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She heard the unmistakable regret as he asked it, when surely regret had no place between them—not when they were doing something like this? Faint misgivings skittered over her skin—and maybe he noticed her brief frown because he leaned forward and brushed his lips over hers.
‘Forgive me my cynicism,’ he said in an odd voice. ‘Do you think you can do that?’
She looked up at him and felt her heart swell with love and trust. ‘Of course I can,’ she whispered, reaching her hands up to his face. ‘I think I can forgive you anything, Jack.’
For a moment a terrible tortured look crossed over his dark features—and she wondered what she’d said wrong—but the look was quickly replaced by desire. He bent his head and his sudden urgent kiss drove away all her questions and left nothing but a dreamy longing. She felt the longing build as he began to stroke her body, his practised touch making her move restlessly beneath his fingers.
‘You’re still wearing your bra,’ he observed unevenly.
‘So… so I am.’
‘And your panties.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think we ought to do something about that, don’t you?’
With one hand, he unclipped her bra and then slid her briefs down over her trembling thighs. ‘You know that your skin,’ he said unevenly as his lips brushed over the hollow at the base of her throat, ‘is like purest silk.’
‘Is it?’
‘Mmm. If I could make a shirt from it, I’d never take it off.’
‘Jack. ‘
‘Mmm?’ He kissed her until she was mindless with pleasure and stroked her until she thought she would go crazy. He seemed to want to take all the time in the world, coaxing and caressing her until she had reached melting point, when suddenly the mood changed. Drawing away from her, he looked down into her face, smoothing her tousled hair away from her flushed cheeks. ‘I hate to break the mood,’ he murmured, ‘but there is something I need to do.’
She watched as he leaned across her and extracted a small foil packet from the bedside table and she knew that she had to tell him.
‘Jack—’ She saw his eyes narrow as he turned his head.
‘For God’s sake.’ His voice was unsteady. ‘If you want to change your mind, then you’d better tell me now!’
‘No. I don’t want to change my mind. I need… I need you to know something. You know that I’m… I’m a.’ ‘You’re what, Ashley?’ He pulled her back into his arms. ‘A virgin, perhaps?’ he supplied drily.
She swallowed. ‘You knew?’
‘Of course I knew.’
Did that mean that her lack of experience was making her a bad bed-partner? Had she been doing everything wrong? ‘How can you tell?’ she whispered.
‘Oh, sweetheart—you couldn’t be anything but a virgin—it’s written in your every gesture. You respond with such a delicious combination of innocence and desire. But if… if you’ve suddenly decided that your innocence is too precious to squander on a hardened cynic like me—then you’d better tell me. If you want to go, then go. In fact, maybe for both our sakes it would be better if you did.’ His voice roughened and a sombre note entered it. ‘Only for God’s sake do it quickly.’
She could see the huge effort it must have cost him to say that—just as she could feel the tension which was making his body so taut. Did he really think that she could just get up and walk away from here—when she had wanted him for so long? ‘Of course I don’t want to go. I want to stay here. With you.’
For a moment he seemed to struggle to contain himself—and then at last he gave a ragged sigh. ‘You are beautiful,’ he whispered, against the spill of her hair. ‘Do you know that? Truly and properly beautiful. Inside and out.’
Yet strangely, the word jarred and Ashley felt a fleeting sense of disappointment as his body moved over hers. She wasn’t ‘beautiful’ at all—that was a lie. So did it follow that everything else he’d said to her was untrue? But there was no time to question him—because a different kind of tension had now entered his body and something of that tension was beginning to flow into her.
Suddenly, she was on fire—every kiss dragging her deeper and deeper into the dark sensuality of this erotic new world. Jack’s world. One where her senses were scrambled and every instinct in her body was crying out for something she didn’t really understand.
But when he thrust into her, she was more than ready for him and the pain was so brief that she barely felt it. And didn’t some darkly primitive emotion revel in the fact that it was Jack who had pierced her and given her that pain—and then replaced it with a pleasure so exquisite that his name was torn from her lips? Jack who had made her change from girl to woman.
‘Jack,’ she cried out as he pulled her down towards a dark, sweet vortex before tossing her out again, helpless on the tide. At first he was gentle with her, his movements slow and seeking as she relaxed into him. And then his movements became harder and faster, his kiss more hungry and intense. She felt like a piece of elastic which was being stretched and stretched—until at last it snapped and she cried out his name. And only when her back began its helpless arch did he begin to shudder within her, his arms tightening as he cradled her, his quickened breath fanning her bare shoulder until gradually he stilled. I love him, she thought fiercely as she clung to him, feeling the moist-satin of his sweat-sheened back.
After a few moments he let her go and rolled onto his back but, to Ashley’s surprise, he didn’t say a word. Thank heavens she hadn’t blurted out how much she cared—because there was nothing coming back from him. In fact, the only thing that Jack had spoken of was desire. She risked a glance and could see him staring up at the ceiling as if he didn’t really see it at all. In the silence of the room, she could sense his sudden disquiet.
Was he regretting what had just happened—and worrying that she would now read far too much into it? Perhaps this was a rite of passage for every woman who became his secretary. Perhaps the words he had spoken to her were the same he used to everyone. She felt a bitter lurch of pain in her heart as she wondered if he had a time-honoured method for removing them from his bed.
