She was eager, she was sweet, she was moist, musky heaven. He suckled her womanhood and she was nectar, and she was his. He felt her body turn to boneless jelly beneath his supporting hands, heard her small, thick cries of pleasure and stood, sweeping her into his arms in one driven movement, and laid her down on the sofa, catching his breath as she looked at him with desire-drenched eyes, fumbling blindly for his zip.
Her fingers were shaking. He covered them with his own, helping her, and when her arms lifted to wind around his neck he went down to her, and into her, into the slick, welcoming heat of her, and heard her gasp of exultation, of wonder, heard it mingle with his own and felt his muscles grow tense with the effort of holding back, slowing down, making it as good for her as he knew it would be for him.
But her body writhed beneath him, her movements driven and wild, and his precarious control went, just went, and all that was left was the savage urge to fulfilment, and the long, shuddering cries of release that came together in the steamy air.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
GEORGIA stretched her deliciously sated body. Not easy on the sofa, her limbs tangled bonelessly with Jason’s, their bodies so close they could have been one. But the difficulty was sweeter than honey, more exciting than the most fiendish white-knuckle ride invented.
They must have slept for hours. ‘I’m hungry,’ she told him soporifically, then gasped as she felt his body’s immediate and deeply satisfying response to her languorous movement. ‘Ravenous,’ she added throatily.
He groaned thickly as his mouth sought the soft hollow at the base of her throat, savouring the honeyed warmth of her skin with tiny kisses that traced the valley between her breasts. ‘Me, too.’
Half drowsing in the aftermath of passion’s storm, drenched in the joy of loving him, the miracle of knowing that the barren years were behind them and that the future beckoned, promising joy, fecund with a love no longer blighted by past misconceptions, she’d felt ravenous for food.
But not now. Oh, no, not now. His love was all the sustenance she needed. She ran her fingers over his back, the hard muscle and bone beneath the satin skin, and this time their loving was slow, exquisitely, tormentingly slow, and afterwards, still joined together in the closest intimacy there is, Jason hoisted himself up on one elbow and gently pushed the damp hair away from her face, his mouth sensual, soft, his veiled eyes holding the hazed golden jewels of hers.
‘Are you OK?’ Concern, tenderness laced his voice, and she ran the tips of her fingers down his ribcage, angling forwards to feather down over the taut muscles of his stomach to where their bodies joined.
‘What do you think?’ Her smile was wicked. Unused muscles might feel sore, but that was a tiny price to pay for such happiness, such glorious peace. The lost years meant nothing now they had found each other again.
He didn’t answer her smile. ‘I meant about what happened, the baby. You must have felt betrayed. I know I did at that time—wrongly so, as it happens. It must have been so much worse for you.’ He placed a gentle kiss on the bridge of her nose. ‘I can’t tell you how much I admire your courage in finding the strength to put it all behind you, to go on. You must have put every scrap of your energy into getting where you are with the agency, becoming the woman you are today.’
‘I coped.’ She dismissed the years of total, grinding dedication to her work. They were meaningless. Loving him was the only thing of value. And there was no difference between the woman she was today and the eighteen-year-old who had conceived his child. She was still besotted, adoring. Probably more so. Definitely more so.
‘I’m fine now, truly. Everything’s sorted out and we know that neither of us was to blame for what happened.’ She trailed her fingers over the dark sockets of his eyelids, the sharp angle of his cheekbones, easing the shadows away, and sensed the relief her words and loving gesture had brought him. She saw his mouth soften into a smile as he took her hand and kissed the backs of her fingers.
‘I think we should get more comfortable. I gave up sleeping on sofas after my student days.’
Scooping her and their abandoned clothes into his arms he carried her to her bedroom, slid her slowly down the length of his body, dropped their clothes on the floor and opened the shutters to the golden promise of another brilliant dawn.
‘A shower, then I’ll fix our breakfast.’ His eyes gleamed at her. ‘I feel like spoiling you, so don’t go all feminist on me and ruin my fun!’
