Beyond All Reason

‘Why?’ he asked implacably. ‘The cold woke me and I saw that you had decided to set up camp on the ground, so I figured that two bodies underneath the blankets would generate infinitely more heat than one.’

Abigail looked at him with dislike, remembering her dream with a shudder of humiliation.

‘You figured wrong, in that case.’ She yanked the blankets towards her and he pulled them back, which made her even more furious.

‘Let go,’ she demanded. ‘Right. If you don’t have the decency to go back where you belong, which incidentally is your own apartment in London, or at least the sofa while you happen to be here as an uninvited guest, then I shall just have to go back upstairs.’

She stood up and his hand snapped out, curving round her wrist and pulling her back down so that she half fell on top of him in an undignified heap.

Her heart was beating fiercely and she put her hands on his chest to push herself back up, but was thwarted by a combination of unobliging blankets, which had somehow managed to wrap themselves around her like a cage, and his arms which were infinitely more unobliging than the blankets.

They stared at each other in silence, their faces only inches apart.

‘Don’t be a fool, Abby,’ he murmured, and the husky depth of his voice made her head begin to swim. ‘You know I’m right This place is like an ice-box, and if we can warm each other then we might as well, because it’ll do us both good to get some sleep.’

‘You are the most objectionable man I have ever, ever met in my entire life.’ The words were bitten out separately.

‘Well, I guess that’s better than being boring.’

She ground her teeth together and made an inarticulate, strangled sound.

‘Light the fire,’ she told him. ‘Light the damned fire and then you can get back to the sofa!’

He didn’t even bother to look in the direction of the logs. ‘My body finds it far nicer to remain where it is.’

She wanted to scream.

‘Relax,’ he told her seriously. ‘This is just a practical solution to a temporary problem.’ He eased her down, applying a little pressure when she squirmed against him.

He wasn’t going to take no for an answer. She lay down, with her back to his stomach, being very careful to avoid any bodily contact, and trying to ignore the warmth of his arms around her. Her head was swarming with a mad whirlwind of thoughts and she was breathing quickly and nervously. Of course, she was never going to get to sleep. She would have slept better if she had remained upstairs in the bedroom, even if that entailed her slowly freezing into a block of ice.

‘Better?’ he asked, and she didn’t say anything. ‘You’re very fiery underneath that icy veneer of yours, aren’t you?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I want to get some sleep.’

‘I knew that there was more to you than what you wanted to show,’ he carried on in a murmur. ‘There’s a lot of truth in the saying that still waters run deep. Every so often I used to catch glimpses of something quite different from the cool, efficient secretarial mask.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Abigail asked. The panic inside her was so sharp and alarming that she didn’t dare move. In fact, she hardly dared breathe. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said bitterly. ‘I wish you’d never come.’

‘Why?’

‘Because this is…wrong,’ she told him. ‘I work for you. I’m your secretary!’ She hoped that that would put things back into perspective, but it didn’t. ‘You’re involved with someone else,’ she continued desperately. ‘We’ve been through all this!’ she virtually wailed.

‘So we have,’ Ross said huskily, and she was glad that he couldn’t see the tremor of despairing excitement that crossed her face. ‘Why are you so afraid? That boss of yours, the one you used to work for, well, you may have been attracted to him but basically I don’t think you liked him very much, and you may have liked your exfiancé—you’ve told me enough times what a thoroughly warm and wonderful human being he is—but face it, you weren’t attracted to him. That, in fact, may have been one of the things that you liked so much about him. Somehow, between the ex-boss and your mother, you’ve come to the erroneous conclusion that physical attraction between a man and a woman is somehow undesirable.’

‘That’s not it at all,’ Abigail replied with a mixture of desperation and despair, ‘that’s the conclusion that you’ve come to because you feel as though you’ve somehow lost your challenge unless you’ve succeeded in psychoanalysing me from head to toe. Please,’ she said in a whisper, ‘won’t you leave me alone?’

