Beguiled and Bedazzled

by Victoria Gordon

  ‘Didn’t Rooster do wonderfully today? I thought he was a real champion.’

  ‘Half a champion,’ Burns muttered distractedly. ‘He’ll need another big win to get his championship.’ The words were slightly indistinct because he was kissing her all along the length of her leg as he spoke.

  ‘Well, at least you can’t accuse me of distracting him,’ Colleen insisted, writhing in the warm water, herself almost driven to distraction by what he was doing.

  ‘Not of distracting him, but you sure as blazes distracted me,’ was the muffled reply. ‘I’m convinced now that I was the only one to suffer that punishment I promised you. Stupid idea, putting this off while we went to that damned dog trial.’

  ‘It was your idea after all,’ she sighed, not quite willing to admit that she had been at least as punished by the self-enforced delay as he had been. ‘I had thought the whole business of the trial was just an excuse for you to come and harass me for not answering your message.’ She could say that now.

  ‘I didn’t need an excuse. I came to find out how it was I could leave you such a splendid, loving answering-machine message and be totally ignored! You came very close to doing serious injury to my fragile ego,’ Burns muttered, without any slowing of his caresses.

  Colleen was surprised that he’d bothered to come after a week with no response. It must have taken a great deal of courage, she thought.

  The message on the answering machine had contained none of his earlier humorous banter, no Ignatius and Freda exchanging innuendo. It had been a blatantly frank admission of love, of caring, of needing, ending with the message that he had several things to tidy up businesswise and would be arriving that weekend to take her to the dog trial.

  Had she bothered to listen — and she now found it difficult to imagine being so stubborn, so totally unsure of her own feelings that she hadn’t! — she would have turned around and driven back to him as fast as her car could have made the journey.

  ‘And as for that damned dog, he’s already won the highest prize he’ll ever get for retrieving; he brought me you. Nothing he could do now would ever manage to top that.’

  ‘He should be lying by the fire with a champion bone,’ Colleen said. ‘It isn’t fair really. He won the trial for you and now he’s out there in a cold, lonely kennel, and we’re—’

  ‘And we’re where I’ve wanted us to be for longer than I like to admit,’ he replied, after he’d used his mobile mouth to interrupt and stop her talking. ‘Now stop rabbiting on about Rooster. I know he’s wonderful and all that, but he’s not a person, even though he sometimes thinks he is. He’s a dog and he’s happy being a dog ... and this ... is no place ... for a dog.’

  The words were interspersed with kisses that touched like small flames along the length of her leg. ‘And I, in case you haven’t noticed, am a man. A man with very specific needs just at this moment.’

  ‘You can’t want more, surely?’ she teased, only to have him growl against her skin. ‘Is this more of your punishment?’

  ‘Call it that if you like. There’s all sorts of punishments, my love. Like this. And this again.. .and again and again.’

  And she shivered as his fingers traced patterns in the soapsuds along her leg, leaving a trail for his lips to follow. Colleen writhed with delight, threatening to make the steaming hot tub overflow.

  Devon was immersed to the point where even his strong, muscular shoulders were covered, but those incredible amber eyes laughed at her. No, she decided, not at her, but with her.

  ‘You wait until tomorrow, when you’re standing around in the cold grey light of dawn, with the wind blowing like it did today — like it always does at that trial site,’ he said. ‘You’ll be thinking this was heaven then.’

  ‘I think it’s heaven now,’ Colleen sighed, then gasped as he tugged her closer against him, lifting her so that his lips could capture a nipple, so that his tongue could tease it into a fragile peak of sensitivity.

  His hand moved too, further up the inside of her thigh, fingers delicately fluttering against her skin, increasing her readiness as they neared their goal. The sensation was exquisite, tantalising, the sweetest of tortures. Again Colleen gasped.