She had no intention of doing anything of the sort, and wound her arms around his neck as he carried her through to the en suite bathroom and under the shower where he lovingly soaped every inch of her body as the warm water cascaded over them.
‘If this is being spoiled, I’m fully in favour,’ she told him with a sybaritic sigh of sheer pleasure as he at last patted her dry with a fluffy towel, then pooled perfumed body oil into the palm of his hand.
‘This is only the beginning, I promise you. All you have to do is stand there and enjoy.’
‘Enjoy’ didn’t come anywhere near describing the exquisite torment as he massaged oil into every pore of her skin, each sensual stroke of his hands a seduction in itself, and by the time he was hunkering down, circling her ankles and slender calf muscles with slow, spiralling movements, she was almost fainting with the intensity of pleasure.
‘Jason—please—’ She gripped his wide shoulders to steady herself, her whole body quivering, heat flaming through her, scorching every cell until she thought she would explode in white-hot flames if he didn’t assuage the wild longing inside her.
‘Patience.’ His dark, sexy voice was laced with humour as he stood upright and twisted a towel around his lean waist. ‘Breakfast first. Hop into bed and I’ll bring it to you. You’ll need to keep your strength up, considering what I’ve got in mind for you over the next few days.’ His voice suddenly sobered, his brows lowering over darkening eyes as he promised, ‘I’m going to make love to you until your head’s reeling, until all the bad things are wiped out and our lovemaking is the only thing you remember.’
Georgia dismissed his sudden and unexpected return to gravity. Her head was reeling already. She watched him walk out of the room, devouring the way the tanned skin lay tight and inviting over wide rangy shoulders, the muscles of his back tapering to the towel-covered lean hips, the long, perfectly proportioned, hair-roughened legs.
She gazed at the door for minutes after he’d closed it behind him, her eyes glittering with sudden tears. She didn’t know what she had done to deserve such a wealth of happiness.
Then she blinked and walked to the bed, glorying in her perfumed nakedness. She had been made for this, for this one man, had known it since the first time she’d seen him. She hadn’t been celibate for seven years because, as she’d told herself so often, she didn’t trust emotional involvement, but because there was only one man for her.
And the next few days, the ones he had talked about, would only be a prelude to the rest of their lives. She wouldn’t have to remember the passion of his lovemaking because that, too, would be with them always.
She flopped on the top of the coverlet and piled pillows up behind her. There were plenty for him, too, but when he carried a tray through he sat at the foot of the bed, then swung his long legs up, lacing them with hers, the tray balanced between them.
‘Now I can watch you eat,’ he told her, smoky eyes glinting. ‘I intend to cram everything possible into this escape from reality.’
Fleetingly, she thought to remind him that this, their rediscovery of each other, their loving, was as real as it got, but he leaned forward and popped a morsel of sweet, juicy pineapple between her parted lips.
He’d sliced all the fruits he could lay his hands on—mangos, strawberries, and the highly perfumed and slightly tart soursops balancing sweet banana slices and luscious grapes.
Georgia said, ‘I’m starving, but if we eat all this and Blossom comes in to prepare our breakfast—’
‘She won’t.’ He selec
ted a plump, ripe strawberry and rubbed it over her lips until she took it between her teeth. ‘I put a note on the kitchen table telling her we’d eaten and that apart from wanting her to put together a picnic lunch we’d be looking after ourselves. So quit worrying.’ He grinned at her suddenly. ‘You may be the boss lady back at the agency, but I’m in charge of your well-being and pleasure—with particular emphasis on the pleasure aspect—for the next few days.’
There it was again, the mention of a few days. Maybe he was too busy to stay longer. In that case she’d cut her own holiday short and return to England when he did. She couldn’t bear to be here without him. Couldn’t bear to be without him, full-stop.
‘We could borrow Elijah’s boat and visit the other side of the island—as I recall, it’s littered with isolated, sheltered cays,’ he suggested when they’d eaten their fill of the delicious fruit. ‘Unless you fancy trudging up the spurs and hacking a way through the forest?’ He buttered a slice of cornbread and handed it to her. ‘The cove on the doorstep here isn’t nearly secluded enough for what I have in mind.’
