‘You want me to go see this Luke and pretend to be you,’ Samantha finished for her.
‘You will do it, won’t you?’ Bobbie appea
led to her sister.
‘What else are twin sisters for?’ Samantha responded gruffly.
Bobbie flung herself into her arms and they hugged one another tightly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SAMANTHA had teased her unmercifully when Bobbie had explained to her what she planned to do with the bathroom of the small house she had bought herself, not with any family money, but with her own earnings.
‘You want to what?’ she had asked, laughing. ‘Oh boy, is that some give-away,’ she had teased her sister when Bobbie had reluctantly admitted that the mirrors that had just been delivered were not to go on the front of her wardrobes but were, in fact, to be fitted around her bathroom with one special antique one to hang over the large Victorian footed pedestal bath she had found in a reclamation yard.
And even when the bathroom had finally been finished, Samantha had still shaken her head. ‘Well, I guess it does look kinda...interesting,’ she had conceded, eyeing the antique filigree candle sconces that decorated the walls and the complementary bronze candle holders that stood on every available surface. ‘But are you sure it’s a good idea...bathing by candlelight? Won’t that make it hard for you to see the dirt?’ she had teased and then gone on about the tub. ‘Why, I guess two people could quite easily fit in it,’ she had mocked innocently whilst Bobbie had given her a murderous look.
So far, though, it had only been put to a solitary and far more mundane use than she had had in mind when she had given in to her romantic and highly sensual yearning for a special place where she and her lover, her beloved, could hide themselves away to indulge themselves in the kind of lovemaking that had always been her secret fantasy.
‘Identical, huh, that’s all they know,’ Samantha had scoffed when she had finally teased out of her twin the erotic fantasy behind her plans for her bathroom. ‘Personally, my choice would be for...’ She had paused and then an unfamiliarly dreamy and half-embarrassed look had crossed her face as she admitted, ‘My favourite sen-sual fantasy would be to make love in some hidden woodland glen with the sound of water somewhere nearby, a stream or preferably a river. It would be springtime—’
‘And the squirrels would pelt you with twigs and leaves for invading their privacy, and as for the brown bears...’ Bobbie had rolled her eyes expressively and both of them had ended laughing ruefully.
‘At least we share a common thing about water, though, I suppose,’ Samantha had concluded slyly when they had finally stopped giggling.
‘Perhaps...’
But it seemed that she was definitely destined to occupy her own private fantasy retreat on her own, Bobbie acknowledged as she walked tiredly upstairs, heading in the direction of her bathroom.
She had arrived home three days earlier and since then she had been working flat out, dealing with her accumulated backlog of mail, doing some basic shopping, cleaning the house and, in short, doing anything and everything that would keep her mind off Haslewich and Luke.
By now, of course, Sam was bound to have seen him and put their plan into action. He would know then just how wrong he had been about her, about them, and being the kind of man he was, she knew that his wretched sense of justice and fair play would not allow him to rest until he made whatever he considered to be due recompense to her for having misjudged her. She knew, too, oh how she knew, that she simply could not bear to endure his remote kindness and remorse, his pity when he knew, when they both knew, just how much more she truly wanted from him.
No, kind and gentle though he might be, it would carry the same degree of intense pain as the merest breath against badly burned or other sensitive skin.
Whilst she could withstand his anger and contempt, his savage condemnation of her by whipping up an answering form of protective anger, she had no defences against this compassion, which was why she had asked Sam to change places with her, to be her and to tell him when he made his apology that it was a little too late, that there were no amends he could make or that she wanted him to make; that it had been amusing for a while to play teasingly with the notion of allowing the sexual chemistry between them to have its head, but now she was bored, ready to move on to fresher pastures.
Oh yes, she could see it now, she acknowledged wearily as she shrugged off her clothes and padded naked from her bedroom to the bathroom, dimming the lights and slowly, as though it was a ritual, starting to light the candles she had set here and there around the bath and on the small occasional tables with the antique lace cloths. Sam would shake her head and stand her ground, she would smile ferally at Luke and laugh negligently as she dismissed her own emotions and him, and when she had finished there would be, could be, no turning back because Sam would carry out the role with relish and inspiration. She would know just how to walk the fine line that barely separated a woman being free-spirited from one who was vulgar, a woman who was hedonistically sensual from one who was brazenly too sexual.
