Why had she never known there would be such a powerful, glorious sense of freedom in giving full rein to her own desires? Why had she never realised how euphoric the knowledge of her own passion could be?
'Angelica...Angel... That's how you feel; too perfect to be real.' She tasted the husky compliments on Daniel's lips as his hands cupped her naked breasts, the rough heat of his palms against her nipples turning them stiff with excitement and anticipation.
'Touch me, Angelica. Touch me, please. I want to feel your hands on my body.'
Eagerly she followed his whispered pleas, tugging impatiently at buttons and fastenings in her need to explore the male heat of his flesh. She felt him tremble violently as her fingertips skimmed the hot satin hardness of his chest, urging away his shirt.
She kissed his throat, lost in a delirious voyage of discovery, culminating in a sudden surge of feminine excitement that stopped abruptly when she flicked her tongue delicately against the button hardness of his nipple. Unable to resist the lure of her own instincts, she covered the small area of flesh with her mouth, teasing it gently with her teeth and then not so gently as she felt the heat pulse through her own body.
Lost in her own growing pleasure, she felt an abrupt shock when Daniel suddenly took hold of her, wrenching her away from his body, his voice rough and raw with warning as he demanded, 'Have you any idea what you're doing to me? How fast you're pushing me to the edge of my self-control?'
Confusion and uncertainty clouded her eyes. Had she done something wrong, offended him in some way? She was suddenly acutely aware of her lack of experience, of the fact that, while she had undoubtedly enjoyed caressing him, he might not have found her caresses equally welcome.
Embarrassed and guilty, she withdrew from him, saying stiffly, 'I'm sorry. I didn't think. I shouldn't--'
She didn't get any further. Daniel made a taut explosive sound in his throat which visibly tensed the muscles there and demanded, 'You shouldn't have what? Made me feel like this?'
Before she could stop him, his hand cupped her breast, his lips feathering its quivering tip in much the same way as she had caressed him, but Angelica was beyond recognising that fact, incapable of recognising anything other than the intense surge of pleasure that jolted through her, turning her boneless, turning her stomach into a hollow of liquid excitement and making her moan his name out aloud and cling with desperate hands to his arms. The gentle pressure of his mouth became harder, more urgent, more compelling. She was shivering with emotion and arousal, only half listening to him while Daniel whispered rawly against her flesh that now she knew exactly how she had made him feel.
She heard him but didn't believe him. Couldn't believe that her inexperienced touch could possibly have aroused him to the frenzy of need his had evoked from her. She was still trembling when his mouth slowly released her swollen flesh, still too caught up in the urgency of her feelings to even think of protesting when his mouth burned a path down over the taut flesh of her ribcage and came to rest on the soft swell of her belly, nibbling at the satin softness of her skin as though the taste of it intoxicated him.
'I want you, Angelica,' he told her huskily. 'Right now there's nothing I want more than to take you to bed and make love to you, but I can't .. .'
Her mind registered the words like a blow, stunned by the unexpected force of it, too crippled to retaliate, while her body screamed in silent agony at his cruelty. To have aroused her so intensely, to have allowed her to believe ...to expect ...to want ...
She made a stifled sound of anguish in her throat and tried to pull away from him, but he wouldn't let her go.
'No. Wait. Don't you understand? I can't make love to you because I can't protect you from the consequences of that lovemaking. I can't protect you from conceiving my child.'
As his words sank in, she knew she ought to be grateful to him, not resentful. She knew one day maybe she would be, but right now ... Right now she felt humiliated and rejected, raw inside with an ache like one from an open wound. She was intensely conscious of how hard she was finding it to get her aroused body back under control, of how much it ached even now for Daniel's touch, for Daniel's possession.
'I never intended things to go so far,' she heard him telling her, but instead of soothing her, his words only inflamed her anguish. She was the one to blame for what had happened. Not him. She was the one who had deliberately tried to force the pace,. who had eagerly and wantonly let her body tell him how much it wanted him.
She felt sick with bitter reaction, nauseously self-contemptuous in a way that not even Giles had made her feel. This was different. Then she had been contemptuous of her emotional folly, this-this physical ... loss, this wanton desire for a man who plainly did not want her... She started to tremble violently, moaning a sharp protest when instead of releasing her so that she could escape to her own room, to privacy and darkness, Daniel continued to hold on to her, pulling her firmly into his arms, imprisoning her against the warm length of his body so that she was almost lying on top of him and intimately conscious of the heat and strength of him.
Her bitter protest was smothered against his skin as he closed his arms around her, one hand soothingly stroking her back, the other refusing to release her, his voice a soft, gentle whisper as he coaxed her to relax. Relax, that was the last thing she wanted to do, and yet oddly, beneath the soothing pressure of his stroking hand, and the soft, mesmeric lull of his voice, she discovered that that was exactly what she was doing, all the angry tension and the overwrought desire eased from her body as he gently brought it down from the frenzied heights of arousal to a more restful plain.
Gradually her breathing slowed and deepened, her eyes closing, her body relaxing into sleep.
