by Maggie Cox
‘I’ve had boyfriends…of course I have. But I just haven’t wanted to sleep with any of them. Is that a crime?’
Feeling chilled to her very bones at the way their passionate reunion was turning out, Caroline stared down at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger. Resting in her lap, they looked too pale…too unloved, somehow. If only she had been able to relax a bit more, she anguished miserably. If only she hadn’t worried so much that she wouldn’t be able to love him as she yearned to because of her fear…
But what was the use in condemning herself for her feelings? She wasn’t deliberately trying to be obstructive. She wanted Jack’s loving more than she wanted to see daylight after enduring a nightmare alone in the dark! But she was also beginning to think that their brief reunion was utterly doomed.
Looking as if he didn’t know whether to believe her or not, Jack sighed heavily.
‘And just now…when you stopped me? It was because you were—’
‘Like you said, Jack.’ Caroline’s eyes and her voice were similarly flat. ‘Seventeen years is a long time. Can you wonder that I was a little tense?’
Before he could say anything, tears were spilling down her cheeks in a steady, agonising flow.
CHAPTER NINE
HE WASthe only man she’d ever properly made love with? Faced with such a momentous revelation, Jack found himself examining Caroline’s crestfallen face with an increasing sense of shock. As the pinnacle of that shock ebbed away, he was unable to resist the sudden great need to hold her. Taking her into his arms, Jack cradled her head protectively against his chest.
The last time he’d seen Caroline break her heart in front of him was when she had confessed to having the termination. and he had been so outraged and so destroyed by the news that he had been stone to her tears. Now, as well as needing to make love to her more than ever, Jack found her distress the one chink in his armour that he hadn’t expected. Emotions were coming to the fore inside him that he’d sworn to keep under lock and key for good, and the realisation disturbed him deeply.
‘Shh…don’t cry…please don’t cry.’
Kissing her gently dishevelled blonde head, Jack became a willing slave to the exquisite sensuality of her subtle yet pervasive scent. It was nothing to do with the shampoo or perfume or bath oil she used. It was everything to do with Caroline herself. Jack was undone by her, and he knew it.
What if he had been too hasty in relinquishing her to her fate all those years ago? Coming out of nowhere, it was a stunning, disconcerting thought, and one he wouldn’t be at all wise to pursue. Instead, Jack moved Caroline a little way away from him, so that he could glean for himself how she was feeling. Holding onto her arms, he started to seductively massage her skin.
‘Explain to me,’ he instructed quietly, ‘why there hasn’t been anyone else?’
Not liking the growing sense of vulnerability that was descending upon her, Caroline realised then that Jack had not been aware of the sheer magnitude and scope of her love for him. Hadn’t she shown him enough? Hadn’t she proved it by giving him her virginity when she was just seventeen? Maybe he’d thought what she felt for him was just infatuation? What if that was why he had been able to believe that she had relented ‘too easily’ to an abortion? If he’d realised how much she had loved him, with all her heart, Jack would have known it could have been nothing less than torture to make the decision about their baby. The guilt she’d suffered over that whole distressing episode had tainted almost everything. Especially the possibility of ever enjoying an intimate relationship with someone new, or trusting that she wouldn’t ever be pressured into terminating a pregnancy again…
‘I just—’ With the heels of her hands Caroline harshly dismissed the evidence of her tears, suddenly furious that Jack was putting her in such an untenable position. She didn’t want to reveal her deepest secrets to him any more. He probably wouldn’t believe her anyway, so what was the point? His mind was already made up about her and nothing was going to change it. ‘Meeting someone and falling in love isn’t automatic, you know. I suppose it simply wasn’t on the cards…’
Jack didn’t know what to think about that. The truth—if he was honest—was that he didn’t want to speculate too hard about why Caroline had resisted intimacy with other men. Somewhere not too deep inside him he had to admit he was glad that she had…and doubly glad that she hadn’t fallen in love again…no matter how selfish that might sound. Yet here she was, living in this large old house all by herself, supposedly content with a single life and seeing no one but a man who was old enough to be her father. Jack didn’t care how strenuously he denied it—Caroline’s doctor friend’s interest in her was definitely not platonic.