  Arc you really going to let Ingrid take both those pieces to Europe — for sale?’ she asked some time later as she lay in his arms, her entire body tingling in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

  ‘She’ll be getting Vixen for sure,’ he said, mouth close to her car, making even this almost irrelevant discussion an act of love. ‘I was going to keep it just to remind me how damned fickle and illogical women can be, but now that I’ve got you—’

  The splash of water against his face stopped him only briefly, but the gesture earned her a kiss before he continued.

  ‘Be serious for a minute, because that bit of work had a lot to do with shaping my attitudes — especially towards this business of working on commissions,’ he said. ‘As I guess I told you earlier, it was the first real commission I ever undertook — and the last as well. I always had a feeling that it wasn’t the way I ought to work, but when my cousin Dave asked I needed the money. I let myself down by going against my own better judgement ... and I ended up paying the price.’

  ‘Your cousin? You never told me that.’

  ‘Oh, not really a cousin. A sort of fourth cousin thrice removed. Let’s just say a distant relative. He’s got more money than brains and more brains than taste, especially in women, but he wanted me to do a statue of his darling wife, and Vixen was the result.’

  ‘And she didn’t like it — so much so that she’s hated you ever since?’

  ‘What she mostly didn’t like was the fact that all I wanted to do was carve and she had.. .other ideas,’ he replied quietly. ‘And, of course, she’s as mad as a meat-axe — which nobody knew at the time. But yes, I suppose she also didn’t like the end result either. I didn’t really see, at first, just how much of her true nature was revealed: the feral quality of the woman, and the madness! Sometimes my hands work better than my eyes. But I guess she did, and then she told Dave a pack of bull-dust that had him fairly frothing for a while.

  ‘In the end she got her revenge, which was to ensure the work wouldn’t be exhibited, but she still hates me. Not that I care all that much, but it certainly did a lot to make me gun-shy about commissions.’

  He paused, but only for a moment. ‘And it also, with the benefit of hindsight, explains why I was so dead-set on you not seeing Siren before it was done — and why I was so worried about your reaction to it. I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d gone all strange and decided you didn’t like it, or ... well ... whatever.’

  ‘Your cousin… Which explains why the little boy looks so much like...’ Colleen was musing without really being aware of it.

  ‘There’s not much danger of him getting lost in this end of the state,’ Burns said. ‘The family resemblance is so strong that I wonder—now that I’ve seen him— what Lucinda contributed at all. I just hope it wasn’t her temperament, or her madness! From all I hear through the family grapevine, it seems that he’s a quite decent kid and she treats him OK too, especially now she’s under treatment.’

  ‘I ... I sort of wondered, that night in the ice-cream parlour, if maybe he wasn’t...’

  ‘Mine?’ He chuckled, then leaned down to kiss her. ‘I had a feeling you were thinking that, but it didn’t seem like the time to go into it. It was a fair enough assumption, after all; I’ve got a picture of me at that age around somewhere and I could be his twin.’

  ‘You knew! And you deliberately let me go on thinking that?’

  ‘What was I supposed to do? Deny it when you hadn’t even asked? You wouldn’t have believed me anyway ... not then. We hardly even knew each other, my love.’

  ‘I’m not sure I ought to even now,’ she said, not really meaning it but unable to resist the chance to stir him. You’re an extremely deceitful person — look at the way you had me continue to pose for a sculpture that y
ou had finished earlier. I really think,’ she said, wriggling closer into his arms to show that she wasn’t that serious, that I probably ought to be quite insulted ... being asked to pose nude, at least towards the end, for the sculpture of a dog!’

  ‘At least it was a male dog; you’d really have grounds for complaint if I’d been using you as the model for a bitch,’ he growled in her ear, and laughed when she attempted to dunk him.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject of deceitful,’ he said, after using his longer reach and greater strength to gather Colleen against him where she couldn’t retaliate, ‘I demand an apology this very instant. It’s a blatant case of the pot calling the kettle black — and you can’t do anything but admit it, my love, because you’ve been convicted out of your own very pretty mouth.’

  ‘Convicted of what? You are deceitful.’

  ‘Says she who promised never to snoop and finally succumbed to her own feminine curiosity. You did, Colleen, and that doesn’t surprise me as much as hearing you admit it.’

