Escape from Desire

Her face told him the answer, the way she cringed away from him as he lifted his hand to push the heavy sw

athe of hair out of her eyes causing him to stop and look at her, and then very slowly and deliberately raise his hand to her face, drawing his knuckles gently across her skin before stroking lightly downwards along her throat, and over her shoulder.

Her breath seemed to be trapped in her throat. Her whole body had gone tense, her eyes those of a hunted animal crouched to flee. His fingers touched her breast and she arched away from him, her whole body jerking as though she were a puppet, the colour draining out of her face, leaving it white and anguished before she started trembling with a sickness that stemmed from her memories of the morning; the guerrilla reaching for her, touching her, Zach stabbing him and then the blood … She moaned deep in her throat, the trapped, hunted cry of someone in mortal terror.

‘Tamara, it will be all right. You’ll forget … when you’re back home with your fiancé.’

‘No!’ Her shudder of revulsion was unmistakable. She couldn’t bear Malcolm to touch her. She couldn’t bear anyone to touch her.

‘Strange …’ Zach was almost talking to himself, ‘I could understand your reaction if you were in-experienced, unaware sexually, but you’re not. You’re a very desirable young woman in her twenties, and presumably your fiancé hasn’t been your only lover, unless you’ve been engaged since you left school. As I’ve learned recently, it’s best to face our devils and exorcise them before they grow too powerful.’

His fingers captured her jaw, tilting her head upwards, his eyes almost hypnotising her as he bent his head, his tongue exploring the soft shape of her mouth, the hard grip of his fingers preventing her from escaping.

Her initial feeling of terror and revulsion filled her with a panic that swept away her normal self-control, her head moving frantically from side to side as she tried desperately to escape the delicate probing of the warm male lips bent on teaching her pleasure instead of fear.

Zach’s fingers tangling in her hair forced her head backwards his body following hers down on to the sleeping bag as she toppled over, her gasp of surprise giving Zach an unfair advantage as his mouth closed swiftly over hers, probing the soft inner sweetness, sending emotions spiralling through her that made her feel faint with bewilderment and shock.

One powerful arm kept her clamped to the moist warmth of Zach’s body. He had pulled on his jeans after his swim, but nothing else, and the hand she raised to push him away came into disturbing contact with the smooth flesh of his shoulders, the crisply dark hairs tangling across his chest, abrasive against her soft palms as her hand slid away.

‘You can touch me, you know,’ Zach murmured silkily against her mouth as his free hand captured her nerveless fingers and replaced them against the taut muscle of his diaphragm.

‘Forget what happened this morning,’ he told her softly. ‘Forget everything but this.’

‘This’ was lean fingers sliding aside the constricting presence of her lacy bra to cup and then stroke the rounded curve of her breasts, his tongue again tracing the parted softness of her lips as his thumb moved sensuously over the hardening peaks of her breasts, unleashing inside her a torrent of emotion she was powerless to control; a pleasurable pain which began somewhere in the pit of her stomach and spread slowly upwards until her body was on fire, with the need to know a more intimate possession.

As though he were unaware of the intensity of her need, Zach began a leisurely exploration of her skin, teasing light kisses against her closed eyelids where her eyelashes fluttered frantically at the tormenting caress, his hands continuing their lazy enticement of her body.

Tamara was beyond conscious thought, beyond anything but the feeling surging through her, the instinct which urged her to caress the satin smoothness of Zach’s skin as she traced the hard bones of his shoulders, first with her fingers, and then with her lips, trembling in their eagerness to taste the male warmth of him. The faintly musky odour of his body excited her with its male alienness, her whole body trembling with the desire possessing her. Her body arched mutely, pleading for more intimate contact than the briefly tantalising caresses Zach was stroking upon it, pride, restraint, self-control forgotten, swept aside in the fierce onslaught of passion as she saw the jade gleam of Zach’s eyes as he looked slowly along the naked length of her body and then lowered his head, trailing fire against flesh so sensitised to his touch that tiny electric shocks seemed to tingle arousingly through her.

The touch of his mouth on hers triggered off a shuddering treacherous response, alerting warning bells deep within her brain, reminding her of the danger she was courting. But she didn’t want to listen; she wanted the sensual pleasure of Zach’s sexual magnetism to go on and on.

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

Tamara’s head snapped forward, her eyes opening as the curt words jerked her out of her trance.

‘Your fiancé,’ Zach reminded her dryly. ‘For a moment there you almost had me fooled, but you responded far too passionately to be anywhere near as frightened as you pretended. And I don’t act as substitute for any man.’

‘You couldn’t even begin to fill Malcolm’s shoes,’ Tamara lied wildly, shrinking away from him, horrified by the wantonness of her behaviour and struggling to hide the pale shape of her body from the merciless decimation of eyes without a single trace of compassion or desire.

What on earth had possessed her? She had behaved like a … like a … Like a woman in love! The thought slid into her mind with all the silky treachery of a serpent into Eden, driving the breath out of her body as she looked helplessly into Zach’s impassive eyes. She loved him? How could she? She’d only known him a handful of days. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t long enough …

Long enough to know that he possessed a hard courage she had never known in any other man, a resoluteness and dedication to purpose that almost frightened her. Long enough to know some of his most intimate fears and thoughts, so why not long enough to love him?

CHAPTER FIVE

DAWN broke in its habitual vivid splendour, and Tamara, who had been awake already for what seemed like hours, watched the slow ascent of the sun. Next to her Zach lay sleeping. During the night he had pushed free of the sleeping bag and she could see the relaxed splay of his muscles beneath the scarred and torn flesh, and her heart started to thud slowly and heavily as she relived those moments in his arms the previous evening and the truth she had been forced to face long after Zach had fallen asleep. She loved him. It should have seemed wildly improbable and hopelessly unbelievable, but as though her body had known the truth long before her mind accepted it, after the initial shock there had been an inevitability in the acknowledgement which made it impossible for her to hide any longer behind the conventional approach to ‘love’, namely that it was something that grew slowly and gradually, and that only infatuation was instantaneous.

In many ways Zach was everything Tamara disliked in men; he was almost aggressively sexual—something she hated, and yet how could she deny now that she had responded almost immediately to it, perhaps an indication that some deep inner core of her had known instinctively the danger he represented.

She moved restlessly in her sleeping bag, tormented by the longing to stretch out her hand and touch the hollow planes of his face; to trace its male shape and feel the rough shadowing of the dark beard beginning along his jaw.

The temptation was almost irresistible; Zach’s proximity tantalised and disturbed her, and the old habits imbued by Aunt Lilian mocked her folly in allowing herself to fall so completely under his spell. He was an astoundingly sexually attractive man and couldn’t have reached the age of thirty odd without becoming aware of it. In addition, his career, his close companionship with danger, honed his maleness to the point where it became a subtle challenge and one that Tamara estimated few women would be able to resist.

Why on earth should he single her out from among the dozens of more beautiful women who must have wanted him?

If it wasn’t for the proximity forced upon them by their present circumstances Tamara doubted that he would have ever spared her a second glance. Aunt Lilian had often stressed during her teens that she was no great beauty. Zach moved in his sleep and the movement revealed the length of his spine down to his narrow waist. She held her breath, almost literally trembling with the desire to trace the line of his backbone, to press her lips to the scar tissue torn by some merciless assailant.

On a sudden impulse she unzipped her sleeping bag and crawled out, only one thought in her mind, and that to remove herself from temptation. She would swim in the pool, she decided—that ought to cool her down and dampen those tormenting fantasies luring her on like a siren song.