by Susan Napier
It wasn’t the fierce, hungry kiss sizzling with passion that Vanessa had eagerly expected, but a long, slow kiss of silky exploration...so long that she nearly suffocated in sweetness before he released her to breathe, only to draw her in again, to taste her with luscious bites of erotic pleasure, his teeth sinking into her swollen lower lip, his tongue unfurling inside her to stroke and linger. A lovely, sensual lethargy dragged at her lower limbs. Her arms slid around his waist to cling to the only solid support in a world of dissolving bliss. She had never known there were so many ways to kiss.
‘Why are you sorry?’ she whispered in blurred tones as his mouth shifted to the side of her throat and slid lower to the little hollow where her pulse fluttered madly. Her breasts were hurting against his chest, tight and unbelievably tender. When was he going to touch her there again?
Instead his arm slid around her back and he drew her away from the wall as if they were dancing, his mouth still moving against her long, slender neck as he swayed towards the stairs. ‘Come with me...’
‘Where?’ It was a dreamy request, without force or curiosity. She knew where he was taking her. Up to heaven in his arms.
‘You’ll see...’
He wafted her slowly up into the darkness of the upper floor, stair by stair, kiss by kiss, as if he was afraid that if he let her go for a moment the sensual spell he was weaving would be broken, but, instead of ending up in his bedroom, when he finally wrenched himself away with a soft groan of regret she found herself blinking owlishly in the harsh fluorescent lighting of his studio.
Dazed and trembling, she reached out, but he was already turning away and unrolling something across the draughting-table and clipping the edges flat. His hands, she was glad to see, were shaking as much as hers.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I want you to see this. The perspective drawings that won the award. And photos of the finished house.’
She stared at him incredulously. He wanted to talk about his work, now? ‘Ben...’
‘Please.’ The look he gave her was both searing and pleading. ‘It’s important to me.’ He held out his hand, steady now, and when she took it he drew her hard against his side, his other hand curving possessively over her hip as he firmly directed her attention to the board.
‘You see—it’s built on a steep hillside covered with native bush. For a couple and their three children. They’re both artists. He works with stained glass—that’s why there’s so much used in the design; they wanted a sense of the bush behind drawn inside the house rather than pushed away by four solid walls. And they didn’t have much money, so I had to incorporate a lot of odds and ends that they’d rescued from demolition sites and make sure that a lot of the building work was do-it-yourself capable. What do you think?’
She could hardly think at all, her whole body attuned to the thumb that was stroking her hipbone through the slippery black fabric, but he seemed anxious, so she struggled for a response that would earn his approval. Then, as her interest was caught, she didn’t have to struggle at all.
‘Why, it’s lovely.’ She bent over to study the higgledy-piggledy juxtaposition of shapes, the way the house seem to mimic the uneven growth patterns of the surrounding bush, taking on odd tilts and angles obviously to avoid the necessity for cutting down the mature trees scattered over the site. ‘It’s fantastic!’ She turned dark, astonished eyes to his. ‘You did this?’
‘I should be insulted by that disbelieving look,’ he drawled unsteadily, his expression strangely grave. ‘But yes, I did that, although you’ll notice it’s not signed Savage. I use another professional name for this kind of work, what I call the fun stuff. It’s a way for me to let off steam, to indulge myself and yet not compromise Dane Benedict’s reputation with our conservative corporate clients... although my identity’s no secret in the trade.’
‘What are these here?’ Vanessa was fascinated by the loving intricacy of his detail. Compared to the slick, water-colour washed sketches of his award-winning commercial work that she had seen these were like illustrations rather than designs, maps of the imagination. ‘They look like ladders up the walls. Where do they go? Are these lofts—?’
