Temptation is the Night

by Marguerite Kaye

  He slid his finger carefully, deeper into her heat, finding the hard, swollen centre of her. He touched, caressed, stroked, slipping and sliding over and round. He felt her writhe and heard her soft moan and he stopped thinking and gave himself up to pleasure.

  Gripping like pain. Excitement like fear. Building, burning and clutching, higher and higher. She could hear herself pleading inarticulately. Jack’s voice answering, saying nothing, everything, harsh and soothing. His mouth on hers, like a petition. Her hands on his shoulders, holding on as if he would save her, though she didn’t want to be saved. Between her legs the storm gathered. Jack thrust his tongue into her mouth, and his fingers stroked like a thrust too, and there, right then, she gave in to it. The chains which held her to the ground were so tight, they were too tight and they were crushing the breath out of her. Suddenly they broke and she was free, free, free. And screaming it, free, free, free, but even as she screamed it, she knew there was still a void for him to fill, for him to be free too.

  She clutched at his arms. He kissed her, looking straight into her eyes, the connection a jolt, as deep as the other connection they were about to make. Exactly like before. Not a bit like before. He pushed her legs apart, angled her up, positioned himself over her, still looking at her, still watching her. Possession.

  He slid into her and into her and into her. Slowly. She could feel every bit of him, hard, pushing, parting, hands under her bottom to tilt her up, so he could push higher. He filled her and she contracted her muscles around him to hold him still, and saw the pleasure in his face as she did, felt it in the clenching of his fingers on her bottom.

  “More,” she begged, breathlessly, thinking there couldn’t possibly be more. He pulled her closer, her ankles wrapped around his waist, and magically, there was more.

  Jack moved. A tiny, tiny pulse of a movement, and still their eyes were locked on each other. Then he moved again. A thrust, pulling out from her slowly, then pushing in suddenly hard and fast, up, up, up, and it was so, so, so…

  He thrust again, hard. Joltingly hard, forging into her, with each stroke harder and deeper. Making sure she could not forget. As if she ever could. She forced her eyes open and he was still watching her as he thrust, and with each thrust she felt a pulse of pleasure, and another. And then he came, spilling inside her, gripping her to him, finally his eyes closed, tight shut, and she knew that something really had been set free.

  The floodgates opened as she held him and Lindsey wept. For what had once been, for what they had just shared, and for what she knew they would never have again.

  Chapter 3

  Jack did not stay. He pulled himself away from her, got out of bed, dressed, and left without a word. He did not meet her eyes again except once, in the doorway, when he looked as if he would speak, but then stopped. Only the rumpled sheets, her torn camisole and the tenderness between her thighs were indisputable evidence of his presence. And now his absence.

  She knew what he was doing, and she felt she owed him the indulgence of allowing him to do it. For Jack, this was the final part of the exorcism. Leaving her as she had left him, without a word of explanation. It really was over.

  Lindsey had thought herself well acquainted with loneliness, but this was worse. After such a connection, after such a coupling, disconnected and uncoupled, she was completely bereft.

  For the next four weeks, she tried her utmost to do what he asked—to forget him, to pretend that the exorcism had worked. She had much to occupy her, with the exhibition and the plethora of social invitations Archie Davenport seemed to expect her to fulfil as his protégée. But what in other circumstances would have been thrilling, was now an unwelcome distraction. Lindsey could think of nothing except Jack.

  The sweetness of their early love came back to her with a freshness which made its loss all the more poignant. They had barely been able to take their eyes off each other. She’d felt like she was living in a dream. The long sea voyage simply encouraged that belief. By the time they disembarked in Southampton they’d been engaged to be married, and all her own plans, to attend art school, to travel to Europe, had simply become irrelevant. All she wanted was to be Mrs Jack Damarell—though actually, what she’d become was the Countess of Crieff. The formality of the title, it seemed to Lindsey, looking back, somehow epitomised what had happened to their love. Formalised, it had set, become frozen, and they had never managed to defrost it. She knew it wasn’t that simple, she had spent the last four years trying to work out what had really happened, but nevertheless, it’s how it felt.