There was a heavy silence, then he did something that she was not expecting. He moved closer to her and folded his arms around her body, and she stopped breathing, every nerve in her body alight.

‘I can’t,’ he muttered, not explaining what he meant.

‘This won’t do.’ Her voice was high and pleading. This was circumstance, she wanted to tell him, this was an intimacy that had nothing to do with real life, just as Boston and what happened there had been a misjudgment brought on by being in a strange place. An abridged version of a holiday romance, she thought with scorn, the sort of thing that she had always abhorred. Foreign places, unfamiliar situations could make people lose their minds and do things which they would regret in the cold light of day. Her affair with Ellis had been cut off from reality as well. She hadn’t seen it at the time, but he had made sure to point it out to her all right, the minute he thought that she might have started taking their affair too seriously. Reality had been the girlfriend from his own social stratum.

‘No, it won’t, will it?’ he agreed, and there was an edge of excitement in his voice that raced to her brain like adrenalin and made her feel suddenly weak.

His hand moved slowly down her body, smoothing along her thigh, then slipped beneath her pyjama top, caressing the flat planes of her stomach, and she groaned with a mixture of protest and wanting.

He must know what she was feeling, he must sense the sickening intense desire inside her which was stirring into life and growing by the second.

There were so many reasons to be fighting this, and they were all clamouring inside her head, a jumble of thoughts that seemed to be locked away inside a box, audible but incoherent, uselessly warning her that every touch, every sigh, every moment of forbidden pleasure would have to be paid for in pain.

She shuddered convulsively as his hand warmly trailed down to her briefs, teasing and tantalising, and with agonised abandon she rolled over on to her back, allowing him to part her legs and then drawing in a deep, sharp breath when he found the moist warmth of her womanhood and began to caress it.

They weren’t speaking but they didn’t have to. His body was giving off the same urgent messages as her own. They were both breathing thickly, their eyes locked, while their bodies obeyed orders from a different source.

She closed her eyes as his fingers explored the depth of her being, a slow, rhythmic exploration that sent darts of pleasure shooting through her.

She unbuttoned the top of her pyjamas, to reveal her aching breasts, and as he continued to excite her with his fingers, he took one swollen nipple into the warm cavern of his mouth, sucking and teasing until she couldn’t bear the peak of desire to which he was sending her.

‘Touch me,’ he ordered her, and she did. Her ignorance of the male body was complete, and she felt his hardened member with an incredulous thrill.

He groaned and lay back and she felt the cold ache of withdrawal as he slipped off his clothes, then he roughly removed hers, his hands as impatient to continue the lingering caress of her body as hers were for his.

He knelt over her, kissing her mouth, her neck, slipping down to lick her breasts, her nipples, then lower, circling her navel, trailing downwards until she felt a spiral of intense, erotic pleasure as his hands caressed the inside of her thighs and his tongue found the hot, burning centre of her need.

She squirmed, abandoning herself to the waves of pleasure, moving against him as the waves crashed harder. When she knew that she could take no more and her body was screaming out for release, he straightened and thrust inside her, gently at first, then building to an urgent rhythm that repeated hers, so that their bodies moved as one.

She wrapped her arms around his muscled body and her legs over his and they reached the point of no return with shuddering delight.

‘Ross…’ she said weakly, and he placed one finger over her lips.

‘Don’t talk,’ he murmured. He pulled the blankets over them, although she was warm enough without them.

‘We can’t lie here in silence indefinitely,’ she said on an amused sigh. She was waiting for the guilt to come; she knew that it was there, biding its time, but right now she felt no guilt at all, just a wonderful feeling of deep contentment.

He moved to lie alongside her and stroked her hair with his hand. In the shadows, his eyes were gleaming pools. You could drown in them, she thought, if you hadn’t already.

‘No regrets, Abby?’ he asked. Underneath the casual voice there was a hint of hesitancy and she shook her head slowly.