Time Fuse

by Penny Jordan

  Her hair had a natural wave and because she always had it well cut, was relatively easy to style. For the office she often wore it up, but tonight to save time she left it down on her shoulders, adding a frosting of eye-shadow and a slick of soft rose lipstick before leaving her mirror. Her office clothes consisted of neat suits and blouses but tonight on some impulse she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, grimacing faintly at her own reflection before leaving her bedroom. She had lost weight and the jeans clung to her hip bones, giving her an air of fragility. Her taxi arrived on time and getting into it she subsided on the seat, giving the driver the address.

  Sir Gerald’s London apartment was one of five in a well-maintained Victorian house, set in impressive grounds. A little to her surprise no security system appeared to be in operation, and after checking the discreetly lettered boards in the elegant reception area she made her way to the lift. Sir Gerald’s apartment was on the first floor, and on impulse instead of using the lift, Selina chose instead to take the impressive carved wooden staircase. The wooden bannister felt smooth and warm beneath her finger-tips and she relished the sensory enjoyment of it beneath her fingers. She had always been acutely attuned to her surroundings; perhaps that was why her childhood had been so unhappy. A less sensitive child might not have reacted so badly in the same circumstances.

  She reached the top of the first flight of stairs and glanced appreciatively around the small square landing. On the ceiling the Victorian plasterwork was still in place, the vine leaves delicately picked out in soft green and gold to match the pastel rug on the floor. Not Aubusson, she suspected, giving in to the impulse to bend and touch the silky fibres, but very beautiful none the less.

  Straightening up, she rang the doorbell and waited. The door opened almost immediately and she stepped inside, smiling in anticipation of seeing her father. As the door swung closed behind her the smile was banished from her face, the shock of seeing Piers Gresham where she had expected her father too great for her to conceal.

  That he was equally shocked was immediately evident—shocked and angry, she noted, her eyes automatically registering the fact that he had discarded his jacket, his shirt open at the throat, his hair slightly ruffled as though he had run irate fingers through it. He was tense as well, his body moving with all the lethal menace of a crouched panther.

  ‘Sir Gerald is expecting me.’ She hovered uncertainly in the foyer while Piers flung open an inner door.

  ‘Is he now?’ His voice was harsh, bitter almost. ‘Come in here,’ he commanded her. ‘What I have to say to you isn’t for general consumption.’

  Numbly Selina followed him, too enmeshed in the aura of bitter violence emanating from him to argue, and found herself in an elegantly furnished drawing room, which apart from themselves was completely empty. She swung round, puzzled and apprehensive, disturbed to find he was right behind her. Her movement had brought her so close to him that she could see the tiny lines radiating outwards from his eyes; the harsh grooves of strain drawn from nose to mouth, his eyes boring into her as he registered her unease.

  ‘My…Sir Gerald…where is he?’ she asked huskily at last.

  There was a tense, unnerving silence, the dark blue eyes glittered angrily over her pale face.

  ‘My uncle, Miss Thorn,’ Piers said curtly at last, ‘is in hospital.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘IN hospital?’ Selina stared at him, too shocked to even think of concealing her emotions.

  His eyes were hard as they flicked over her white face. ‘Your concern for my uncle is extremely touching,’ he rasped, ‘but you’ll have to forgive me if I find it somewhat suspicious. Look at you,’ he commanded her, grasping her wrist and half-pulling her into the hallway, so that she faced her own reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall. The pale-faced, huge-eyed girl who stared back at her was someone she barely recognised. A wave of dizziness swept through her, and she was dimly aware that her surfeit of emotion must seem suspicious to the man holding her, but how could she explain that the emotional starvation of years had finally caught up with her, and what she was experiencing now was the fear that having met her father she was to lose him.

  ‘Well?’

  The harsh question cut painfully into her own thoughts. She turned her head and stared blindly at her interrogator, barely registering the curt demand.

  ‘Nothing to say, is that it?’

  She flinched away from his muttered curse, her body reacting like that of a stuffed sawdust doll as he shook her briefly. ‘Do you realise that if you’d arrived half-an-hour ago my aunt would have been here? How do you suppose you would have felt if she’d witnessed the betraying reaction I’ve just seen? Are you having an affair with my uncle?’

  Her dizziness cleared long enough for her to stare incredulously at him. Was that what he thought? She knew he had been suspicious of her motives in applying for her job, but that he should suspect this?

  ‘Are you?’

  He shook her again, and suddenly fear and pain gave way to anger. How could he be so blind? Was that really how he saw her? As a woman who would enter an affair with a man old enough to be her father and a married man at that? Hysteria bubbled wildly inside her, threatening to overset her fragile self-control.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Sir Gerald that himself?’

  She hadn’t meant to make the challenge, but somehow the words were forced out through stiff lips, the cold anger in his eyes changing to deep bitterness and then something else as he continued to hold her.

  As she tried to sustain his concentrated study, fighting against the control his mind was trying to force on hers, she felt another wave of dizziness sweep back. The hallway started to sway and she felt the sharp bite of his fingers; heard the harsh expletive he uttered as she gave way to swimming darkness.

