A Kiss To Remember

‘You could be right there. But not this way.’ And he placed the drink down. ‘So, tell me, Angie, has life brought you all you ever wanted? Is there some eager young man waiting downstairs for you to return to his loving arms?’

At that moment, Angie wished she’d put arsenic in his drink. ‘Actually no, Lance,’ she returned with a coldly brittle smile. ‘I’m between boyfriends at the moment. As for my other ambitions, I am only twenty-four, and only three years out of my degree. I need a little more time before I can change the whole world. Though I realise now that some things—and some people—can never be changed.’ This with a sour look at Lance.

‘Look, drop the acid barbs, will you? It’s Bud’s birthday, and if I remember Bud, there’ll be music and dancing downstairs. I could do with some music and dancing at this moment, believe me.’

Taking Angie’s nearest hand, he pulled her somewhat abruptly to her feet. She stumbled slightly and his other arm shot out to steady her, then snaked slowly round her waist. Startled, her green eyes widened as they flew to his, only to meet a decidedly cynical gaze.

‘Don’t look so surprised, Angie,’ he drawled. ‘Isn’t this the sort of behaviour you would expect from an unconscionable rake like myself? I’m just taking you up on that hello kiss you offered me earlier on.’

Panic-stricken, Angie turned her face away from his descending mouth. ‘Too late,’ she muttered through clenched teeth as his lips brushed her cheek. ‘I only give hello kisses at the door, not in bedrooms.’

He cupped her chin and brutally forced her face frontwards. ‘Then call this a goodbye kiss,’ he ground out.

No, she tried to cry out, but his kiss obliterated the word before she could do more than open her lips.

The memory can certainly play tricks with your mind, Angie thought dazedly as Lance’s lips took violent possession of hers. She’d told Vanessa that his kiss had made her think she’d died and gone to heaven. Either she’d been mistaken, or things had changed dramatically. There was nothing at all heavenly about the lips which were clamped to hers at that moment, prying them apart with so much force that her lips were ground back against her teeth. It was sheer hell.

But no sooner had Angie decided that she’d been mad to imagine she’d loved him all these years than everything changed. The fingers gripping her chin suddenly gentled, then trailed tantalisingly down her throat. Another hand slid up her back and into the hair around her neck. The vice-like lips lightened their gruelling pressure.

And then—then, when she was sighing with relief and almost relaxing into him—then his tongue moved slowly and incredibly seductively into her mouth.

It dipped deep, then withdrew, then darted back, coupling with her own tongue in an erotic dance which went on and on and on.

Angie was polarised with the most intense pleasure—eclipsing everything she had remembered. Sensations were racing to every corner of her body, every last nerve-ending, every tiny fibre of her being. She felt shattered, yet at the same time almost complete. This was where she’d always wanted to be—in Lance’s arms, his mouth fused with hers, their bodies pressed together. Only by making love would she be totally complete.

In silent yearning she reached for that end, her hands instinctively lifting to splay into his hair, to keep his mouth on hers, to press herself closer and closer. She heard his groan of raw desire, felt it rising against her. Her own desire rose to meet his, and her hips moved with instinctive need.

‘Auntie Angie...’

The small voice pierced the fog of her passion with crippling effect. She gasped away from Lance’s mouth, the wild wonder of it all immediately replaced by sordid reality as Angie was faced with the knowledge that she had only been moments away from letting Lance do whatever he wanted with her.

‘I want a dwink of water,’ three-year-old Morris cried, when his auntie looked over Lance’s shoulder at him.

With a soft moan of self-disgust, she pried herself out of Lance’s seemingly frozen arms and turned to her nephew, who was standing just outside the open doorway—another factor in Angie’s mortification. My God, she thought, anybody could have walked by and seen us. What if Bud had come up?