And yet for all her lack of experience, for all her years of celibacy, somewhere hidden deep inside her and unrecognised by herself must have lurked some kind of inner knowledge and instinct, because the moment Silas’s lips touched hers, her mouth seemed to swell and soften, her lips clinging eagerly to his, her eyes closing, so that when he almost immediately broke the tormenting contact of his mouth on hers, her eyelids lifted, heavy with arousal and need, her eyes dark with confusion, her lips still parted so that when his returned to caress them again she felt it could only be because her own had begged him to do so.
Three times or maybe four he repeated the light caress, and each time as she reluctantly opened her eyes, convinced that it was over, that he was about to push her away from him and let her go, she was confused by a question she seemed to read in his eyes but was unable to answer.
It was almost as though he was waiting for something, but what?
Her lips felt swollen and sensitive. She touched them with the tip of her tongue exploratively and then tensed as she heard Silas’s explosive breath and felt his hand slide from her jaw into her hair, his fingers tangling in her curls.
He said something under his breath. She thought it might have been her name, but she wasn’t sure, and then as she looked uncertainly up at him, he bent his head and covered her mouth with his.
This time his kiss was neither brief nor gentle. This time…
It felt as though her heart were literally turning over inside her. It felt as though every single one of her muscles had turned to cotton wool, and her blood to liquid heat. It felt…it felt like nothing she had ever experienced in her life, nor expected to experience, and if Silas had chosen to remove every item of clothing from her body and from his and to lie her down right where they stood, among the cool soft grass and the falling autumn leaves, and to possess her body as no man had possessed it since Jimmy’s awkward and youthful taking of it, she would not only have not stopped him, but would have actively and very, very eagerly have helped him to do so.
Fortunately he did not choose to do so. Fortunately he chose instead to lift his mouth from hers, and to press tiny biting kisses along her throat, and even more fortunately when he reached her ear he chose to whisper raggedly into it, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’
They most certainly should not. She froze immediately, sickened and disgusted by her own behaviour, wrenching herself out of his arms so determinedly and so speedily that he automatically let her go.
‘No, we shouldn’t,’ she told him bitterly.
She was shaking so much that he had to be aware of her reactions. How could she have done this…? How could she have allowed it to happen? And why had it happened? He was obviously a man with not just a high sex drive, but a virtually uncontrollable sex drive—he had to be, otherwise he would never, ever have attempted to touch her. She was Katie’s mother, for heaven’s sake.
And yet…and yet nothing about him had suggested that he lacked self-control…
But then neither had anything about him suggested that he had the kind of ego and lack of maturity which forced him to bolster himself up by seducing teenage girls. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps his vanity was massaged by the thought of having them both, mother and daughter. Perhaps…
Wild thoughts followed one another like hounds after a fox, out of control and eager to cause destruction.
She was trying desperately to control her emotions, her breathing, the tumultuous beat of her heart and the body that still ached for him so much that she could hardly believe it was her body, her emotions, that were reacting like this. She felt stupidly close to tears, and tears were something she simply never allowed herself. She had learned years ago the futility, the danger of becoming lachrymose and self-pitying.
Now she felt more vulnerable, more afraid than she could ever remember feeling in her whole life, and all because of this man, she reflected bitterly…all because of this man who had no right to make her feel such things. This man who was supposed to be committed to her daughter. This man with whom she had just betrayed that commitment and Katie herself.
She couldn’t bear the burden of her own guilt. She wanted to demand to know if he had any thought at all for Katie, if he realised what he had done, if he, like her, was suffering any feelings of guilt, of anguish, but she simply could not bring herself to utter her daughter’s name. Not so soon after she had been in his arms. She had been responding to him with such abandon, such eagerness. She had been the one to partner him in that betrayal. To mention Katie’s name now would be like betraying her daughter a second time.
Instead she had to content herself with a low-voiced, ‘How could you? How could you behave so…so vilely?’
As she turned away from him, she saw him frown. ‘You’re over-reacting a little, aren’t you?’ he demanded curtly.
She held her breath, tense with bitterness and self-loathing. Another second and he would be telling her, ‘It was only a kiss.’ Well, she might be inexperienced, but that had not been ‘only a kiss’, and as for over-reacting…
She gave him a fiercely condemning look and said angrily, ‘Over-reacting? I don’t think so. Not in the circumstances.’
His frown deepened. ‘I see. It seems I totally misread the situation.’
Caution and self-preservation warned her not to respond, but she was being driven by her guilt and her pain and so she ignored caution and demanded icily, ‘What do you mean?’
The look he gave her was level and thoughtful. Not the look at all of a man consumed by guilt or ego.
‘I think you know what I mean.’ He said it almost gently, almost in the manner of an adult to a wayward child.
‘No, no, as a matter of fact I don’t,’ she told him, her voice too high and pitched too sharply.
Still he was regarding her with that gravely questioning look that was beginning to unnerve her so much.
‘Very well,’ he said slowly. ‘I im
agined—thought—that what happened between us was not something to which you were, shall we say, averse?’
It took several seconds before his meaning seeped in and, when it did, she saw red.