by Marsh, Susan
Tom Russell gazed broodingly down at the rich red and blue oriental rug, while the delicate subject loomed silently between them, then he raised his eyes to hers. ‘I’m sorry about before, Cate. I do apologise. Very bad timing.’ He shook his head. ‘Bloody criminal.’
She nodded in stiff acceptance. ‘That’s—all right. It should never have happened.’
‘It certainly shouldn’t have.’
‘It wasn’t part of our agreement. ‘
‘I know. I was a bastard, kissing you like that.’
She glanced quickly at him. His expression was solemn, but she wasn’t sure she could trust his sincerity, especially with that sensual glow in his eyes.
He lounged carelessly back against the sofa, and heaved a sigh. ‘You know, I think we got off to a bad start this morning.’ He stretched his arm along the sofa back. It was an intimate move, and brought him closer. His mouth was relaxed, his warm gaze intent on her face. ‘I know I may have seemed—abrupt. I am sorry.’
Her heart swelled with gratitude that he cared enough to apologise. Less than an arm’s length away from him, she felt infused with a dangerous tingling warmth, like a small feminine moon sucked irresistibly towards a strong, hot sun.
‘I think I understand, Tom. You’ve been under stress, what with everything. Losing your dad, and all.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘And look … er … I’m sorry if I hurt you. With the things I wrote about him.’
Unconsciously, her fingers slid down the stem of her glass. She felt his gaze flick to them beneath his black lashes.
He gave a small sardonic laugh. ‘Don’t apologise. He’d be the first to agree he deserved every word.’
‘You must have been very close.’
He made a wry grimace. ‘I’d thought so, finally. Although not so much when I was young. He was already in his fifties when I was born, you know. It wasn’t until I reached my twenties that we really began to understand each other. At least … I thought we did. I thought we were close. But then, right at the end, he …’
The lean, bronzed fingers tightened on his glass, and he dropped his gaze and lapsed into a brooding silence. The humour lines around his mouth and eyes seemed to deepen and grow pained.
What had happened at the end? Had that old man turned away from his son? She wished she were close enough to him to ask. For a moment he looked so weary her heart ached for him.
‘You look so sad,’ she exclaimed involuntarily.
At once the shutters came down. His brows snapped together and his guarded gaze set her at bay like an intruder. She could have bitten off her tongue. The last thing Tom Russell wanted from her was sympathy. How inept of her to have trampled on his private feelings. She curled her hands in her lap. How insensitive he must have thought her.
She felt his keen glance on her face. As if he’d read her dismay, he swiftly moved to recover the mood, and gave an easy laugh.
‘Sad? Never.’ He waved his glass. ‘Don’t forget the real funeral was more than two weeks ago. It’s not as if I haven’t been anticipating his end for a long time.’ A darker edge crept into his voice. ‘It’s different when a death comes—suddenly. Then you can feel—knocked about.’ He stared, frowning, into his wine, then took a swallow and relapsed back into abstraction.
She remembered that his wife had died suddenly. Hadn’t two years been enough to soften the loss? Perhaps not, considering the sharp rebuke he’d given Olivia in the cathedral. The silence lengthened, and she wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the lamplight, but a harsh fierceness showed in his strong face, as if he were locked in battle with some private anguish. Her heart swelled with compassion. Despite his light words of denial, the signs of grieving were all there.
She wished she had the right to take him in her arms and offer him solace, and wondered who else there was in his life to help him bear his grief. Surely he should have spent this night in the company of loved ones. If anything happened to Gran, she knew she’d want someone to comfort her through the rugged night watches.
‘Sometimes it can catch up on you later,’ she observed huskily, needing to break the silence. ‘My parents were killed when I was five, then when I was nine I shut down for half a year.’
He roused himself from his musings. ‘Both your parents? Oh, Goldilocks,’ he exclaimed softly, reaching out to touch her cheek. After a while he added, ‘What does that mean, shut down?’
‘I stopped wanting to go to school. In the mornings I stayed in bed and turned my face to the wall. Me. Don’t laugh, but I lost interest in everything. My friends, games, all the kids’ parties. It seems incredible now.’