The candles had a delicate floral fragrance that warmed the senses and Bobbie breathed it in appreciatively. She was not going to cry, she told herself firmly as she ran herself a bath. There was after all, no need.
It was sad, of course, that Luke did not love her, but one day... She bit down hard on her bottom lip as she fought the pain that sliced through her. A small handful of crystals added to the bath-water turned it a soft shade of blue. In the candlelight, the antique mirrors gave her back her own reflection; her skin looked peachy gold, sun-warmed and ripened, her hair a honey-soft swath that fell silkily below her shoulders, her breasts warm, round globes with deep golden rose nipples, the soft tangle of curls between her legs the same warm honey colour as the hair on her head.
She looked...she looked like a woman who was ready to make love, Bobbie admitted achingly, gently tracing the soft swell of one breast until her fingers started to tremble so much that she had to stop.
Fighting back the tears, she stepped into the bath and then lay back in it, positioning her head on the strategically placed bath pillow and closing her eyes.
The tape she had switched on as she walked into the bathroom was playing Vivaldi, haunting and evocative. One tear escaped from beneath her closed eyelids and then another as her mouth started to quiver.
Cocooned in her private sanctuary, absorbed in her deep sense of loss and pain, she didn’t hear the front porch door being unlocked. She didn’t even hear the determined swift feet on her stairs as their owner followed the sound of the music.
It was not Bobbie’s practice to bolt her bathroom door. Why should she? She lived alone after all. She still had her eyes closed when it was pushed open and it was only the audible swiftness of her visitor’s quickly indrawn breath that alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone.
Galvanised into action she opened her eyes; at the same time she stood up, starting to reach for a towel, and then froze, shock and disbelief warring for prominence as she stared into Luke’s eyes.
‘Luke! What are you doing here? How did you...?’
‘What the hell do you think I’m doing here?’ he muttered thickly and then before she could stop him he was lifting her out of the bath, ignoring both her cries of protest and the damage her soaking wet body had to be doing to his suit, ignoring everything but the need to satisfy the famished need of his mouth to be in the closest possible physical contact with hers.
This wasn’t kissing, Bobbie thought incoherently, it was...it was hunger, starvation, wholehearted possession. She could feel herself reacting to his nearness, her whole body starting to tremble, to ache...to burn, with such a searing need that she could no more have denied it than she could have stopped breathing.
She wasn’t sure which one of them undressed Luke; she only knew that the sight, the scent, the feel of his naked body, his skin, his flesh against her own, sent such a fierce surge of sensation through her that she was almost too self-consciously embarrassed to meet his eyes.
But far from being shocked, or even worse, contemptuous, of her body’s very obvious open, aching need for
him, Luke tightened his hold on her and told her hoarsely, ‘It’s all right...it’s all right. I feel exactly the same. God, but I want you...I want you so damn much that...’
He had started to kiss her again, not just on her mouth this time, but on her throat, her breasts and then her belly. He dragged his mouth against her skin, causing her to shudder violently and moan his name as she pressed herself eagerly against him.
They made love then and there on her bathroom floor, Luke’s possessive and open need to fill her with the fiercely powerful stroke of his body matching her own equally strong desire to have him there. Obeying instincts she had never before experienced, Bobbie wrapped her legs tightly around him, holding him securely within her body, keeping him there as she cried out her famished need to him, urging him to possess her totally and completely, so intimately and deeply, that her body would carry the memory of him within it for ever.
Their desire for one another was uncontrollable, a wild, untameable primitive force, their lovemaking quickly reaching its natural climax, and as she felt the hot spurt of Luke’s seed deep inside her body, Bobbie knew with some dreamy, illogical female instinct that she would conceive, had conceived his child, and that knowledge made her eyes fill with tears of joy, the most exquisite sensation of complete fulfilment engulfing her.
Wonderingly she reached out and touched Luke’s face, her eyes darkening as she held his head. He gently kissed the palm of her hand. ‘We need to talk,’ he told her quietly.
But Bobbie shook her head and closed her eyes defensively, whispering, ‘No.’
She was afraid to hear what he might be going to say...or discover why he was even here; she was afraid, too, that now that their hungry desire for one another had been slaked, he would...
‘Yes,’ Luke insisted, overriding her thoughts, overriding her denial, and asked her quietly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’
‘I didn’t think you’d believe me,’ Bobbie answered huskily.