by Robyn Donald
‘Genes are strange things,’ Sanchia said, her awkwardness concealed, she hoped, by her matter-of-fact tone. For a violent couple of seconds she’d been torn by jealousy—and he knew it.
Need clutched Caid’s gut as he watched her. The sun caught her lashes, gilding the tips, casting shifting shadows on her exquisite skin. Her mouth had softened into a sensuous bow; his skin flexed as he recalled the way it felt on him. Curbing his fierce response, he said casually, ‘I have my father’s colouring and my mother’s bone structure. Which of your parents do you look like?’
‘Neither. My mother called me her changeling.’
He controlled a spurt of anger. ‘Why?’
She shrugged, but he saw an echo of remembered pain in the involuntary tightening of her full lips. ‘I don’t fit into the family portrait album,’ she said lightly. ‘She didn’t mean anything by it.’
‘You said she and your father were a devoted couple.’
‘They were.’
‘Parents like that can make their children feel like outsiders.’
She sent him a startled glance before her lashes fell again. Perhaps his carefully impersonal kindness had loosened her tongue because she said, ‘They loved me, but sometimes I felt like the extra one, the third arm.’
‘Made worse, I imagine, when your mother chose to die with your father and you found yourself living with a woman who didn’t want you.’
Another dismissive shrug of those smooth shoulders set his body alight. She moved with a sinuous grace that signalled the promise of sex. Good sex. Supremely good sex.
His body responded to that thought with a pounding urgency.
‘Did I feel abandoned?’ she drawled. ‘Yes, of course I did. Kids can be thoroughly unreasonable.’ She looked directly at him with sombre, sardonic eyes the turbulent, smoky colour of the best greenstone. ‘Only the other day I read that—’
Visibly gathering her reserve about her into a cool, impervious shield, she told him of an amusing article about the general self-absorption of teenagers. Frustration bit into him, but although she was rebuilding her defences as fast as she could, he knew now that he could dismantle them.
When she’d finished the anecdote he said casually, ‘Speaking of genes, there’s a possibility that you might be pregnant. I didn’t use any protection last night.’
Colour surged through her translucent skin. ‘No,’ she said, her voice stiff and distant. ‘I have—I’m on the pill.’
When his brows lifted she said even more stiffly, ‘I have bad period pains.’
He nodded, surprised at his flash of disappointment. I must, he thought cynically, be getting dynastic urges. But the image of Sanchia blooming with his child stuck in his mind.
The day drowsed on; when the sun’s rays probed beneath the umbrella he insisted they move to loungers in the dense shade of the pergola, and for a while Sanchia slept in a fragrant haze of jasmine perfume.
When she woke Caid was still close by, reading a thick sheaf of papers, the focused, clever face intent as his gaze ran rapidly down each one.
Although the glossy leaves of the jasmine sheltered them, he seemed to glow with an inner light, golden and powerful. He was, Sanchia thought dreamily, utterly gorgeous, the strong framework of his face buttressing the powerful male beauty of his features and his colouring.
A sudden desire to stretch languorously as a cat hummed through her. Unbidden tides of sensation licked along her nerves, carrying with them secret messages, hidden orders from instincts as old as womankind.
Ignoring them, she sat up. Instantly he stopped reading and glanced across. Her skin tingled, and he smiled and leaned over and kissed her swiftly, his mouth hard and subtly possessive.
Sanchia responded with violent demand, forgetting everything but this dark enchantment of the senses. His mouth moved the length of her throat; pushing aside the shell top he kissed the gentle swell of her breast.
Sanchia waited for the panic, but it was truly gone.
‘Touch me,’ he murmured against her breast. Heat dissolved her bones, burst through her skin, but a movement in the doorway of the house caught the corner of her eye and she jerked back.
‘So here you are!’ Clearly rejuvenated, Mrs Hunter smiled benignly at them both.
‘She has an instinct for making an entrance too,’ Caid murmured mockingly, getting to his feet.
