Nicholas must have been out here when the phone had rung, she realised, discovering a folded-back newspaper on one of the stone seats. Picking it up, she sipped her lime juice and stood reading a few items of news in the fiery light of one of India’s spectacular sunsets, the unromantic cause of which, Nicholas had been unkind enough to tell her last weekend, was the thousands of fires still necessary to India’s poor if they were to have cooked meals.
When Nicholas emerged from the house she dropped the paper and gave him a quick shy smile, his sweeping survey making her very conscious of the shorts and veststyle cotton-knit top she had put on, tired of the short straight skirts she considered her work clothes, after three days of them. He himself was still wearing an office shirt with the trousers of a suit, although he had loosened his tie and unfastened the top buttons as well as rolling his sleeves up.
‘How was Madras?’ he asked rather perfunctorily. ‘Safe and successful, I must assume, since here you are… You really and truly have got legs, haven’t you?’
But although his eyes rested on their slender, lightly tanned length for several seconds he sounded distracted. Bridget saw the tightness around his mouth and the frown of annoyance that drew his black eyebrows together, and promptly forgot everything she had been so eager to share with him.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Nothing serious.’ Nicholas was dismissive. ‘Just one of my cousins. He’s actually twenty-seven, but Loris is the brat and the baby of the family, and he makes a habit of involving himself with somewhat possessive young ladies and then having to be extricated from their clutches when he tires of them. He has just been on the phone asking if there’s any chance of an immediate overseas assignment until the current attachment’s ardour cools, but there’s not really anything requiring his presence outside England right now, unless I let him take over from me here, and that means I’ll no longer be able to keep an eye on what you’re up to. He handled our Seoul—’
He broke off in response to the crash and tinkle of Bridget’s glass hitting the tiles at her feet and shattering, bits of glass and what remained of the lime juice scattering far and wide.
‘I…’ Bridget pulled her horrified gaze away from his face and looked down, beginning to go forward, ready to pick up the pieces. ‘Oh, what have I done?’
‘Don’t be stupid, you’ll cut yourself. You aren’t even wearing shoes,’ Nicholas snapped, noticing her bare feet, and, as she drew back in instinctive obedience to his peremptory tone, he reached out, taking her arm and drawing her away from the mess. ‘It’s all right. Come inside where there’s no glass. I’ll tell Sita what has happened and find out if Gopi Sindhi is still around to come and clear it up and hose the tiles.’
Bridget had yet to meet the man who was responsible for the garden, and she had been looking forward to telling him how much she admired his work, but now, standing numbly in the centre of the living-room, she couldn’t summon a spark of interest.
She had thought of Loris less and less frequently over the last few days, but with Nicholas’s words now hammering at her brain it was as if she were reliving those humiliating moments in London when she had found out how cynically he had her lined up to replace his current girlfriend.
‘He’ll be along in a few minutes,’ Nicholas announced, returning.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Normally she would have been a lot more distressed over what she had done, but a broken glass hardly constituted disaster measured against the shocking news Nicholas had imparted. ‘Are you going to let him? Let your cousin take over from you here, I mean.’
Amused realisation lit his face as he searched her eyes, so shadowy and appalled that barely a hint of green was discernible.
‘Why is it upsetting you so much? I wondered if there was something more than mere clumsiness behind your dropping the glass, especially as you’re the reverse of clumsy most of the time—quite breathtakingly graceful, in fact.’ As Nicholas paused, still appraising her pale face, his amusement took on a diabolically mocking quality. ‘Will you miss me so much, Bridget, if I go home and let Loris complete the safety survey for me?’
‘No, of course not!’ she protested agitatedly, confused colour replacing her pallor and bringing a surge of angry resentment. ‘I’d be delighted not to have you around, wanting to interfere in the work I’m doing! I just think it’s typically arrogant of you to want to interfere in his life. He ought to be able to rescue himself from things he gets into.’
