by Penny Jordan
‘I can’t,’ she protested, panicky. It was too soon… too much… she wasn’t ready yet for that kind of decision, that kind of commitment—and besides, how could she leave Joel?
Kenneth watched her. He could afford to wait, to enjoy the pleasure of anticipation, and sooner or later she would come to him, he was sure of it.
If her husband was as sexually driven as she was implying, Kenneth doubted that he would be content to live a semi-celibate life for very long. Sooner rather than later there would be another woman, Kenneth reflected cynically, and once there was…
‘I can’t bear to think of you going back to him,’ he told Sally after they had gone round in circles for another ten minutes. ‘Being with him… sleeping with him…’
‘Don’t,’ Sally protested, her eyes filling with tears. She felt as though she was being pulled apart, her body and her emotions wrenched into aching sickness by her conflicting needs.
Talking with Kenneth had underlined the emptiness of her marriage and her relationship with Joel, and yet he was her husband; she had committed herself to him. If she left him…
‘Don’t look like that,’ Kenneth told her. ‘It’s not your fault. He’s the one who’s to blame for losing your love, Sally, not you.’ He turned her towards him, releasing her hand to cup her face and look down at her. They were alone in the garden, but Sally still looked anxiously over his shoulder as Kenneth bent to kiss her. The sensation of his mouth brushing delicately against hers with a gentle control instead of the intense passion she had expected filled her eyes with grateful tears.
‘Right now there’s nothing I want more than to take you home with me and make love to you until you agree to leave him and stay with me, but I can’t do that… my conscience wouldn’t let me. Just as I can’t take hold of you now and force the issue between us by making us lovers.
‘That isn’t the way I want it to be between us, Sally,’ he told her quietly. ‘You are going to be mine, but I want our coming together, our sexual intimacy to be a celebration of our feelings for one another, not some frantic, urgent sexual coupling which leaves us both feeling as though we’ve been cheated… You mean too much to me for that.’
He had her now, Kenneth exulted. He could see from her face just how much his words were affecting her.
As a student he had won a commendation for his powers of oration. His ex-wife had derided him as a verbal poseur, a show-off, who enjoyed talking about sex more than he enjoyed doing it.
‘I won’t rush you,’ he promised Sally. ‘But I won’t let you go, either. I need you, Sally…’
* * *
‘Joel, we mustn’t,’ Philippa repeated shakily, but there was no real conviction in her voice, no real desire for his fingers to stop their gentle stroking of her scalp nor for his eyes to stop gazing down into hers, recognising her desire, responding to it, promising…
Her brain, her mind, her conscience told her one thing, but her body clamoured wildly for another, and if she really wanted him to stop then why was she turning her face up towards his, moving closer to him, staring at his mouth while her body shivered in sensual excitement and arousal?
He shouldn’t being doing this, Joel recognised; he should have more restraint and more control… No matter how much he wanted her… ached for her, no matter how intense his desire… no matter how cold the bed he shared with Sally, he could not… should not. But then she moved against him, an unintentional, oddly innocent but wholly sensual small frisson of sensation that touched his own flesh and destroyed his will-power.
She was so caring… so warm and yielding, so responsive, and he ached so badly with his need for her.
Nothing else mattered other than what was happening between them now… Nothing… nothing…
His hands cupped her face… He could feel her trembling, see her throat muscles move as she swallowed nervously. He bent his head to kiss her, and her lips felt soft and full, moist, the trembling of her body increasing.
It seemed a lifetime to him since a kiss had felt like this: exciting, arousing, making him ache until he was almost in agony.
If she had ever been kissed like this before, hungered, ached, needed like this before, she didn’t remember it, Philippa acknowledged dizzily; this fierce, eager union of lips, of mouths and tongues, this devouring, aching intensity was something new and unfamiliar; and yet it was also somehow something that a part of her had always known… a dim echo of all those hours, those nights spent fantasising about a lover who would make her feel like this, who would be the spark that would set fire to the dry virgin territory of her sexuality, making it burn until both of them were caught up in its conflagration.