For the rest of the day Sanchia tried to relax, but immediately after a dinner that surpassed even Terry’s high standards she excused herself and went to her room. There she stood for a moment, looking around; she’d left the room so quickly she hadn’t made the bed, but Terry had done it, and tidied up after her. The clothes she’d worn to fight the grass fire last night had been washed and put away, and the bathroom was immaculate.
In some ways life for the very rich was like a fairy tale.
Slowly, moving like a woman in a dream, she showered with the exquisite toiletries, rubbed her tingling body dry and got into a fine T-shirt.
For the first time in her life she wished she had a silken nightgown, something sensuous and bias-cut that hugged her body, something smokily green, or the same transparent white as her skin.
When she was ready she walked out onto the terrace and sat down in a chair, emptying her mind of everything but the knowledge that Caid would come to her.
Sure enough, when she was night-dazzled and star-dazed, he walked silently across the grass, tall, arrogantly gaited, and stood looking down at her.
‘What do you want?’ he asked softly.
‘You.’ Her voice was husky.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
‘Yes.’
Sanchia had never been more certain of anything. Elemental needs worked on her; she wanted to lose herself in an emotion bigger than she was, wanted to make memories to hoard against the empty years ahead—the years when Caid would marry a woman more suitable to his position.
But most of all she wanted this man, and the wanting consumed her—wild and sweet, stripped of everything but a stark, elemental need.
Her experiences at Cathy’s house had frozen her sexual responses, but perhaps because Caid had kept such a rigorous distance between them during her years with Great-Aunt Kate, she’d allowed herself to fantasise, to daydream that he looked at her as he’d looked at the golden girls he’d shared the holidays with, that he touched her the way he’d touched them…
Long before he kissed her the first time, Caid had found his way through barriers he hadn’t known existed. Some time during those long summer days of heat and youth and awareness she’d fallen in love with him, and she’d stayed in love with him.
And last night he’d killed her darkest dragon for her.
‘Sanchia?’ he prompted, his voice rough, almost threatening. ‘I won’t let you use me as a comforter to take your mind off the past.’
His next words terrified her.
Holding her gaze, he said, ‘Last night was a time out of time, but tonight both of us will know what we’re doing. Making love is not like a kiss a mother gives a child to take away the pain or soothe bad memories. It’s not comfortable—it’s primitive, a basic force of nature, and it changes lives. Is that what you want?’
Some primal part of her quivered, ready to give him what he asked. She put her hand up to run a tentative finger along his cheekbone. Under her fingertip his heated skin was like the finest of leather, supported by the strong framework of his face.
‘I don’t find you at all comfortable,’ she said softly.
He captured her hand and held it prisoner across his mouth. Eyes blazing beneath half-closed eyelids, he said with disturbing intentness, ‘The feeling is entirely reciprocal,’ and kissed the sensitive palm. While her heart was still rocketing he bit the flesh he’d kissed.
Sensation speared through every cell in her body. Her eyes darkened as she stared at him, her lashes drooping, her mouth softening, becoming fuller, more sensitive.
With a deep laugh Ca
id pulled her into his arms. But he didn’t take her yielding mouth; instead his lips found her pale throat and branded it.
And when he lifted his head he turned her around and kissed the nape of her neck, his hands cupping her breasts. The soft material of her T-shirt abraded her thrusting nipples, but it was the warmth of his hands, their devilish skill, their leashed power that made her gasp. Her head rolled back against his shoulder.
‘You’re so lovely,’ he said in a raw, sensual voice against her skin. ‘You walk like the wind, and your skin reminds me of a pearl—translucent, gleaming, white. And your mouth—it’s a seduction in itself. Sanchia…’
This, she thought dimly with the small part of her brain still capable of logic, was too much—she craved fire and flash and the oblivion of ecstasy, not this overwhelming tenderness. She wanted the physical drama of sex, the mindless surrender, the blind, feverish passion; she didn’t want to be wooed.
