. “I feel that way too.”

  Steffy smiled. “I just wish it wasn’t so complicated.”

  Bill brushed the back of his hand along her cheekbone. “We’ll get through that, Steffy, I promise. Just promise me you’ll remember that I love you, that I’ll always love you. Promise me you’ll trust in that.”

  Steffy nodded. “I promise.”

  Bill lowered his head and pressed a sweet kiss on her mouth. “Then we can do anything,” he murmured.

  And when they emerged into the sunshine half an hour later, they were holding hands, united in their love and ready to face their future together.

  Acknowledgments

  This is, without a doubt, the most challenging, exciting project I’ve worked on to date. Not only was it shrouded in secrecy but the parameters weren’t defined because nobody from the publishing house to the television producers were exactly sure what they wanted either—it was all a big new adventure to them too.

  Which left us a lot of scope—or some might say a lot of rope…

  But it was also a lot of fun and gave me an opportunity to try something completely different, something totally out of left field. Growing as a writer is always important and I think it’s fair to say that this project gave me wings.