This, she recognised, was the force, the power within herself that a part of her had always feared and stepped back from—this knowledge of what her sexuality really was.
‘I want you… I need you… Oh, please don’t make me wait.’
The words surrounded her, fevered verbal acknowledgements of her physical arousal echoing the other sounds of their intimacy: the scratch and rustle of fabric against her skin as Joel removed their clothes, his own far less gently than hers, cursing as he tried to remove his jeans with one hand, unwilling to let go of her completely, to stop caressing and kissing her; the soft, silken brush of skin against skin, body warming body in the cool air of the room; the slightly rougher sound of his hands touching her, stroking her, shaping the curves of her body while he marvelled at its femininity, told her with his hands and eyes and mouth how much all of her delighted and aroused him; the sound of mouth meeting mouth; of accelerated charged breathing, quick gasps; the soft, satisfied suckle of Joel’s mouth against her breast, drawing her nipple deep into his mouth until she felt he could almost draw the aching hunger of need out of her flesh like someone sucking poison from a wound.
There was something intensely erotic about the feel and taste of a woman’s breast, Joel acknowledged, and yet at the same time something almost forbidden in the awareness that his adult male pleasure had its roots in the innocent infant suckling of a child at its mother’s breast.
Sally had not liked him to caress her breasts like this after she had had the children. She said it was because feeding them and then going on the Pill had made them too sensitive.
Angrily he pushed the thought of Sally out of his mind. She didn’t want him, wouldn’t care what he was doing. Not like Philippa, who was whispering feverishly to him that the feel of his mouth against her breast was making her ache to have him inside her, who was touching, stroking his body with urgent, helpless little gestures of pleading need.
Philippa gave a sharp high moan of pleasure as Joel’s hand slipped between her legs and touched her, stroked her, made her shudder in uncontrollable response to his caress.
This was, she recognised distantly, her sexuality laid bare, stripped of civilisation and pretence, of custom and upbringing to reveal its pure, basic core; and there was a purity to her need… to their need… as though its very urgency and intensity had burned away the emotions of shame and guilt.
‘Now. Now… now…’ she demanded huskily, pressing herself fiercely against Joel.
‘Oh, God. Yes… Yes…’
She could hear the exultation, the male triumph in his voice as Joel lifted her up, holding her as she balanced herself against him and wrapped her legs round him. Her body felt slippery with sweat, her breast laved with the moist suckle of his mouth.
Her desire for him was so intense that the sensation of him entering her made her shudder in exquisite relief. He felt bigger, harder than she could ever remember Andrew feeling, her awareness of the sensation of him within her intensely acute; the intensity of her orgasm, the urgency and swiftness with which it overwhelmed her were as unfamiliar as the extent of her desire.
She heard herself cry out and Joel make an answering guttural response, driving through her orgasm and carrying her with him, prolonging it until he reached his own peak.
Afterwards Joel held her tightly, str
oking her damp hair back off her face, kissing her forehead, and then her mouth, gently, and then a second time, questioningly, before silently taking her hand and leading her upstairs.
This time their need was just as great, but their pace slower, so that she had time to marvel at the way the sunlight through the window played on his skin, highlighting the formation of the muscles that lay beneath it. She traced them, wandering with fingertips and then her mouth, kissing his throat and his chest, savouring the taste of him on her tongue, her senses excited by the maleness of him.
It had never occurred to her during her marriage to Andrew that a man’s body could be something to admire, his arousal something to gloat secretly over in deep-seated female triumph. With Andrew the rare sight of his naked body had caused her to feel uncomfortable and faintly embarrassed for him as well as for herself. Now, without realising it, as she touched Joel she was making soft purring sounds of feminine approval and admiration, touching him, looking at him, Joel recognised as he watched her, as though his body was her greatest delight, giving him visually and verbally the approval and acceptance that every man’s ego secretly yearned for.
