by Penny Jordan
‘I really shouldn’t drink any more of this,’ she heard herself whispering dizzily as she picked up her glass and took a nervous gulp, and then watched as Oliver walked softly towards her.
‘No, you really shouldn’t,’ he agreed as he reached her and took the glass from her unresisting fingers, and then he took her equally unresisting body in his arms and her quiescent mouth into the warm captivity of his.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she reproached him, mumbling the words against his mouth, her arms wrapped around him, her fingers burrowing into the thick darkness of his hair, her eyes luminous with the desire that was turning her whole body into molten liquid as she gazed up into his eyes.
‘Oh, yes, we should,’ was his sensuously whispered response. ‘Oh, yes, we most definitely, assuredly should.’ And then he was kissing her again. Not forcefully, but oh, so compellingly that it was impossible for her to resist him—impossible for her to want to resist him.
‘You’ve already kissed me once for Christmas,’ Lisa reminded him unsteadily as he slowly lifted his mouth from hers and looked down at her.
‘This isn’t for Christmas,’ he whispered back as his hand slid under her hair, tilting her head back up towards him, sliding his other hand down her back, urging her closer to his own body.
Lisa could feel her heart hammering against her ribs as sensations that she had never experienced before—not with Henry and certainly not with the man who had been her first and only lover—flooded her body.
‘Then what is it for?’ she forced herself to ask him huskily.
‘What do you think?’ Oliver responded rawly. ‘I wanted you the first time I saw you—did you know that?’
‘How could you have done?’ Lisa argued. ‘You were so furious with me, and—’
‘And even more furious with myself… with my body for the way it was reacting to you,’ Oliver told her, adding rawly, ‘The same way it’s reacting to you right now.’
Uncertainly Lisa searched his face. Everything was happening so quickly that she couldn’t fully take it all in. If she had felt dizzy before, with the combination of the rich wine and the warm fire, that was nothing to the headiness affecting her now, clouding her ability to reason logically, making her heart thump dangerously, heavily as her body reacted to what was happening to her—to them.
‘I’ll stop if you want me to,’ she heard Oliver telling her hoarsely as he bent his head and gently nuzzled the soft, warm flesh of her throat. As she stifled the small, betraying sound she made when her body shuddered in shocked pleasure Lisa shook her head.
‘No. No. I don’t want you to stop,’ she admitted huskily.
‘Good,’ Oliver told her thickly. ‘Because I don’t want to either. What I want is you, Lisa… God, how I want you.’
‘I’m not used to this,’ Lisa said shakily. ‘I don’t—’
‘Do you think that I am… that I do?’ he interrupted her almost roughly. ‘For God’s sake, Lisa, have you any idea how long it is since I was this intimate with a woman… since I wanted to be this intimate with a woman? I’m not a teenager,’ he half growled at her when she shook her head. ‘I don’t normally… It’s been a hell of a long time since anyone has affected me the way you do… One hell of a long time.’
Lisa was trembling as he took her back in his arms, but not because she was afraid. Oh, no, not because of anything like that.
At any other time the eagerness with which she met Oliver’s kiss would have shocked her, caused her to deny what she was experiencing, but now, for some reason, things were different—he was different. This was Christmas, after all—a special, magical time when special, magical things could happen.
As she felt the probing thrust of Oliver’s tongue she reached out towards him, wrapping her arms around him, opening her mouth to him.
Somewhere outside this magical, firelit, pine-scented world where it seemed the most natural thing of all for her and Oliver to come together like this there existed another, different world. Lisa knew that, but right now… right now…
As she heard the rough deep sound of pleasure that Oliver made in his throat when he tasted the honeyed interior of her mouth Lisa gave up trying to think and behave logically. There was no point and, even more important, there was no need.
Instead, as she slid her fingers through the thick softness of Oliver’s hair, she let her tongue meet his—slowly, hesitantly at first, such intimacy unfamiliar to her. The memories of her much younger, uncertain teenage explorations recalled sensations which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the sensations she was experiencing now as Oliver’s tongue caressed hers, the weight of his body erotically masculine against the more slender femininity of her own as his hands caressed her back, her waist, before sliding down over her hips to cup the soft swell of her buttocks as he lifted her against him.