  In London, where they’d spent much of their married life, the memories were impossible to avoid. Restaurants they had dined in, parks they had walked in, galleries they had trailed through, she so eager to show off the one subject on which she felt she knew more than him, he so laughingly keen to let her. How much she had loved him.

  She visited their town house in Cadogan Square, but Jack had sold it. She drove down to Crieff House one day, in one of Jack’s own sleek sports cars, and found the gates padlocked. Peering through them at the overgrown pathway, the lawns like a hayfield, she cried. The beautiful Palladian mansion she’d dreamed of filling with love and laughter and children was a desolate wilderness.

  Lindsey tried, she really did try for Jack’s sake, but she was not just back to the start, she was more deep in love with him than ever. The mature love of a woman, sweet and ripe, so much more potent than the tartness of the young love they had once had.

  What had gone wrong? Why? How? The questions would not go away.

  She sought him out. At the Café de Paris, where he had a table beside the stage with an actress—the famous one, with the name which sounded like a fanfare. She could not breach the all-male bastion of his club. She watched him play tennis and polo. He cut her every time. He did not visit her exhibition. He did not call at her hotel, nor return her telephone calls. His butler politely but firmly barred her entry from his plush Mayfair flat.

  Lindsey’s frustration turned first to anger, then determination. There was something between them worth saving. The night at Lady Eleanor’s had proved that, and he must know it as well as she. Was he just being obstinate? She knew him better. He was running from something. But they had both run enough. She needed another chance. If he would not give it to her, she would have to take it.

  Jack was struggling. Every day he reminded himself that it was over, that it must be over, because there was nothing left to try, but Lindsey refused to go away. Worse, it was no longer her ghost which haunted him but the real person. The raw passion of their night together by far exceeded all his memories. Always before, it had been like a secret, their lovemaking, an illicit meeting of strangers. That night at Lady Eleanor’s had been different. A meeting of lovers in the full light. But still, he stuck to his purpose. It had to work, because it had to be over.

  The dreams had come back. The sweat-drenching, bone-shaking dreams. Twice in the last month he had woken up screaming, like in the old days. And once, in the factory, he had blacked out. Just for a few seconds, and thank God it had been Bill Paisley, his foreman and ex-Sergeant Major, who had been with him. But it had happened, and irrationally, set upon proving himself right, he blamed Lindsey for it. Another reason to ignore her pleas for a fresh start. Another reason to remind himself of how impossible were his feelings for her, how wrong it was, and would still be. Even if wrong was the opposite of how it felt.

  “Jack!” Bunty Cowper hailed him as he came out of his club. “What a marvellous coincidence, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your gorgeous cars. Daddy wants to buy one for Duncan’s birthday, but they told him there’s a waiting list of six months.”

  Duncan was Bunty’s younger brother, a photographer who had achieved recent fame with his society portraits, and also an excellent tennis player who occasionally partnered Jack at doubles. “I’m afraid there’s not much I can do,” Jack told her, reluctant to become embroiled.

  “Nonsense darling.” Bunty w
as not a woman who could be easily cold- shouldered. “There’s always something. Let me buy you a little drinkie and we can talk about it.”

  “There’s really nothing…” Jack started to protest, but already Bunty had a hand on his arm and was propelling him to her waiting car. Without quite knowing how it came about, twenty minutes later he was sitting in the Ritz with a glass of champagne in his hand and Bunty had extracted a promise from him to do his best to produce one of his cars in time for her brother’s birthday. Now Jack looked pointedly at his watch while Bunty enthused about Lindsey’s paintings.