There could be no greater delight than this… no deeper, richer pleasure than to lie next to a woman you had just made love to knowing you had pleased and satisfied her, hearing her making those soft cooing sounds of pleasure.
His throat tightening with emotion, Joel reached for her, drawing her back down against his body, holding her, Philippa recognised shakily, with the kind of tenderness that transformed what had happened between them from something purely physical to something far, far more dangerous.
Slowly Joel traced the bones of her face, his face shadowed and sombre. She felt so frail in his arms, so soft and vulnerable. He had felt her need in the way she’d clung to him and responded to him; the way her flesh had welcomed him. He felt his heart lurch against his breastbone. This was how it should be between a man and a woman… how…
‘Philippa, I…’
Shakily Philippa reached out and placed her fingertips against his lips. ‘No… please… don’t say anything,’ she begged him huskily. ‘I don’t want us to lie to one another, to make promises we can’t keep.’
She watched as Joel closed his eyes against his emotions and then reached out and took hold of her wrist, kissing the fingertips she had placed against his mouth and then her wrist, the soft, vulnerable place inside her elbow.
Joel heard her moan as his mouth touched her throat and then her breasts. He teased her nipples gently, aware of his own desire to know and caress each and every part of her. Loving her was like a banquet, a feast of such unimaginable delicacy that he had to fight not to gorge himself but to savour and enjoy instead every individual sensation and flavour.
Philippa shivered as his mouth caressed her stomach, her skin tensing tightly against her muscles. Joel’s tongue circled her navel and her quiver became an open shudder. His hands slid beneath her, holding her, lifting her.
‘No,’ she told him protestingly, shivering with the awareness of what he intended to do, torn between her physical longing for the intimacy of such a caress and her emotional fear of what the giving and taking of it could mean.
But either Joel hadn’t heard her or didn’t want to hear her, because his mouth was already moving delicately against her inner thigh and the sight of his dark head bent over her body made her heart turn over inside her chest in physical and emotional arousal.
Tears burned behind her closed eyelids as she recognised his tenderness and care, mingled with the hotter, more urgent thread of his desire, forming a skein of emotion and sensation that aroused her so intensely that it was impossible for her to control her body’s response to him. It flooded through her, unstoppable, uncontrollable, charging through her body in fierce spurts of delight, as Joel’s mouth caressed her until the final pulse of her pleasure had died away.
Later they made love again, and not just because she wanted to repay him the pleasure he had shown her, Philippa acknowledged drowsily as, to her own surprise and against her own expectations, she felt her body quicken against the slow, erotic thrust of his until she was urging him to move deeper and deeper within her, her hands reaching round him, holding him to her, her need for him a dam which, once breached, could not be restrained.
* * *
‘Philippa, wake up.’
Sleepily she opened her eyes, her face flushing as she saw Joel leaning over her. He was fully dressed, holding a cup of tea, which he handed to her, saying, ‘I… I brought you this…’
He watched her gravely while she struggled to sit up and take the tea from him and at the same time clutch the duvet protectively to her body.
Something in his eyes made her smile ruefully and let go of it.
‘You must go,’ she told him quietly. ‘We shouldn’t have…’
‘I shouldn’t…’ Joel corrected her.
‘It was an accident… a mistake…’ Philippa pressed on doggedly, ignoring what she could hear in his voice. ‘We must both forget that it ever happened. It should never have happened.’
‘No,’ Joel argued tensely, ‘it shouldn’t, but as for forgetting… do you know how long it’s been since I felt like that… since I…?’ He stopped abruptly and then told her, ‘Have you any idea what it does to a man when a woman responds to him like that… needs him… makes him feel that she-?’