Glancing wryly into her sleeping face,Daniel wished he could ease the tormenting ache from his own flesh as thoroughly as he had soothed it from hers. He felt guilty that he had allowed things to get so out of hand, but he had never imagined that she would touch him so intimately nor so arousingly. And once she had ... Well, once she had, the pleasure of feeling her mouth moving against his skin had been far too intense for him to stop her.
As he eased her gently away from him, his body pulsed its aching message of need to stay close to her. It was just as well she had fallen asleep, otherwise ... otherwise. .. Otherwise he would have been dangerously tempted to go on making love to her and to hell with the consequences.
He was a rational, analytical man who rarely acted on impulse, but now he reflected grimly that there were some needs and impulses over which the brain had precious little control, and unless he wanted them to take over his life completely he had better take Angelica upstairs and leave her safely alone in her own bed.
It was just as well she was moving next door in the morning. Then he would no longer be in the invidious position of having to keep some distance between them, of having not to seem to take advantage of their situation. Then he would be able to establish a proper relationship with her. Smiling softly at her, he bent his head and pressed a lingering kiss on her mouth. In her sleep she mumbled his name and her lips clung moistly to his. He felt his heart start to thunder and his body tense, and, sighing a little, he released her.
CHAPTER FIVE
ANGELICA lay tensely in bed, straining to catch some sound of activity from downstairs. She had woken up half an hour ago, and immediately the events of the previous evening had come flooding back to her. The mere fact that she had been tucked beneath the quilt still half dressed told its own story, and she reflected bitterly that it had no doubt come as a great relief to Daniel when she had so conveniently fallen asleep before things had got too embarrassingly out of hand.
Poor man, all he had probably intended to do was to exchange a few meaningless kisses with her. A pleasant finale to their evening together, their last evening together, and she had had to go and make a complete fool of herself by behaving in a way that had been so pathetically over the top that her whole body burned with hot embarrassment even
to think of it.
Thank goodness she had already made the decision to take up residence next door. Daniel must be feeling as relieved about that as she was herself. There was really no excuse for the way she had behaved last night, like-like a woman starved of physical affection for so long that her hunger for it had totally overwhelmed her.
She moved uncomfortably in her bed. What had happened to her must have been some sort of physical backlash to Giles's rejection of her. That and the overheated atmosphere of intimacy forced on her by her illness was what had led to her astoundingly stupid behaviour.
The wine hadn't helped, of course. Alcohol was notorious for relaxing one's inhibitions. But surely the desire had to be there in the first place. And that didn't account for the fact that she had felt such an extraordinary intensity of desire for Daniel, only that she had given way to it. And if she was honest with herself, hadn't she really been aware of him as a man for far longer than a mere evening?
Her mind balked at accepting the truth. What kind of woman was she anyway? She who had always felt so safe and so aloof from the vagaries of sexual desire, she who had always assumed that it was a need from which she was never going to suffer. Was it something to do with her age-a woman-something to do with the fact that she was a woman nearing thirty who had suddenly woken up and realised that she was not fulfilling her primary biological function? But it hadn't been a desire to conceive a child that had sent her wild in Daniel's arms, had it? It had been her need, her intense physical ache to make herself a part of him. It had been for her!
Maybe then it was caused by the stress she had suffered; maybe it was some kind of delayed reaction to losing Giles. Maybe she had even somehow or other transferred on to Daniel the physical desire she should have felt, but never had felt, for Giles.
She pressed her hands to her temples, helplessly wishing she could just close her eyes .and make last night disappear from her memory and from Daniel's.
She could hear him moving about downstairs, and, reluctant as she was to face him, the thought of him coming to find her, walking into her bedroom, seeing her lying beneath the quilt where he had placed her and undoubtedly then remembering how she had behaved last night was enough to have her scooting up out of bed and hurrying to get showered and downstairs.
Once she was dressed, she lingered as long as she could over packing away her possessions and her clothes, while acknowledging that she could hardly stay upstairs all day.
Taking a deep breath, she opened her bedroom door. The sooner she went down and faced Daniel, the sooner she would be able to escape next door.
Even if he was compassionate enough not to mention last night, it was going to lie between the two of them, creating deep embarrassment on her part and no doubt making him regret that he had ever given in to whatever impulse had moved him to kiss her in the first place.
It was all very well remembering that he had said he wanted her, that he had touched her with passion and need. It was different for men. They were allowed to be carried away by the needs of their flesh. Women were expected to be more circumspect, and anyway, the way she remembered it, she was the one whose self-control had snapped so disastrously.
If she had expected Daniel to glibly and sophisticatedly ignore the fact that last night had ever happened, if she had expected him to behave as though it was a subject best not referred to, the moment she stepped into the kitchen she realised her mistake.
He must have heard her coming downstairs because he was waiting for her, watching her with grave scrutiny as she walked into the room.
