Unexpected Pleasures

by Penny Jordan

  She closed her eyes and ran her hands feverishly over Gabriel’s torso, avidly relearning its shape, tugging buttons free of buttonholes as he kissed her, plunging her straight down into the depths of her own desire to that place where there was no reason, only the voices of her senses, whispering to her to hurry, to take what she could while she could, while there was still time.

  She pushed his shirt off his shoulders, her eyes open now, as she watched him shrug it off completely, her body following his as he moved back to unfasten his belt. She leaned forward, tracing the line of his collarbone with her finger tip and then following it with small, slow kisses, breathing in the raw male scent of him as she stroked and kissed her way down his body. She was completely lost in the world of her own longing.

  His belt was unfastened, his hands on the waistband of his chinos. Sasha lifted her hands and placed them against his chest, pushing him flat on the bed and then replacing his hands on his waistband with her own.

  Slowly and carefully, inch by inch, kiss by kiss, she eased down his zip, relishing the sensual pleasure of slowly exposing to her touch and her gaze the plain of his belly crossed by the neat line of dark hair. She circled his navel with the tip of her tongue and then lifted her head to look, solemn-eyed, where the neat line of dark hair started to thicken. Beneath her hand, through the fabric of his chinos, she could feel his erection. A pulse quickened in her own body. She tugged impatiently at his chinos, exhaling in fierce relief when he responded to her need and stood up to remove the rest of his clothes.

  On the beach there hadn’t been time for her to look at him properly, but now she could. Her heart lifted and lurched against her ribs, her nipples tightening as white-hot desire—a woman’s desire, not a girl’s—shot through her. This too was something she hadn’t known at seventeen. This fierce desire, stripped bare of the sweetness of fantasy, this real woman’s need for an equally real man in the most elemental way there was. At seventeen all she had really wanted and craved from him was emotional love. Now, here, in this bed, she was fully prepared to sacrifice love for the physical satisfaction he could give her, Sasha decided fiercely. She was a woman now, with a woman’s right to indulge her own sexuality and need. What had happened between them on the beach had turned the key on ten years’ worth of sexual denial and repression.

  But she couldn’t afford this kind of self-indulgence, a warning inner voice reminded her. She was not free to do so. She was a mother, as well as a woman: a mother who needed to think first of her sons and not herself. Gabriel was their guardian, and she couldn’t give him the weapons to corrupt their innocent belief in her.

  As though he had guessed what she was thinking, and already sensed her withdrawal, Gabriel reached for her, telling her fiercely, ‘It’s too late for second thoughts now, Sasha. I mean to claim what’s rightfully mine. And I intend to show you just what you gave up when you walked out on me.’

  The softness of his voice, so loaded with sensual promise, made her tremble with longing. He was stroking her skin with the lightest of touches, the merest brush of his fingertips against her flesh, which suddenly burned for so much more. It was as though he was deliberately teasing her body, Sasha recognised, as he kissed her mouth lightly and then withdrew from her, only to repeat the brief kiss again and again, whilst the teasing, trailing movement of his fingertips against her skin became a form of slow torment.

  Desperate for more than he was giving her, she tried to hold him closer. But he simply closed his hands round her upper arms and kept her still while he kissed her throat and then her shoulders, so briefly that she had to hold her breath so as not to miss the sensation.

  ‘You want me,’ he whispered to her. ‘Don’t you?’

  All she could do was let the convulsions of open pleasure that seized her body give him his answer, and then moan against the liquid heat of her reward when his lips skimmed her breast, moving closer to her nipple. It was impossible to stop her body from straining eagerly towards him, or her hand, miraculously freed from imprisonment, from cupping the back of his head to urge him closer. The slow, erotic pull of his lips on the hard peak of her breast had always had the power to turn her belly liquid with erotic delight. But her memory had failed to provide a true record of the intensity, Sasha recognised weakly, when the teasing sensation of Gabriel’s tongue-tip circling her eager flesh became the heat of his mouth closing on it. Pangs of pleasure so intense that they made her cry out seized her, gave her over to wave after wave of surging arousal. It flooded her and possessed her, picking her up and carrying her with it.

  Without her saying a word, Gabriel found the soft wetness his touch had made ready for him. The feel of his fingers against her sex drove her desire higher, her whole body arching up to the heat of his mouth to the caress of his fingertip circling the swollen ache of the source of her female pleasure.

  For a few seconds it was enough. But her body held memories of other, deeper pleasures, and it demanded that the circling fingertip become a slow, deliberate stroke over the whole length of her outer sex. Not just once, but over and over again, until she was grinding her hips and her teeth in frustration, then reaching up to grip hold of Gabriel in her need to feel him fill the waiting emptiness inside her.

  ‘You want me?’ He had moved back a little from her to position himself between her legs.

  Sasha nodded her head and watched him, waiting, holding her breath as longing flooded her body.

  His hands were on her hips. He was bending his head over her body, lowering it, his breath warming her belly.

