‘Will you let me?’ he persisted, his eyes boring into hers.
‘I really shouldn’t,’ whispered Harriet, her pulse racing. ‘What about Lewis?’
Edmund’s face darkened. ‘Surely you could—’
‘Harriet,’ Lewis called suddenly, cradling the phone between his chin and shoulder, ‘is it all right with you if I go to the local pub and meet up with Mark tonight? I’ll only be gone an hour or so.’
‘Why can’t Mark come here?’ asked Harriet, and felt Edmund’s fingers dig into her flesh. She realised he thought it was a stupid thing for her to say.
‘I didn’t think you’d want us working in the house.’
‘I really don’t care,’ retorted Harriet, torn between irritation at the fact that he was willing to go off and leave her alone with Edmund and her desire for him to do exactly that.
Lewis raised his eyebrows and then returned to his phone conversation.
‘You see,’ said Edmund with a half-smile. ‘Fate’s been kind to us.’
‘There’s still Noella,’ Harriet pointed out.
‘I have a feeling that Noella’s been making plans of her own,’ said Edmund, who’d already suggested that his wife made her first move towards Oliver in the hope that this would enable him to begin his pursuit of Harriet – a pursuit that he knew Noella anticipated would end with Harriet joining both of them.
Still Harriet hesitated. ‘I’m not sure,’ she murmured.
‘I won’t give up,’ warned Edmund. ‘And believe me, I usually end up getting what I want.’
‘Suppose it isn’t what I want?’ asked Harriet, twisting free of him and starting to swim away.
‘But it is, isn’t it?’ he called after her, and it was.
‘You’re really going then?’ asked Harriet that evening as she watched Lewis taking his jacket from their bedroom wardrobe.
‘Sure, you don’t mind do you?’
Harriet took a deep breath. ‘I don’t mind, but I hope you know exactly what you’re doing.’
Slinging the jacket over his shoulder he looked thoughtfully at her. ‘So do I, Harriet, so do I.’
Harriet knew with absolute certainty that if he went to meet Mark then she and Edmund would make love that evening and the thought both intrigued and frightened her. ‘Please, Lewis, don’t go,’ she said quietly. ‘Life’s good at the moment, let’s not spoil it.’
‘I’m not spoiling anything; I’m simply going out for a drink with my scriptwriter. Where’s the harm in that?’
She knew then that he was quite determined to have his film scenario acted out, whatever the price, and that once she took the first step, controlling the outcome would prove impossible. ‘No harm,’ she agreed, turning her back on him to stare out of the window. ‘It’s strange,’ she added as he opened the door and went to leave.
‘What’s strange?’
‘For the first time tonight I understand how Rowena felt that summer we met.’
Lewis’s handsome face darkened. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, this isn’t the same thing at all.’
‘Yes it is, Lewis, it’s exactly the same, except that this time your role is a more passive one. Somehow I think that might prove quite difficult for you to accept.’
‘My “role”, as you put it, will be as passive as I wish, and no more than that,’ he retorted and then he was gone.
In the drawing room Edmund was immersed in a book, but he looked up when Harriet entered. ‘Has Lewis gone?’
‘Yes. Where’s Noella?’
‘She told me she was taking a walk – a walk that will, I suspect, lead her straight to Oliver Kesby’s cottage.’
‘And you don’t mind?’ enquired Harriet, who was beginning to wonder if all men were as detached as Lewis and Edmund.
‘There was a time when I would have minded,’ he admitted, ‘but that time’s past. Tonight I’m rather pleased. Aren’t you pleased too?’
Harriet stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, her hands fidgeting at her sides. ‘I’m not sure.’
Edmund stood up and crossed the room to her. Placing both hands on her shoulders he smiled into her eyes, but she noticed that there was little warmth in his. ‘Come with me,’ he murmured. ‘In a very short time you’ll be as pleased as I am, and that’s a promise.’
Taking her by the hand, he led her upstairs and into the bedroom that he and Noella shared. ‘Stand quite still,’ he said quietly. ‘I want to really look at you.’
