by Alison Kelly
He’d expected her skin to be soft, yet the texture of it beneath his fingers as they trailed the length of her arms made him think of whipped cream. A ridiculously whimsical notion, but one that projected such highly erotic images it caused his heart to double shuffle and the heat in his groin to bum hotter. She was hot, too. He could feel the heat in her skin...
With a whimpered mew, she turned to him.
Oh, yeah...she was hot, too. The evidence was in the liquid arousal in her eyes, the raspy shallow breaths she drew and the way her nipples pressed hard against the cool rich fabric of her gown. The temptation they offered was too much for his mouth to resist; lowering his head, he tongued one through the fabric. The feminine half-gasp, half-whimper made him smile. Oh, yeah...she was hot all right. Hot for him and ready to be loved to the point of meltdown. His and hers.
The force of her hands grabbing his head in a desperate bid to bring his mouth to hers commanded he oblige, but when the taste of her moans threatened to strip him of his control he forced her from him. He wanted to possess her more than he’d ever wanted to possess any woman, but he wanted it his way. She’d already messed up his mind and tortured his libido enough, he reminded himself.
Stepping back, he slowly began to unbutton his shirt. When she reached to assist he increased the distance between them.
‘Uh-uh, babe,’ he whispered. ‘I want you to see what you’re getting.’ He didn’t care that the words sounded egotistical; he loved watching the way her eyes devoured him, the way she now pressed her palms flat against the wall as if it was taking every ounce of her control not to jump his bones.
The thought almost made him surrender. Damn, but she was the only woman who’d ever made him hot and horny just by looking at him. And the hell of it was she didn’t know it. He wanted her to know it. He wanted her to know that she could flick his switch with just one slow, lazy look from those eyes of hers. He wanted her to know so that the knowledge could turn her on at times when it was utterly impossible for her to do anything but let her insides bum with unsatisfied lust.
He discarded the shirt and reached for her hand. It was elegantly fragile and small within his, and though it trembled it capped his erection with a confidence which caught him off guard. The surge of his blood made him dizzy, but it was nothing compared to the sensations which assaulted his senses when she bent and licked a criss-cross pattern over his chest. Yet when her languid tongue trekked its way between each of his ribs and down the furred centre of his belly to his navel, his legs came so close to buckling he had to grab her for support, his fingers driving through her raven hair to anchor against her skull.
She disposed of his belt and both his trousers and jocks with a competence that surprised him and a smile sufficiently smug to restore his need for control. Snaring her wrists before her hands could entrap his now bare shaft, he stepped out of his pants and kicked them aside.
Meeting her excited gaze with a deliberately lazy one, he walked her backwards the three small steps it took to sandwich her between him and the wall. The scent of her perfume drifted around them like smoke. Her pupils were dilated with raw, uncut desire. Her breasts rose and sank against the gossamer silk still shielding her body from his eyes. But it wasn’t a shield against his body. Keeping his gaze locked on hers, he rubbed against the coolness of the fabric and felt his blood catch fire from the heat radiating from beneath it. Her heat.
When she started to ride against him the loud, throaty moan of arousal that cut the darkness might have belonged to either or both of them as their mouths fused in primal hunger. Her hands and nails pressed into his buttocks with an impatience that granted permission for him to take her with speed and begged him to do it now. He rose above the temptation, knowing he’d find far greater pleasure in pleasuring her.
So he worked to calm her with soft kisses and whispered words. With feather-light caresses of her arms, shoulders and throat. Then, when she was lulled to soft whimpers that begged for him, only him...all of him, he slowly began to ease the now warm silk up her legs.
The delicate lingerie was a torment to his eyes and an erotic distraction for his fingers, but it was the delicate heated flesh beneath it which had him cramping with desire and caused his passion to bead in anticipation. Still nothing could have prepared him for the overwhelming surge of lust that tore through his body when his hand encountered no barrier to her feminine core. Her hot, slick and oh, so ready feminine core.