  “They’re frightfully good Jack, she’s awfully clever. Downtown, by an Uptown Girl, the exhibition is called—that was Archie Davenport’s idea, of course. So affecting, all these poor people on the streets with nowhere to live. Ghastly really, and Lindsey tells me it’s not far from where her studio is. One can only be thankful that there’s nothing like that in London.” Bunty took another dainty sip of champagne. “Lindsey tells me she hasn’t seen you since Lady E’s party.”

  Jack looked into her button-bright eyes, and decided he’d had enough. “No,” he said baldly. “Now if you don’t mind, I have an appointment.”

  Even Bunty could not be anything other than intimidated by the look he drew her. She adjusted the slave bangle she wore on her arm and decided she’d done her bit. “Little girls’ room,” she said, pushing her chair back before the waiter could help her, “won’t be a tick.”

  Jack called for the cheque. The waiter brought him a message with it. Bunty had run into some friends and would he please bring her bag up to their suite. Sighing, Jack retrieved the clutch from where it had fallen under the table.

  He made his way through the Long Gallery to the foyer, up to the first floor and knocked on the door. A voice bid him enter. He did so. The reception room of the suite looked out over the verdant swathes of Green Park. It was empty, but a door at the far end was open. Suspicious now, Jack walked towards it. At first he thought that this room too was empty, then there was a movement from behind the door. A soft cloth over his mouth and nose. The smell. The taste, he remembered it from the field hospital. He struggled, but could already feel his legs shaking. He staggered over to the bed, dropping Bunty’s bag onto the floor. Unconsciousness claimed him.

  His head was thumping. His vision blurred. Shirt sleeves. Someone had taken off his coat. He tried to move, and found he was splayed out, bound by the ankles and wrists to a four-poster bed. Cool hands on his forehead. A glass raised to his lips. “Drink this, you’ll feel better.” He recognised the voice. He struggled to sit up, but the ties on his wrists prevented him.

  “I’m sorry, but there was no other way.”

  Lindsey. Jack strained violently, but succeeded only in tightening the ties around his wrists. “What the hell are you playing at?”

  “I need to talk to you.” She walked across the room to pull a gilt chair out from under the dressing table. She was wearing a robe, long and soft and silky. Ivory- coloured like her skin, it was trimmed with feathers the same shade. The train trailed out behind her as she walked, the feathers billowing, the material rustling. He could hear the soft swish of silk on flesh. As she came back towards him, pulling the chair behind her, he caught a tantalising glimpse of leg. Stocking top. A scissoring movement then the other leg.

  Lindsey sat down beside the bed. Her lips were painted vermilion red, her eyes outlined with kohl. She looked exotic. Not a bit like herself. A temptress, the vivid scarlet slash of her mouth like the glistening petals of something fatal. Lips made to envelop. The image sent his blood racing. Jack tried desperately to think of something else. He closed his eyes, but it served only to make him aware of the scent of her. A musky perfume, cinnamon maybe, spicy and heady, and beneath it, Lindsey. His wife. When would he ever stop thinking of her as such?

  His wife, in an exotic wrapping. He could feel himself hardening. He opened his eyes and saw her watching him, her face alight with something he could not interpret. Her tongue, pink on the vermillion of her lips.

  “Let me go.” His tone was clipped, peremptory. The voice of one used to being obeyed without question.

  Lindsey shook her head. “No. We’ve tried it your way, and it didn’t work—not for me. It’s only fair that you at least consider trying it mine.”

  “Why should I?”

  “For the same reason as me, because your way didn’t work. Did it?” She swallowed hard, but she knew without at least this admission she had neither the will nor the nerve to go on. “Tell me honestly, Jack.”

  The atmosphere had been tense, now it seemed to thicken. Surely the clock stopped ticking? Jack’s eyes were steely grey. “It doesn’t matter whether or not it worked,” he said, “there is nothing left to try.”

  She let out her breath with a little whoosh. It hadn’t worked! She knew better than to let her feelings show too much. “We can try again.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? We still have something. We always did have something, right from the moment we met. Do you remember, that evening on the Aquitania?”

