Passionate Retribution

'You mean big sister wasn't the first?' Luke clicked his tongue in mock-sympathy.

'Don't judge the rest of humanity by your abysmally low standards.'

'Excuse me,' he drawled. 'But you did say promiscuous.'

'If you think I'd lower myself to score points off Gavin you are sadly mistaken,' she continued, gritting her teeth and ignoring his gibes. 'I realise you think you're totally irresistible, but I acquired immunity when I was sixteen. My bloodstream is positively crammed with antibodies that make me want to throw up at the idea of you…' Her mouth went dry as she met his lancet blue regard. What had possessed her to dredge up a piece of dusty history? she wondered bleakly.

'Undoing the buttons on your blouse?' he supplied helpfully as her tongue refused to curl around the words necessary to complete her sentence.

She froze as his fingers began to perform the task he described so matter-of-factly, a task so intimate that she had no experience with which to compare it. Had she actually married Gavin, this would have been his right, to remove her clothes and touch her flesh with a possessive certainty that he would please her, that it was his right. Could she ever have allowed him this and other greater intimacies?

Her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth as she watched Luke—his hands, to be precise…long, lean fingers—in a horrified fascination. Where was her instinctive fastidious distaste now? The one that had gripped her at the notion of Gavin doing what Luke was doing now with such casual expertise? She shook her head in a mute denial of what he was doing, what she was permitting. The heat was a solid thing in the pit of her belly. It rose until it occluded her windpipe, fogged her thought processes.

She had imagined this so many times that it had seemed real. Luke had spent more time than usual at Charlcot during her sixteenth summer. He'd been recovering from an injury he'd sustained during the coverage of a violent coup in a Third World country, a fact that had increased his glamour in her eyes. Only the age-gap had stopped him declaring his feelings, she was convinced. She had spent her time in a permanent daydream, awaiting the magical moment when she was sure he would be overcome by the passion that consumed him. Just the thought of him could make her body react to an imaginary touch. The power her mind had over her body had fascinated her. She'd constructed so many complex fantasies, placed herself in mortal danger from which he inevitably rescued her. Her eyes had followed him with transparent yearning. The thought of it made her curl up with embarrassment. What he had actually seen had been an awkward adolescent.

Now the fantasy was happening, but it had never been like this…a sweet, aching violation of body and will both intolerable and addictive. She was going to stop him—wasn't she? The soft, cool air against her skin passed unnoticed as Luke's hand cupped first one breast and then the other in his hand, his fingers sliding over the brief lacy covering. Sensations were building up layer upon layer, intermeshed, swelling the pleasure, the unacknowledged hunger.

Self-preservation was screeching in her head, but the hypnotic spell of sensual enchantment his voice and hands had spun held her immobile.

'You have blossomed a little since sixteen,' he mused slowly. Emily was too submerged in the chaotic jumble of unaccustomed craving to register the unsteadiness in the deep rhythm of his voice. She was blind to the raw hunger that flickered in his eyes. A white-hot fire smouldered at the back of his eyes. Her own eyelids prickled with hot, painful pin-pricks, and her head dropped back, exposing the slender column of her throat to his greedy gaze.

'Sixteen?' she echoed, wishing her mind would begin to function independently of her senses; they were saturated, and it hurt to feel so much when she knew she shouldn't.

One of his hands slid down her cap of silky, honey- coloured hair, capturing in his fist the strands at the nape of her neck. The other remained on her ribcage just below the swell of her breasts. 'The crush—don't you recall?'

They'd laughed when she'd walked in on them. The blonde had been older than he was…a friend of her mother's, prematurely widowed and enjoying the situation to the full. It had cured Emily instantly. She'd felt betrayed and disgusted, but relieved that her torrid fantasies had stayed firmly private in her head. It seemed Luke had a good deal of insight into these things. It wasn't by accident that Gavin had been the antithesis of Luke. The painful lesson had made her wary of the qualities he had which made him so fatally attractive. Gavin had been the safe option.

'You were speaking about antibodies?'

Emily felt life flow back into her limbs. She tore herself free of him. 'You disgust me,' she hissed, pulling the loose edges of her blouse together as his eyes strayed on the heaving contours of her breasts. This was all a lesson just to prove how irresistible Luke was; or did he need to humiliate her because she'd committed the ultimate sin—she was a Stapely?