He told himself to go slowly, but she bucked once, hard, against his hand, and he needed no second invitation.
Never had he felt so utterly male as he watched her fling back her head, chanting his name as her nails dug into his shoulders and she frenetically rode his fingers. Never had his own control been so challenged, so tenuous he feared he wouldn’t last long enough to find complete enjoyment in what he literally held in his hand.
In his head he heard a crash of metal, and her scream lift above it, but the clang continued to echo dimly in his head—
Brett woke with a jolt and instinctively reached for where Joanna—wasn’t lying. The bed was cold.
It took his hormone-drunk brain less than a second to realise that be was alone in the tangle of black satin sheets. That his tortured mind had been the victim of a dream. The kind he’d long ago outgrown!
Disbelief warred with anger and self-disgust as he turned the darkness of his room blue with a string of apt and heartfelt expletives. He sprang from the bed, furious with himself, but more furious with the raven-haired witch who’d invaded almost every minute of his waking day and now had the audacity to encroach on his sleep as well!
Muttering under his breath, he snatched up the bathrobe which her presence in the house necessitated and strode into the hall with the intention of taking a shower. The glow from the kitchen light altered his plans and he turned in that direction, cinching the belt of the robe tight enough to rupture his spleen.
The sight which greeted him was as bemusing as it was explanatory.
The presence of several saucepans and their assorted lids scattered across the slate floor accounted for the cymbal like clang which had woken him. It didn’t, however, explain what Joanna was doing in the faint dawn light covered from head to foot in flour!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘WHAT the hell are you doing?’
She jumped at the sound of his voice, then glanced down at the unholy mess surrounding her. ‘Would you believe cooking?’ she asked, producing a cute, sheepish smile.
Brett wasn’t amused. Not least because she was clad in the negligée of the night before. Irony had never been so cruel, nor so frustrating.
‘A friend I know is having a...a party tonight,’ she explained, the break in her voice indicating she wasn’t oblivious to his mood. ‘I promised I’d bring a cake and I wanted to make it before I went to work.’
‘Well, couldn’t you have done it quietly?’ he barked. ‘Or, better yet, considering the mess you’re making, just bought a cake on your way home? Hell, the way you dress it’s not like you’ve got to rely on your culinary skills to impress men!’
Brett regretted his tone and choice of words even before her face fell with shock and hurt. He couldn’t have felt any worse if he’d slapped her.
‘Jo, I’m sorry!’ he said quickly. ‘I swear I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’
Straightening her back, she eased back onto her heels, one flour-dusted hand unsteady as it slipped a strand of hair behind her ear.
‘There’s no need to apologise,’ she said, with obviously forced dignity. ‘My own sister has said far worse to me.’
Brett dropped to his knees in front of her and grasped her hands. ‘Jo, please...I didn’t mean that.’
Her turquoise eyes were shiny with threatening tears. ‘You mightn’t have meant to say it, Brett. But if the thought hadn’t been somewhere in your head to start with it couldn’t have come out.’
He had no doubt she’d read that in some magazine article, but did she
have to be so damn serene and rational? Why wasn’t she ranting and raving, or grabbing the nearest saucepan and hitting him over the head? God knew, he deserved that and more.
‘Jo, listen to me a minute,’ he urged.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t have time. I need to clean this up before I go to work. I’m sorry I woke you...’ She pulled free of his hands. ‘Go back to bed and let—’
‘I’m not going anywhere until we straighten this out,’ he told her.
‘I made the mess; I’ll clean it.’
‘I’m not talking about the damned kitchen, and you know it!’ He clamped a hand on her thigh, only to deter her attempts to stand, but her recoil from his touch was like a kick to guts.
Last night when he’d massaged her shoulders, he’d had to force himself to block out the purrs of pleasure she’d emitted as she’d begun to relax. How he’d resisted the temptation of really making her moan was something which had kept him awake most of the night When he finally had managed sleep, he’d taken her in his dreams. Now, within moments of waking, he’d managed to insult and alienate her for no reason other than his own frustration.
