She felt most peculiar, oddly light-headed and so cold still. She wanted to crawl beneath the covers of her bed and lie there. She didn’t want to see or speak with anyone.
She was only a few feet away from the bed, but for some reason as she tried to walk towards it her feet felt almost too heavy for her to lift. The bed wavered and dipped as she tried to focus on it, the floor tilting. She gave a sharp cry of protest and another softer one of shock as suddenly Hugo was next to her, supporting her, holding her.
Holding her!
Dee closed her eyes, longing flooding through her—a longing that was so intense, she could feel it in an actual physical inner pain. With her defences down, shot to pieces, the mantra she had taught herself, that Hugo belonged to her past and love was something she had learned to live without, no longer had the power to work, even if she could have remembered it.
Suddenly she was a girl again, longing for the security of her lover’s arms, wanting him so much, aching for him so intensely.
‘Hugo.’
As she whispered his name she wrapped her arms tightly around him, closing her eyes, ecstatically breathing in the scent of him.
‘Hugo.’
She turned her head, desperately seeking his mouth with her own.
She heard him say something, her name, a plea...a sound. It didn’t matter.
His hands were cupping her face, his lips, his mouth responding to the hungry passion of her own.
Once, a lifetime ago, they had kissed like this as hungrily and needfully as this, unable to take the time to draw breath properly, their hearts thudding in rapid unison, the passion between them building to such a pitch that it was almost too much to be endured.
Once, a lifetime ago, she had already experienced this need to lose herself completely in him, to be absorbed totally into him, to become somehow a part of him, so that the two of them were one indivisible whole.
Frantically Dee clung to him. She had lost him once, just as she had lost her father. Her father was lost to her for ever, but Hugo was here, alive, warm, real.
Passion—the kind of passion that allowed nothing to stand in its way, that swept down like an avalanche, swamped like a tidal wave, burned a path like a forest fire—gripped her, filling her, leaving no room for anything else.
She might as well have been blind, deaf and dumb for all the attention she paid to the logical warnings of her brain.
She heard Hugo groaning, and her senses recognised the sound, receiving it, registering it and interpreting it. Her hands slid feverishly down his back, past his waist, spreading against the hard masculine shape of his buttocks, pressing him into her own body just as when, long ago, that soft little groan had been a signal and an invitation for her to touch him in just that way, a sensual message from him that he wanted her to touch him, that he wanted her to show that she was responding to his desire for her and that she welcomed his arousal. So now Dee responded to it as such, trembling a little in the ferocity of her own passion as she felt the unmistakable hardening of his body.
‘Dee...’
His voice was low, raw with longing, liquid with need, roughened by a soft burr of warning.
‘Yes. Yes, I know,’ she whispered back to him between the hungry kisses they were still exchanging.
‘Undress me, Hugo,’ she begged him. ‘Quickly, I can’t wait.’
As though to prove her point, she started to tug at her own top, moaning a little in frustration when he didn’t immediately come to her aid. Hugo had never been the kind of lover who had allowed their lovemaking to drift into a stale routine, a familiarity that meant that he no longer had to court her, and automatically she abandoned her attempts to remove her own clothing and turned instead to the much more exciting task of removing his, tugging frantically at the buttons on his shirt, muttering little absorbed sounds of protest as her fingers refused to work fast enough to satisfy her urgency.
‘Hugo, help me,’ she demanded feverishly. ‘I want to see you, touch you...taste you... Hugo...’
She gave a small gasp of satisfaction as the button she was tussling with finally came free exposing the upper half of his chest. Impatiently she tugged at another, and then another, so totally absorbed in her task that she wasn’t fully aware of the sudden tension that gripped Hugo’s body and the way he drew in his breath in a swift, sharp gasp. His skin was slightly darker now than she remembered it—his time spent in the field was responsible for that, no doubt—and the muscles beneath his skin were somehow more solid, heavier, stronger, just as the silky sprinkling of dark hair she remembered as being quite light was now thicker, different, somehow far more dangerously masculine and exciting.
Since she was not in the habit of studying men’s bodies, and since there had been no intimate relationships in her life since Hugo had left it, she had no way of comparing him with any other man, but Dee knew instinctively that his body, at once both so familiar and yet at the same time so pulse-racingly different, was a kind of body that very few men of his age possessed. Wonderingly she touched the soft hair that shadowed his skin, and then very deliberately followed the line it made down the length of his torso.
‘Dee.’
The hoarse explosive sound of protest he made shocked her into stillness. Questioningly she looked up into his eyes.
‘Dee!’ he said again, and then as he looked back into her eyes he stopped and groaned, closing his own eyes and then opening them again to tell her rawly, ‘Come here... If you’re going to torment me like that then I’m going to do a little tormenting of my own.’
His fingers were much defter on the fastenings of her clothes than hers had been with his shirt. It took him only seconds to remove her silk blouse and the bra she had been wearing under it. His hands were on the waistband of her trousers when she leaned forward and delicately started to nibble at his throat, tender little biting kisses of a type he had always loved.
As her trousers slithered to the floor his hands swept up, cupping her breasts, moulding and caressing them, the pads of his thumbs rubbing urgently over her already stiff nipples. Dee moaned his name and pressed her hot face into the curve of his shoulder, the urge to rake her fingers down the length of his back so strong that she had to fight not to give in to it.