But it was, she thought painfully, already too late—she had no chance now of uprooting him from her heart.
Danger crackled through the air, followed his skilful hands. At their touch her bones melted, leaving her lax and unable to move. Caid lifted her and carried her inside and across to the bed; beside it he set her on her feet and eased her T-shirt upwards. She shuddered.
Frowning, he asked, ‘Are you all right? Do you want to stop it now?’
Clearly, in spite of the arousal he wasn’t trying to hide, he was confident that he could stop if he thought she was afraid.
A twisted pain made her rash. Sanchia wet her lips, her heart singing when she saw how he watched the swift movement of her tongue.
‘No,’ she croaked. ‘I think I’m desperate.’
‘So,’ he said in a voice raw with need, ‘am I.’
CHAPTER NINE
CAID’S reply gave Sanchia the courage to sink onto the bed. Greedily, her hands linked in her lap, she watched him yank off his shirt and strip down his jeans.
Her heart leapt into her throat and blocked it.
Of course she’d seen men without clothes—well, pictures of them; it was practically impossible to grow up without knowing what the naked male form looked like. And over the years she’d seen Caid shirtless, in shorts, in a variety of bathing trunks…
Nothing had prepared her for the reality of Caid without anything covering his beautiful body, not even last night, because last night it had been dark and she’d thought she was dreaming.
Sanchia’s breath came rapidly as she feasted on the potent synergy of black hair and taut muscle and the rich, sleek sheen of olive skin, the lethal, masculine grace of strength and litheness. He looked like a Greek sculpture, yet no one would have mistaken him for anything other than a profoundly virile, forceful, dynamic man.
Smooth and as inevitable as flowing honey, an aching languor drenched her. In seething impatience she swung her legs onto the bed and watched from beneath her lashes as he walked around to the other side. Instinct warned her that his prowling desire was firmly caged behind the bars of his will, perhaps because he still wondered about her fitness for this.
Although later she might respect him for his consideration, it was the last thing she wanted now. Their lovemaking the previous night had released her wild inner self from a cage of secrets, freeing a Sanchia with no scars, no inhibitions.
So as he came down beside her she ran questioning fingers across his chest, following the patterned scrolls of hair.
When her seeking hand reached his waist he made a rough noise in his throat. ‘Not yet,’ he ordered on a half-laugh, easing her back onto the pillows.
Her heart shook, but although this might be the biggest mistake in her life she wasn’t going to stop now.
She couldn’t. Already her body was softening, the secret inner passageway throbbing with anticipation. Warmth flooded her, and a return of that need to stretch, to twist against him—it was like a fever deep in her bones, yet she welcomed the fiery ache.
His handsome face grave, he surveyed her. Not a muscle moved; she thought he’d retreated to some place where perhaps no woman could reach him. And then he smiled and bent his head and kissed the gentle swell of her breast, and Sanchia went up in flames.
What followed proved that Caid was a brilliant lover—tormentingly generous, touched by greatness, able to wring the utmost sensation from a body only too keen to respond. Sanchia discovered that his lightest caress could knot through her in a pleading, insistent demand that was totally outside her experience.
Under his skilled tutelage her hunger increased to a tempest, a drumming, boundless urgency. When he touched her, when she licked the smooth tanned skin of his shoulder and his taste filled her mouth and clouded her brain, when she writhed against the sheets, her head thrashing back and forth on the pillows as he showed her how ravishing his mouth on her breasts could be, her brain gave up the fight to think. Heavy eyelids drifting down, she let her other senses spring into full play; she smelled their lovemaking, heated, mingled faintly with the musk of the jasmine outside, and she felt…oh, how she felt!
Lost in the erotic slide of skin against skin, the sensations his masterful hands coaxed from her, she found her own power. It both soothed and stimulated some repressed need in her when she realised that her touch made him catch his breath, that he stiffened beneath her hands, that her mouth on his body made him tremble.