  WHEN she came round she was lying on a long, cotton-covered settee with Piers standing over her, a frown of fierce concentration creasing his forehead.

  ‘Here, drink this,’ he commanded her brusquely, handing her a glass half-filled with amber liquid. She swallowed some automatically, grimacing, and then shuddering as the raw spirit hit her stomach, instinctively swinging her legs back on to the floor and struggling to sit up.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Piers commanded curtly, ‘Give yourself a chance to recover.’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t just throw me into the lobby,’ Selina said bitterly. ‘Aren’t you afraid my unsavoury presence might contaminate the atmosphere?’

  She watched the shrug of powerful shoulders beneath the fine silk of his shirt and was shocked by her sudden need to reach out and touch him. She wanted to feel the heat of his skin beneath her fingertips; to feel his body burn and take fire from her own, his hands and lips caressing her…

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  His abrupt question brought her back to reality.

  Her chin tilted firmly as she returned his cool scrutiny. ‘Sir Gerald telephoned me at the office and asked me to bring round some papers he needed. He told me there was no urgency as long as he had them some time this evening and suggested that I went home first and had my meal and then brought them. We had not arranged a clandestine lovers’ meeting if that’s where your fertile imagination was leading you.’

  She had the satisfaction of seeing a thin, dark seeping of colour line his cheek-bones, his eyes glittering savagely as he looked down at her.

  ‘I should have thought my uncle had more sense than to involve himself with someone like you. He’s been through the traumas of an illicit affair once and it damn near destroyed both him and his family. Not that I can’t see why he’s tempted,’ he added in a different voice, before Selina could protest her innocence. She was bitterly regretting giving in to the childish impulse she had had earlier not to answer his question directly but to refer him to Sir Gerald. Why had she done it? On some crazy hope that it might make him jealous? Now it was her imagination that was running away with her. Strangely enough
she found nothing flattering in his assertion that he could see why his uncle was tempted by her. For one thing it smacked too much of the suggestion that she had been the one to involve Sir Gerald in their supposed affair instead of the other way round.

  ‘Really?’ She managed to make her voice sounded arctically indifferent, ‘But unlike Sir Gerald you are able to resist the temptation, is that it?’

  She hadn’t realised how provocative her taunt was until she saw the dark colour running up under his skin and caught the savage imprecation that left his lips before his dark head bent towards her and she was imprisoned against the settee by the powerful force of his hands against her shoulders, his mouth hot and angry as it covered hers.

  She knew she should be cool and withdrawn, but her need was too strong for her, and against all common sense her lips softened and clung, her arms sliding round Piers’ neck to find the thick dark hair growing close to his nape. The hoarse murmur of satisfaction he made did nothing to encourage her resistance, her body as pliant and fluid as silk as he moulded it to his own, the bruising grip on her shoulders easing as his hands stroked over her back, spanning her narrow waist before reaching her hips.

  It was only when she felt the hard arousal of Piers’ body moving against her own that sanity intruded. She wasn’t accustomed to such intimate contact with a man’s body and her own reacted acutely to it, with a mingling of wanting and fear that jerked her back to reality.

  She started to struggle, but Piers had manoeuvred them both so that they were lying side by side on the settee, and with her back pressed against the cushions and her front covered by the superior weight of Piers, there was no way she could win any show of physical strength.

  ‘Stop fighting me.’ His voice was thick and slightly slurred and for the first time Selina remembered that he had only arrived from the States earlier that evening, and must surely be close to the point of exhaustion. If he was, he wasn’t showing it, but it could explain his behaviour. Lack of sleep could play strange tricks on one’s self-control, and wanting wasn’t loving, she reminded herself as she tensed her body in rejection of the male heat of his, for what had started out in anger, as a demonstration of contempt was swiftly changing course, threatening to overwhelm them both, Selina recognised as she felt Piers shudder against her, his hand cupping her breast and searing her with his heat.

  ‘I want you.’ He muttered it against her ear, his voice thick and unrecognisable, his touch sending frissons of hectic pleasure racing over her skin as his lips caressed the delicate flesh behind her ear.

  Her T-shirt had become partially untucked in her struggle and when his hand slipped inside and found the rounded warmth of her breast she shivered in tense reaction, recognising that Piers’ desire was fast approaching the point where it would be outside his control. If that happened and he made love to her how would he react afterwards? He would hate himself and her, Selina thought bitterly. He would hate himself for letting his guard down to such an extent that he had given in to his need to possess her and he would hate her for being a witness to what she knew he would consider to be a weakness. She had to stop him. Frantically she tried to pull away, but his free hand simply grasped the front of her shirt, wrenching it away from the waistband of her jeans as he refused to let her move.

  ‘No!’ He said the word softly, but the feverish glitter in his eyes underlined his determination. She had never seen him looking like this before, Selina thought achingly, his hair ruffled and tousled, his skin drawn tight against his cheek-bones, and flushed with colour.