Lisa knew already that he was aroused, but until she felt the taut fullness of his erection against her own body she hadn’t realised how physically and emotionally vulnerable and responsive she was to him. A sensation, a need that was totally outside her previous experience overtook her as she felt the liquid heat filling her own body, her hips lifting automatically, blindly seeking the sensual intimacy that her flesh craved.
‘So much for your low sex drive,’ she heard Oliver muttering thickly against her ear, before he added throatily, ‘You’re one hell of a sexy lady, Lisa. Do you know that? Do you know what you’re doing to me…? How you’re making me feel…? How you’ve made me feel since you stood there in your flat in that damned suit, with your breasts…?’
Lisa heard him groan as his hand reached upwards towards her breast, sliding beneath the fabric that covered it to cup its soft, eager weight, his thumb-tip caressing the hard peak of her nipple.
‘Let me take this off,’ he urged her, his hands removing her jacket, and then starting on the buttons of the waistcoat underneath it, his eyes dark with arousal as he looked deeply into hers. And then, without waiting for her to respond, his mouth curled in a small, sensual half-smile and he bent his head and kissed her briefly but very hard on her half-parted mouth. ‘I want to see you, Lisa—all of you. I want to touch you, hold you, taste you, and I want you to want to do the same as me.’
Lisa knew that he must have felt the racking, sensual shudder that convulsed her body even if he hadn’t heard her immediate response to the mental image that his words had aroused, in the low groan she was not quite able to suppress.
‘You want that,’ he pressed huskily. ‘You want me to undress for you. You want to see me… to touch me…’ He was kissing her again now—slow, lingering kisses all over her face and throat—whilst his hands moved deftly, freeing her from her clothes. But it wasn’t the thought of her own nakedness beneath his hands that was causing her breath to quicken and her heart to lurch frantically against her ribs, but rather the thought of his nakedness beneath hers.
What was happening to her? she wondered dazedly. Her, to whom the thought of a man’s naked body was something which she normally found rather discomforting and not in the least erotic. What was happening that she should now be so filled with desire that her whole body ached and pulsed with it at the mere thought of seeing Oliver’s? The mere thought… Heaven knew what she would be like when that thought became a reality, when she was free to reach out and touch and taste him too.
Helplessly she closed her eyes, and then opened them again to find Oliver watching her.
‘Is that what you want, Lisa?’ he asked her softly whilst his thumb-tip drew a sensual line of pleasure around her sensitised mouth. ‘Is that what you want—to see me… touch me… feel me…?’
Dry-mouthed, Lisa nodded. Her top was unfastened now, and she was vaguely aware of the half-exposed curves of her breasts gilded by the firelight, but her own semi-nudity seemed unimportant and irrelevant; her whole concentration was focused on Oliver, on the deft, steady movements of his hands as he unfastened the buttons on his shirt, his gaze never wavering from her as he
started to remove it.
His chest was broad and sleekly muscled, tanned, with a dark arrowing of silky black hair down the centre, the sight of which made her muscles clench and her breath leak from her lungs in a rusty ache of sensory overload. His nipples, flat and dark, looked so different from her own.
As his hands reached for the fastening on his trousers, Lisa leaned forward, acting on impulse. The scent of him filled her nostrils, clouding her thought processes, drugging her…
As her lips closed around the small dark nub of flesh, she made a soft sound of feminine pleasure deep in her throat. Her tongue-tip circled his flesh, stroked it, explored the shape and texture of it before she finally returned to sucking gently on it.
‘Lisa.’
The shock of being wrenched away from him was like having her whole body plunged in icy-cold water after it had been lapped in tropical warmth, the pain so great that it made her physically ache and cry out, her shocked gaze focusing in bewilderment on Oliver’s, quick emotional tears filming her eyes as she wondered what it was she had done, why it was that he was being so cruelly brutal with her.
