by Susan Napier
She stared at him in horror. ‘This was all part of some clever plan of yours, wasn’t it?’ she accused wildly. ‘That we be seen to sneak away and Lacey follow us—that she catch us in a flagrantly compromising position...’ She realised what she must have looked like with her skirts hiked up around her waist and Benedict’s hand between her thighs, and on her breast. ‘Oh, God, you planned for this to happen...’
‘The hell I did! How was I to know you were going to swoon in my arms?’
‘You used me. You promised you wouldn’t, then you used me!’ Vanessa cried. ‘How can I ever believe anything you say? Oh, God, I hate you!’
She lashed out with a viciously closed fist and he caught it in an iron grip, jerking it behind her as he ground out savagely, ‘That’s enough!’
He caught her other wrist and clamped it with the same hand, and then dragged a weakly struggling Vanessa out of the ramshackle back door of the garage and across the unlit rear courtyard to the French doors of the library, the only downstairs room that was shut off to the party-goers. While Vanessa panted and squirmed he searched for his keys in the narrow pocket of his breeches and unlocked the door, thrusting her inside and locking it again behind him, drawing the curtains and turning on the lamp on the desk before striding to the door to the hall to make sure that that too was firmly secured. The soundproofing that had been installed with the new wall-linings created a hushed, exotic quietness as Vanessa stood, rubbing her wrists and summoning her courage finally to demand imperiously, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’ Benedict turned, stripping off his tunic and shirt as he came towards her. ‘Creating the strictest privacy in which to make love to you. No distractions, no interruptions, no possible grounds for a misunderstanding later. Perhaps I can teach you to trust the pleasure I can give you, if nothing else. At least it’ll be a start. Will you take off that dress—or do you want me to do it?’
Vanessa put her trembling hands to her breasts to quiet the tumult that rioted there at the sight of his powerful chest and flat belly sheened with a light perspiration that defined the lean wedges of curved muscle as they rose and fell with his ragged breathing. He looked as if he had been running, his body pumped with adrenalin, his control so finely balanced that she could see faint tremors as opposing bunches of muscles strained against each other in anticipation of the next explosive burst of movement. He was the brutal image of a man primed for sex.
He was unbuttoning his breeches now, watching her become aware of the violence of his arousal as he exposed himself blatantly to her shocked eyes. He bent to pull off his boots and the narrow black breeches, his hard flanks flexing and bunching, and then he straightened again, completely naked. Completely vulnerable. Glistening with his need...
‘Give me this one chance, Vanessa,’ he demanded, the angry edge of his ruthless intent blunted by the flushed fascination with which she was still staring down at his jutting body. ‘Let me show you that when I’m with you, as far as I’m concerned, nobody else in the world exists...’
Her eyes flickered up to his. Her hands fell away from her breasts. He reached for her...
The cataclysm struck.
One moment Vanessa was standing before him, fully clothed, and the next her dress was on the floor and she was lying on the rug beside it covered by a trembling, groaning man in the throes of urgent passion, her long legs wrapped around his powerful hips as the excruciating pleasure that was concentrated in the thrusting fullness that parted and penetrated her escalated to a series of violent convulsions.
There had been no time for fear, no time to register anything but the glory of his manhood as he had reacted with frenzied delight to the sight of her in the satin basque, rolling over on to his back and seating her astride his engorged loins so that he could enjoy the sensuous sight of her arched above him as he roughly dealt with the row of hooks, releasing her pointed breasts to the lascivious attention of his hands and mouth as he undulated beneath her, letting her control the pace until she began straining and shuddering, unsatisfied by anything less than his complete possession.
There was no pain as he turned her on her back and mounted her in one fluid movement, stretching her with his fingers to fit him, only a ferocious relief at being able to take the full length of him, to absorb and milk him of his maleness until he jerked and stiffened and uttered hoarse, guttural cries of violent gratification as she joined his fierce upheaval.
