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He bent his dark head to do something sinfully erotic to her earlobe. Laughter shook him as an agonised ache of anticipation uncurled in her belly. Feverishly disorientated by his swing from threat to passion, she uttered a stifled negative which he completely ignored. The force of his mouth thrust her head back. He devoured her with the hot, rapacious intimacy of a lover and she went boneless, her defensive fingers unbracing to slide weakly down to his flat stomach, feeling his muscles jerk in reaction to the accidental caress.
‘God, I want you all over again,’ he groaned, bending her back over his supportive arm to send his lips travelling over her bared breasts, his tongue lashing wetly over her urgently sensitive nipples. Crying out, she clutched at his thick hair.
He wrapped her legs round his lean hips and carried her upstairs that way while he told her with a lack of inhibition that both shocked and excited her exactly what he planned to do next. Her aroused body had the consistency of melted honey heated to boiling-point when he tumbled her down on the bed. She sought him blindly with her hands but he would not be hurried. His control was infinitely stronger than hers.
Storm after storm of drowning sensation had alternately ravished and inflamed her before her sobbed pleas brought an end to the torture. He plunged into her and her nails scored his back. A sound between anguish and ecstasy escaped her. Her every sense was abandoned and attuned to the raw physical reality of his body moving on and within hers, hard and fast and then soft and slow until she bit his shoulder in a torment of frustration and the game stopped as he drove deep into her silken sheath. What she had dimly believed couldn’t happen again happened in an agony of intense fulfilment as convulsive pleasure shuddered through her.
Dawn had fought the darkness for a long time while she lay, content just to look at him. His arm was a heavy anchor across her, his dark, tousled head resting against her shoulder. He slept in an extravagant sprawl, taking up most of the bed. Her fingertips itched to trace the straight, uncompromising jut of his nose and the stubborn angle of his stubbled jawline.
Sleep had been impossible for her. There was a sense of almost childish wonder that he was actually there in the flesh beside her. Eight years of feverishly suppressed need and longing were running riot with her emotions. To lose a single precious moment in sleep would have been heresy. She was extremely uncomfortable, pinned to the lumpy edge of the mattress, but she could have lain still on bare boards with alacrity because he was holding her close. Oh, yes, this was love, great rolling breakers of feeling flooding her with a strength that only increased by the hour.
Was it really like last night for everybody? she wondered still in a partial daze. An insatiable passion, never entirely damped down, never completely satisfied? He had reached for her again and again. How many women had experienced that same mindless satisfaction in Jake’s arms? Stiffening, she struggled to bury that first unwelcome shard of disquiet and insecurity, but it was swiftly followed by another.
Paula appreciates her freedom as much as I do, he had told her bluntly yesterday. Oh, why did she have to remember that now? Why did she have to remember that tomorrow and the next day weren’t ringed on Jake’s calendar with her name beside them? Hot-blooded sensuality lay at the very core of Jake’s temperament. He was a very physical male with a strong sexual appetite. Why was she lying here like a lovesick, dreaming idiot with her heart in her eyes?
Jake had simply taken what he considered to be on offer. He hadn’t intended to become involved with her. At the start he had avoided her. But somewhere along the line he had decided that she was a permitted weakness. For one night? Two nights? She inched dully out of the seductive warmth of his hold. Her glow of unreasoning euphoria had ebbed through the intrusive bars of reality. Jake didn’t love her. He wanted her. Nothing had changed.
Last night she had faithfully promised herself that she would still leave. A desperate promise made by a desperate lady, fearfully accepting that she had lost all control of her emotions. On tiptoe she crept into the bathroom with an armful of clothes. Daylight shed a humiliating clarity on their respective motivations. Jake drew her like a magnet to her own downfall. When this ended the grief would be hers, not his, and she couldn’t blame him for it this time. The scenario was all of her own making. She should never have come back.