‘Play-lofts and tunnels between the children’s rooms.’ He gave them a quick, uninterested glance and then deliberately put his hand down over the section she was trying to interpret. ‘Vanessa, I didn’t bring you here to play twenty questions. I just wanted you to see it, that’s all. So that you’d realise that I am capable of being...whimsical and sensitive to interpreting other people’s needs, even if they’re not completely sure about them themselves. I mean, I may come across as a heartless bastard sometimes but—’
‘I never thought you were that—’ Vanessa was driven to protest, the lovely warmth of passion beginning to drain away. Was he trying to let her down lightly? To explain that he had responded to her only because he thought that she had needed the flattery of his desire?
‘Until now.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked hollowly, not wanting to know the answer.
He turned her, holding her at arm’s length by her shoulders, his face grim. ‘Just this: unless you lied about sleeping with Wells or have some other secret lover hidden away, there’s no way you can be pregnant.’
For a moment she was puzzled and then she realised what he was admitting and why he looked so tense, almost anguished.
‘Oh, Benedict, I’m so sorry...’ Had he thought that she would think him less of a man because of it? She stroked his taut mouth with tender compassion and he recoiled as if her finger were tipped in poison.
‘You’re sorry?’
‘Are you quite certain?’ she asked, seeing that she had jolted him with her swift understanding. ‘There’s a lot that doctors can do about sterility these days—’
He dropped his hands from her shoulders, his eyes blazing with cobalt fire. ‘What in the hell are you talking about? I’m not sterile!’
He sounded so furiously certain that Vanessa’s heart squeezed in her chest. ‘You have children?’ She faltered. It had never even occurred to her. Oh, she was so naïve!
‘No, I don’t have children!’ he shouted at her, so furiously offended that she took a step back.
‘Then—then how do you know you’re not sterile?’ she stammered with what she felt was impeccable logic.
‘Because—’ He stopped and uttered a word that made her pinch her mouth primly. ‘I don’t know—all right? But I have no reason to not believe I’m not—’ He ran a hand through his hair in an uncharacteristic gesture of helplessness. ‘Oh, hell, will you stop confusing the damned issue while I’m trying to make a confession?’
‘I’m confusing it?’ Vanessa couldn’t help an involuntary smile, which seemed to infuriate him beyond bearing. She had never seen him so close to losing control. It was quite fascinating.
As she watched, round-eyed, he took a deep, controlling breath and said very, very carefully, ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Vanessa, is that there is not the ghost of a chance that I got you pregnant that night—’ It was a measure of his mood that there wasn’t even the glimmer of amused recognition of his inadvertant pun.
‘Oh?’ Her limited sexual experience sent her imagination haywire. ‘You mean you—er—withdrew...before you...?’
‘No, I didn’t withdraw,’ he snarled. ‘There was nothing for me to have to withdraw from.’
Vanessa looked at him, appalled. Her colour rose, along with her vivid curiosity. ‘You mean we just...did it without actually—?’
‘We didn’t do anything in bed that night!’ he exploded. ‘Correction, we did do something,’ he amended grimly. ‘We slept.’
‘Slept?’
He shrugged, easing the motion down through the rest of his body as if loosening it up for combat.
‘Slept?’ She repeated sharply. It was finally beginning to sink in.
‘Yes, you know, that state of unconsciousness wherein one is completely relax—�
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‘We slept!’
He bowed his head, awaiting the storm. It wasn’t long in breaking.
‘Why, you—’ Vanessa rounded on him like a furious tornado. ‘Are you telling me that I didn’t—?’
‘Ravish me? I’m afraid not,’ he said meekly.
‘That you didn’t—?’
‘Ravish you—no.’
‘That we just spent the whole time sleeping! And you expect me to believe that? What do you think I am, an idiot?’ she screeched.
‘No, an innocent.’ He was unwise enough to expand on that. ‘If I’d made love to you that night, Vanessa, believe me you would have been in no doubt of it the next morning. You would have been aching and tender in places I’m too polite to mention—’
‘You—polite?’ she spat. ‘Was it polite to let me think—? You...you bastard!’ She went bright red at what she had thought. How he must have been laughing at her!