Afterwards, while they still lay co-mingled, he gentled her out of her state of shell-shocked bliss, making her blush with his lavish praise.
‘You see, at least we can speak honestly to each other with our bodies,’ he murmured as he reluctantly helped her to dress, kissing her breasts in tender acknowledgement of her passionate exhaustion as he zipped her up and then pulled on his own clothes, his manner redolent with possessive satisfaction. ‘What could be more honest than sustained mutual passion...?’
Vanessa looked at her sinfully dishevelled Puritan as he stretched contentedly, then strolled over to unlock the hall door. He was signalling that their lovely private idyll was over already. Her heart ached for all that she now had of him...and all that she never would. Unless she risked one final dare...
‘Mutual love, perhaps?’ she ventured bravely.
He stood, his hand on the door-handle, looking so utterly stunned at the suggestion that Vanessa knew instantly that she had made a bad mistake.
Before she could retrieve the betraying words Benedict staggered as the door was suddenly thrust inwards against him.
Moments later, just how bad Vanessa’s mistake had been was being forcefully rammed home to her as they were confronted by Benedict’s horrified parents, who wasted no time in pointing out the appalling implications of Benedict’s allowing himself to be publicly associated with a woman of Vanessa’s deeply dubious background and morals. And Benedict seemed to be tacitly agreeing with every doom-laden word!
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS dark inside the hilltop apartment and Vanessa cursed at the lack of light as her trembling fingers dropped the doorkey and she had to grope around on the cold marble floor to find it.
Then she had trouble finding the light switch and when she finally clicked it on she had to blink in disorientation as she was confronted by the white-on-white, ultra-modern room. It took a few moments for her to remember to cross to the long narrow window on her left and wave in silhouette to the man waiting on the city street below.
The yellow Corvette took off with a throaty roar and Vanessa watched the red lights glow as he took the corner at the end of the street.
She wondered why Dane was in such an all-fired hurry to get wherever he had suddenly insisted he had to go, when he had done nothing but procrastinate, delay and dawdle all the way from Thames to Auckland. What should have taken no more than an hour and a half had taken over three. He had driven at least twenty kilometres per hour under the speed-limit, stopped for petrol and oil at two different petrol stations and pulled over twice to check his ‘pinging’ engine.
Then, just past Huntly, he had decided he was ravenous and had pulled into an all-night truckers’ restaurant and ordered a huge meal which he had taken ages to eat, all the while plying a white-faced Vanessa with coffee and trying to persuade her to reinterpret the scene which had prompted her midnight flight from Whitefield without even so much as a change of clothes or a toothbrush. She had even had to borrow Dane’s car-coat to cover the crumpled satin costume she wore in order not to create a riot among the truckers.
Somehow it had seemed symbolic that she had left Whitefield as stripped of possessions as she had been of pride. Lacey’s malicious introduction of Vanessa to Benedict’s parents as his lover-cum-butler couldn’t have been better timed to create maximum shock and embarrassment...especially since it was obvious to them all what had been going on in the locked library.
The older couple had heard of the party from Lacey and had duly decided to make a fl
ying visit, expecting to be able to offer their congratulations on what they assumed to be their son’s engagement to a most eminently suitable young lady. Instead they had been confronted with graphic evidence that he had fallen into the clutches of an appallingly unsuitable, social-climbing hussy.
Vanessa had had to bear the shame of hearing Aaron Savage tell his son, ‘For God’s sake, if you want to sleep with the servants at least have the decency to be discreet about it!’ and his mother frigidly suggest that whatever he was paying her it was obviously too much!
‘A female butler! I always wondered what possessed you to agree to such a questionable arrangement,’ Denise Savage had said in cut-glass accents of brittle disdain. ‘And now my worst fears have been justified!
