Where had that sweet child gone to? he wondered. When had she turned from virgin to vamp?
A type of guilt twisted his heart. Surely it couldn't have been his fault, could it? That night, in the library... She'd caught him unawares, kissing him like that. For a few seconds he'd completely lost control. Hell, he could still recall how it had felt as her soft, breathless mouth had flowered eagerly open to accept the thrust of his tongue, as well as the way her heart had beat madly against his.
For a split-second, he'd wanted to forget his conscience and just drown in her delicious young body. He'd been tempted to take it for his pleasure and his pleasure alone, knowing he could seduce her virginal flesh quite easily, knowing he could mould and form her, body and soul, to his wants and needs.
She wouldn't have stopped him. He knew it. So in the end he had had to stop himself. He'd thought himself so right, so noble, so.. .good. He'd been made her guardian, for God's sake, not her corrupter. Not even her teenage declaration of undying love had swayed his determination to put aside such a wicked temptation. Not then, nor during the subsequent years as she'd gone from child to woman, from a shy and somewhat awkward teenager to a sophisticated and successful model, had he wavered in his resolve.
The crunch had come, predictably enough, at her twenty-first birthday party. He should have known seeing her on that occasion would be his undoing. It had been three years before, on her eighteenth birthday, that his lust had first raised its ugly head. Till then, he’d only ever seen Ebony in either her school uniform or shapeless jeans and tops. Teenage girls never
seemed to wear anything else.
But that fateful night, his mother had bought her a white lace dress that might have been virginal on the peg. On eighteen-year-old Ebony, complete with make-up and high heels, it looked so seductive that it was criminal. When Alan had spotted her corning down the stairs, his heart had stopped beating. Not so the rest of his body. It had leapt with a desire so fierce and so instant that he'd been thunderstruck.
He'd stared at Ebony and she had stared right back, those deep black eyes of hers showing not a hint of understanding of what was happening to him. Had she understood? Was that why she'd been so shocked that evening in the library a few months later when he'd knocked her back, scorned her offer of love?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Ebony's thoughts and motives were a mystery to him. She was a mystery. Sometimes he wondered if those three years of sacrifice had all been a wicked waste. Maybe at eighteen she'd already started on her sexual journey; maybe she hadn't been a virgin at all.
She certainly hadn't been a virgin three years later. And how!
There was no peace for his flesh as he recalled *hat Ebony had done to him the night of her twenty-iifsi »bjrthday. No peace at all.
She'd been bit tipsy of course, and the guests had left. But that was no excuse for stripping off all her clothes and blatantly going swimming in the pool in the nude in full view of him. She'd claimed afterwards she hadn't known he was there, but he didn't believe her. She'd been watching out for him all night, baiting him, tempting him.
Besides, there'd been no resistance whatsoever when she'd climbed out of the water and he'd come forward to draw her dripping nakedness against him, nor when he'd claimed her supposedly startled mouth in a hungry kiss. She'd been more than willing to let him touch her all over, to take her right there by the pool, to carry her back to his room where he'd worked his will upon her body all night.
Naturally, he had heard the rumours about her, but rumours about models were rife and not always true. For some inexplicable reason, he'd been reluctant to believe she could be as promiscuous as people said she was. He had found out that night that she was all that and more. Never had he known
a woman so wild and wanton and willing. She was sex mad, he decided. Totally sex mad. Just like her father.
His first thought the next morning had been that he had to keep what had happened from his mother, as he'd kept from her the rumours about Ebony's private life. His mother thought Ebony a sweet, old-fashioned girl and he didn't want to destroy that illusion, or the close relationship the two women enjoyed.
Maybe he had explained it badly to the naked girl in his arms. He hadn't meant to hurt her, though he suspected he had. But what was to be gained by dressing up reality with false words of love? It wasn't as though she were an innocent, whose sensitive feelings had to be treated with kid gloves.