by Penny Jordan
Somehow the past and his betrayal of her slipped away. Without her realising it, her hands had lifted to hold Sean’s face, and her heart leapt with shatteringly intense emotion. Just the slightly rough feel of his morning-shaved skin was enough to take her arousal levels dangerously higher.
Whilst her hands held Sean’s face, his were moulding her body with familiar caresses, kneading her shoulders, then stroking down her spine, spanning the back of her waist and then moving lower. Kate could feel herself starting to tremble as his hands slid past her hips. His thumbs grazed her hipbones themselves, and were then withdrawn as he pulled her fiercely against his own body.
It should have been impossible for her to feel the same shockingly intense thrill of sensual arousal now, as she felt the hard fullness of Sean’s erection, as she had done that very first time he had held her like this—but she did. If anything her awareness and the reaction of her body now, as a woman and not as a girl, was far more immediate and fiercely erotic than it had been then.
Perhaps it was because then she’d had no experience by which to measure the pleasure his arousal could lead to, whereas now she most certainly did. Already her imagination had broken free of her control and was filling her head with wanton images, bombarding her senses with messages and promises that totally destroyed her defences.
Within the space of a few seconds her own body was as eager for his as it had been when she was eighteen.
The movement of his hand from her bottom to her breast evoked a low sound of delirious pleasure from her throat and she angled her body so that her breast filled his hand.
‘No, Sean. No... Mmm, like that...’ Kate could hear herself whispering incoherent urgent words of praise and pleasure between the frantic hungry kisses with which she was caressing his mouth. She no longer cared about what she might be revealing, only what she was feeling! ‘Sean.’ As she moaned his name she covered the hand he had placed over her breast with her own and whispered achingly, ‘Touch me properly, Sean.’
‘Properly?’
She could hear the thick male arousal roughening his voice and her skin prickled in female response to it.
‘You know what I mean,’ she urged him hotly. ‘You know what I like.’
‘You mean this?’
He was caressing the tender flesh surrounding the tormented nub of her nipple and Kate trembled violently in reaction.
‘Mmm, yes. That,’ Kate agreed huskily. ‘And more, Sean—but without my clothes. No clothes. Just you,’ she continued. ‘Just you and me.’
‘No clothes? Not even like this?’ Pushing down her bra, Sean used his thumb and finger to delicately rub the silk fabric of her top against the stiff thrust of her nipple.
Immediately Kate cried out in agonised pleasure.
‘Good...? That was good?’ Sean’s voice was so thick and low Kate could barely hear it, but she didn’t care. He had pushed her clothes completely aside now, and she could see the creamy swell of her breast filling the darkness of his hand as he slowly caressed her eager nipple.
Standing silently in his hold, she gave in to the violent shudders of pleasure ripping through her.
‘And with your mouth...’ she begged him. The words were jerked from her lips as her body suddenly convulsed against him.
‘Kate! Kate!’
Just the way he was saying her name touched every one of her senses. He took hold of her hand and dragged it against his own body. Her fingers curled eagerly around the erection straining against his clothes, making a feverish exploration of their remembered territory. But she wanted to feel him without anything in the way.
She was stretching her hand towards his zip when his mobile rang shrilly, the sound jerking Kate back into reality.
What was she doing? Pulling away from Sean, she started to run towards the house, wanting to escape not just from him but also from her own self-imposed humiliation.
‘Kate!’
Sean cursed under his breath when she refused to listen. The mobile was still ringing. Impatiently he switched it off, then started to follow her.
* * *
As soon as she reached her room Kate opened the wardrobe and pulled out the suitcases Sean had bought for them. Opening one of them, she started to drag clothes off the rail and throw them into it.
‘What are you doing?’
The sound of Sean’s voice made her swing round. ‘What does it look like?’ she snapped. ‘I’m packing. Oliver and I are leaving! We should never have come here in the first place. I knew—’
‘You knew what?’ Sean stopped her.
He was looking at her with a glint in his eyes that made her heart thump and apprehension feather chillingly down her spine, but angrily Kate refused to bend.
‘I know that I just don’t want to be here with you, Sean,’ Kate answered angrily. ‘Look, I don’t want to talk about it,’ she threw at him when he didn’t answer her.
‘Less than five minutes ago you were in my arms and—’
‘I’ve just told you I don’t want to talk about it!’ Kate stormed. ‘That...what just happened...meant nothing. It was just...’
‘Just what?’ Sean challenged her with a softness that was far more dangerous than anger would have been.
He was trying to make her look at him, Kate recognised, but if she did she knew he would see in her eyes how vulnerable she was. Keeping her face averted from him, she insisted stubbornly, ‘Nothing!’
Something in his voice had warned her of what was to come. Panicking, Kate dropped the clothes she was holding and started to run, only realising when it was too late that—idiotically—she had run towards the bed instead of the door. Now she was backed up against it, with Sean standing in front her and no option but to turn round and try to scramble over it.
‘Nice move,’ she heard him say with soft amusement from behind her, and his fingers curled round her ankle as he kneeled on the bed looking down at her.