When at last he commanded gutturally, ‘Open your eyes,’ she had to force her lashes upward. She saw a face drawn with passion, the angular framework strained and uncompromising in a stark, determined drive towards completion.
A fierce elation exploded through the heated languor of her bones and body. Smiling, she said thickly, ‘It’s all right, Caid; I know who you are.’
‘And I know who you are,’ he said, as though it was a vow, and thrust into the passage that waited for him, that he’d prepared so skilfully.
A terrifying pleasure exploded through her. Linking her hands across the bunched muscles of his back, she opened to him, working to pull him in, lock him against the entrance to her womb in a grip that insisted and entreated and persuaded and promised, a grip as instinctive as it was irresistible.
Eyes narrowed and smouldering, Caid withdrew, only to thrust again and again. She met his need, matched it, joined him in setting up a rhythm that reverberated through her until it gathered in a central place, pouring into her and from her in waves that surged higher and higher, more and more intensely. And then they caught her and tossed her into ecstasy, a rapture so unbearable that she sobbed with its beauty.
Caid followed almost immediately, his head thrown back as he spilled himself into her, a shivering groan torn from his throat. For a fleeting moment she felt his beloved weight on her, before in one fluid movement he turned onto his side and scooped her across him.
Sanchia made a small distressed sound.
‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice oddly hoarse.
‘Nothing.’ How could she say she’d wanted to cradle him for a few more precious seconds?
‘I’m too heavy to lie on you for long.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she muttered, hiding a huge yawn in his shoulder.
His chest lifted in a half-laugh. ‘Trust me,’ he said drily. He kissed her on the forehead before threading his hands through her hair to hold up her face. Blue and enigmatic as the depths of space, his eyes searched hers. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘You know you didn’t.’
That smile caught his mouth. ‘No sign of panic?’
When she shook her head he kissed her again and Sanchia, who’d believed passion died with satiation, discovered that it merely slumbered.
‘No, not now, not again,’ he said in a constricted voice against her mouth. ‘You need time to recover. I’d like to lie with you tonight and hold you, but if I stay we’ll make love again. You have a powerful effect on me—as you may have noticed.’ His smile was wry.
Sanchia sighed. ‘It’s unfair,’ she said sleepily. ‘Stay w
ith me.’
‘I have to go.’
So that his mother didn’t discover he’d slept with her guest?
‘Then you’d better go now,’ she said, and because she couldn’t help herself she kissed the corner of his mouth, and a soft earlobe.
‘Don’t tempt me,’ he said, returning the kiss on her mouth, then got up, magnificently unashamed in his nudity, and pulled his jeans on.
His gaze ran hotly over her body. ‘Sleep well,’ he said.
When she woke, pleasantly aching, as the bird chorus gathered in the bush to celebrate the dawn, she lay dreamily sorting her memories, filing them into the storehouse of her brain.
Eventually she got out of bed and walked across to the windows, pushing back the curtains.
Oh, God, she thought, closing her eyes on the sky of clear blue sprinkled with feathery silver clouds, last night had been heaven; she loved Caid with everything in her, every part of her.
But when Caid decided to marry he’d choose a woman from his own circle, someone who could take her place in the world of the very rich—someone like the girls who’d used to come to the Bay during the holidays—a sleek, pampered woman with excellent connections, a woman who knew how to organise everything from a dinner party to a charity ball.
Not Sanchia Smith, who had no connections, no influence, and whose idea of a dinner party was an informal occasion with friends!
Struggling to free her brain of obsessive images, of remembered ecstasy, she pushed the door back and breathed in. No smoke sullied the air, but she could still smell the faint stench of burning. Turning away, she headed for the shower.
‘Did you sleep well last night?’ Mrs Hunter looked enquiringly across the breakfast table.
Trying to ignore the colour licking along her cheekbones, Sanchia accepted a cup of coffee. ‘Like a log, thank you.’ She kept her eyes studiously away from Caid, big and dominant and amused on the other side of the table.