As she waited she said hesitantly, ‘I can’t pretend to understand why. I know I’ve probably shocked you. If you’d prefer not to…’
Opposite her, Matt tried to probe what lay behind the cool, well-mannered words—if she was simply playing a joke on him, trying to make a fool of him, or if she actually meant it. He tried to tell himself that there was no way he could feel this urgent, clamouring desire for a woman about whom he knew nothing at all other than that he wanted her, but his body refused to listen to such logic. His body was reinforcing what he already knew—his body…
Emily heard him mutter something under his breath and tensed, waiting for his rejection, her back held rigidly towards him.
And then, unbelievably, she felt his hands on her shoulders turning her towards him, his voice low and ragged as he said rawly, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this, you know…’ He held her roughly as though pleading with her to deny him.
‘No…I know…’ Emily responded breathlessly, knowing even as she spoke that there was no power on earth that could stop this extraordinary mutual need that was driving them both.
And most extraordinary of all, she marvelled dizzily as she felt his arms close around her and draw her down against him, was the feeling she had of being so safe with him…so free to express herself and her desires, so free from restraint and shyness, so in tune with him that it was as though she had known him all her life, rather than a space of time that could be counted in minutes and hours instead of days and years.
‘If you should change your mind…’ The words whispered against her lips, tantalising their soft flesh.
Here was her chance to hold back, to let caution and common sense hold sway, to withdraw from this madness which seemed to have possessed her—but ignoring it, rejecting the opportunity he was giving her, she heard herself saying almost fiercely, ‘No…no. I don’t want to change my mind…’
CHAPTER THREE
‘YOU’RE sure you want this… Me?’
The words thrilled against her skin, raising a rash of gooseflesh, making her quiver and then tense as she felt Matt’s lips tracing the shape of her mouth, exploring it, cherishing it so that her tension died in a flood of wonder and pleasure.
Why had she never known that it was possible to feel like this; that the delicate, almost hesitant touch of another mouth against her own could arouse her to such dizzying pleasure and need? It was as though this sensual exploratory meeting of their lips was something she had dreamed of—yearned for for an aeon of time, rather than knowing she wanted it only seconds before she experienced it.
Against Matt’s mouth she whispered back, ‘I want you,’ and another thrill of anticipation ran through her as she felt the answering tension in Matt’s body.
An unfamiliar heady eagerness to reach out to him and show him, with the touch of her hands and her lips, just what delight it gave her to have him near her overwhelmed her. She, who had never once initiated an embrace with any man—not even Gerry—had suddenly turned into a woman she could hardly recognise.
How had she known that the delicate touch of her fingertips against his skin would make Matt tense and groan against her mouth, tightening his hold on her, drawing her down against him so that her body was enveloped in the heat and maleness of his?
His hands cradled her head, his fingers sliding into her hair as his mouth explored the delicate contours of her face. His warm breath against her ear made her tremble and shiver beneath a shower of fiery darts of excitement. Sensations she had never known existed coiled through her stomach and swelled the soft curves of her breasts, inciting her to move with instinctive enticement against Matt’s body, as her wanton flesh silently begged him to free it from the final barriers left between them.
She wanted to feel him against her, she recognised. She wanted to feel the hard heat of his skin against her own, to experience the touch of his hands and mouth against her body, and to explore the alien contours of his with hers. Her needs suspended reality and her ability to rationalise, her mind reeling under the shock of the dominating demands of her body.
As Matt’s hand swept back her hair to lay bare her throat to the hungry assault of his mouth, she arched eagerly towards him, not in humble supplication, but in proud demand, knowing by some primitive instinct that, whatever the differences between them, in this their need for one another they met as equals.
The heat of his breath against her skin, the hard pressure of his mouth, the sharp bite of his teeth, the rough stroke of his hands on her skin, all of them were so perfectly attuned to her own needs that to experience them fed her desire at the same time as they momentarily satisfied it.