Feeling another jealous wave settle over him, he moved his hands up Caroline’s graceful and slender arms to her shoulders and slowly—with a deeply possessive glint in his eye—pulled her flimsy straps back down again. Her soft flesh quivered delightfully, sending another spear of scalding need straight to his groin. He heard her emit a soft, startled breath, and before she could utter a word Jack was kissing her with a stark, ravishing hunger that must have been simmering inside him for years.
When he reluctantly slowed things down, to obviously search for protection in his discarded clothing, Caroline’s heightened senses descended briefly back down to earth again. What if they didn’t use protection? If they could make another baby together…If Caroline could only get pregnant again…She would be able to show Jack that her most heartfelt wish was to be the mother of his baby. A wish she had been cruelly robbed of at her father’s shameful and brutal instigation.
Distressed at the impossible and dangerous direction her thoughts were taking her, Caroline let her gaze cling heatedly to Jack’s as with breathtaking expertise he stripped her of her nightgown. Naked in front of him, there was nowhere to hide, and she shivered almost violently as the heat in his eyes licked over her with barely contained lust.
Taking her cue from him, Caroline dipped her gaze to examine the fine display of tight, trained muscle that was so evident in his lean but awesome physique, her stomach jolting in reaction when she saw how aroused he was. Raising her glance level with his again, Caroline was even less able to stop from violently trembling.
‘God must have created you just to drive me out of my mind,’ he ground out, his voice hoarse with longing. ‘But you’re in my blood and I can’t get you out.’
With a just barely civilised groan, Jack pushed her down onto the rug. In even less time than it had taken to accomplish that, he had settled her beneath him, turning the attention of his expert kisses to her breasts, her ribcage, her sexy tucked-in navel and her hips—skimming over her bones and skin, his mouth and tongue doing things to her body that made Caroline clutch at the rug beneath her to try and stay on the planet.
When he slid his hand between her trembling thighs to part them, his fingers sliding in and out of her wetness with destroying ease, Caroline shut her eyes and no longer cared about staying earth-bound. She almost leapt out of her skin when Jack replaced his fingers with his mouth, and nothing could have prepared her for the sheer dazzling violence of the climax his erotic torment finally and inevitably elicited.
All the tension and doubt about whether everything would be okay vanished in a blaze of sensation so strong that Caroline didn’t have a prayer when it came to keeping her feelings silent. Crying out with pleasure, she blinked dazedly up at Jack as his firm, muscular thighs straddled her hips. Then he laid passionate siege to her mouth once more.
Her already reeling senses stayed in the ascendant somewhere, circling the heavens. But even as she registered their languid descent Jack had sheathed himself and thrust into her with destroying deliberation. Inevitably Caroline tensed a little at his masculine invasion—for a moment her fears that it might hurt returning—but Jack cleverly seduced her into relaxing, melting any resistance away with amazingly addictive and sublime kisses that left her whimpering for more. Contracting her hot silk
y muscles around his hard satin length, she felt any trace of lingering anxiety vanish, quickly turning to feelings of pleasure and relief instead. Caroline prayed that Jack now knew with indisputable certainty that he was still her first and only lover.
As he loved her with an intensity that snatched her breath from her lungs—reuniting their bodies even more passionately, it seemed, than he had done all those years ago, when they were both so young—Caroline had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t going to wake up from a dream any time soon—that this blood-stirring erotic encounter was really part of her present and not her past.
Sometimes her powerful longing to see Jack again had been so all-consuming that she’d almost believed she could will him to come back to her. Now, Caroline wouldn’t swear that she’d been able to accomplish any such feat, but even so…she would not discount the possibility of magic. Taking unimaginable delight in simply touching him—in reacquainting her love-starved hands with his powerfully strong body once more—she told herself that even if it all went horribly wrong again she couldn’t regret this uninhibited loving. In seventeen years she hadn’t met one other man who had come anywhere near making her feel like Jack did.