He considered her for a while, then lightly brushed her hand. ‘I’m not laughing. So what did they do to you? Send round the Feds?’
‘Well, Gran talked to people at the school and I was allowed some time away. She had to take time off from her job at the paper, and I did my lessons with her. From what I remember, I must have been like a sleepwalker. For months I hardly did anything but practise my violin. I think the music must have helped.’
‘What snapped you out of it?’
She smiled. ‘Luckily—especially for the music lovers of the neighbourhood—Gran understood what was wrong, and she just waited until I was ready to talk about it. Then one day some friends who’d known Mum and Dad came to visit, and brought up some stories about them from the past. After they’d gone, somehow the floodgates opened.’
She laughed in ridicule of herself, but her eyes still misted over with the glimpse of the old tragedy.
He sat very still, his eyes intent on her face. She could feel him analysing, searching inside her brain with his sharp intelligence. After a while he sighed and frowned down at the rug, then with an impatient gesture tossed off the last of his wine.
‘Let’s not dwell on it all now. They’ve gone, all of them. Ashes to ashes.’ He turned his slumbrous gaze to her. ‘But we’re here. You’re here. And you’re so very—very alive.’ He reached out and lightly traced her jawbone with his thumb, then his hand slid to her throat. ‘I can feel your blood pulsing just here.’
How could a careless touch be so intensely sensual? All at once her blood wasn’t blood, and it wasn’t merely pulsing. It was wine, and the scorching, high-voltage desire in his eyes sent it seething madly through every vein in her body. More than ever their brief, wild slide into passion before dinner simmered between them like a tangible force. Was this the consolation Tom Russell sought?
She tried to weigh up the issues, the potential consequences, but his magnetic presence only a few centimetres away sparked fire along her nerves and made her limbs feel heavy and languorous.
A tiny voice tried to warn her it could be spurious, this sudden gentleness and accessibility, nothing to do with her at all. Even macho men had their softer moments. Wouldn’t he be as desirous of any other woman who happened to be here with him this night?
But there was no other woman. She was here, and, transfixed with a longing to be close to him, she couldn’t have run away from him now to save her life. And who else did he have? she argued with herself.
‘Have you—do you have much to do with your stepsisters?’
Amusement crept into his eyes. ‘As little as possible. They’re far too keen to hustle me to the altar. They’ve tried to set me up with every little diamond-miner in Sydney.’
‘That’s a pity. I know if Gran died … Well, when it does eventually happen, a long, long time in the future, touch wood … I hope I won’t be alone to deal with it.’
‘She means a lot to you.’
It was a statement more than a question. She nodded, and his eyes held such warmth and understanding she was seized by a deep, instinctive certainty. Caught up as he was with his grief, he still had heart enough to spare for her concerns. Whatever crazy fate had decreed she should be with him this night, it felt right.
The fiery glow in his eyes intensified, and he said softly, ‘We’re neither of us alone tonight, are we?’
Ever
ything in her slowed and held its breath, poised on a pivot of desire. When Tom Russell put his hand out and gently tilted up her face, she surrendered to his firm, warm lips with willing fervour. This time he kissed her with such a slow and exquisite tenderness her bones melted into liquid fire.
He drew away from her, his breathing a little ragged. His deep voice thickened. ‘If you were my girlfriend now I’d carry you into that bedroom.’
‘Well, then,’ she breathed over her tumultuous heartbeat, ‘let’s pretend I’m your girlfriend.’
He put one arm around her, the other under her knees and hoisted her up, laughing as he swayed precariously backwards and forwards, threatening to spill her. She giggled, then cried out with alarm as he nearly overbalanced. Then he changed his grip, and she clasped her arms around his strong neck while he carried her into his bedroom as easily as if she were a leaf.
For a suspenseful moment he stood by the bed, holding her as if preparing to toss her into the middle. He was smiling down at her, devilment in his eyes, then they darkened and his smile faded. He set her down on the rug.