As Harriet remained motionless he walked round and round her, occasionally pausing to touch a strand of her hair or run his fingerrs up and down her spine. Her body quivered but she kept her breathing even.
‘You’re really beautiful,’ he said at last, and then his fingers began moving over her stomach and hips. Beneath the fabric of her dress her skin seemed to burn. ‘Take off your clothes and put this on,’ he said abruptly, taking one of his striped shirts off a hanger and handing it to her.
Harriet looked at the shirt. To her amazement, his fingertips caught her nipple with a flick that was almost a caress. Slowly, feeling like someone who’d been hypnotised, she obeyed him.
As she changed, Edmund took off his clothes and when she turned to face him, she saw that he was already fully erect, his penis long and supple.
Reaching forward, he unfastened the top buttons of the shirt so that Harriet’s breasts were half-exposed and then stepped back to admire her. ‘Perfect,’ he exclaimed, and turned her so that she could see herself in the wardrobe mirror. She’d never realised before how sexy a man’s shirt looked on a woman, but when he reached round from behind her and plunged a hand down inside the shirt, softly gripping the aching flesh, she closed her eyes for a moment and leant back against him to feel the heat of sexual desire rising off her body.
‘Now lie on the bed,’ he murmured, ‘and I want to cover your eyes.’
Harriet shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Edmund. Not until we know each other better.’
He didn’t smile, instead his expression was one of keen interest. ‘Are you frightened of me?’ he asked.
Harriet felt her mouth go dry. ‘Not really. Should I be?’
‘Perhaps a little, but then I think you are already if the truth be told. Fear’s an aphrodisiac, Harriet.’
‘I don’t want—’
‘I know what you want,’ he said firmly. ‘Now lie back and do as I ask. After all, there’s no point in us doing the same things that you do with Lewis, is there? Where’s the sense in that? Surely you’re with me because you think I can give you something he can’t?’
He was speaking the truth, but it was a truth that Harriet was having difficulty in coming to terms with. ‘I don’t know why I’m with you,’ she said defiantly.
‘Then let’s just assume that I’m right and play it my way, shall we?’
Harriet realised that she had two choices. She could tell Edmund that she’d changed her mind, get up and leave the room and never mention the incident again, or she could stay and discover exactly what it was about him that fascinated her. ‘All right,’ she agreed after a moment’s thought. ‘Your way it is.’
‘Good girl,’ he whispered, and then his hands were on her shoulders and he was pressing her backwards against the bedspread, before taking a black silk scarf from the bedside drawer and tying it carefully over her eyes.
‘I want you to lie quite still,’ he explained, his voice sounding so remote that for a moment Harriet wondered if he felt anything for her at all, ‘and you have to guess what I’m touching you with. All right?’
She frowned. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘You’ll soon find out. Now, thrust your belly upwards.’ There was a quaking sensation deep inside Harriet, a mixture of fear and almost terrifying desire. Without a word she arched her back and he watched her slender stomach rise up towards him. With the faintest of smiles, he took a grape from the fruit bowl on the dressing table and, using the palm of his hand, rolled it over the taut exposed fles
h.
Harriet gasped at the initial contact. As the small pliable object moved over her straining flesh, she tried to picture it in her mind’s eye, but all the time she had to contend with the spirals of desire that its touch was engendering.
‘Well, what do you think it is?’ asked Edmund, fascinated by the way her top teeth caught on her lower lip when she was concentrating.
‘A jelly bean?’
He laughed. ‘Now there’s an idea for later. No, not a jelly bean, try again.’
‘I can’t think when you keep moving it around, it feels so good,’ murmured Harriet.
‘That’s what makes the game enjoyable.’
Suddenly Harriet knew the answer. ‘A grape.’
‘Well done.’
Much to Harriet’s dismay he immediately stopped moving the grape over her and she slumped back flat against the bed. He didn’t give her any warning as to where she’d be touched next, and when her breasts were suddenly touched by something ice cold, rounded but with hard edges, she gave a low cry of excitement.
