‘From past experience!’ Chelsea flung at him. Two spots of colour burned in her otherwise deathly pale face, disbelief and distaste warred inside her.
‘As it happens you’re wrong.’ Slade had turned his back to her and Chelsea had no means of telling from the broad shoulders what he was thinking. ‘Strange as you might find it,’ he added coolly, ‘you’ll be the first woman I’ve ever had to bribe to share my bed. Normally…’
‘They pay you?’ Chelsea suggested sweetly, gasping with shock as he turned with the swiftness of a supine panther.
‘I’m a man,’ he told her contemptuously, ‘with all that the word implies. I don’t sell myself.’
‘Neither do I,’ Chelsea told him proudly.
‘It’s too late for backtracking now. You cheated on me, Chelsea, and that’s something I don’t allow anyone to get away with. First you’re going to pay me what you owe me; then, if I think I’m getting value for money,’ he told her insultingly, ‘I’ll consider coming to an arrangement with you, but first things first. Oh no,’ he told her in a perfectly normal conversational voice as she turned for the door. ‘I shouldn’t try that—not unless you want me to get a good deal more impatient than I am already. Smile,’ he commanded in a parody of a coaxing tone, ‘like you did in Melchester.’
With sickening certainty Chelsea knew that she wasn’t going to be allowed to leave the bedroom until she had satisfied his insane desire for revenge. He reached for her, and she started to tremble.
When he took her in his arms and feathered light kisses along her throat instead of the violent approach which she had expected, she didn’t understand, and her bewilderment increased and showed in her eyes. Slade’s mouth continued to move over her skin, subtly undermining her barriers. His hands moved from her shoulders over her back and then beneath the fine wool of her jumper, warm against her spine. She opened her mouth to protest when he unclipped her bra, but the words were muffled beneath the explosive warmth of his kiss. Weakly she closed her eyes. Sensation after alien sensation coursed over her.
‘No!’
Her protest was totally ignored as Slade picked her up and carried her over to the bed, deftly removing her jumper before releasing her angrily trembling body.
He seemed totally impervious to her bitterness. Her skirt followed her other clothes on to the floor along with Slade’s jacket.
‘I want you,’ he told her slowly, his eyes moving hotly over her body, ‘and you’re going to want me too, Chelsea, no matter how indifferent you’ve been to all those who came before me.’
It was then that she knew that he wasn’t going to be satisfied with simply possessing her physically; he also wanted from her a response, total capitulation to his possession, and as she looked up at him studying the silky-skinned curves of her body Chelsea knew why she had run out of his flat and why she was trembling with sick fear now. It had nothing to do with Darren, and everything to do with the way her body reacted to Slade; the physical response merely looking at him aroused inside her; the terrible need to yield to the melting sensations spreading through her, to give herself up to him so completely that she became part of him.
Romantic novelists had a name for those feelings, she thought feverishly. They called them ‘love’, but it was impossible for her to love Slade Ashford. Love was something that grew with time and had nothing to do with this aching, raw desire that burned to fever pitch inside her.
‘No!’ she protested, blindly trying to escape from her own thoughts, fear closing her throat. ‘No!’
‘It’s too late for that now,’ Slade told her harshly. ‘Although I don’t doubt you mean it. Women like you always want to be in control, don’t they? They like to be the aggressor, the hunter, the one who arouses desire but never truly experiences it.’
Chelsea could feel him watching her, his eyes moving slowly over the pale flesh he had exposed. Her heart hammered under her ribs, the effort of controlling her breathing making her throat ache with pain. She felt him shift his weight above her as he leaned on his side to study her, and then his hands were moving slowly over her body, stroking and caressing, banishing all her preconceived ideas and prejudices. She had simply never known that she was capable of feeling such pleasure. Hazily she tried to think back. Had she ever felt like this with Darren? She knew she hadn’t. Her love for him had been an adolescent’s, blind and adoring, completely free of the physical hunger leaping to life inside her now. Pride and pride alone was all that kept her own hands rigidly at her sides away from Slade. She must not touch him. The words hammered over and over again through her brain in a mindless litany which she used to try and blot out the sensations he was arousing, as though somehow she could divorce herself from the desire he was deliberately awakening.
She had expected, when he talked of her paying her dues, that he intended simply to possess her as a means of soothing his bruised ego, but she had underestimated him, she admitted; he wasn’t going to be satisfied with simple physical domination.
‘Open your eyes.’
The softly spoken command couldn’t be ignored. She blinked at him hazily, gasping as his hands moved from her waist, upwards to cup her breasts, his fingers teasing her nipples. Panic stormed through her as she tried desperately to avoid his touch, squeezing her eyes closed as though by doing so she could obliterate the memory of how it had felt to have him touch her so intimately. Even when his hands returned to her waist she couldn’t stop quivering. His mouth was against her throat, sending small shudders of pleasure along her skin. Despair and fear of her inability not to betray her feelings to him lent her the courage to say coolly, with just a hint of boredom in her voice,
‘Look, why don’t you just simply get it over with? I don’t…’
‘Have a lot of time?’ he mocked, strangely unangered by her taunt. ‘I like to take my pleasure slowly and enjoy it,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t you?’