‘I always did think that you’ve got the sexiest backside I’ve ever seen: nicely curved and temptingly peachy. And I can remember...’
Kate did not want to hear what he could remember, and for a very good reason. She feared that listening to what Sean could remember might make her feel even more dangerously vulnerable.
Surely there was no good reason why she should feel almost the exact same mix of nervousness and excitement lying here on a bed now, with Sean leaning over her, as she had done that very first time they had been together like this? They had been lovers; they had been married and they had been divorced—his body was almost as familiar to her as her own.
But she did feel the same, and she did feel... Stubbornly Kate tried to deny her feelings, to ignore as well the sensual caress of the bracelet of Sean’s fingers round her ankle. She stiffened her body against it, just as she refused to look away from Sean when he turned his head to smile into her eyes.
‘Now, about this “nothing”,’ he murmured, almost affably. ‘Let’s go through it all again, shall we? Starting right here...’
Somehow he was down on the bed beside her, the upper half of his body pinning hers to the bed, and shamingly Kate knew that a part of her was already greedily soaking up the pleasure of having him so close.
One look at his eyes told her what was going to happen. He was looking directly and deliberately at her mouth, and somehow that look was making her part her lips and wet their nervousness with the tip of her tongue.
‘Nothing?’ His fingertip traced the curve of her jaw and then the shape of her lips, slowly and heart-stoppingly, whilst he continued to look down at her.
‘You know that I’m going to kiss you now don’t you?’ he whispered.
She tried to say no. She tried to mean no. But Sean was using unfair weapons against her. He knew how very vulnerable she had always been to that slow, sensual, o
h-so-seductively-sweet way he had of kissing her, that made her insides melt and her lips cling to him, and the reason he knew was because she herself had told him so, over and over again, in their shared past. And maybe more recently in the heat of that fevered night? Right now all she seemed capable of doing was focusing on his mouth, whilst her heart-rate accelerated.
It had been a bad mistake to close her eyes, Kate acknowledged helplessly, a flurry of heartbeats later, because closing her eyes had somehow transformed her back into the girl she had been the first time Sean had kissed her like this.
Now, as then, her lips parted willingly and eagerly, her senses tensely aroused by the passionate intimacy of his tongue against her own, primed by the kisses they had already shared. Shockingly Kate recognised that her body was rebelliously impatient of any gentle preliminaries, that she was being consumed by a fierce, hungry surging need.
She lifted her hands to Sean’s shoulders and held onto them, needing the security of their strength as her own longing smashed down on her, carrying her bodily in its fast-paced flow.
Beneath Sean’s, her mouth clung and hungered, and her hands left his shoulders to press his body down harder into her own. She felt Sean tense and lift his mouth from hers to look down into her face.
Surely the hand lifted to his face, the fingers dragged sensuously against his jaw and then raised to trace the shape of his lips and run over and over his mouth could not be hers? Surely that liquid aching heat spreading through her body could be controlled if she really tried?
Surely this wasn’t her, lifting her head off the bed and cupping Sean’s face so that she could press impassioned kisses into his skin whilst she moaned her need softly into his mouth?
‘Touch me, Sean.’ Love me, Kate whispered silently inside herself as she stroked a trembling finger over the mouth she had just kissed. ‘Make it like it used to be for us...’
Had she really said that?
‘Like it used to be?’ she heard Sean repeat softly. ‘You mean when we were so hungry for one another that not being together was a physical pain? Is that what you mean, Kate? That you want me like that? Like this?’
As he spoke his hands were shaping her body, and Kate could feel the small flames of desire inside her, feeding on his words and growing stronger. Soon there would be a conflagration which would threaten to destroy her, and yet somehow she no longer cared about her danger—all she cared about was this, and now, and Sean’s hands on her flesh, Sean’s mouth on her mouth, Sean’s body covering her body. The wild, untrammelled flood-force of her own dammed-up love and need crashed through the barricade, taking every single last bit of her resistance with it.
Willingly, eagerly and passionately she savoured the hot, urgent strength of Sean’s kiss, meeting it and matching it just as she had done when their love was new and her faith and trust in him whole and unbroken. With her eyes closed she could even almost smell the scent of their shared past—the hot dusty air in the small suburban street mingling erotically with the fresh male heat of Sean’s skin and her own excited arousal.
But the hand she lifted to curl round Sean’s neck, to hold him whilst she prolonged their kiss, was the hand of the woman she was today—and today she wanted Sean as the woman she was, Kate recognised emotionally. And how she wanted him! So much, so very, very much. Her body hungered for him like parched earth crying out in silent agony for the caress of rain.
Only her need wasn’t silent any more. It poured from her lips in a soft litany of longing, word on word, plea on plea, as she begged him, ‘Sean—my clothes... I don’t want them. I want you—your hands, your skin. You.’ Kate could feel herself shuddering with the intensity of her own feelings as she twined her arms around him and her body moved restlessly against his. ‘I want you, Sean,’ she told him. ‘The whole essence of you...all of you...’
