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There was one more thing she had to settle first, even though it was becoming as hard to think as it was to breathe.
‘Adam—about Helen...’
‘I told you—’
‘No, not mine, the other one. The Helen you fell in love with and wrote those letters to...’
‘You mean Mary?’
‘Not your wife—Helen.’ She wondered whether the same desire that smoked along her senses and obscured her thoughts had also clouded his.
‘But Mary was Helen...Helen was Mary. My God, didn’t I ever tell you that?’ he murmured, in as much shock as she. ‘It was a sort of a joke between us—she was my Helen of Troy, I was her Paris—kidnapping her love from her parents and carrying her off for myself. Which is exactly what I did. Her parents disapproved of our marriage—she was an only child and they thought Mary was too young and I was too big and rough, too hot-blooded and disrespectful ever to be suitable for their delicate little girl. They disapproved of me until the day they died. I could never forgive myself for being the reason that Mary was alienated from her parents, even though she never once threw it up at me...’
Honor’s unfurling confidence froze, darkening her sea-green eyes with doubts. Could she still go through with this? According to Greek legend Helen was the most beautiful woman of her entire age! Everything she learnt about Mary-Helen seemed designed to make Honor feel lack-lustre and ordinary.
And yet Adam didn’t think of her that way...
‘I wrote those letters in a rage of hormones—I stole bits from great literature because I didn’t think I could match their fluent skill in seduction,’ he murmured, picking up her wrists in his strong hands, as if he sensed her uncertainty and was focusing sharply in on it.
‘But you didn’t have to cheat like that, Honor, because you have an incredibly sensuous response to words and a romantic nature that makes you instinctively know how to use them. When I read some of the things you said it was like being stroked with a velvet glove. I got aroused, and I knew th
at you had been aroused when you wrote them for me, too...’
In that same, sultry voice he quoted her one of her wilder paragraphs. ‘I like the idea that I can inspire you to write something like that...’
Honor’s captive pulse beat heavily against his palms. ‘It wasn’t so much you as your letters,’ she denied huskily.
‘You were absorbed by the rapture of your love,’ he said, lifting her hands to the level of his chest. ‘And that love was embodied in every lustrous word...’ He dipped to kiss first one wrist, and then the other in tender salute.
‘Lustrous being exactly the right word.’ Honor tried to keep the last fragment of her pride intact with the foolish pun. ‘It was a physical infatuation expressed in metaphysical form—’
‘You fell in love with a phantom.’ He mocked her refusal to admit it. ‘And now you need him to love you back.’
She wouldn’t let him see how devoutly she wished it. He might want to tease her into saying it, but she wouldn’t be able to say it as teasingly as he wanted her to. She couldn’t. And her serious intensity might very well drive him away...
‘I want him to make love to me.’ She made the distinction boldly. ‘But he seems more interested in word-play than love-play. Do you usually make it so difficult for a woman to start an affair with you?’
His face was unreadably still. ‘An affair...is that really all you expect from me, Honor?’ Was that a trace of anxiety in his question? She rushed to reassure him.
‘Of course it is. Friends and lovers, you said.’ She pushed against his restraining fingers, until her hands could flatten against his hard chest. ‘Or have you changed your mind?’
His nostrils flared as he watched her breasts lift with the act of placing her palms on the thick pelt of his chest hair, the blue veins on their surface becoming more prominent as blood flowed under her skin, engorging them with a heavy ripeness.
‘So be it.’ His hands covered hers for a moment, pressing them against his hot chest, then moved to bracket her hips, pulling her hard into the cradle of his hips with a groan of relief.
‘Oh, yes, yes...’ His head tilted back as she raked her nails lightly against him. ‘Harder, Honor, I need to really feel you! To know you’re real. Like this...touch me like this...’
His fingers had found her nipples through the stiff cups of lace, drawing them out with gentle twists that sent ribbons of fire unfurling through her body. When she copied him, seeking out the flat masculine areolae in their nests of soft curling hair, he shuddered violently and Honor was stunned to feel them harden and thrust eagerly against her caressing fingers.
‘Oh, yes, God, yes, I like that...do that again, harder—and this, do this to me, too...’ He bent his head and her body leapt in shocked pleasure as she felt him run his open mouth over the twin curves of her breasts straining above the black lace. He pressed his face deep into the abundant softness and rubbed it back and forth. The sensation of him crushing and kneading her and then biting and sucking moistly at the creamy mounds was profoundly and primitively erotic.
He cupped her head when she feverishly sought reciprocal rights, shifting her mouth against his chest, guiding her for his pleasure while his hands explored beneath the frill that veiled the shadowed mound between her legs and the high rise of her buttocks. For long, sumptuous moments they shuddered and fought against the restrictions of being a single desire in two separate human bodies, until Adam uttered a harsh sound of impatience and twisted away to rake the rest of his clothing down his hard thighs.
He stood before her, naked and unashamed, magnificently aroused, his muscles thick and corded, bulging with a brutal tension that screamed for release. Honor’s eyes were momentarily stunned with admiration until she saw how his swollen body reacted to her silent worship, shifting and hardening even further in a way that terrified and excited her. She trembled as she guided his big hand back to the trailing laces that hung down the front of the teddy.
He was swift to interpret her shy request. ‘This lacing must be uncomfortably tight...’ he suggested softly, pulling it momentarily tighter, the compression delivering a sexual jolt to her highly sensitised nerve-endings.
Honor watched him under heavy lids, responding as she knew he wanted her to. ‘Yes, yes, it is...very...’