Raking his hair, he tried to find the words to atone for his stupidity, but came up empty. In the end he decided to tell her the truth, or as near as he could get to it without giving the impression he was a sex-starved lunatic who was rapidly becoming obsessed with her.
Oh, God, how pathetically accurate was that description!
This time when she would’ve risen, he resorted to words. ‘Please, Jo, hear me out... You know I wouldn’t deliberately hurt you.’
‘No, I don’t know that.’ Her voice was low and her head was bent, studying her hands. ‘You’re virtually a stranger to me. And I was wrong in thinking my own sister would never deliberately hurt me.’
‘You told me you trusted me,’ he said. ‘How can you trust me if you think I’d want to hurt you?’
‘Th-that’s different. Besides, I don’t mean you’d physically hurt me.’
He wanted to tell her that, no, he wouldn’t hurt her physically, but that still didn’t stop him wanting to make an assault on her body in an entirely different way. He’d have been no less honest in telling her that he so regretted what he’d said that his chest ached and his stomach was churning. Except his pain didn’t come entirely from guilt; some came from the gut fear that if he didn’t sort this out now, Joanna would be packing her bags.
‘Jo, will you just hear me out? Please?’
He got no response or acknowledgement that she’d even heard him. But since she made no effort to move away he took this as a positive sign.
‘The thing is...’ he started, addressing the raven crown of her bent head, but paused to study the ethereal effect the now rising sun had on its satin smoothness. Even when he was scrambling to save his sorry skin, she was a distraction and a fascination he couldn’t ignore...
He tried again. ‘Jo... My head is in a hell of a mess right now. For personal and professional reasons.’ It was the truth; ambiguous, but the truth nonetheless. ‘The fact, is the person I was really angry with this morning was myself. This...’ he indicated the mess that surrounded them ‘...and you... Well, unfortunately they just gave me a handy outlet for that anger.
‘It was easier to be angry with the situation than it was myself. External problems are less threatening than internal ones.’
That doesn’t explain your snide comment about the way I dress,’ she told him, lifting her head to look him squarely in the eyes. ‘I can understand you being angry about being woken at the crack of dawn and finding this disaster, but what you said was really personal.’
He couldn’t deny it. Nor could he tell her that she was the source of his problems and that they all revolved around sexual fantasies. Chances were that even if at some point in her bid to self-educate herself on life she had managed to scan an article on the subject, she wasn’t going to be flattered by such an admission. This was a girl still wholesome enough to get a thrill out of receiving a three-dollar pair of chopsticks and candy floss.
When he emerged from his musing it was to find her watching him with a mixture of curiosity, disgust and disappointment. It was enough to spur him to speech.
‘Okay, I admit the comment I made probably subconsciously stemmed from a problem I have with the way you dress, but I didn’t mean it the way you think,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t implying you were cheap. And it’s my problem. Not yours.’
He wondered where she’d learned to look so sceptical.
‘The thing is, Jo, you’re an incredibly beautiful woman, but in my opinion you tend to slightly overstate things when it comes to your clothes. That’s not to say you dress badly,’ he hastened to add. ‘You’ve got a flair for fashion and an excellent eye for quality. You also know how to coordinate—’
‘Oh, and that takes real flair when I only wear black,’ she piped up.
The underlying amusement in her sarcasm had him scanning her face to see if he’d imagined it. The faint almost smile nudging her lips was enough to send relief flooding through him.
‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘Now tell me what I’m doing wrong.’
It wasn’t an in-your-face challenge, but her words had a definite you’re-not-getting-off-the-hook-that-easily inflection.
‘And I want the truth,’ she added, seeming to know he’d been contemplating soft-pedalling her.
‘All right,’ he agreed.
“Well, for starters,’ he said, ‘the truth is you’d look brilliant in anything...’
‘But?’ she prodded.