‘It’s too much, too soon,’ she heard him telling her harshly. ‘I can’t… It’s…’
Still half in shock she watched him as he shook his head.
‘You’re turning me on too much,’ he told her more gently, ‘and I can’t…’
Lisa could feel the shock of it all the way through her body—the shock and an intensely feminine thrill that she could have such a powerful effect on him. As though he had guessed what she was feeling, she heard Oliver groan softly, and then he was reaching for her, holding her in his arms before she could evade them, kissing her now tightly closed eyelids, and then her mouth, and then he was telling her, ‘Another few seconds of that and right now I’d be inside you and without—’ He broke off and then added, ‘That isn’t how I want it to be for our first time together.’
Lisa moved instinctively against him, and then tensed as she felt the rough brush of his body hair against her naked breasts.
As she bent her head to look down at where her top had slid away from her Oliver’s gaze followed hers, and then he bent his head, slowly easing her top completely away from her as he gradually kissed his way down her body, stopping only when he had reached the dark pink tautness of her nipple.
As he closed his mouth on it, repeating on her the caress she had given him, Lisa tensed in shock beneath the surge of pleasure that arced through her, arching her spine, locking her hands against his head, making her shudder as her body, beneath the weight of the flooding waves of pleasure that pulsed through her, was activated by the now urgent suckle of his mouth on her breast.
Was this how he had felt when she had caressed him in the same way? No, it couldn’t have been, she denied. She could feel what he was doing to her, right deep down within her body, her womb. She could feel… With a small, shocked gasp she started to push him away.
‘What is it?’ she heard Oliver asking thickly as he released her nipple. He was breathing heavily and she could feel the warmth against her skin resensitising it, making her…
‘I…’ Nothing, she had been about to respond, but instead she heard herself saying helplessly in an unfamiliar and huskily sensual voice, ‘I want you, Oliver… I want you.’
‘Not one half as much as I want you,’ he responded tautly as she quickly removed the remainder of her clothes and his own, and then, like a mystical, almost myth-like personification of all that was male inspired by some Greek legend, and filling her receptive senses with that maleness, he knelt over her, his dark head bowed as he gently eased her back against the soft fabric of the sofa and made love to her with a sensuality that took her breath away.
It didn’t matter that no man had ever touched her, caressed her, kissed her so intimately before or that she had never imagined wanting one to do so. Somehow, when it was Oliver’s hands, Oliver’s mouth that caressed her…
So this was desire, need, physically wanting someone with an intensity that could scarcely be borne.
Lisa gasped, caught her breath, held out her arms, her body opening to him, wanting him, enfolding him as she felt the first powerful thrust of him within her and then felt it again and again until her whole world, her whole being was concentrated on the powerful, rhythmic surge of his body within her own and the sensation that lay beyond it—the ache, the urgency… the release…
Lisa heard herself cry out, felt the quickening thrust of Oliver’s body, the hard, harsh sound of his breathing and his thudding heartbeat as she clung to him, moved with him, against him, aching, urging and finally losing herself completely, drowning in the liquid pulse of pleasure that flooded through her.
Later, still drowsy, sated, relaxed as she lay within the protective curve of Oliver’s body, she told him sleepily, ‘I think this is the best Christmas I have ever had.’
She could feel as well as hear him laughing.
‘You do wonders for my ego, do you know that?’ he told her as he tilted her face up to his own and kissed her lingeringly on the mouth.
‘It’s the truth,’ Lisa insisted, her eyes clouding slightly as she added more self-consciously, ‘I… I never realised before that it could be so… That I could feel…’
‘It?’ Oliver teased her.
‘Sex,’ Lisa told him with dignity.
‘Sex?’ She heard the question in his voice. She looked uncertainly up at him. He looked slightly withdrawn, his expression stern, forbidding… more like the Oliver she had first met than the man who had just held her in his arms and made such wonderful, cataclysmic, orgasmic love to her.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him hesitantly, her heart starting to thump nervously. Wasn’t this what all the books warned you about—the man’s withdrawal and coldness after the act of sex had been completed, his desire to separate himself from his partner whilst she wanted to maintain their intimacy and to share with him her emotional awe at the physical pleasure their bodies had given one another?