  Sasha drew in a defensive breath and tensed her body against an intimacy she didn’t think she could survive. This wasn’t what she had expected, or wanted. It was too intimate, too personal, too liable to strip her of all her defences and leave her exposed to him.

  But it was too late to stop him. Gabriel’s tongue-tip was already delicately stroking between the swollen pads of flesh that had opened as if in sensual offering, causing a rush of hot, shocked delight to invade her.

  His tongue brushed slowly over the pulsing swell of aroused flesh it was seeking. Sasha tried, but failed to hold back her cry of pleasure. It radiated out from the place where the slow brushstrokes had become a sensually rhythmic slide. She could feel the swift assent to her climax coiling tightly inside her. It was too late now to escape. Her back arched of its own accord, her toes curling tightly as the feeling inside her soared towards its cataclysmic point of explosion. She felt Gabriel move, his weight settling against her, his heat between her thighs as he lifted her hips and thrust powerfully into her.

  For the space of several strokes her body trembled on the edge of release, her muscles greedy for the sensation of his movement within them. And then the deep, gripping spasms of pleasure took over, possessing her completely as he drove through them to take her even higher. She could feel the sudden hot spill of his own climax with its added frisson of extra sensuality, and then the intensity was dying, leaving her lying defenceless and dependent on the support of Gabriel’s arms in its retreating tide.

  For a long time it was impossible for her to speak. All she could do was lie there, listening as the harsh sound of Gabriel’s breathing softened, and accept the spasmodic aftershocks still galvanising her body.

  Finally Gabriel released her and moved away from her. ‘You have thrown in my face all those things Carlo gave, but we both know that he never gave you what I just have.’

  His words reached her as though they had dropped like stones into deep water from a great height, disappearing from view but leaving behind them echoes of their existence that would last for ever.

  ‘There’s more to life and living than sex, Gabriel.’

  ‘You can say that now,’ he mocked her. ‘But ten minutes ago—’

  ‘I can’t change the past, but I can control my future,’ Sasha retaliated. ‘I won’t be used as your sexual plaything, G
abriel. I have my sons to consider. No amount of pleasure in bed with you can come anywhere near being worth compromising my relationship with them.’

  ‘You say that now. But we both know that I can make you change your mind.’

  Sasha closed her eyes, not wanting to watch as he gathered up his clothes, not wanting to know when he left her. But of course she did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HE HAD DONE what he had promised himself he would do. He had forced Sasha to admit that no other man could make her feel the way he could. So why wasn’t he feeling elated? Why did his triumph feel so empty? Why was there this ache inside his chest? This driving need to see her smile at him with that same tender warmth with which she smiled at the twins?

  Why had he allowed his need for her to overpower him to such an extent that he had had sex with her not once, but twice, without using any kind of protection? Why did he wake in the night longing for her closeness, wanting more than just the cry of her pleasure during sex?

  But more of what? What exactly did he want from her? His heart knew the answer. His heart? He didn’t have a heart; his mother had destroyed his emotions almost before they had been formed. He had never feared loving anyone because he had never believed he was able to love. So what, then, was this feeling that ached through him?

  The truth was that Sasha was a woman any man would be a fool not to love.

  Gabriel stared unseeingly at his computer screen, unable to understand where that thought had come from, and equally unable to reject the truth of it. The girl who he had once held in such bitter contempt for the damage she had done to his pride had become a woman worthy of anyone’s respect, and she now had the power to inflict pain on something far more vulnerable than his pride.

  Slowly, carefully, like a man lost in a tunnel without a light to guide him, Gabriel felt his way cautiously through the unknown territory of this new world of emotions he had suddenly entered, flinching when a careless movement brought him up against a sharp, painful discovery.

  Was this what love was? This powerful combination of strength and weakness, of a need to have and a need to give, of wanting to protect as well as wanting to possess? When he thought back—really thought back—hadn’t he felt those things for her all those years ago, even if he had denied both their existence and their meaning?

  Love. He tasted the word, rolling it around his mouth, feeling its form and shape while inside his head an image of Sasha formed.

  The sound of the twins’ voices on the other side of the half-open door to his office broke into his thoughts.

  ‘You ask him,’ he could hear Sam saying.

  ‘No, you ask him.’ Nico was insistent.

  A rueful smile tugged at his mouth as he guessed that the purpose of this unscheduled deputation was another attempt to get him on their side in the matter of their longed-for bicycles. Pushing back his chair, he got up and strolled over to the door, opening it and inviting them in.

  The twins exchanged expressive looks, shuffling closer together in a way that was unintentionally endearing. They were still young enough to automatically seek the comfort of each other’s physical presence, Gabriel realised as he closed the door and walked back to his chair. Having undergone some kind of radical transformation, he was now suddenly discovering that not only did he have a heart, but that it was vulnerable to the most unabashed and foolish kind of sentimentality.

  ‘Right, so who is going to ask me whatever it is, then?’ he invited.

  Another eloquent exchanged look, followed by a sharp dig in Nico’s ribs from Sam’s elbow, seemed to decide the matter.

  Nico shuffled forward a couple of inches. ‘Me and Sam have been wondering if you’re our real father.’