  “Of course I remember,” he said tersely.

  “I was so young. You seemed to me so mature. You’d been through so much, things I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I know it’s silly, but I thought—I thought I could heal you. Stupid.”

  “Very.”

  She flinched, biting her lip in her determination not to cry, smudging her carefully applied lipstick instead.

  “I didn’t mean to sound cruel, but it’s the truth.” Jack’s face softened slightly, but his voice was still cold. “There can be no fresh start. No clean slate. It’s just not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t work. I know it doesn’t work, because it’s what I tried with you the first time around. You were my clean slate, and look where that got us. Not a fresh start, I just dragged you under with me.”

  “You’re talking as if we were doomed from the outset.”

  Jack winced, trying desperately to mask the pain the conversation was causing him. The scars which would never heal, the wounds he so desperately did not want her to see, he could hardly bear to look at them himself. “I suppose in a way we were doomed. There are things—I can’t tell you. I’m damaged goods. You can’t make a fresh start with damaged goods.”

  “Jack, I’m your wife, you can tell me anything.”

  “No!” He pulled so hard at the ties, she thought he would hurt himself. Through his shirt, she could see the muscles of his arms and shoulders straining. “For God’s sake Lindsey, untie me. This is a ridiculous situation.”

  He was right, but desperation could do curious things. If she let him go she would never see him again. This was her only chance. She steeled herself to make the most of it.

  Jack seemed to sense this. With an enormous effort of will he forced himself to calm down. “Look,” he said in a more conciliatory tone, “I didn’t set out to make you unhappy. It’s just that things were—complicated. Still are complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  “There are things you don’t— can’t —understand.”

  “Then explain to me, Jack! Help me understand.”

  “I can’t. I can’t talk about it.”

  She got to her feet and padded across the room to look out through the long voile drapes. Taking a deep breath she returned to the bed, the swishing tail of her peignoir trailing behind her. “Don’t you see that’s the problem. You never let me in. Always locking yourself away from me, and never wanting to explain why. Do you realise we never once spent the night together in the same bed? Not once. I’ve never gone to sleep in your arms. Never woken up beside you. At first I thought it was just your English ways, but it wasn’t that. You don’t do intimacy, and you wouldn’t let me. Eventually I realised it wasn’t because you couldn’t, it was because you didn’t want to.”

  Underneath the cosmetics, her expression was one of raw pain. “I know it wasn’t just my
fault, but I feel so guilty. I was so young. Perhaps if I’d tried harder, done something else, though I don’t know what. That’s what’s killing me, I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “Lindsey, what’s the point in raking over this? It’s done.”

  “It’s not done! I still love you, that won’t ever be done!” She stopped abruptly, shocked by her admission. Jack’s face was unreadable. She should have known then, but she took no heed, she was too far gone to pay heed. “There, now you know, I’ve said it.”

  He wished she had not. He wished he could believe it made a difference, but it didn’t. Jack closed his eyes. “It doesn’t make any difference, Lindsey. I’ve told you, I’m not interested in a reconciliation, and I’m not interested in a dissection of the why’s and wherefore’s.” He was being cruel, he was being unfair, but it was for the best, of that he was absolutely sure. The door must be firmly closed, for his own sake as well as hers.

  Lindsey bit back the hasty retort which sprang to her lips. His reaction was as she had expected, after all. Jack Damarell was not a man who responded positively to coercion. He wasn’t going to talk. He wasn’t going to back down. There was only one way to break through his reserve.

  If she had the nerve.

  “What are you planning to do, keep me here tied up like a bonded slave until I agree,” Jack asked sarcastically.

  He was still straining furiously at the ties around his wrists and ankles. So infuriatingly stubborn. So coldly determined to suffer whatever it was he was hiding from her in silence. She loved him. He had loved her once, surely he could love her again, if only she had the courage to make him see. “Whether you want to admit it or not, there’s still something special between us Jack, and I’m going to prove it.”