It had always amazed her that those big, strong hands could be so delicately gentle and assured when removing her clothes, but now their unexpected impatience as Sean pulled and tugged at fabric and fastenings sent a fierce thrill of pleasure through her.
‘Kate. Kate. Oh, God, how I’ve missed you—and this—us...’
The words tumbled thickly from Sean’s tongue and were breathed against her skin as he kissed the flesh he was revealing. The sensual drift of his hands had become an urgent, compelling possession that demanded her body give itself over to him completely. The hard need of his mouth on hers spoke of a hunger so long denied that it might easily devour them both. But Kate only gloried in the realisation. How could she not when it so exactly mirrored her own feelings? The fierce thrust of Sean’s tongue against her own; the heavy weight of his hand cupping the curve of her hip so possessively; the grinding heat of his body against her own—she welcomed them all.
‘Take off your own clothes, Sean,’ she begged him huskily. ‘I need to feel you against me.’ As she spoke she shuddered slightly, remembering how it had felt to have the hot satin of his skin next to her own.
‘You do it,’ Sean answered.
When she hesitated, he took her hand and lifted it to his body.
‘Did I ever tell you how much it turned me on when you undressed me?’
When Kate just looked at him, in passion-soaked silence, he added thickly, ‘Do you want me to tell you how much you are turning me on now? Do you want me to show you how much you are turning me on now, Kate?’
She was trembling so violently that she couldn’t even unfasten the buttons on his shirt.
‘You do it like this,’ Sean said huskily, covering her hand with his own. ‘And then you do this—’ He guided her hand to push his shirt off his body. ‘And I do this...’
Kate’s whole body arched as he cupped her breast with his hand and then bent his head to cover her tight nipple with his mouth. Kate heard her own raw moan of fierce arousal as his tongue stroked the hard nub of flesh, teasing it, tormenting it. Sean seemed to know exactly when she reached the point where she couldn’t bear the torment any longer, because suddenly he took the hard, wanton ache of her nipple into his mouth and drew rhythmically on it, until Kate felt as though that same rhythm was pulsing throughout her whole body, gathering deep inside her, making her want to open her legs and wrap them tightly around him.
Fiercely she tugged at his clothes and Sean helped her.
‘Kate!’
The explosive denial Sean made as he virtually pushed her away made Kate stare uncomprehendingly at him.
‘If I let you touch me like that I’ll come too soon,’ he told her rawly. ‘And I don’t want to do that until I’ve given you more pleasure than you’ve ever known. Until I’ve given you that pleasure and watched you take it from me. Until I’m inside you, where I’ve ached to be every single night since I’ve been without you. Until I’ve done this...’
Long, long before the leisurely journey his hands and his mouth were making over her body had reached the small swell of her belly, Kate was trembling visibly with desire.
As she felt the brush of his mouth against the soft skin of her inner thigh she closed her eyes in aching mute anticipation. His hand covered her sex, making the demanding, hungry pulse deep inside her beat faster. When his fingers parted the arousal-swollen lips of her sex she cried out loud eagerly, almost unable to bear the searing pleasure of his touch.
Her body ached and pulsed, and just the touch of his fingers against her wetness made her rake her fingers against his skin. But the eager sensual movement of her body stilled when Sean exposed the swollen, secret nub of pleasure those lips had concealed to the hungry caress of his tongue.
Kate was helpless to stop the feeling that ran through, over her, filling her and taking her over, making her cry out and lift her body to Sean’s mouth as he brought her to that place she had not known for so very long.
And then, when Sean moved and positioned himself in between her legs, taking
her in his arms, Kate welcomed him with fierce pleasure. This was what she ached for—this total possession of him and by him, this hard, purposeful thrusting of him within her, that fulfilled and completed her. This climbing together towards that shimmering, shining place where for a brief heartbeat of time they were almost immortal.
Kate reached it first, crying out, her body tensing round Sean to take him with her. And as she felt the familiar pulse of his satisfaction within her Kate’s eyes filled with tears.
That this act, so very, very intense and erotically a pleasure beyond all pleasures for those who loved one another, could also be the creation of life, had always given it an extra special intensity for her.
Once she had believed that Sean shared that feeling with her—he had even said that to her the first time she had shyly confided to him her deep, almost spiritual feelings about making love.
And yet now he was denying his own child!
Bitter self-loathing filled her. Where was her pride and her self-respect?
She could feel Sean withdrawing from her, not just physically but emotionally as well, and suddenly a black wave of misery and exhaustion swamped over her.
* * *
Sean looked down at the bed where Kate lay fast asleep. He had left her to go to the bathroom, and when he had come back she had been asleep. Anguish shadowed his eyes and hollowed his face as he watched her.
Whilst making love with her he had forgotten there had been another man in her life—someone man enough to give her a child. Bitterness carved his mouth into hard anger.
In his arms she had responded to him as though no other man had ever touched her, as though she had never wanted any other man to touch her... And God alone knew how much he ached and needed to believe that she hadn’t. The sweet taste of her still clung to his lips, and the scent of her filled the air around him.