The object teased at her swelling tissue, scraping lightly over her rigid nipples until she was squirming helplessly beneath its touch. Edmund couldn’t resist letting his spare hand stroke down Harriet’s side, and then, as the object dipped beneath the underside of one breast, he allowed the roaming hand to stray to the join of her inner thigh. Harriet’s legs parted automatically and her entire vulva seemed to pulsate with need.
‘What is it?’ he whispered, and Harriet tried to blot out the hand at the top of her leg and concentrate on the object now tracing the outline of her left breast. She wished that she had a firmer grasp of its shape but that seemed to change, sometimes flat and sometimes concave, and she was totally confused.
‘It’s some kind of metal,’ she gasped, her hips wriggling at the feelings that were spreading through her pelvis.
‘That’s right, it’s metal.’ Again he let his free hand move, but this time the fingers parted her pubic hair and she felt the touch of his fingertip against the edge of her outer sex lips – a touch so gentle and yet so precise that it could have been that of a surgeon.
‘Please, press harder there,’ she moaned, finding the teasing torment almost unbearable.
‘When you guess the object,’ he repeated and continued the tender stroking movement.
‘It’s cutlery!’ shouted Harriet as the edge of the object became clearer to her. ‘A spoon, isn’t it?’
‘What size spoon?’ he teased, his own excitement growing with her increasing need.
‘That’s not fair.’
‘I make the rules tonight! What size?’
‘A dessertspoon.’
‘Quite right, a dessertspoon. Now I’m going to use something on you that might have some kind of connection with a dessertspoon. Don’t move, I just have to go and fetch it.’
Harriet could have moved, could have taken off her blindfold or simply flexed all her tense muscles, but she obeyed him because she realised that every move he made was calculated to ensure that she had the maximum amount of pleasure from the final climax.
Edmund came back into the room so quietly that she didn’t hear him and it was only when she felt her sex lips being parted that she realised he was back. ‘Now, tell me what this is,’ he urged her, and suddenly the aching space where she longed to feel his penis was filled instead by a freezing cold substance that had no sooner touched her burning tissue than it began to melt and trickle down her shamelessly spread thighs.
‘It’s ice-cream!’ she shouted, ecstatic at both the sensation and the ease of the test.
‘I’m afraid it isn’t,’ said Edmund in mock regret, but before she could protest she felt a new sensation between her thighs. It was the tip of his tongue, and it moved slowly up her inner channel until it reached the substance, and once there it began to lick it away, at the same time adding further torture to her highly stimulated nerve endings.
Edmund used both his hands to hold Harriet’s outer sex lips apart as he consumed the substance that was now almost melted. Once he’d cleared it away he allowed his tongue to enter her most secret place, the place he had been longing to see from the moment he’d first met her.
His tongue was long and rougher than she was used to, but felt to the writhing Harriet to be made of velvet. When he probed inside the entrance to her vagina, and then curled his tongue upwards, he spread the last drops of the substance against the top wall of her vagina, around the area of the G-spot. The highly sensitive gland immediately responded by sending urgent streaks of red-hot pleasure up through her pubic bone and she clenched her buttocks in order to heighten the feelings.
‘Guess again,’ said Edmund softly. ‘Guess right and I’ll let you come, Harriet, and that’s what you need to do now, isn’t it? I can tell by the way you’re so tight. Tell me, do you ache here?’ and he put a hand across the base of her belly, pressing down so that the ache he’d mentioned increased and she was sure her climax would be triggered.
‘Yes! Yes, I do!’ she screamed, no longer caring if anyone heard. ‘I don’t know what it is. Just let me come before I go mad.’
He laughed softly. ‘You won’t go mad, Harriet, except with pleasure. You’re nearly right, but what do Americans like almost as much as ice-cream?’
She knew, but couldn’t think of the word, and all the time she tried to recall it he kept his tongue moving and his hand pressing against her until it felt as though the whole of her lower body was on fire, as she tried to force the elusive orgasm past the point of no return.
Seeing her straining and hearing her gasps and pleas, Edmund too had difficulty in controlling himself and at last he put her out of her misery. ‘In England it’s more usually eaten unfrozen,’ he murmured.
‘Yoghurt!’ shouted Harriet. ‘It’s frozen yoghurt.’