He came towards her, still studying her, his quiet, 'Are you OK?' making her nerve-endings tingle warningly as she stepped sideways to avoid the hand he held out to her and chose to pretend that she thought he was referring to her original food poisoning by averting her head and saying briefly, Yes, I'm fine. In fact, totally recovered. I shan't eat at an unfamiliar restaurant again in a hurry . though.'
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his mouth compress as though he was annoyed. But what had he expected her to say? she wondered nervily as her heart skipped a beat and her pulses started to race.
That she still ached inside for him, that she was confused and afraid of the power of her own desires, that she felt humiliated and ashamed of the way she had behaved, that her mind was full of searing mental images of how she had touched him, her brain ringing with the bitter-sweet betrayal of the pleas she had made to him. Did he really expect her to admit to all of that? Couldn't he see how difficult she was finding it just to try to behave normally, when all she really wanted to do was to crawl away and hide herself somewhere until she could come to terms with what was happening to her?
And what was happening to her? She knew that physically he affected her in ways that once would have made her laugh in self-derision. She knew that the mere sight of him sent her heartbeat and pulse rate into such a frenzied burst of over-activity that she felt she was in danger of hyperventilating. She knew that this strange aching pain growing inside her like a grey cloud of melancholy meant that it wasn't just physically that he affected her, but she also knew that it would be self-destructive in the extreme to allow herself to dwell too deeply on any of these things.
From behind her she heard Daniel saying grimly, 'I wasn't referring to your food poisoning and you know it. Last night we came damn close to being lovers. When I put you to bed I--'
It was too much. She couldn't bear any more. For a man whom she had believed to be extraordinarily sensitive and aware for one of his sex, he was suddenly displaying such a cruel disregard of her feelings that she could only believe that he must actually be enjoying inflicting this humiliation on her.
She had tried ignoring the issue, pretending that it hadn't happened ... He hadn't taken the hint, hadn't seemed to accept that it was something she just could not bear to discuss, but he couldn't force her to respond to him.
Compressing her lips, she hurried over to the coffee-machine and picked up the jug of hot coffee, pouring some into a mug. Her hand wavered, the hot liquid splashing on to her bare arm, causing her to stifle a small sound of pain.
Even as she put down the jug, Daniel was beside her, holding her scalded arm, frowning down at it as he hustled her over to the sink and ran cold water over it.
The scald was only minor-the effect of his fingers on her skin, the heat of his body standing directly behind her own so that she only had to lean back to rest against him and feel the warmth of his breath on her hair, however, were a major threat to her equilibrium and far harder to bear than the sting from the scald.
'I'll spray it with something,' he told her grimly. 'That should take away the sting.'
She had to suppress an insane desire to ask if it would have the same effect on her heart, but stopped herself in time.
This was the Daniel with whom she was familiar. The Daniel who had tended her so comfortingly when she was ill. The Daniel whom she had come to rely on and trust so gradually and insidiously that she hadn't realised until she woke up this morning just how dependent on him she had become.
She wanted him so desperately in her life, she recognised numbly, and not just as a friend. Her heart gave a tremendous bound as she acknowledged her physical need for him. It seemed to jolt visibly right through her body, causing Daniel to tighten his grip on her and demand roughly, 'Are you sure you're all right? You've gone as white as snow.'
Driven beyond her self-control, she snapped frantically, 'Will you please stop going on about last night? So you kissed me and lover-reacted. Can't we just leave it at that? It isn't an episode I'm particularly proud of, nor what I feel inclined to sit down and discuss in depth over breakfast, no matter how much you seem to relish the thought--'
She broke off as something in the quality of his silence reached her. When she looked at him, he was watching her with a curiously opaque gaze so that she had no idea what he might be thinking.
In a voice totally devoid of any inflexion he told her softly, 'As a m
atter of fact, I wasn't referring to last night.' He looked from her face to the reddening patch on her arm, and immediately her face burned as the realisation that he had been referring to her scald sank in. She took a gulp of her still too hot coffee, badly needing its stimulation and warmth. It burned her throat, making her wince.
'Look, Angelica, while we are on the subject of last night .. .'
Panic churned inside her. She wasn't ready to listen to him-she would never be ready to listen to him on this subject. She could all too easily guess what he wanted to say to her; how he must be determined to ensure that she hadn't misunderstood what had happened, that she wasn't harbouring any foolish illusions about whatever it was that had prompted him to kiss her in the first place, but right at this moment it was more than she was capable of to stand stoically and endure whatever it was he felt he must say to her.
'I want to apologise,' she heard him saying quietly. 'I should never .. .'
Never have what? Touched her? She suppressed a wild desire to start laughing. Not with amusement. The feeling inside her was more one of frantic hysteria. Hysteria! Her? Impossible!
And yet even knowing that the wise thing, the sensible thing, the only mature thing was to simply stand here and calmly accept whatever it was that he wanted to say to her, she found herself protesting fiercely that there was nothing he needed to say, at the same time, as she edged away from him, putting as much distance between them as she could so that within seconds her back was pressed up against the kitchen unit while he watched her with narrowed, careful eyes.
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