An instinct she hadn’t known she possessed told her when to draw her own mouth against his flesh, when to stroke it tenderly with her tongue and when to graze it more ardently with the subtle pressure of her teeth.
Their surroundings, the storm which had brought them together, the fact that they were strangers to one another—all these had faded into insignificance. All that was important was that Matt had at last removed the last barriers of their underwear, and that his hands were cupping and shaping her breasts. That his thumbs were stroking eagerly, wonderingly almost, against the sensitive hardness of her nipples as though he knew exactly the intensity of her need to have him touch her just like that; as though he knew that even another second’s delay in doing so would have stretched out the taut hot wire of desire that compelled her that little bit too far.
And, when he lowered his head and took one tender, flaunting nub of flesh into his mouth, caressing it gently with his lips and then his tongue, raking it less gently with his teeth and then finally sucking so erotically and rhythmically on it that her whole body turned fluid and pulsed in a shockingly arousing harmony with it, it was as though she had waited for this moment, this pleasure…this man, for an infinity of time.
What she was experiencing went far beyond right or wrong, far, far beyond worrying about doing the right thing…about defending herself from hurt and pain. This need they were sharing was so elemental, so fierce, so overpowering that it cut across every layer of civilisation, laying bare the deepest essences of their humanity.
The Emily she had always known, had always been, would rather have died a thousand deaths than cry out in a pleasure that was almost pain at the sheer impossibility of containing what she was feeling—what he was making her feel. The Emily she had thought of herself as being could never have imagined herself wanting to share with any man her joy in the pleasure he was giving her—wanting to tell him, to show him, to give to him in equal measure all that he was so generously giving to her. The Emily she had thought she was would never have eagerly and openly murmured her need when Matt turned his head to caress her other breast as he had done its twin.
‘Francine…I can’t believe this is happening. You’re…’
Emily tensed. Francine. She had forgotten about that. Would he have wanted her the same if she had told him she was Emily? A rose by any other name…
Francine. Perhaps it was being Francine that gave her the freedom to behave in a way that Emily could never have behaved.
Matt’s mouth touched her stomach, sending tiny pulses of electric sensation coiling through her, making tiny nerve-endings beneath her skin beat frantically in excitement. His hand stroked her hip; soon…
‘No. Not yet,’ she told him huskily. ‘I want to…’ She stopped, realising that she had almost said ‘I want to love you.’ What words did you use to tell a man that you wanted to explore and enjoy the sensation of his flesh beneath your hands and mouth the way he had done yours? That you wanted to give him the same pleasure he had given you; that you wanted to share with him your joy in the fact that he was a man?
If they existed she had no idea what they were, and so, while he hesitated, she simply asked softly, ‘Can I do this?’ and then placed her mouth against his body, tentatively tracing the aureole of his nipple, so different from hers—and yet, perhaps in some ways not so very di
fferent after all, she decided as she felt him shudder and move restlessly against her, his hands gripping her waist and then stroking up over her body before he buried them in her hair, silently urging her to repeat the caress, and then not so silently as she fulfilled his silent command and experienced the satisfaction of feeling his body shudder in immediate response to her touch.
Why had she never guessed there would be a time, a man, with whom all the barriers of protection and self-preservation would simply be swept away; a man whose body aroused her to such heights of both tenderness and desire that the sound of helpless need he made in his throat when her mouth touched the taut plane of his belly almost made her eyes sting with tears. He was so vulnerable to her—as vulnerable as she was to him. With Gerry, sexual intimacy had been something she had always secretly feared. She had analysed that fear as a fear of her own lack of experience, of disappointing him, of being found inadequate; but now, with Matt, there was no fear, no hesitation, nothing that could mar the fierce surge of joy that touching him brought her. Where she had only felt fierce feminine pride in her own responsiveness to his touch, now that she was the one to arouse him, to strip him of all the veneer of civilisation and lay bare his essential maleness, she did feel humbled, softened, awed by the strength of his response to her.