She knew exactly what he had in mind. Her throat tightened and her heart began a wild tattoo. Around him she was in a permanent state of arousal.
The bread dropped from her suddenly nerveless fingers, back on to the plate, and Jason leant over to put the tray down on the floor, then looked deep into her wide, expressive eyes.
‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I know.’ And he lifted the small foot that was tucked against his hip bone and began to suckle her toes.
‘I could get used to island life!’ Georgia murmured pleasurably as she wriggled her bottom into the soft cushions of the comfy cane chair. She eyed Jason over the silver coffee pot and delicate china cups the waiter was placing exactly so on the tabletop.
Jason looked particularly edible this morning. Over the past five days his tan had deepened spectacularly, and his dark hair needed the attentions of the top-flight barber he obviously used. But she liked it that way. With the fine cotton black collarless shirt opened down to his waist, where it tucked into narrow-fitting white trousers, it gave him a buccaneering look that completely turned her on.
Yet everything about him turned her on, she admitted, grinning at him as the waiter moved away. She had never, in the whole of her life, been happier. Never felt so feminine, so sexy, so utterly ravished!
‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You already own one of them.’ He returned her smile, but his was guarded. He poured coffee for them both, concentrating on that, and Georgia watched him from under her lashes and turned his words over in her mind very carefully.
She had wondered. Jason hadn’t proposed, and he hadn’t said he loved her. But every touch, every look told her that he did. It was unthinkable that they wouldn’t spend the rest of their lives together, but the idea of living in this paradise with Jason was almost too wonderful and perfect to comprehend.
Thanks to Harold’s legacy neither of them need work for a living ever again. But Jason possessed a fierce ingrained pride that would baulk at the mere thought of living off her money. Not for the first time she wished Harold had divided his assets equally between his stepchildren.
But they could certainly spend every holiday on Blue Rock… She allowed her thoughts to drift, soaking up the atmosphere of San Antonio’s most exclusive hotel. They were sitting outside on the pillared open piazza, amongst tubs of perfumed flowering shrubs, with a glorious view over the hotel’s manicured lawns. The spreading branches of enormous cotton trees made a leafy frame for the natural harbour below, where the yachts of the seriously wealthy were moored.
When Jason had suggested visiting San Antonio this morning because he needed to make a couple of phone calls, and he couldn’t do that from Blue Rock, she had immediately agreed, and now she remembered him saying, ‘Elijah will be glad to see the back of me. He must be desperate to have the use of his boat. Going fishing is his only way of getting away from Blossom’s sharp tongue!’
‘We could hire a boat,’ she told him now, stirring her coffee, enjoying the tiny sound of the silver spoon clicking against fine china. The smallest, most surprising things gave her pleasure since she and Jason had come together again. ‘It would give Elijah his freedom back. What do you think?’
It seemed the fairest thing to do. Stuck at base, poor Elijah would be getting restless, with Blossom constantly on his case, chivvying him to do this, that and the other chore around the place when he obviously preferred to shift himself ‘when the spirit moved him’.
And they would still have the means of getting to the farthest side of the island, anchoring off one of the uninhabited cays that lay in the shelter of the reefs, as they had been doing for the past five days. Taking one of Blossom’s lavish picnics, swimming, drowsing on the hot white sands, making love…
Jason took his time responding. Georgia leant back in her chair and relaxed. They, too, seemed to be living on island time, the pace slow and dreamy. Magical. As divorced from the reality of everyday life as the distant millionaires’ mansions that could be glimpsed in wide clearings carved into the forest that clothed the high hills of the interior.
With a sigh of pleasure, she leaned forward and refilled their coffee cups, her smile faltering when she saw the lines of tension suddenly carve into his darkly handsome face, making him look austere—lines that had been absent recently.
He caught the slight query in her long-lashed golden eyes and his heart hurt.