A suffocating heat seemed to rise up inside her, but whether it was engendered by what he had said or the way he was looking at her Chelsea didn’t know.
His hands moved from her waist to her hips, caressing the fragile bones. Tension locked every muscle in her stomach. Lazily Slade slid one hand up to her breast, touching her as though he derived intense sensual satisfaction from the feel of her skin. His fingers looked brown against the paleness of her own flesh. His thumb stroked softly over her nipple and her nerve endings tightened like fine-drawn wire.
‘Don’t!’ The word jerked involuntarily past her lips.
‘Touch me, then,’ Slade murmured provocatively, guiding her hand inside his shirt. His skin felt curiously vulnerable; soft and warm, the shadowing of hair on his chest grazing the tender flesh of her palm. She slid her hand experimentally along his ribs, startled to feel the powerful beat of his heart beneath her fingers. It was ridiculous to realise at her age that she had never touched a man so intimately. Her heartbeat sounded unnaturally loud in her ears, and somehow of its own accord her other hand started to explore the male breadth of his shoulders. Slade muttered something under his breath and discarded the shirt completely. His skin gleamed like burnished wood, tanned and healthy, and Chelsea’s eyes seemed to cling hungrily to him, drinking in every feature. His hands framed her face, trapping her hands between them as her lips parted instinctively beneath his mouth.
Sensation after sensation rolled over her, all coherency lost as she was enveloped in a new world which contained only tactile sensuality.
Slade’s hands held her hips, moulding them against the aroused maleness of his thighs, his lips exploring the soft slope of her shoulder and then moving downwards along the curve of her breast, his face buried against the warmth of her.
Something seemed to constrict her breathing, an unbearable tension holding her in its grip. Dimly she was aware of a car door slamming, but its meaning didn’t penetrate, until Slade swore suddenly and thrust himself away from her, his face unreadable in the darkness as he commented sardonically, ‘Your guardian angel ha
s suddenly come back on duty, and with a vengeance! Mrs Rudge is back,’ he added when she continued to look befuddled. He laughed softly. ‘Perhaps it’s no bad thing after all; it might do you good to suffer a little of what you put me through when you ran out on me that night. Dreams are no substitute for reality, as I’m sure you’ll soon realise.’
His eyes rested on the provocative thrust of her breasts and Chelsea reached hurriedly for her jumper, shame searing her as she acknowledged how dangerously—and how easily—she had succumbed to his sensual expertise. Even now when her mind was acknowledging the providence which had brought Mrs Rudge back, her body was treacherously aching for Slade’s touch. She glanced quickly at him, overwhelmed by a sudden urge to reach out and touch him; to feel the thick darkness of his hair beneath her fingers, and the warmth of his body against hers, and the knowledge of what those feelings meant rocked her back on her heels.
CHAPTER SIX
CHRISTMAS drew nearer. Chelsea had refused the invitation from the farm, explaining that she wanted to complete her work on the tapestry as soon as possible.
The hours she spent up at Darkwater were becoming oases of calm which allowed her to re-charge her batteries in readiness for the time she was obliged to spend with Slade.
To her surprise he had made no further attempts to be alone with her, or to remind her of his threats, and at first she thought he had abandoned his plans, until she realised that he was playing a careful waiting game. He desired her. It was obvious in the way he looked at her without saying a word, his eyes on her body, but instead of feeling flattered Chelsea felt only fear. If he had merely been seeking revenge she felt she could have coped, but his desire was something against which she had no armour, and she sensed that his need to make her capitulate to him was the greater because of it.
And then there were her own feelings. It was no longer possible for her to dismiss the way she felt whenever he touched her, and she knew that if it hadn’t been for Darren, she would have succumbed to Slade’s charismatic sensuality long before now.
The local people seemed to like him. Tom told her that they were saying in the village that it made a change to have a ‘Black Percy’ in residence who had their interests at heart.
She and Mrs Rudge must be the only two people who still held out against him, Chelsea reflected bitterly, and she told herself that she was glad she had the common sense not to be taken in by what she knew to be mere surface charm.
Later in the afternoon she had an unexpected opportunity to see the full potency of that charm and its effect on the female sex. The tapestry was responding even better than she had hoped to her ministrations. The dyed wools and silks were a perfect match to the existing threads, and Chelsea had spent a very enjoyable morning re-stitching the helmet and visor of a Crusader before turning her attention to a scene depicting the women’s long wait for their men to return.
A woman with golden hair almost as long as the fabled Rapunzel’s stood in the embrasure of a tower, children at her skirts. The wife of the Crusader? Chelsea wondered—but surely she would have had her hair covered. As she stitched industriously at the golden plaits she found herself weaving daydreams around the stiffly sewn figures. She was a young girl of the household who had been in love with the knight from girlhood. He had married for reasons of financial and political gain—a marriage arranged by his family. There were children of the marriage and the girl had been appointed their nurse. The knight had ridden off to the Crusade and now he was coming back, and the young girl had the unhappy task of telling him that his wife had died of childbed fever in his absence.