His hands rested fleetingly on her shoulders as though he meant to urge her away from him, and then, when her tongue deliberately followed the soft line of hair that ran down from his navel, he tensed and writhed, torn between protest and need, moaning a contradictory burst of staccato pleas.
She ignored everything he was saying. This was her pleasure as well as his; her need, her desire. They would only have this one night, and now, while her soul and her body were so receptive to him that it was almost as though he was actually a part of her, she wanted to share with him all her joy, to pour out over him the gift of her body’s desire for him.
Beneath her hands and mouth, Matt cried out her name. Once, long ago, he had wanted to love Jolie like this and be loved by her in turn, but she had hated it when he had touched her breasts and kissed them. He had blamed himself for his inability to arouse her; had blamed his own lack of skill and sensitivity. Women could and did enjoy sex, as he had discovered during his teenage years, but although Jolie had been quite willing to allow him the intimacy of her body he had known that there was no reciprocal joy in it for her.
He had told himself that he must exercise restraint, that his love for her would show him the way to give her pleasure, that he must control his own desires and think first of her. And then he had found her in bed with someone else.
One of his friends at the time had told him that he was better off without her, describing her as a cold bitch who liked to tease. How would that same friend have described the woman in his arms now, he wondered hazily, his mind dissolving in the heat that lapped his body.
There was nothing calculated or self-seeking about the way she was touching him…loving him. She had no artifice…no tricks. She aroused him in a way he had never experienced before; she made him feel more like a god than a man, he acknowledged shakily as his senses rioted beneath the delicate exploration of her mouth against his flesh. Her mouth… He shuddered violently beneath its caress, hearing the soft purring sound of pleasure she made in her throat, before he caught hold of her and said roughly, ‘No. It’s been too long,’ and then, in a lower, rawer voice that locked the muscles in her throat, Emily heard him whisper huskily in her ear, ‘When it happens, I want to be inside you; if you keep on touching me like that…’
Her stomach seemed to somersault inside her as he drew her down against him and she felt the hard, male weight of him resting between her thighs. Her body was open, moist, eager to feel his flesh within it.
He hesitated, and for a moment fear touched her. Then he said quietly, ‘It’s not too late…to change your mind.’
Emily didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Instead, she slid her hands down over him in deliberate invitation, arching up to meet him as he moved against her and then within her.
It was like nothing she had ever imagined: an indescribable maelstrom of sensations, a sudden sharp dart of surprise that, despite her readiness, her eagerness for this moment, she should still experience the age-old thrill of feminine fear at this first possession by a maleness that was suddenly so much more male and overpowering than she had realised.
But even as the fear struck Matt was kissing her, causing her body to flood with such heat that the fear melted, and the brief, unexpected spasm of discomfort was gone before she had time to react to it, leaving her body free to respond to the rhythm Matt’s was teaching it. The rhythm of life itself, Emily recognised hazily as her senses opened out in response to all that she was feeling in the same way that her body opened itself to the pleasure of experiencing Matt’s possession of it, so that a sharp escalating urgency soon overtook her feminine triumph at her body’s ability to hold and arouse him. Beyond that urgency lay something she just had to reach, somewhere she just had to be, all her senses striving eagerly towards it, so that when she did finally reach it she cried out without knowing she did so, and then cried out again as she felt the hot pulse of Matt’s release inside her.
As she lay supine and exhausted in his arms, she thought dizzily that there was something she ought to say…something she ought to do, but her body was now as greedy for sleep as it had been for completion. It felt so right lying here next to Matt—so very right…
As she drifted into sleep, Matt stared into the darkness. He was not a promiscuous man. There had been women, of course, but his experience with Jolie had taught him that sex alone was not sufficient. And as for love… He wasn’t sure he believed any longer that sexual love could exist.