She hunched knee to chin in a shallow bath, angry with herself, hating herself, but the effect of both sensations effectively cancelled out by the tormenting awareness of how much she loved him. As she was climbing out of the bath, water sloshing noisily about in spite of her efforts to be quiet, her ears pricked up at what she briefly thought was the phone ringing. She listened to silence and then towelled herself dry, certain she had been mistaken. Dressed, she padded out on to the landing like a sneak-thief. She didn’t really want him to wake up. Awake he had to be faced.
The bedroom door was ajar, no longer closed as she had left it. With his back to the doorway, Jake was zipping up his jeans although he must have heard her entry.
‘You’re leaving?’ Nothing like stating the obvious, Kitty, she thought with an inner groan. ‘Don’t you want…breakfast?’ she enquired awkwardly.
Silence…seething silence. Rock-hard tension had brought the muscles into prominence on the long, virile sweep of his back. Distractedly noticing the little parallel scratchmarks she had left on his smooth skin, she reddened.
He swung round to snatch up his shirt. ‘You lied to me!’ he bit out in savage condemnation.
Astonished by the attack, she blinked bemusedly. ‘Lied?’
‘When did you phone Maxwell to tell him where you were?’ His clenched features were a mask of dark fury.
Her brain was working in slow motion. ‘But I didn’t…the phone!’ Eyes wide with horror, she grasped that she had indeed heard the phone earlier. ‘Grant? Grant phoned? And you answered…oh, God,’ she muttered in cringing conclusion.
His white teeth were a feral slash against his dark skin. ‘You went crawling back to him, didn’t you?’
Her palms pressed to her hot face. ‘What did he say?’
‘Well, let’s put it this way, he didn’t sound his usual oily, self-satisfied self when I cut the connection,’ he imparted with derision. ‘In fact he displayed an amazing amount of shock and disbelief for a creep who’s been cheating on you from day one!’
She was feeling sick. ‘What did you say to him?’
A black brow ascended. ‘He wanted to know what I was doing here at this hour and I told him. He was still raging when I put the phone down,’ he murmured scornfully. ‘I doubt if he’ll be very forgiving. He’s ninety-nine per cent ego.’
Numbly she shook her head.
‘I swear I don’t know how he found out where I was!’ she burst out. ‘He must have guessed. It was probably him who tried to phone me last night but I didn’t get there in time to answer it.’
Jake loosed his pent-up breath in an aggressive hiss. ‘What a shame. A case of bad timing if ever I heard it!’
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sp; ‘I didn’t have to tell you the truth!’ she said painfully.
He searched her eyes fiercely. ‘If I thought for one moment that you were lying to me…’ He left the threat hanging and visibly ground his teeth together. ‘If I’ve misjudged you, I ought to apologise.’
She waited.
‘How the hell do you think I felt answering the phone to that bastard?’ he vented instead, and strode past her into the bathroom.
What must her father be thinking? Had he realised it was Jake? There was only one parallel between Jake and Grant—a mutual loathing for the merest mention of the other’s name. She sighed. She should have phoned Grant long before now. He didn’t hold spite. She had never really believed for a second that he would cut her completely out of his life. But he had hurt her, and when Kitty was hurt it took her a long time to emerge from her defensive shell again.
When Jake came downstairs, she was replenishing the fire. Covertly she glanced at him, absorbing the brooding stillness of his stance. He had an explosive temper. A volcanic brilliance still lingered in his dark scrutiny even though he had backed down. ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you, but his was the last voice on this earth that I wanted to hear.’
Razor-taut, she murmured, ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘You don’t want to know what I feel.’ His handsome mouth twisted sardonically. ‘That would be breaching the limits you’ve set us. Narrow, nasty little limits they are too. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here last night solely to make love to you.’
Somehow he was putting her in the wrong and she resented that. Strung up with nervous tension, she said, ‘No?’
‘No! I don’t want an affair with you,’ he countered harshly.
Dumbly she looked at him all at sea. ‘Do you want coffee?’ she asked again, desperate to fill up the silence and not even appreciating how ridiculous the question sounded.
He swore under his breath and fixed her with a bitingly aggressive stare. ‘I want to marry you.’