  Like hers, his shirt had come free of his trousers, and with half of the buttons undone she could see the dark shadowing of hair against his skin. Her need to reach out and touch him shook her, overwhelming her with its intensity. Until now she had not realised how sexual hunger could be a force so strong that no mere effort of human will could overset it, but now she did and the knowledge both thrilled and frightened her. Beneath Piers’ roughly caressing hand she felt her breast swell, her nipples tightening; aching. The initial savage assault of Piers’ mouth on her own had changed to a series of seductively explorative kisses feathered against the skin of her face and throat; at first relaxing and now tormenting as her body yearned for a return of that earlier intense hunger.

  Against all the dictates of common sense Selina found herself reaching out to touch him, prompted to do so by the deep sense of urgency he was building inside her. His thumb stroked the taut peak of her nipple and she gasped involuntarily, arching against him, feverish with need, her hand sliding inside the fine silk of his shirt to find the solid muscles of his chest. When his hand left her breast and he muttered something under his breath, her first feeling was one of sharp disappointment, followed by relief as common sense returned, only to flee again as he tore impatiently at the buttons of both their shirts, flinging his own off to reveal a torso tanned by the sun and silkily smooth apart from its shadowing of fine dark hairs. When he removed her own Selina tried to protest, panic clawing at her stomach as he unfastened her bra, but fear, panic, common sense; all of them fled as he pulled the lacy garment away and looked down at her body.

  The pressure of his hand against her back had caused her to arch slightly upwards and against her will her eyes were drawn to follow the path of his as it burned over her skin, compelled by the twin crests of her breasts glowing deep pink against the delicate pallor of her skin.

  This was madness, she told herself achingly…it had to stop. She lifted her arms to push him away, but all her hands encountered was the thick darkness of his hair, her closed eyes jerking open as she felt the heat of his breath searing her breasts. The touch of his mouth in the valley between them seemed to burn her skin, her urgent plea to be set free lost beneath his fierce exclamation of pleasure as his hands cupped their pale fullness and his lips burned a tortuous path towards first one summit and then the other, just stopping short of each peak and then tormenting her with lightly delicate kisses that burned rings of fire around her aching flesh.

  The small sound she strangled in her throat as her fingers twined feverishly in his hair seemed to reach him despite her desire for it not to do so and his hands slid from her breasts to her waist and then down to her hips, pulling her into the aroused heat of his and holding her there, his mouth plundering hers, forcing her lips back against her teeth, inflicting an almost unbearable pleasure-pain on her senses that made her move feverishly against him, tormented by the delicate rasp of his body hair against her tender breasts; and urged on almost against her will to a fulfilment she sensed lay somewhere waiting for her.

  She had enough sanity left to realise her own danger and tore her mouth from his, demanding her release in a voice that shook with all that she dared not say to him.

  His response was to slide his hands slowly up her body, stopping when he reached her breasts. Without saying a word he caressed their aching fullness watching the expressions of anguish and pleasure dawn in her eyes. She must have moved, despite her determination not to do so, because suddenly she saw the flare of an answering hunger burn in his study of her, a harsh sexual tension stamped into each feature as he bent his head, and before she could stop him, possessed the taut crest of one breast with lips, tongue and finally the light edge of his teeth to devastating effect.

  Her body arched instinctively, her breasts swelling and throbbing; small feminine sounds of pleasure tearing at her tense throat as a feverish heat consumed her; a pleasure she had never envisioned possible radiating out from the centre of her breast to curl tight fingers of need in her lower stomach. She wanted it all, she realised desperately; she wanted every last frisson of pleasure he could give her. Wantonly her body rejoiced in the fierce heat of his; in the complete lack of self-control.

  As though sensing her feelings, he sucked fiercely on her breast, tormenting the other with urgent fingers, the fine grate of his teeth against her sensitive skin, as he gave way to savage hunger, making her shudder in frantic pleasure. She couldn’t stop him no
w… Hard on the heels of her admission came a fierce thrust of pleasure because the decision had been taken away from her. She wanted to give in to him, she acknowledged achingly; she wanted his possession of her body…and even though it galled her soul to admit it she knew that her love and need of him were so intense that she was prepared to take what he offered, knowing it for exactly what it was.

  When he lifted his head from her breast she wanted to cry out in frustration, but gradually the tension in his body communicated itself to her and she too tensed, realising that what had caught his attention was the ringing of the telephone. As he moved away from her to answer it she was overwhelmed by a wave of sick disgust for her own behaviour. What she had been on the point of doing went against all her dearest held precepts… Even if she had been sure of his love she should not have acted so recklessly. What if he had made love to her? She could quite easily have become pregnant. The thought was sobering enough to drive out all her early need and to replace it with a sense of sick self-disgust so acute that her stomach actually twisted nauseously with it.

  Something in her expression must have mirrored Piers’ own feelings because when he came back from answering the phone he studied her now fully dressed body with cynical eyes, his mouth twisting derisively as he said. ‘So now we know. There’s nothing so potentially treacherous as sexual desire, is there? But at least I don’t carry the burden of knowing I’m supposed to be committed to someone else.’