She’d twisted her hair up on top of her head this morning, and feathery tendrils had escaped to frame her lovely, sun-kissed face. The chocolate-coloured top she was wearing left her golden arms and most of her slender shoulders naked, lovingly cradled her firm breasts and then came to a full-stop, leaving several inches of midriff bare above the waistband of her tiny white shorts.
Tantalising, sexy, incredibly desirable. The hard edges of the Georgia who had come back into his life such a short time ago had been rubbed away now. Their time together, after the misconceptions of the abortion that never was had been cleared away, had done that for her. They had both needed an escape from reality, needed their fantasy time, their healing time.
But now it was time to end it, to draw a line under this period of adjustment and move on.
Long after she’d fallen asleep in his arms last night he’d lain awake, thinking it over. Nothing lasted for ever, not even paradise. He’d known it would be difficult to say goodbye, but hadn’t realised just how difficult until he’d seen the query in her eyes.
Now he had to answer it.
‘It’s a possibility,’ he responded to her suggestion. ‘But unless you’re confident you can handle a boat, I wouldn’t advise it.’ Something twisted fiercely in his gut at the thought of walking out of her life. He ignored it because he had to, and explained gently, ‘I won’t be with you. There’s an air taxi out later this afternoon, and I’m hoping to arrange a connecting flight from St Vincent. Failing that, I’ll book into a hotel in Kingstown and wait on standby.’
For long, silent moments she didn’t understand what he was saying, and then she did. Their island idyll was over, and the drag of disappointment went right down to her toes.
She recovered immediately. For pity’s sake, they didn’t need azure seas and sparkling sunshine to be happy! Wherever he went, she needed to be. Besides, he had a high-profile job to get back to, and he took his responsibilities seriously.
‘Of course.’ She flashed him a commiserating smile. ‘You’ll need to get back to work; I understand that. No problem. I’ll come with you.’
She drained the last of her coffee, making rapid mental plans. Do his business here, a forty-minute boat trip back to Blue Rock, pack, tell Blossom and Elijah goodbye. Assure them she had no intention of selling up, that their home, their livelihood was safe. And forty minutes back again to catch the late-afternoon air taxi—Elijah would ferry them. No problem.
Her soft, kissable mouth was set in the determined line he had
come to know so well, and her golden eyes were glittering with the excitement of moving on. But it wouldn’t work, couldn’t work.
He would never want another woman the way he wanted her, but that was his problem, and he wasn’t going to compound it by allowing the relationship to go any deeper. Any deeper and he’d be bound to her for ever. And he couldn’t do that with the spectre of Harold in the background.
Harold, whether he’d been telling the truth or not about who had been coming on to who, had caused the complete breakdown of Georgia’s already troubled relationship with her mother. Yet he’d flown out to New York, after Vivienne’s funeral, and everything had been hunky-dory. Harold had kept all her letters—which Jason hadn’t been able to bring himself to read—and lunched with her at monthly intervals after her permanent return to England.
Jason had tried to dismiss it as quasi-fatherly interest, but he hadn’t succeeded. One look at the spectacularly gorgeous new Georgia, coupled with the knowledge of what his stepfather had been like—and knowing what he’d known about the legacy—had turned ugly suspicions into near certainties.
And she’d clinched the whole thing herself. He recalled the taunt he’d flung at her, not believing she’d refused Harold’s advances—‘Because as sure as God made little green apples he wouldn’t have left his entire fortune to you if you had.’ He’d hated himself for the jibe even as the words had left his mouth. But she’d simply given him that cool, clever look of hers and calmly congratulated him on how astute he’d become.
That certainly hadn’t been the hot denial he knew he’d been secretly hoping for. It had made him hate her for what she’d become.
Yet, looking at her now, he could only want her, couldn’t hate her. The violent emotion had been stopped in its tracks the moment he’d learned the truth about what had happened to their unborn child.
His heart had bled for her, for what she must have gone through, and the rest, as they say, was history.
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