  The simple question stunned Gabriel, and when he didn’t answer, Nico continued in a kind voice, ‘It’s okay. Before Dad died he told me and Sam that he wasn’t our real father.’

  ‘Yes, but he did say, too, Nico, that he’d always be our dad and that he loved us very much,’ Sam put in.

  ‘I know that. But he didn’t tell us who our real father was, did he?’

  Sam, eager now to take over from Nico, gave him a scornful look.

  ‘No, but that was because he said that one day, when we were old enough, Mum would explain it all to us, and that we weren’t to tell her what he’d told us. He said that he was proud of us and that we were real Calbrinis,’ Sam informed Gabriel importantly, before giving Nico another sharp nudge.

  Dutifully, Nico fixed his earnest gaze on him. ‘Well, me and Sam have been thinking, and we wondered...’

  Gabriel watched as they exchanged more looks.

  ‘We would really like if it you were our father,’ Nico said in a rush.

  ‘Yes, it would be really cool,’ Sam agreed.

  It took from the first thunderstruck realisation of what they had said to the change of his heartbeat to a sudden heavy thud of recognition for Gabriel to recognise that such a short span of time had the power to change his whole life. As though the hitherto secret combination of a complex locking mechanism had suddenly clicked into place, a series of doors opened inside his head, allowing the truth to walk freely through them.

  Of course they were his. How could they not be? The wonder was not that they were, but that he had not recognised it before now.

  He walked over to his sons and crouched down beside them. Their familiar features blurred slightly, causing him to blink.

  ‘Do you really want me to be your father?’ he asked. It was the first time in his life that he had thought of the emotional needs of others as something more important than what he himself might want.

  The boys looked at one another and then at him, wide watermelon grins transforming their faces as they nodded their heads in unison.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We knew it was you—didn’t we, Nico?’ Sam said smugly.

  ‘Yes. We both knew,’ Nico told Gabriel gravely, before reaching out and tucking his hand around Gabriel’s arm, leaning against him.

  This was why Carlo had wanted him to be their guardian, Gabriel suddenly realised, emotion clogging his throat as he knelt there, with a child—a son—in each arm, hugging them both fiercely to him. No wonder he had felt so instantly at ease with them, so immediately determined to protect them. This was what Carlo had struggled to tell him, only to change his mind. Because he had feared that Gabriel might reject the truth?

  ‘I think for the moment, until I’ve spoken to your mother, we should keep this to ourselves,’ Gabriel told his sons.

  ‘But not for too long,’ Sam countered. ‘Now that you’re our father you’ll be able to tell Mum that we can have bikes for our birthday.’

  When had they thought that one up? Gabriel wondered wryly as he received a pair of happy, confident smiles. As male logic went, it seemed a reasonable exchange, but Gabriel doubted that Sasha would see it that way.

  The boys went to join the Professor, sworn to secrecy and having happily assured Gabriel that they were glad he was their real father.

  Against all the odds, they had the kind of sturdy emotional self-belief that he could only envy. No, not against all the odds, but because of their mother. Because she had given them something more precious and more valuable than any amount of money or material possessions. She had given them a mother and a father, the secure knowledge that they were loved and wanted, the loving firmness of boundaries they had been taught to respect, and most of all the emotional freedom to be themselves. Wasn’t Sasha herself the most valuable gift life had given them?

  And the most important gift life had given him?

  Sasha. He needed to talk to her.

  * * *

  HE FOUND HER in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher. She looked up when he walked in, and then looked away again quickly. He wanted to look at her and to go on l
ooking at her, marvelling that her body had nurtured the lives of their sons, that she was responsible for the miracle of their existence. But not solely responsible, of course.

  ‘The boys have just been to see me.’

  ‘They’re hoping you’ll persuade me to let them have bikes for their birthday,’ Sasha said.

  ‘They wanted to know if I am their real father.’

  The water jug she had been holding slipped from Sasha’s grasp, smashing onto the tiles in a shower of broken glass.

  The look on her face told Gabriel everything he needed to know.

  ‘Carlo was their father,’ she whispered, bending down to start picking up the broken glass.

  ‘No—leave it. You’ll cut yourself,’ Gabriel warned, but it was too late. Blood was dripping from her palm, where a shard of glass had slipped in her shaking hands and cut the skin.

  Sasha stared numbly at the bright red blood welling from the small cut. She felt oddly separated from what was happening, as though some huge force had shunted her sideways into a place where she could only observe herself at a distance.

  ‘But he didn’t father them. He told them that himself, Sasha, so there’s no point denying it.’

  This couldn’t be happening. She looked down at the glass.

  ‘This needs cleaning up,’ she told him. ‘I—’

  ‘I’ll do it. You come and sit down.’

  How had she got here, to the kitchen chair? She watched blankly as Gabriel deftly swept up the broken glass and disposed of it.

  ‘Now, let’s have a look at that hand.’ Docilely she let Gabriel lead her to the sink and run cold water over her palm, before removing the first aid kit from the cupboard and putting a protective dressing over the cut.

  He took her back to the table and sat her down.