‘Don’t you care about the pain you’re causing your father and I? Do you know the damage this could do to the family’s reputation if it got into the papers? Goodness knows, there are certain people who would leap at the chance to use a scandal to embarrass your father. Whatever you do inevitably reflects directly on us... And you’re not really being fair to this...this person either. Is she really someone you’d be comfortable introducing to our friends? Of course not...because it’s all in such appalling bad taste, Benedict. Even if you’re temporarily blinded by infatuation you must realise that we’d be a laughing-stock if you tried to introduce her to society...’
There had been more in that vein and Vanessa had kept waiting for an angry Benedict to leap in and defend her honour. But he had remained silent and when she’d finally tried to interrupt on her own behalf Benedict had coldly told her to be quiet and let him hear everything his parents had to say.
In the end, she had walked out in such a blind agony that she had nearly trampled Dane as he hovered by the door. Benedict had been so absorbed in what his parents were saying that he hadn’t even noticed her go and, looking back over her shoulder one last time, Vanessa had numbly realised the true extent of the family resemblance.
Benedict’s face had worn the same expression of pale hauteur that his mother’s habitually did and his arrogant stance had been so similar to his father’s that it had been almost like seeing the same man reflected through an age-distorting mirror. Perhaps his fling with her had been just one last act of rebellion against the inevitable genetic trap.
She’d been walking down the driveway towards the gates of Whitefield in a zombie-like state when Dane had caught up with her, and when no amount of desperate pleading could divert her from her obsession with getting to the airport in Auckland by whatever means she could, hitch-hiking—even walking every step of the way if she had to—he had eventually agreed to drive her. She had to go home, she’d kept repeating. She was running to the only haven left to her, the home of her heart—her family—to the love and understanding of her father in Los Angeles. He had never been ashamed of her...
She had fiercely refused to go back to the house even to pack, nor would promise to wait for Dane while he did so, and in the end he had given in to her fragile mental state and got his car.
While he drove he had talked incessantly, telling her what a great guy Benedict was, deep down, and how, if Vanessa was in love with him, she owed it to him to give him the benefit of the doubt; that Benedict’s parents were knee-jerk reactionaries; that she shouldn’t do anything rash, like leaving the country, without talking to Benedict first.
Vanessa had refused to respond until he had pointed out to her, when they were nearly to Auckland, that since she had neither money nor passport she couldn’t leave the country immediately anyway. He had kindly insisted she stay at his apartment for the rest of the night, until she could call her father and ‘reorientate’ herself. By that time all Vanessa had wanted to do was crawl into a bed, bury her head in the pillow and have a good, long, private bawl!
She was a bit disconcerted that, after hours of relentless over-concern, Dane had casually dumped her on his doorstep with his key and a casual ‘good luck’, but she supposed he was respecting her desperately obvious need for privacy. Equally obviously he would have no trouble finding a bed elsewhere.
Bed...
Wearily, she turned towards the spiral staircase that Dane had included in his verbal sketch-plan and plodded upwards. She couldn’t ever remember having felt this hopelessly bone-weary before. She shook her head to try and clear the miasma of exhaustion that thickened her thoughts.
The first room at the top of the stairs was a bathroom and when she clicked on the light and caught sight of herself in the mirror Vanessa shuddered. She looked even worse than she felt. The crimson dress was tawdry and garish against her bloodless skin and she could see several faint, reddened marks on her breasts from Benedict’s lovemaking. Was this what his parents had seen? This...brazen doxy. No wonder they had been so horrified!
Vanessa was suddenly acutely aware that she was still perfumed with the fragrance of her abandon. She could smell Benedict on her skin. With shivering haste she shed the wretched gown and the indecent garment underneath.
The hot shower did its job, easing her aching body and cleansing away the intimate evidence of passion, although nothing could wash away the tiny, tender abrasions on her breasts and stomach and thighs. Weak tears mingled freely with the pulsing water over her face as she began to wonder what she had forfeited by her cowardice. If Benedict hadn’t fought for her honour, neither had she made any attempt to fight for his. What if he, too, was alone and hurting right now...?