‘Joel, you’re married,’ Philippa interrupted him desperately. ‘You’ve got a wife… children. What happened between us… it must never happen again. We mustn’t see each other again. I can’t…’ She stopped as she saw from the look in his eyes that a part of him was pleased by the knowledge that she feared his sexuality and her own responsiveness to it, and yet she couldn’t blame or accuse him for it. She had felt an equally atavistic female thrill of pleasure as she’d dropped the duvet and watched as his eyes and his body responded to the sight of her.
‘It was just sex,’ she told him huskily. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Just sex, that’s all.’ But she couldn’t quite keep the forlorn note of loss out of her voice, and Joel, hearing it, leaned forward and touched her.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ he corrected her gently, holding her.
‘No,’ Philippa agreed. ‘But it still mustn’t happen again—for all our sakes. If it does, I might not be able to stop myself becoming emotionally attached to you,’ she told him with quiet honesty, ‘and Sally—your wife—you love her…’
‘Before today I thought I did,’ Joel told her. ‘But now…’
‘It was a statement, not a question,’ Philippa told him with a smile.
‘It would be very easy for me to love you, Philippa,’ Joel told her sombrely. ‘In fact…’
‘For a while,’ Philippa conceded. ‘And then it would be very, very hard… for both of us. We both know that if things were better for you at home you would never… Go home, Joel,’ she told him softly. ‘Go home and forget that this ever happened.’
‘And if I can’t…?’
‘You must.’
She would cry later, when he had gone, because she already knew what she was turning her back on and rejecting, and how much she wished that things were different; that he were free.
What had happened between them was like a summer storm, intense and shocking when it happened, overshadowing everything else, but quickly forgotten once it had passed.
Easier to let him go now than to risk the heartache and pain that an affair with him was bound to bring.
Easier…? Easier than what? she asked herself grimly after he had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FROWNING, Elizabeth surveyed the clothes she had laid out on the bed: trousers to travel in, the suit she planned to wear for the conference, underwear, tights, shoes, a sweater ‘just in case’, and a thin silky shirt she could wear in the evening with her black trousers just in case she needed to look a little bit more dressed up. Or ought she perhaps to take a dress?
‘Richard, do you think I
should put a dress in for the evening…?’
‘It’s a conference you’re supposed to be going to, not a dinner party.’
The terseness of his reply startled her. He had been uncharacteristically irritable recently and she had put this down to the fact that she knew he was anxious about the siting of the new Fast Response Accident Unit. Now, however, her frown deepened slightly. A little wifely tolerance to oil life’s wheels was one thing; an irritable, bad-tempered husband venting those feelings on her without explaining what was causing them was another.
Firmly she checked through the items she had placed on the bed before turning round and asking quietly, ‘Something’s bothering you, Richard. What is it…?’
‘Nothing,’ Richard lied shortly, and then added betrayingly, ‘For God’s sake, Liz, it’s only a two-day conference you’re going on. With all the fuss you’re making, anyone would think you’re going to a world summit… When I went to conferences…’
Elizabeth had heard enough.
‘When you went to conferences, you had me to organise this kind of thing for you,’ she told him with a sweep of her hand, indicating the things laid out neatly on the bed. ‘Maybe I am over-reacting a little bit, but you see, this is all still very new to me, Richard… New and—yes, I admit it—exciting as well… No doubt when I’ve attended as many conferences as you have I’ll be as blasé about them as you are, but until then I’m afraid you’ll just have to indulge me a little bit,’ she told him tartly.
Ruefully Richard shook his head. ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry, Liz,’ he apologised.
‘I know how worried you are about the Accident Unit,’ Elizabeth told him gently, softening towards him. ‘If you think it would help if we talked about it…’
‘Save the counselling for your clients,’ he suggested, his irritability returning.
When he saw the way Elizabeth folded her lips and quietly turned away from him he cursed himself under his breath. How could he explain to her how he felt? How could she possibly understand what it was like to feel as though you were constantly having to look over your shoulder to see how quickly younger men were catching up with you… what it felt like to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic because all you could see in front of you was a dead end, a blank wall, where once there had been a dozen different avenues of possibility and promise?