He had no idea why this had happened tonight… Why he had felt this intense desire—this compulsive need for this woman who was a stranger to him, and yet, at the same time, so familiar to him that he might have known her always.
She had given herself to him freely and joyfully. She muttered something in her sleep, curling towards him. He leaned down, and brushed the hair away from her face. In the morning there would be faint bruises on her skin where he had loved her, while he… He flexed his back and grimaced. He was on his way to start a new life, to take up a new post. The last thing he needed right now was any kind of emotional complication. And the last thing he could do after tonight was to ignore what had happened and to pretend that the woman sleeping in his arms did not exist. Not now. Not ever.
* * *
It was the sound of male voices which eventually woke Emily. She came to reluctantly and groggily, conscious of several things at once, none of them particularly pleasant: she was cold and her body ached, from sleeping on the hard floor of the Land Rover her spine felt as though someone had walked up and down it, and there was another ache as well, less easy to define—and then abruptly she remembered, her fingers automatically gripping the protection of the sleeping-bag more tightly around her as the full details of the previous night came flooding back.
What on earth had she done…and why…? In the cold light of day, the overwhelming force of the need which had driven her seemed impossible to accept or explain. She was alone in the Land Rover; she could hear Matt talking to someone outside, which must mean that the road was clear.
Someone, not herself she was sure, had folded her clothes and placed them easily within her reach. There was no one to see the hot tide of colour that burned her skin as she reached for them, hurriedly dressing beneath the protective cover of the sleeping-bag.
What on earth was she going to have to say to Matt? How was she going to face him? A memory from the previous night washed slowly through her: an echo of passion…of closeness, of giving, of love—but no, that was impossible. Theirs had simply been a brief coming together of two people whose momentary need had overwhelmed their common sense.
Now, with that desire deadened, Emily suffered a sickening sensation of shocked bewilderment that she cou
ld ever have behaved the way she had, a sense of self-revulsion she could not quell.
She heard Matt rap briefly on the side of the Land Rover, as though in warning, before he opened the door. In the harsh, snowlit light of day, his unruly hair and untidy growth of beard looked even more raffish than they had done the night before. But then, she supposed she looked little better, Emily thought tiredly, conscious of her crumpled sweatshirt and creased, although dry, jeans.
‘That was the snow plough,’ Matt told her unnecessarily. ‘I’ve warned him about your car. Now that the road’s cleared we might as well be on our way. Is there anywhere special you want me to drop you?’
Yes, the largest, deepest hole he could find, Emily thought miserably, all too conscious of the way, after one brief, uncertain glance in her direction, he had avoided looking at her.
It was all right for him, she told herself bitterly. He was a man, no doubt accustomed to these casual, meaningless encounters. Silently lashing herself with twin whips of guilt and self-contempt, she kept her back to him as she asked if he would drop her in the small market town on the other side of the hills. From there she could ring Uncle John and find a garage to rescue her car.
‘There’s some coffee left,’ she heard Matt saying hesitantly behind her. ‘If you…’
She couldn’t speak. For some reason, there was an enormous lump in her throat. Last night, in his arms, she had felt as though they were two halves of a perfect whole. This morning…this morning she couldn’t understand the fever which had driven her into those arms in the first place; and then, illuminatingly, as she turned round abruptly and looked at him, something inside her seemed to turn over and melt.
As he watched her, Matt wished he knew what to say; last night she had been so warm, so eager… This morning she was so cold and withdrawn, making it very plain that last night was now a forgotten incident. The trouble was that it had been so long since he had been involved with a woman that he had come close to forgetting the rules. He’d heard enough…read enough about this new breed of woman who felt uninhibited enough and free enough to take her sexual pleasure where she chose without making any kind of emotional commitment to her partner, but this was the first time he had experienced this new feminine sexual freedom. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to tell her how much last night had meant to him, but her whole manner indicated how much she now wanted to distance herself from him. He cursed himself for his weakness in wanting to establish some sort of emotional bonding with her.