‘It’s hardly the gratuitous interference you’re implying when it was Loris who rang me asking to be rescued,’ Nicholas retorted caustically.
It distracted her momentarily because it upset her perception of him as an arrogant despot, arbitrarily running the lives of his family, but she was still too shaken by the prospect of having to confront Loris again to give the matter any real reflection.
‘And is that what you’re going to do?’ she asked unevenly, already realising frantically that she could hardly run away from an encounter when she was committed to doing a job for Virginia.
‘I haven’t decided yet. I told him I’d call him back later. But why is it really bothering you so much—?’ Nicholas broke off, eyes narrowing in sudden concentration, and Bridget saw him make the connection between the subject and her obvious distress. ‘My God! Loris is the man you’ve been breaking your heart over, isn’t he? I suppose you met him one of the times he sloped off to visit Virginia in her office?’
Bridget didn’t know what to say, knocked completely off balance, the first shock of learning that she might have to face Loris rendering her incapable of bracing herself to withstand that of his disconcertingly clever guess.
‘I…’ She couldn’t speak and she was shaking like a victim of real, successive earth-tremors.
‘He is, isn’t he, Bridget?’ Nicholas repeated inexorably.
‘Yes, all right, damn it, he is!’ Bridget confessed tempestuously, knowing she could never manage any convincing lies, and then discovering an unsuspected store of pride that made it intolerable to have him see her in this state.
She turned to leave the room and was aware of Nicholas following right behind her.
‘Something neither you nor Virginia have seen fit to tell me,’ he accused harshly, but the arrival of a short dark individual with a young man’s slim figure and an old man’s face prevented anything further, and Bridget made her escape.
Not that she could truly escape, she accepted, so there was no point in hiding herself away in her bedroom; therefore she went out to the veranda overlooking the formal rose-garden.
She would have to face Nicholas again, and Loris too in all probability, because she could hardly rely on Nicholas to be as kind as Virginia and wish to spare her the trauma of such a meeting.
Standing out there in the gathering purple darkness and trying to still her trembling reaction to the emotional violence of the last few minutes, Bridget felt truly alone for the first time in her sheltered life, adrift and unprotected as she confronted these difficult realities.
She knew when Nicholas emerged from the house and came to stand behind her, although he made no sound and cast no shadow. She could feel his presence as a difference in the atmosphere, at once warming, because she was no longer alone, and oppressively threatening, as if he represented some unknown danger.
Then his hands came to rest on her shoulders, dispelling such wild fancies, her alarmed jerk purely a reaction to the simple physical contact.
‘No, don’t move,’ he urged coolly when she would have twisted away.
Obediently, she stood still, her ponytail falling forward over one shoulder as she bent her head, trying to steel herself to endure the mockery she was sure would be forthcoming, without making more of a fool of herself than she had already done.
But the fingers curving about her shoulders were making her shiver, despite their warmth and the soft humidity of the October night, and seconds later she was reduced to a state of quivering helplessness as
she felt his mouth come to rest against the vulnerable nape of her neck.
The kiss was deliberately erotic, a slow slide of lips parting over the tender area, warm pressure, and then sensuously exploratory movement.
Bridget didn’t breathe until she was forced to gasp, at the mercy of a fluttery sensation in her pelvic region that was part panic but mostly pleasure. His mouth seemed to grow hotter and harder, its pressure heavier, either demanding or commanding, and Bridget’s whole body tensed, arching involuntarily, causing his hands to tighten on her shoulders.
‘What…? What…?’ Her voice emerged as a strangled whisper and Nicholas ended the kiss.
‘Did you like that?’ he enquired idly, deftly turning her to face him and continuing without waiting for an answer. ‘What have I decided? Is that what you want to know? That my cousin can get himself out of his predicament this time, and that I am staying right here in India. I always like being here for a while anyway, and I’m going to enjoy it even more now that I know I don’t have to go on restraining myself where you are concerned—that I can in fact touch as well as look, and to several excellent ends, it seems.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Bridget demanded wildly, still subject to a debilitating sensation under the hands that now held her by the upper arm.