‘Tit for tat, Vanessa,’ he pointed out, but Vanessa was in no mood to be fair. Her temper had reached flashpoint and her hand had streaked out and cracked across his face before she even realised her intention.
‘That’s one,’ he said so coolly that she lashed out again, across the other cheek. His head snapped to the side with the force of the fresh blow. Slowly he looked back at her.
‘That’s two.’
She wasn’t foolish enough to make it three but she had a desperate need to goad him out of that infuriating calmness.
‘What are you trying to do, frighten me?’ she sneered, circling him in a swirling of skirts like a black thunderstorm building up static electricity.
He, perversely, seemed to think he had already weathered the worst. He folded his arms across his chest, slowly rotating to follow her prowling progress. ‘I don’t have to. You’re doing a very good job of frightening yourself. I always wondered what you’d look like in a passion. Now I know. You should lose your temper more often.’
She knew he was trying to distract her. ‘And you should be ashamed of yourself!’ she spat, clenching her hands in the soft folds of her skirt. All the thwarted passion of a few minutes ago was now channelled into the relief valve of rage.
‘I think I should be complimented for my honesty,’ he protested. ‘I’ll even admit that I looked and I lusted but the flesh was sadly unwilling.’
Was he trying to tell her that no man would want her, even served up on a platter? She flinched, then rallied furiously. She wasn’t going to let him get away with sexually humiliating her. She had promised herself that no man would ever do that again. ‘It damned well wasn’t unwilling when I woke up,’ she flung at him. ‘You were certainly plenty aroused then.’
He had the gall to flaunt a grin. ‘I’m usually at my best in the mornings,’ he said modestly. ‘And I was probably dreaming about what was to come...so to speak. I had every intention of making love to my luscious satin-wrapped present when I’d slept off my jet-lag. I was very disappointed to find her a figment of my lustful imagination.’
‘You’re disgusting!’ choked Vanessa, coping with a rush of conflicting feelings—relief, embarrassment, forbidden delight...
‘I’m a man.’
‘You’re a pervert!’
‘The perversion would have been if I’d brought you up here and made love to you without telling you that it was our first time together. It wouldn’t have done for us both to discover you were still a virgin—’
‘I’ve made love before!’ she flared defiantly.
‘Good. Then I won’t have to worry about hurting you—’
She shuddered at the painful memory that that evoked, wrapping her arms around her waist and hugging herself in a revealing gesture that made his eyes narrow and his mouth thin.
‘Surely you don’t have the gall to think that I’d let you—’ She choked to a halt as he moved closer, his voice gentling.
‘Not let, Vanessa. Fully participate as a mature adult. Nothing’s changed. You wanted me enough to come this far—’
‘No, I didn’t, I was just curious.’
His mouth thinned still further. ‘Was, and still are. Would you like me to prove it to you, Vanessa? At least I’ve been honest with you. More so than you’ve been with me...’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All this outrage about what I did or didn’t do to you. Isn’t it really a mask for your own guilty feelings? Didn’t it secretly excite you to think about how liberated our lovemaking must have been...neither of us in any state to worry about restraint or inhibition? Weren’t you even a little aroused when you woke up to find me beside you?’
She hugged herself tighter. ‘I was shocked—’
‘Of course you were shocked. But there you were, semi-nude, cuddled up with a naked, aroused man who was completely vulnerable to whatever you chose to do to him. You were curious about me then, too, weren’t you, Vanessa? It never occurred to you that it might have been rape, because subconsciously even then you trusted me. So you didn’t scream. You looked at me instead. You looked at my body. Did you touch me? Did you want to touch me? I would have liked it if you had. I would have liked to have been woken that way, liked it more than anything...’
She couldn’t look at him, turning her back and trying to retrieve her badly fragmented composure. ‘I—’
‘Because I touched you, Vanessa,’ he told her with devastating candour as he moved up behind her.