Knowing that her adoration must be beaming from her gaze like a beacon, Caroline wondered how she was supposed to contain it under these most intimate of circumstances. Whether Jack knew or cared about her feelings or not, she was not adept enough to completely hide them from him. Anchoring her hands around his tautly flexed biceps as he thrust deeply inside her, Caroline watched the passion and purpose intensify on her lover’s indisputably charismatic face—every masterfully etched muscle straining to delay the gratification of his desire until her own peak had sent her spinning off into the heavens once more.
Jack was suggesting with gravel-voiced ease that she wrap her long legs around his back—to ‘better enjoy the ride, beautiful’—and Caroline didn’t hesitate to comply, gasping out loud as desire rose to a whole new level…loving the way the strength in him was brought home to her as she gripped him hungrily with her thighs. Driving himself even deeper, Jack smiled wickedly down at her, giving Caroline no quarter whatsoever. When want, need, and bone-deep desperation to reach the stars found its ultimate reward she cried out again, with every atom of love and longing in her soul, tears slipping helplessly down her face as Jack looked down at her…revealing for just the tiniest moment something like regret or sorrow in his eyes.
Then he bent his head and commandeered Caroline’s lips harshly with his own as he ardently surrendered to the need that had been multiplying inside him with ever-increasing command—emptying himself inside her with an echoing shout that wouldn’t be contained.
Clearly overcome by the raw, unfettered emotion of the moment, he laid his head on Caroline’s breast and groaned again—his dark silky hair tickling her chin and his strong heartbeat matching hers beat for rhythmic beat. Fear as well as joy swirled inside her chest, and although part of her felt buoyed-up by happiness—at the same time Caroline experienced pain that was like a thousand razor-cuts bleeding into her very soul.
‘You always were intoxicating,’ Jack whispered husky-voiced against her breast, his warm breath skimming her sensitised skin, ‘but you’ve become even more so.’
‘Have I?’
The brief tormented smile that he hadn’t witnessed melted away. Staring up in silence at the shadows from the fire, moving like dancing silhouettes on the ceiling, Caroline felt the tears she had cried dry on her cheeks. She would be very ‘adult’ about what happened, she decided resignedly. She wouldn’t make demands or sound ‘needy’, as he might already be anticipating she would. Fear settled more profoundly in her bones, like a brooding storm deep in her vitals. He wouldn’t stay. She knew that. So how did a person go about forgetting the love of their life, not once but twice in a lifetime, without losing their mind?
She’d fallen asleep in his embrace, right there on the rug in front of the fire, giving Jack ample opportunity to study her peaceful sleeping features and to conclude once again that she was still the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He tried to recall how enraged he had been when she had confessed to having the termination, but right then—sated with the passion they had expended with such uninhibited fervour—Jack found that his anger had somehow diminished.
He didn’t doubt that his long-held rage towards Caroline for making the decision that had shaped the course of his life for ever would no doubt resurrect itself once he was away from her sphere of intoxicating influence. In the cold light of day he would remember in detail how she had betrayed him, how she had committed the most unforgivable of actions. But right now…for the first time in a long time…a lifetime perhaps?…Jack peacefully surrendered his embittered defences.
For a while he lay there alone with his thoughts, listening to the flurry of wind and rain slam against the windowpanes and inside the soporific ‘womb-like’ hiss and crackle of the fire burning comfortingly beside them. Then, getting to his feet and being careful not to disturb the woman he’d lain beside, he recovered her fleecy dressing-gown and draped it gently across her sleeping form, so that she wouldn’t get cold when the fire went out.