He surveyed her and the air prickled with suspense, as if something between them had reached a critical point. She had a sense of fathomless depths in Tom Russell, of the jagged darkness beneath his lean, sexy surface.
Adrenaline lurched in her belly. Hadn’t some part of her known from the very first—the first glance, the first words—that everything this day would lead to this moment? Although how much of his desire was attraction, and how much of it was pain?
He stood before her, straight and tall and silent, sophisticated and sexual, his hot eyes focused on her, and she felt an inner surge of sheer exhilaration. She was a woman and she wanted him. There was only now. This one night.
Gently, he lifted the hair from her neck and weighed it in his hand. Immediately her spine became a river of shivers. She could hear his quickened breathing as his smooth fingers sought her zip and found it. She stood very still, her breath coming faster as he slipped the zip down, his gaze intent on her face. As the cool air touched her skin she quivered uncontrollably.
He bent his dark head and her blood leaped in intoxicated response as her nostrils filled with his clean masculine scent. He kissed the curve of her neck and shoulder, and where his lips touched her skin burned. With a quick movement he slid the dress from her shoulders and it fell to the floor.
His lustful gaze on her near-nakedness fuelled a warm erotic rush to her nipples, and kindled the fire between her legs. He’d hardly touched her, yet her body remembered how aroused she’d been earlier and ignited again, her flesh pricking with desire. Her skin craved the caresses of those smooth, lean hands, his artful, sensuous mouth.
To speed things along she reached for his shirt, but he caught her hands and held them still.
‘Not yet,’ he growled, his deep voice reaching into her with its dark authority, stirring her longings to be with him, to draw closer to him.
He unfastened her lacy bra with hands that were only just steady. Panting, she helped him, her own eager hands trembling. His eyes flared at the sight of her bare breasts, the nipples taut and ripe, and though her longing for him to touch them, taste them, roared, he knelt down. Caressingly, as if she were of priceless porcelain, he eased down her high-cut pants to rest just below her hips, and exposed her blonde triangle of curls.
There was a sudden electric stillness in him. The potency of those earlier moments, the raw, pulsing passion, reignited. He cast her a knowing glance, almost as though he guessed her hunger to feel his lips there again, his clever seeking tongue.
‘Patience,’ he commanded, sitting back on his heels, a wicked laugh in his hot eyes, though there was a flush across his cheekbones.
Then, in deliberate provocation, he traced one mocking finger from her knee up the inside of her thigh, to where the skin was softer than silk. Rivulets of sensation thrilled beneath her sensitised skin, tormenting her inflamed flesh. She trembled in yearning for his smooth fingers to travel further, to extend that tingling delight and ease the insatiable, all-consuming hunger, but with a swift movement he whipped her pants all the way down to her ankles, then stood up.
The flagrantly sexual heat of his darkened gaze seared her to her core. She’d never felt so blazingly naked, or so wired to be appreciated.
‘So, Goldilocks,’ he said, appraising her flush, her stiffened nipples, with a challenging quirk of one brow. ‘Do you want to run away from me now?’ Despite his mockery there was a tear in his breathing that thrilled her to her feminine marrow.
She could play that game. She stepped out of her flimsy undies and kicked her dress aside. ‘Only if you promise to chase me.’ Her voice was smoky with desire. ‘If you think you can catch me.’
‘I can catch you,’ he growled at once, stepping forward and easily trapping her in his embrace.
But she slipped from his grasp and danced away from him, and, with her arms outstretched, pirouetted in her high heels, her hair flying out around her, taunting him, revelling in her nudity like a brazen siren. As he watched her, laughing, the flame that flared in his eyes revved her excitement to a wild pitch. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so turned on, so joyous and wanton and abandoned. She wanted him to do everything to her, to ravish her to the limit and take her to paradise with his hard, athletic body.
She brought her fandango to a standstill, posing with her back to him. ‘What do you think?’ she taunted huskily, throwing him a glance over her shoulder.