‘When I got into bed with you I fondled you a little before I drifted off to sleep—your long, gorgeous back and especially that beautiful, rounded bottom.’ His arms came around her body to wrap themselves over hers and gently tug them down to her sides, pressing them there as his voice nuzzled in her hair. ‘It was so irresistible...all bare and warm under that flimsy satin slip, like a delicious, downy peach I wanted to bite into... You were lying on your front so I couldn’t stroke your breasts, but I knew they must be ripe and full because your slip was loose and I could see the luscious swell at the side where your breast was compressed against the bed. I went to sleep thinking about turning you over and cupping them in my hands, finding out how your nipples would taste, whether they were big or small, cherry-pink or—’
‘Stop it!’ she cried faintly, far too late for the protest to be effective.
‘Why, am I turning you on, Vanessa?’ He ran his hands lightly up and down her arms and then, taking her by surprise, spun her around, looking deeply satisfied when he saw her flushed face and cornered eyes, the full lower lip that he had bitten so voluptuously earlier now captured by her own nervous teeth.
He touched her hair with a tenderness that made her eyes sting. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to force you to do anything that you don’t want to. Not tonight, anyway. I won’t rush you but I’m not going to let you deny your feelings, either, or mine. I give you fair warning that I have every intention of fulfilling my fantasies where you’re concerned!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
VANESSA lifted her head and let the stiff breeze float her loosely bound hair off her shoulders. She dug her cold hands deeper into the pockets of her down jacket as she walked along the beach, stepping carefully in her thick-soled trainers to avoid slipping on the piles of loose rocks.
Unlike the silky white-sand beaches of the east coast of the Coromandel, most of the west-coast bays were small, rock-strewn stretches of brown sand scalloped from point to rocky point, the mussel- and oyster-encrusted rocks at the waterline giving way to small boulders than could be overturned to reveal scuttling colonies of crabs and, up past the high-tide line, bleached driftwood and stiffened brown seaweed lay among thick drifts of smoothly weathered stones and pebbles ranging through the spectrum of earth colours.
Vanessa looked up at a sharp cry, but it was only a seagull wheeling above the shallow inshore waters, brown with stirred-up sand. She watched its soaring, wind-tossed flight across the pale grey sky, envying its freedom. There were times she would like to fly free, away from all her problems. But instead she could only drive and
walk and even then she wasn’t escaping them, because her biggest problem was herself.
She turned to retrace her steps and froze, her heart shuddering in her breast.
Correction, her biggest problem was in front of her, calmly strolling between the rocks as if he had as much right to be there as she did.
She waited until he got into earshot before she asked tightly, ‘What are you doing here?’
Benedict shrugged, his black leather jacket sliding open over his cream sweater with the careless movement as he halted on the other side of a shallow rock-pool. ‘Walking.’
She snorted. ‘You never walk.’
‘Only because I don’t usually stay here long enough to miss my daily swims. I’ve decided I’d better get out and about a bit if I don’t want to run to fat.’
She gave his lean length a contemptuous look. ‘I don’t think you have to worry about that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It wasn’t a compliment, it was a statement of fact,’ she said irritably.
‘Thank you anyway. You’re looking very trim yourself.’
He was looking at her long legs, clad in the jeans that she kept in the boot of the estate car along with her spare down parka and a pair of old sports shoes. When she had left the house earlier she hadn’t even bothered to change, just grabbed a cardigan and fled, and now, with her prim navy ‘uniform’ lying on the back seat of the car, she felt wretchedly defenceless.
She brushed the wind-blown hair out of her eyes, trying to tuck the strands back into the scarf she had used to tie it back.
‘Did you follow me here?’ she asked bluntly.
‘What makes you think that?’
She refused to retreat in the face of his daunting amusement. ‘It seems a very strange coincidence, that’s all.’
‘Since there’s only one main road around here, it’s not that much of a coincidence. I saw the car parked on the verge so I stopped.’