Lord knew it was so tempting for Jack to stay right where he was and spend the night there in Caroline’s house…the house he had been barred from as a youth. If he’d still been immersed in his usual fury towards her and her dead father he would have taken a perverse kind of pleasure in staying there, only to disdainfully leave in the morning. But just what was Jack supposed to say to Caroline when she woke? His store of words was worryingly empty. He was, instead, swamped with all kinds of feelings that were taking him by storm. Feelings that he hadn’t expected. In the light of this confusion, any words he did utter would be like the sound of scraping fingernails down a blackboard. They would be harsh and unpalatable, because his familiar, automatically employed barriers were already slamming into place and Jack knew he would defend his position to the hilt.
Concluding that all he could do was leave Caroline to sleep on undisturbed, he quickly gathered his strewn clothes together, dressed with regretful ease as he watched the soft rise and fall of her breath and glimpsed the smooth alabaster perfection of her breasts beneath her robe, then left the house with the stealth of a thief in the night, to return to his hotel…
Caroline had known she was alone, that Jack had left, as soon as she’d opened her eyes. The heat from the fire had noticeably died to barely warm embers that threw off scant comfort, and even though she found herself covered by her dressing-gown she shivered hard as she quickly pushed her arms into its fleecy sleeves and got shakily to her feet. Inside, a silent keening rose up from the emptiness of her heart. Desolation and confusion hit hard. She felt like the only child in a wintry playground being pelted by a bombardment of icy snowballs from her uncaring classmates.
Jack had left her even sooner than she’d thought he would. He hadn’t even had the decency to wait until the morning to demonstrate his contempt. Caroline could hardly believe that even he could be so heartless. She hadn’t been foolish enough to imagine that they might be going to take up where they had left off seventeen years ago, but even so…Jack had seduced her into loving him again one more time, allowed her to let down her defences long enough to fall asleep in his arms, and then—cool as you like—left her there to wake up alone.
Was this particularly cruel behaviour something he had devised on the day that he’d bumped into her? Was it his abominable way of getting back at Caroline for the deep grudge he obviously still bore her? She must have been out of her mind to let him into her house like that in the middle of the night. Now she only had herself to blame for the fall-out. It had been obvious from the start that Jack’s reappearance would bring her nothing but more trouble and heartache, but Caroline hadn’t been able to resist the compulsion to get burnt by him again. She should have just told him to get the hell out of her life and stay out! Not invite him to make things worse! Why had she done that? W
hy?
‘Because I’m a sad, stupid idiot—that’s why!’ she shouted out loud, kicking the rug. ‘He only wanted to get back at me…to hurt me all over again because of what I did…what I was practically forced to do! Jack Fitzgerald doesn’t possess a forgiving bone in his entire body!’
Giving vent to her frustration and fury, and at the same time making an Olympian effort to suppress the anguished sob that arose inside her throat, Caroline briefly stooped to pick up her crumpled nightdress, then resignedly left the room to go upstairs to bed…
Out of the chaos of scaffolding, cement and mud, the improvements that Jack had devised with his architect for the undeniably neglected Victorian house were slowly but surely taking place. Having just inspected the downstairs area, where a major extension was being built onto the back of the building to utilise some of the space of the three-hundred-foot garden, Jack allowed himself a momentary burst of pleasure and anticipation.
For the last week, being actively involved on site—overseeing building work and having long, productive discussions with the architect and the contractor he’d hired to undertake the renovations—Jack had welcomed long, busy days that started at around seven in the morning and continued long into the evening, when spotlights were rigged up all over the site to replace the fading winter daylight. It had helped him to push the thought of Caroline and what he was going to do about the confusion of feelings he felt towards her out of his mind at least temporarily.
One thing was crystal-clear. She must think him a contemptuous bastard for leaving before she woke the other night, and not even saying goodbye. But, as he’d silently admitted to himself at the time, he wouldn’t have known what to say to her after what had transpired between them…what should never have transpired between them if it hadn’t been for the fact that Jack had allowed his lust for her to tow him round by the nose…