Tom felt his laughter seize along with his lungs. Driven by the need to obliterate the intensifying black pain that threatened to engulf him, he fixed his every conscious nerve on her pale beauty.
The hot blood pounded a path to his groin as he took in the heavy hair brushing her white, shapely back, the alluring ridge of her spine. Slowly, he drank in the heart-stirring curves of neck and shoulder, the delicacy of her supple waist. His underclothes constricted him. He feasted his eyes on the gorgeous curves of her bottom, as smooth and exquisitely shaped as a peach.
Impossibly he hardened further, throbbing to penetrate that slim blonde beauty and bury himself in her sweet, vibrant flesh.
Gently he took her shoulders and turned her to face him.
‘Luscious,’ he said, his voice gravelled with lust.
Cate gasped in a breath. He wasn’t playing now. His eyes were aflame. He pulled her against him and she felt the hard ridge of his erection against her belly. He slipped his hand under her chin to lift her face, and his mouth came down on hers in a searing kiss, as possessive and uncompromising as a conqueror’s. As he pushed her towards the bed his marauding tongue thrust in to stroke hers in a graphic simulation of possession, driving her body to a raging awareness of an empty hollow desperate to be filled.
With her thirst still burning to be slaked, the sexy kiss broke as abruptly as it had started, the backs of her knees connecting with the bed, and she plumped down on its edge.
She surveyed him with wanton eyes while he unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it. Her mouth dried at the hard beauty of his bronzed chest, his powerful arms, the scattering of curled black hair that narrowed over the flat plane of his abdomen to disappear so alluringly below his navel.
Her mouth watered to taste him. In the grip of fever she reached up to caress his lean ribs, and, moaning, felt the scorching heat of the bronzed satin skin riding his taut muscles.
She panted for him.
A quiver rippled through him as she sought his belt buckle, but he captured her hands and put them firmly from him, frustrating her immediate need to enjoy him to the full, refusing to allow her any control.
It was maddening. It was torture. It was cruel deprivation.
But with a flash of that divine creativity he seemed to inspire in her, she rolled herself into the middle of the bed, and stretched out like a sensuous cat, casting him a long, tantalising glance as she ran her tongue-tip over her upper lip.
It worked. To her immense pleasure somethi
ng like a flash-fire bolted through his body. His hot eyes riveted to her languid pose, he dragged off his shoes and socks, unbuckled his belt and stripped off his trousers and underpants.
For the first time she viewed him in the naked flesh. Her heart slowed to a heavy pounding beat, awed by his proud erect penis, its thick, virile length impressive. With appreciation she took in the sinewy grace of his long limbs, so muscular and satisfyingly hairy. The raw, masculine beauty of Tom Russell’s lean frame grabbed at her heart and stirred the hot, throbbing ache between her legs, melting the coil of tension in her womb into a molten pool of yearning.
If he could be hers …
The lamp’s glow warmed the smooth, supple undulations of her body to a pale golden shimmer, and Tom felt all the knifepoints of anguish that had gathered in him since he’d read his father’s letter soothe. With a mental effort he thrust aside awareness of his wounds to concentrate on her beauty. Sweet forgetfulness beckoned like a mirage.
He stretched out beside her, urgent to drown himself in smiling blue-green eyes shadowed by passion. She turned on her side to receive him, and his hungry gaze devoured slender limbs and curves as smooth and graceful as an alabaster figurine.
He inhaled the fresh, clean scent of her skin. His rock-hard shaft throbbed for the sheath of her honeyed flesh, but he disciplined himself to wait, take her higher, and her release would be all the sweeter.
Despite his heavy heart, his pulse pumped a strong erotic beat as he pushed her onto her stomach. He traced the curve of her spine, relishing her skin’s tingling fire under his fingers, the pleasure of pleasing her somehow an assuagement to his pain.
He grazed the hollow at the base of her spine with his lips, then, with sure, knowing hands, caressed the smooth contours of her buttocks. It was a challenge to stop, they were so achingly, meltingly desirable, and he struggled with his bittersweet need to take her there and then as he registered the little flinch that signalled her leap of response.