‘But...by opting exclusively for unrelieved black and dramatic, avant-garde styles you aren’t really doing yourself any favours. Sure, people look at you, but they don’t really see you; the clothes become the first and last thing they remember. Now that’s what designers want from catwalk models, but Dad always said he got more joy out of seeing a woman wearing one of his creations than seeing one of his outfits wearing the woman.
‘I’m not saying you should play it safe all the time,’ he told her. ‘Merely suggesting you vary your wardrobe a little so that when you do go for the dramatic people will say, “Doesn’t Joanna look fabulous”; rather than “Doesn’t Joanna’s outfit look fabulous.”’
She looked so intent, Brett wasn’t sure whether she was contemplating what he’d said, still trying to absorb it, or if the concept had escaped her completely. She frowned questioningly as she said, ‘In other words I should work on the “less is more” theory?’
He grinned his approval. ‘More succinctly put than my effort and spot-on. Except, perhaps,’ he added, ‘in the case of the dress you wore to the fund-raiser the other night. If there’d been any less of that you’d have been arrested.’
She flushed. ‘It was that bad?’
Brett sighed and forced himself to be objective. No, the dress hadn’t been that bad. His problems with it had started before he’d been aware of its daring neckline. They’d started even before his trembling fingers had buttoned her into it and continued escalating from there. He’d boiled with jealousy at every admiring male gaze fired in her direction and now, two weeks later, he was still ready to punch walls every time he thought of Steve Cooper undoing the buttons on it later that evening.
There wasn’t really anything wrong with the dress; just his mind.
‘No, it wasn’t that bad, Jo,’ he said finally. ‘In fact it was a stunning dress. You looked fantastic in it.’
Her pleasure at the words was evident.
‘The thing is, Jo, don’t think you have to work hard to look great. With your face and figure it doesn’t matter what you wear.’
‘It does to me.’
‘Well, yes, I understand that—’
‘No, you don’t, Brett,’ she said softly. ‘Not really.’ She sighed. ‘I spent all my childhood being made to wear clothes that the parents of other children wouldn’t have dreamed of putting their children in, let alone sent them out in public wearing them. Oh, t
hey weren’t old,’ she qualified. ‘Mother sewed me three new dresses every year—sometimes more if I had a growth spurt. But they were always plain and ugly and all based on childish styles of the fifties.’
Once again Brett could only imagine how difficult her life must have been; he and Meaghan had been the ones to set fashion trends amongst their peers.
‘So fashionable clothes were another “sin” to your family?’
She nodded. ‘That was one of the reasons I enjoyed my time at boarding school so much; uniforms were compulsory, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t obviously different to other girls my age.
‘I’d never worn much less owned a pair of jeans until Andrew bought me a pair. I know now they were only the chainstore variety, but to me they were the most fabulous gift anyone had ever given me. As much as he hurt and humiliated me, I’ll probably always think kindly of him for that.
‘My sister Faith told me I’m cheap, shallow and vain, but...’ Her breasts rose and fell as she took two steadying breaths, but on this occasion the action didn’t stir Brett on a sexual level, but somewhere much deeper.
‘Honey...’ He reached out and gently cupped her face. ‘A person’s most honest, genuine beliefs are those they form themselves, not those they have forced down their throat. You’re none of those things your sister said.’
She bit her lip and eased back from his touch. ‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t want your gratitude, Jo. I’d rather hear you swear to forgive me for acting like a jerk this morning.’
Her mouth curved into a smile. ‘Sorry, but I was brought up not to swear or blaspheme. I might’ve rejected most of my family’s beliefs, but I’ve never thought that a particularly unreasonable one.’
Brett mentally cringed at the countless times he must have offended her with his own uncensored dialogue.
‘But if you’re genuinely contrite and looking for a penance you could always make a pot of tea while I get started cleaning up,’ she teased, scampering to her feet. ‘I’m not certain it’ll impress God all that much, but...’ she winked ‘...it’ll definitely get you back in my good books.’