‘What we just shared may have been sex to you,’ he told her quietly, ‘but for me it was more than that. For me it was making love in the true sense of those words. Experimenting teenagers, shallow adults without maturity or sensitivity have sex, Lisa…’
‘I don’t understand,’ she told him huskily, groping through the confusion of her thoughts and feelings to find the right words. ‘I… You… We don’t really know one another and…’
‘And what?’ Oliver challenged her. ‘Because of that we can’t have any feelings for one another?’ He shook his head. ‘I disagree.’
‘But until today… until now… we didn’t even like one another… We…’
‘We what?’ Oliver prompted her as she came to an uncertain stop. ‘We were very physically aware of one another.’
Lisa opened her mouth to deny what he was saying and then closed it again.
‘Not so very long ago you told me that you wanted me,’ Oliver reminded her softly, ‘and I certainly wanted you. I agree that the circumstances under which we met initially clouded our ability to judge one another clearly, but fate has given us an opportunity to start again… a second chance.’
‘Twenty-four hours ago I was still planning to marry Henry,’ Lisa protested helplessly.
‘Twenty-four hours ago I still wanted to wring your pretty little neck,’ Oliver offered with a smile.
‘What’s happening to us, Oliver?’ she asked him uneasily. ‘I don’t understand.’ She sat up and pushed the heavy weight of her hair off her face, her forehead creased in an anxious frown. ‘I just don’t do things like this. I’ve never… I thought it must be the wine at first… That…’
‘That what? That the effect of three glasses of red wine was enough to make you want me?’ He gave her a wry look. ‘Well, I haven’t even got that excuse. Not then, and certainly not now,’ he added huskily as he reached towards her and took hold of her hand, guiding it towards his body whilst he bent his head and kissed her slowly.
To be aroused by him the first time might just possibly have been some kind of fluke, Lisa acknowledged, but there was no way she could blame her desire for him now on the wine. Not a second time, not now. And she did desire him, she acknowledged shakily as her fingers explored the hard strength of him. Oh, yes, she did want him.
It was gone midnight before they finally went upstairs, Lisa pausing to draw back the curtains and look out on the silent, snow-covered garden.
‘It’s still snowing,’ she whispered to Oliver.
‘Mmm…’ he agreed, nuzzling the back of her neck. ‘So it is… Lovely…’
But it wasn’t the view through the window he was studying as he murmured his rich approval, and Lisa laughed softly as she saw the way he was studying her still naked breasts.
‘No,’ Oliver said to her, shaking his head as she paused outside the guest-bedroom door. ‘Tonight I want you to sleep with me… in my bed… in my arms,’ he told her, and as she listened to him Lisa felt her heart flood with emotion.
It was too soon yet to know just how she really felt about him, or so she told herself. And too dangerous, surely, when her body was still flooded with the pleasure he had given it? She was by nature cautious and careful; she always had been. It wasn’t possible for her to fall in love over the space of a few hours with a man she barely knew.
But then less than twenty-four hours ago she would also have vehemently denied that it was possible for her to want that same man so much and with such a degree of intensity that, as he drew her towards his bed and held out his arms to her, her body was already starting to go liquid with pleasure and yearning for him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘OUCH. THAT’S NOT FAIR. I was retying the snowman’s scarf.’
Lisa laughed as Oliver removed from his collar the wet snow of the snowball she had just thrown at him, quickly darting out of the way as he bent down mock-threateningly to make a retaliatory snowball of his own.
She had been awoken two hours earlier by the soft thud of a snowball against the bedroom window, Oliver’s half of the bed that they had shared all night being empty. Intrigued and amused, she had slid out of bed, wrapping the quilt around her naked body as she’d hurried across to the window. As she’d peered out she’d been able to see beneath the window Oliver standing in the garden next to a huge snowman, a pile of snowballs stacked at his feet.
