‘I want to tell you,’ she whispered back, and then added truthfully, ‘I need to tell you.’
He listened in a silence she found hard to fathom as she told him the story of the bank raid and her kidnap. Only once did she surprise emotion in his expression, and that was when she mentioned being taken to the flat and left there.
‘I didn’t know they’d left me on my own,’ she told him, shuddering still at the memory. ‘I thought they were there, watching me.’
For a moment she forgot that she was here in the present, safe in his arms, in her own bedroom, and her body went rigid with the old, remembered fear.
Daniel neither spoke nor moved, simply holding her lightly as though her body had the fragility of an eggshell, but when she eventually recovered enough to turn and look at him his eyes were burning gold with murderous rage.
‘It was all a long time ago,’she told him huskily.
‘But you still remember it.’
‘Yes…Yes…After I was rescued…well, I was ill for quite a long time. Nervous exhaustion. Shock. And then when I did recover, I didn’t feel I could ever face going back into the bank. I’d realised, you see, that all my life I’d been trying desperately to be the person my parents wanted me to be, and that that person was not necessarily the real me. I know they were disappointed. I’d grown up knowing that it was my duty to follow my father into the bank, to take the place of the brother I’d never had. So, after I’d told them of my decision, I decided it was best to…to distance myself from them a little.’
‘So you don’t see much of your parents, then?’ Daniel asked her carefully.
Unaware that she was almost wringing her hands with anguish, she told him, ‘I daren’t. I feel I can’t trust them not to put pressure on me to go back.’
‘To go back? To the bank, do you mean?’
‘Yes. It means so much to my father. They don’t really understand.’
‘And because of that you don’t trust them?’
Why was he making it sound like an accusation? She looked at him, but could discern nothing hostile in the clear, calm gaze of his eyes. Even so, she shivered a little, as though she had just been exposed to a cold draught.
‘Not them, nor anyone involved with them,’ she admitted tightly. ‘You see, my father has considerable influence. In the early days, he used some of my friends to try and manipulate me into staying in London.’
‘You’re making your parents sound extremely selfish and hard-hearted,’ he commented quietly.
Immediately guilt filled her. ‘No. They aren’t…not really. They just think that they know what’s best for me.’
‘A fault common to most parents,’ Daniel told her, and then said lightly, ‘So I take it that if I said that I knew your parents, you would banish me from your life forthwith. Is that right?’
She looked at him uncertainly, unable to tell from his expression whether or not he was teasing her. Her breath locked in her throat and for a moment she couldn’t speak. When she did, her voice was raw with pain.
‘I’d have to, you must see that…’ She hesitated and then asked tensely, ‘You aren’t trying to tell me that you do know my father, are you?’
She had gone cold at the thought, everything that she was feeling revealed in her eyes.
Daniel was looking at her, his eyes sombre.
She felt the breath leak from her chest.
‘I don’t want to talk about it any more,’ she told him shakily, knowing her question was idiotic. Of course he didn’t know them; she was becoming paranoid.
‘I think I’ve spent enough time now feeling sorry for myself. I know my parents love me,’she added painfully. ‘Neither of them would force me to go back, but I’m terrified that living with them, seeing my father’s disappointment, would force me to give in. You see, the bank’s been headed by a member of our family ever since its inception. If I don’t marry and produce a son—’
‘Is that what you intend to do?’ he asked her thoughtfully.
‘No!’ Her response was sharp and immediate. ‘At least, not to provide the bank with a chairman!’
‘Well, in these volatile days of mergers and take-overs, I don’t suppose it will be long before your father finds himself a partner to help him to shoulder the burden of command.’
He sounded so uninterested that Jessica immediately thought she was boring him.
‘I’m all right now,’ she told him quickly, trying to pull away from him. ‘You must be exhausted. You’ve been so kind, and now I’ve ruined your sleep.’
‘It was already ruined,’ he told her briefly, his eyes resting betrayingly on the swell of her breasts.
Immediately she was intensely conscious of the thinness of her satin nightshirt, so demure with its long sleeves and prim neck, but the fabric itself was anything but prim, and neither was the way it moulded itself to the soft curves of her body.
Heat began to prickle under her skin. Her body, unused to the intensity of physical desire, reacted instinctively to Daniel’s maleness, and her face flushed with mortification as she realised that the wanton hardening of her nipples was clearly visible to him.
‘Jessica.’ He breathed her name thickly, roughly almost, as though it were a protest. Her body shook with the force of her own emotions, incited by the message she could read in his eyes.
‘I want you,’ he whispered achingly. ‘But now isn’t the right time—for either of us.’
She knew it was true, but it shocked her that he should have needed to say the words. In her second-hand experience of male to female relationships and desires, it was always the woman who called a halt, not the man—the woman who thought beyond the immediacy of the moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ she responded tautly, and watched mesmerised as the golden eyes turned fiercely molten and beneath his skin the bones of Daniel’s face tightened.
‘For what?’ he demanded roughly. ‘For responding to me like this?’ His hand touched the curve of her breast—instant heat, instant pleasure, instant awareness of how she would feel if he were to strip her nightshirt from her and stroke first his hands and then his mouth over her rebellious skin, stormed through her. Her body didn’t want to listen to warnings or common sense. Her body wanted to submerge itself eagerly in all the pleasures it sensed he could give.
‘Dan…iel…’
He felt the spasm of longing convulse her body, and his hand dropped from her breast to lie flat and hard, low down on her belly, so that the heel of his palm pressed against the swell of her pubic bone and his fingers curved round her, not so much in a caress, but in a gesture that acknowledged the extent of her need and sought to comfort her for it.
That he should know so easily everything she was feeling and experiencing should have embarrassed her. After all,
she was not familiar with the rebellious arousal of her own flesh, nor with the emotions that churned inside her, but instead of embarrassment she felt a tender, aching swell of gratitude that he should be so aware of her vulnerability and seek to comfort her in it.
‘I want you,’ he told her raggedly. ‘I want to stay here with you now, to take you in my arms and explore every satin inch of you. I want to kiss the hollow here at the base of your throat and feel the pulse of your life’s blood go crazy for me. I want to hold your breasts in the palms of my hands, to feel you arching your back in supplication of my mouth against you here.’ His free hand touched the hard crown of one breast and she shuddered delicately, breathing shallowly. ‘I want to hear you cry out to me in need, your body moist and fragrant with the heat of arousal.’ His fingers left her breast and stroked lightly against the valley between them, while the other hand—the hand that held her so intimately, and so, she had thought, detachedly—moved briefly against her, causing her body to yield and open.
The small, frantic sound she made in her throat was as much one of panic as of desire and, as though he knew exactly what she was feeling, his hand dropped to her thigh and stayed there.
‘And that’s only how I want to touch and see you. I could spend the rest of the night telling you how you’re going to make me feel when you touch me.’
He got up off the bed and stood with his back to her, but not before she had seen the tell-tale signs of his physical arousal.
Her pulse-rate doubled. She wanted to tell him to stay, but she knew he was right, that it was too soon…far too soon for them to become lovers.
‘Will you be all right if I leave you?’ he asked thickly.
Jessica nodded and managed an unsteady, ‘Yes,’ watching him walk to the door.
* * *
‘How are you feeling this morning?’
‘My arm’s very bruised and stiff.’ They were both standing in Jessica’s kitchen. She had woken up early and had dressed and come downstairs, only to find Daniel there before her.