He would need to marry again, Chelsea reflected, a mother for his children and a chatelaine for the castle, and who better than the girl who had adored him for so long?
She sighed. Life wasn’t like that. The girl would probably end her days unwed while the man would marry again for financial advantage. If she was lucky the girl might find herself sharing his bed one night when his wife’s back was turned; a crust thrown to a starving dog.
Chelsea lifted her head as she heard the sound of a car outside. Doors slammed and then there were voices in the hallway below her. She froze as she heard Slade saying lazily, ‘Most of the structural work is finished now—but I don’t need to tell you that.’
She wasn’t quite sure what she ought to do. Slade and whoever was with him were probably unaware that she was in the gallery working and that she could hear every word of their conversation whether she wanted to or not. If she made her presence known it might seem as though she were trying to foist herself off on them, and if she didn’t…
She was still debating what to do when she heard Slade add, ‘But of course it’s the tapestry you’ve really come to see. I believe Miss Evans is working on it upstairs.’
‘A marvellous find,’ a husky feminine voice agreed. ‘We couldn’t believe our luck. That combined with the money you’ve endowed on Darkwater should ensure its unkeep for the future.’
‘I hope so,’ Chelsea heard Slade say as they walked towards the stairs. ‘This house has been the home of my family for a long time. I hadn’t realised how neglected it had become, which was my own fault, I suppose. I visited my uncle pretty regularly, but the place was always locked up, and somehow there was never the time.’
‘It’s quite a common story,’ another male voice agreed. ‘A few more years and we might not have been so lucky.’
‘What I can’t understand is why your uncle allowed the house to deteriorate so much,’ the husky female voice chimed in. ‘By all accounts he was a relatively wealthy man.’
‘Yes, he was,’ Slade agreed. ‘I think the root of the problem lay in the fact that he had no direct heir to leave the place to. The fact that he never married was his own choice, and I don’t honestly believe he regretted it, or the knowledge that the place would one day come to me, until very recently. Some of the blame must lie with me. I was in New York for six months when I wasn’t able to see him. When I returned I was appalled to see how much he had aged; his memory was seriously impaired, and with it, I suspect, his judgment. He seemed to be obsessed by the fact that I wasn’t able to perpetuate the Percy name. He even wanted me to adopt it, but as I pointed out to him, I owed it to my father to stay an Ashford. My father was never made particularly welcome up here and some people never forgave him for the fact that he was a southerner.’
Mrs Rudge, thought Chelsea immediately. Had she deliberately tried to poison Slade’s uncle against him? She could easily imagine her doing so. The housekeeper was almost fanatical in her belief that the ‘old master’, as she called him, should have had sons of his own.
As she heard feet on the stairs she quickly folded the piece of the tapestry she had been working on and stood up.
‘Ah, there you are.’
Slade’s smile was coolly businesslike. At his side was an elegant blonde, her hair drawn sleekly back off her face, her expensive tweed skirt and cashmere sweater proclaiming her ‘county’ origins. She extended her hand to Chelsea with a thin smile, barely touching her fingers.
‘Ah yes,’ she murmured, consulting some papers she had with her. ‘You are employed by Jerome Francis, I believe?’
‘Yes, I am,’ Chelsea agreed. ‘At the moment I’m working on the tapestry.’
‘And doing an excellent job on it,’ the third member of the trio praised warmly. While Slade and his female companion had approached her he had turned his attention to the tapestry, which for ease of working Chelsea had spread out on a long refectory table.
‘How badly damaged was it?’ Warm brown eyes surveyed Chelsea approvingly. Older than Slade, she placed the man somewhere in his late thirties, and she warmed to his admiration and appreciation of the rare tapestry, as he studied it closely, listening to her explaining the preparatory work which had been necessary before she could start repairs.
‘Geoff and Fiona are from the National Trust,’ Slade explained to her. ‘They were in the area and wanted to come and see how w
ork was progressing.’
‘And to enjoy that lunch you promised us when you came to York,’ Fiona reminded him provocatively, ignoring both Chelsea and the tapestry, until Geoff directed her attention to the latter and she was obliged to study it.
It was plain to Chelsea that the blonde girl knew little or nothing about the work, and she was forced to quell a swift stab of resentment when the pink-tipped nails rested lightly against Slade’s jacket-clad arm as she asked him to explain the scenes depicted, knowing that the girl had next to no interest in the work and that all she wanted to do was to focus Slade’s attention solely upon herself.
They made a stunning pair, Chelsea was forced to acknowledge grudgingly. Fiona was tall and slender, almost fragile when compared to the lean muscularity of Slade’s maleness. Watching their two heads bent over the tapestry, dark against fair, she was appalled by the sudden surge of emotion that swept her. Try as she might she couldn’t drag her eyes from Slade’s lean fingers and immaculately kept nails as he pointed out various features of the tapestry to his companion.
The way Fiona fawned over him was sickening, Chelsea told herself, trying to convince herself that it was sheer female revulsion at such a lack of pride by a member of her sex that was responsible for the emotions raging inside her—and as for Slade himself, his smug acceptance of her admiration as his due just underlined how right she had been in her initial reading of his character.