Pushing away the painful thought, Vanessa blotted herself on the thick white towel from the heated rail and rubbed half-heartedly at her steam-damp hair, discarding the towel listlessly on the floor with uncharacteristic untidiness before padding naked into the only other room on the mezzanine floor.
In the hint of clouded moonlight from the window she was aware of the vague, shadowy outline of a bed by the far wall but she ignored it, drawn across the room by the melancholy sight of the sleeping city. The view led in a direct line across the bricks and blocks of the central commercial district to the moon-struck waters of the Waitemata Harbour. Moon-struck. That perfectly described Vanessa. She wallowed for a moment in her splendidly miserable, self-induced isolation.
She turned on the standard lamp that she had nearly knocked over as she approached the window, and unlatched the fastening on the casement so that she could open it wide, breathing in the faintly metallic air of the city and momentarily enjoying the faint tightening of her bare skin at its cool touch. She must start to do this now, appreciate the small joys of life, since she was making such a mess of the larger ones.
She turned, a wistful smile of self-derision on her lips, and froze.
The big, wide double bed was already occupied.
The pool of light spilling across the floor from the lamp behind her was more than sufficient to reveal that the occupier was a man. He was sprawled on his stomach, his arms spread-eagled, his face buried in one of four huge pillows that were propped up in a row against the headboard.
Vanessa closed her eyes and shook her head sharply, sure that it was a fatigue-induced illusion.
She looked again, moving hesitantly towards the bed, still unwilling to trust the evidence of her tear-swollen eyes.
Above the white silk sheets, which were bunched carelessly low on his hips, the interloper’s long, naked back was lean and densely muscled, faintly gleaming in the muted light, as smooth as tan-coloured satin and rippling faintly with each slow, sensuous breath. Under the arm outflung towards her she could see a thick drift of silky-soft black hair and, just above the edge of the sheet, the taut rise of the twin globes of his buttocks revealed a dusting of similar, very fine black down.
A powerful sense of bitter outrage gripped Vanessa. How dared he?
She began to bend and suddenly every muscle in that long, sexy, naked male back tensed and he rolled over and she found herself staring into a very wide-awake pair of grave blue eyes.
‘Hello, Goldilocks. What took you so long?’
She was stun
ned by the warmth of desiring in that soft, whimsical growl. ‘W-what are you doing—how did you get here?’
He shook his head back and forth against the pillow.
‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ he murmured, with such aching gentleness that she felt weak. Her knees swayed against the mattress and he came up on one elbow and caught her wrist, applying just enough pressure to sit her down on the edge of the bed, facing him. In her shock she forgot that she was nude and he ignored her state of innocent unawareness with gentlemanly tact.
‘Where else should I be but here—with the woman I love?’ he asked quietly.
It was a dream, a wishful dream.
‘This is Dane’s bedroom—’
‘Oh, no.’ His mouth curved at one corner. ‘My friend has much better preservation instincts than that. This is my apartment, Nessa. That’s where you were always going to eventually end up. In my bedroom, in my bed...in my life.’
The last was the most devastating. She trembled, brushing at her damp hair with her free hand, unaware that her bare body was revealing the welcome that she could not yet dare admit. ‘But...you can’t be here—’
He kissed the strong, slender wrist that he held, watching her intently as he drew her hand down to his chest and she couldn’t help noticing that he had a number of reddened marks which were the feminine version of the brands she wore. He held her hand against his strongly arhythmic heartbeat. ‘Does this feel like an illusion?
‘Dane called me on his cell-phone from the first garage he called at. I made him promise to bring you here but to delay long enough to let me get here first. Thank God the pilot who flew your dress down is a teetotaller, because I’d invited him to the party and I just grabbed him and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I wouldn’t even let him stop to change on the way to the airport. It’s the first time I’ve ever flown anywhere with a giant bat at the controls.’
Vanessa almost giggled in spite of herself. Then she remembered, and her face acquired a painful stiffness.