‘Yes, it is. So, what would you like as your reward?’
Harriet was almost sobbing now, desperate for the blissful moment of release. ‘You know what I want,’ she cried.
‘I want to hear you say it, Harriet. I want you to beg.’
‘I want a climax, and I can’t wait, I just can’t!’ she cried. With a sigh of regret Edmund finally gave in to her pleading. He continued to lick at her G-spot, one hand remaining on her lower belly, using his other hand to touch her very lightly on the area surrounding her clitoris.
‘Bear down for me, Harriet,’ he urged her. ‘I want to see the little nub at the moment you come.’
She didn’t understand what he meant, but she heard the words and pressed down internally, forcing her clitoris to emerge from beneath its hood. Then Edmund moved his mouth and, with an almost imperceptible touch, he swept the ice cold tip of his tongue over the exposed bunch of nerve endings.
For Harriet it was a moment of ecstasy so intense that she wasn’t sure she could bear it. Shards of shattering pleasure ripped through her, and the moment her body began to come down from the pinnacle of its pleasure, Edmund told her to bear down again and he repeated the touch, so that once more every nerve ending in her body was activated. This time she screamed at the top of her voice and her body heaved from side to side forcing Edmund to release her and sit on the bed, watching as she was racked by the second and final convulsion that signalled her total release and respite from the torture of prolonged sexual tension.
Edmund was both relieved and delighted by her responses. She was all that he’d imagined and more. With Noella he sometimes had the feeling that she agreed to his games and experiments to please him rather than to please herself. With Harriet there would be no such fear because Harriet wasn’t his wife. He felt reasonably certain that she’d allow him to remain the controller, a role he relished, but only if he made the rewards great enough. The fact that his hold over her would be so tenuous was an aphrodisiac in itself, because he had a contradictory streak in him that meant he liked to control sexually, but only strong-willed women. He gained no satisfaction from exerting control over naturally passive women. A
nd he knew that he was still searching for the perfect soul mate, a woman who could be everything to him. Watching Harriet as she revelled in their activities, he wondered if it was possible that she could be the one. If so, he would have to take her away from Lewis and that, he knew, would be extremely difficult as well as ultimately dangerous. Lewis was not a man to cross, either personally or professionally.
Harriet opened her eyes and stared up at this man she’d just allowed to pleasure her so thoroughly. ‘Is that all?’ she asked, her voice soft and languid. ‘What about you?’
She expected him to smile, but smiles were difficult for Edmund and he merely nodded thoughtfully, as though in appreciation of her words. She couldn’t help contrasting his behaviour with Lewis’s warm, caring way of making love, but even so still felt a longing to have Edmund deep inside her. That way, she was sure, she could force him into giving more of himself emotionally than he was at the moment. Quite apart from that, she needed to have him fill her, to satisfy her need for closer contact between them.
‘I think I’ll save something for another time,’ he said slowly.
‘You mean, you’re not going to make love to me?’
‘I’ve done that, or have you forgotten already?’
‘Hardly,’ laughed Harriet, moving her still-heavy limbs slowly on the bed. ‘But there’s more to sex than that.’
‘Yes, much more, and we’ve got six weeks to explore the boundaries. I think, though, that there is something I’d like to do before we finish tonight.’
Harriet moved over on the bed as he lay down beside her. His hands drew her over him until she was crouching on all fours, her hands resting on either side of his waist so that her breasts brushed against his belly and his erection nestled between them. Edmund lifted his hands and wrapped her swollen breasts around the shaft of his penis, giving a small sigh of pleasure at the moment of contact. ‘Now move your body for me,’ he murmured.
Harriet looked down at his face, still apparently unmoved by what was happening, and she felt an urgent desire to force some kind of response from him. Slowly she moved her body rhythmically up and down, taking care to linger at the top of each upward movement so that the purple glans was given maximum stimulation. Then, once her rhythm was established and Edmund’s eyes started to cloud with excitement, she moved more slowly and heard his breath catch in his throat as he lost his momentum and his climax, which had been imminent, started to fade.
Forbidden Desires Page 7