‘You, of course.’ She could just see his confident smile in the darkness, a flash of white. ‘Crying over Loris in the night—was it out of disappointment, Bridget? Wouldn’t he marry you? Did he tell you or did you find out by chance? You weren’t in love with him, though.’
‘I was,’ she began insistently, too confused to think of dissembling.
‘Oh, no, darling, if there had been anything like that, you couldn’t have felt what you did—what you’re still feeling now because I’m touching you,’ he asserted softly. ‘You know, you seemed so young and inexperienced that I thought I’d better resist temptation for once in my life. But I know Loris and if you’ve been around with him you can’t be the innocent I took you for, although it seems you need convincing that you weren’t in love with him—or is it me you’re trying to convince that you were? Because your real interest in him won’t bear scrutiny, perhaps?’
‘I don’t believe you! I don’t believe any of this!’
Whatever she had expected from Nicholas, it wasn’t this, and it convinced her that he was the cruellest of the Stirling men, worse by far than Loris, if he could tease her like this when he had seen for himself how upset she was.
‘Why not, Bridget?’ he urged in a tone of lazy enjoyment. ‘Oh, I’ll admit it surprised me too at first, just because you did seem so very young, but I’ve kept finding myself fascinated by things about you that I’ve never even noticed with other women—the curve of your cheeks when the light is behind you, for instance, and the way your hair grows back from your temples and brow, and then there’s the back of your neck—it’s irresistible, as you must have just found out if you didn’t know it before—and your hands that look as if they’ve never held a man. All misleading, of course, but my mistake, and I’ve now learnt better.’
‘Learnt what?’ she questioned him faintly, her perception of their relationship severely shaken by the astonishing things he was saying.
‘That I can have you after all,’ Nicholas claimed with flippant satisfaction.
‘Nobody has me,’ Bridget began indignantly.
‘Oh, you’ll have me too,’ he conceded lightly. ‘Forget Loris, Bridget. You won’t remember him soon anyway.’
She registered his supremely arrogant meaning, but she had no concentration to spare for finding a suitably stinging retort because Nicholas was sliding his arm about her and drawing her into a close embrace, the devastating self-asssurance with which he did so justified by her absolute lack of resistance.
Bridget was engulfed in warmth which she sensed could become overwhelming heat, and some nameless emotion was exploding in her breast, intense and painful.
Somehow her hands were on his shoulders and creeping towards the powerful column of his neck, fingers stirring tentatively against its warmth before finding their way to the sides of his face, only a couple of inches above hers and inscrutable in the dark.
She heard the slow breath Nicholas drew as she stared at him, eyes still straining to penetrate the darkness that hid him from her. The search failing, she let the fingers of one hand wander over his features, reading him that way but still not knowing him, while her other hand strayed to the clean smoothness of his hair, instinctively stroking it, the movements gentle and rhythmic but trembling too, because she was shaking like a spring flower in a gale, buffeted and about to break.
‘Well, go on, don’t keep me in suspense. Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ Nicholas invited her as her fingers paused almost shyly in their passage from the bridge of his nose to the outer angle of one cheekbone.
The thread of amusement running through his voice snatched her out of mindlessness for a moment, allowing her a single coherent thought: what was she doing? But a hand at the small of her back, exerting a gentle pressure and bringing her closer still to the taut male body, prevented another. Her fingers dropped from the angular line of his cheek to his collarbone, and the hand that had been tracing the beautiful contours of his proud head made its way to the back of his neck and pressed in, innocently urging him closer.
Mouths touched and parted, touched again and merged, and Bridget was drawn into a new world of intense feeling. Physically it was both exhilarating and terrifying; emotionally it was oddly and profoundly moving. This was nothing like that other fleeting kiss in the courtyard. Her senses thrilled to firm male lips parting hers with superb mastery, and to the way his mouth possessed hers and directed her response.