  ‘I admit nothing,’ she retorted, wriggling in his grasp to no real effect, ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

  She was turned around now, so that avoiding those amber eyes was impossible, not that she wanted to — until he explained. Then she wanted to dunk herself, perhaps permanently.

  ‘I’m talking about what you’ve already admitted,’ he said with a smug grin. ‘That you’re a snoop, Colleen Ferrar-soon-to-be-Burns.’ And he proceeded to tickle her — to great effect — in a place where she was definitely not used to being tickled.

  ‘You might as well admit it; we can’t start our married life with something like that hanging over your head,’ he said, laughing at her discomfort. ‘If you didn’t snoop how could you have known I was working on the Rooster piece while you were posing?’

  ‘Because I snooped, of course, which I suspect is exactly what I was intended to do,’ she said then. ‘In fact, I know that’s what I was intended to do; you set me up!’

  Burns merely laughed. ‘No, my love, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I only had that piece there because I had to have something to do with my hands while you were posing, or there’d have been all sorts of problems. In fact I didn’t remember which piece was where until almost the last minute, and you’d laugh yourself if you’d seen the scurrying around I had to do, getting things swapped round while I was bringing in Ingrid’s bags.’

  His grin then was pure boyish mischief.

  ‘But it was worth it to see the look on your face when it came time to unveil Siren. You were just so certain of what you were going to see...’

  ‘It’s not funny.’ Colleen finally was able to reply. ‘You, the great professional, taking advantage like that.’

  ‘It was just that I didn’t know any better way to keep you where I could keep an eye on you.’ His fingers, meanwhile, kept tracing intricate patterns along her flank. ‘I don’t suppose it’s any consolation to know I had the devil’s own time trying to keep it just to looking and not … this...’

  His mouth descended to halt any protest, any attempt to argue further. His kiss was gentle, his lips perfectly shaped to take in the contours of her mouth, practised now in melding their individual ardour into a single, elemental passion.

  ‘None at all,’ she managed to whisper after an interval that seemed an eternity, but which they both knew was only the beginning.

  ~~~

  About the Author

  Victoria Gordon is the pseudonym and muse for Canadian/Australian author

  Gordon Aalborg’s more than twenty contemporary romances.

  As himself, he is the author of the western romance The Horse Tamer’s Challenge (2009) and the Tasmanian-oriented suspense thrillers The Specialist (2004)and Dining with Devils (2009)

  as well as the Australian feral cat survival epic Cat Tracks.

  Born in Canada, Aalborg spent half his life in Australia, mostly in Tasmania, and now lives

  on Vancouver Island, in Canada, with his wife, the mystery and romance author Denise Dietz.

  More on www.gordonaalborg.com and www.victoriagordonromance.com

  THE BOOKS

  As Victoria Gordon

  Wolf in Tiger’s Stripes (2010)

  Finding Bess (2004)

  Beguiled and Bedazzled (1996)

  An Irresistible Flirtation (1995)

  A Magical Affair (1994)

  Gift-Wrapped (1993)

  A Taxing Affair (1993)

  Love Thy Neighbour (1990)

  Arafura Pirate (1989)

  Forest Fever (1986)

  Cyclone Season (1985)

  Age of Consent (1985)

  Bushranger's Mountain (1985)

  Battle of Wills (1982)

  Dinner At Wyatt's (1982)

  Blind Man's Buff (1982)

  Stag At Bay (1982)

  Dream House (1981)

  Always The Boss (1981)

  The Everywhere Man (1981)

  Wolf At The Door (1981)

  The Sugar Dragon (1980)

  as Gordon Aalborg

  Cat Tracks (Hyland House: Melbourne: 1981)

  (Delphi Books: U.S. edition: 2002)

  The Specialist (Five Star Mysteries: 2004)

  Dining with Devils (Five Star Mysteries: 2009)

  The Horse Tamer’s Challenge (Five Star Expressions: 2009)