Nothing like this had ever happened to Bridget before. She had never touched a man with such unthinking lack of inhibition as she had been doing a few moments ago, or held on to anyone as confidently as she was doing now. She had never submitted to anyone or anything with such a feeling of it being right and natural to do so, and nor had anyone ever controlled her as Nicholas did. It was almost as if he was setting the pace of her reactions for her, delaying by giving her time to absorb each new sensation, waiting for whatever signals he was receiving from her before scooping her easily up to the next level of excitement.
When the need for more made her shudder, he deepened their kisses, the most intimate Bridget had ever known, the probing possession shocking to her senses. His mouth was so hot and knowledgeable about its task, but no more heated than hers, responding with an urgency that made the smoothly gliding play of lips and tongues almost a contradiction.
A new intensity of hunger racked her when her acutely sensitised mouth was briefly freed, the spasm shaking her whole body. Nicholas captured her lips again, and now he began to run his hands sensitively over the suppleness of her slender body, the light caresses covering its entire willowy length. With a soft sound of helpless pleasure, Bridget surrendered herself to this new delight, her body pliantly yielding, and yet her breasts were hard and aching against the solid wall of his chest, yet another of passion’s paradoxes.
As his blazing mouth slipped knowingly from hers to the side of her neck, she felt his hands cup her buttocks briefly, then the fingers of one against the bareness of her thigh below the edge of her shorts, and a tiny, shivery cry escaped her, a sound of helpless wonderment.
Soft heat bloomed between her thighs and there was a similar blossoming, but more fiery and intense, deep within her, which threatened to consume.
Her head fell back as his mouth acquainted itself with every graceful curve and line of her throat, and her body was stirring quite naturally, beginning to writhe with its woman’s need to admit—to take in.
Nicholas raised his head as he felt her make the transition from pleasurable desire to pure wanting, bringing his hands round to clasp her slim hips, stilling her erotic movements before she could become completely lost in mounting passion.
But Bridget was alrea
dy deep in the cycle of arousal and response he had introduced, and she had no answering control with which to match his. Still her body clung to his, and her lips had found the strength of his throat above his unbuttoned collar and loosened tie and were pressing compulsive kisses against his skin, which was fever-hot and slightly, tantalisingly damp.
‘This is all very promising, darling, but I suspect that Sita may be about to summon us to dinner,’ he cautioned her in a tone of rich satisfaction, still holding her by the hips.
Slowly, so infinitely slowly, Bridget made the dazed descent back from the heights, past all the levels of sensation through which he had carried her, to painful frustration—and ensuing panic.
‘What do you think you were doing?’ she demanded, wrenching herself out of his hold, turbulent emotion roughening her soft voice.
‘Well, it was mostly what you were doing,’ he quipped drily. ‘You were beautifully responsive, and so incredibly quickly… Are you changing for dinner?’
With awareness fully restored to her, Bridget’s dominant feeling was angry embarrassment, and it left her speechless, so she welcomed the opportunity to flee.
Burning shame scorched her, intensifying when she reached her bedroom and caught sight of her reflection in the mirror, eyes feverishly glazed, cheeks hectic. Hastily she lowered her gaze. How was it possible for her to have forgotten herself, to have forgotten who and what Nicholas was and how things stood between them, to such an extent, and to have felt—all that?
The obvious explanation was his experience and her lack of it. She wasn’t used to physical contact with a man and didn’t know the tricks by which her body’s urges might be suppressed, so she had been unable to resist him. Even the hostility between them and her dislike of his cynicism and arrogance had counted for nothing, which was probably the most shaming thing of all, because she thought it must mean she lacked the strength of character to give her emotional or mental control over her physical desires.
Sophisticated Seduction Page 7
