by Anne Mather
As if he sensed her need, he shifted slightly, let his hands move lower, stroking, caressing as they went until they were stopped by the tight waistband of her trousers.
For a moment she held her breath, waiting for him to open the fastening, move lower still. But, just as he had with her breasts, so now he subjected her to more delightful torture of waiting, caressing and teasing her through her clothes, cupping her so that the heat of his broad male palm reached her through the cotton, adding to the already burning need that pulsed at her most intimate core.
‘Angelos!’
It was a cry of protest, of hunger, of need. She wanted more than this. Needed his touch more intimately. Needed him more. And even when she lifted her hips from the cushions, pressing herself against his hard fingers, it was not enough. The pleasure of his touch was blunted by the folds of material between them and it was not his touch she wanted but him. She needed to know the full truth of his most intimate possession and only that would satisfy her.
They weren’t close enough. He was still fully clothed for one thing, frustrating her need to touch him all over, to know the sensation of skin on skin, her naked body against his. She didn’t have his skill with the buttons, her eyes still closed as she dealt with them blind, but after a few moments tugging and twisting they were open and she heard his soft laughter deep in his throat as he helped her at last, shrugging off his jacket and then his shirt, barely pausing in his attentions to her breasts as he did so.
‘And these will have to go …’
Kneeling up, he slid down the zip on her trousers, then, hooking his fingers at the loosened waistband, eased them down her legs, taking the pale pink knickers with them. That tormenting mouth followed the path of her clothing, kissing its way down the exposed skin from her waist, along her thighs, right to her toes, then back up again, lingering on the cluster of curls between her legs, making her cry out in shock and wonder as her hands reached down to clutch at his dark head once more.
‘This is what you were inviting …’
Angelos pressed harder, hotter kisses down towards the most feminine part of her. Strong hands eased her thighs apart, thumbs smoothing over the hidden cleft, making her catch her bottom lip between her teeth and bite down hard in an effort to hold back the need to urge him on, to plead with him, beg him to take her now.
She wanted the fulfilment she knew was waiting for her just over the horizon, still out of reach. And she wanted it now. But at the same time she wanted to drag out this most intimate torment of waiting to its fullest, to experience everything that this man could give her. To know the full truth of being a woman in the hands of a man who truly knew how to make love to her. A master of his craft—a master of passion—a master of pleasure.
And it was when those strong fingers stroked the innermost core of her that Jessica felt she was truly beginning to know the meaning of pleasure. Beyond thought, incapable of doing anything but respond to him, she could only open herself up to his touch, submit totally to his control. Her own control was gone, lost, blasted away on the explosions of pleasure that his touch had triggered off all over her body, so that now she was abandoned to pleasure, heedless of anything else. And when his tongue swirled over the hidden bud of her clitoris, already sensitised almost beyond endurance by the touch of his powerful fingers, she gave herself up to the mind-blowing shock of fulfilment that had her open her eyes wide, and her whole body was thrown into a spasm of total gratification.
‘Angelos!’
His name was a wild, soaring moan of abandonment, all thought of what her tongue might express torn away from her on the waves of delight that pulsed through her.
‘Oh, yes, dear God, yes! You are so right …’
Another spasm of ecstasy had her gasping for breath before she could continue. She heard Angelos make a rough, dark sound in his throat, then he moved suddenly, taking her in his arms and holding her tight against him as she rode the wave of stunned sensuality.
‘Oh, yes …’ she managed again, her lips pressed against his cheek, her body molten against his. ‘Yes! Living well is the best revenge … and this is truly living …’
But, even as she spoke, she felt the change in Angelos’s mood, the sudden stiffening of his long body beside her. The words died in her throat as she sensed the terrible change in the atmosphere, the sudden destruction of the heated passion, the soaring pleasure that had gripped her.
‘Ochi!’
Angelos moved suddenly and shockingly, his caressing hand snatched away, his proud dark head flung back, and he pushed himself to a sitting position and then, appallingly, jackknifed off the settee and on to his feet. Standing like this, he towered above her, big and dark and disturbingly powerful. Jessica risked one terrified glance into his dangerously furious face and then flinched away again, burying her face in a cushion, with her eyes closed for good measure.
‘Ochi!’ he snarled at her again, his normally near-perfect grasp of English deserting him in the throes of the icy-black rage that burned in his eyes. ‘No! No way! I am not a substitute for any man.’
‘Substitute … Oh, no!’
Sheer horror brought her eyes wide-open again, her whole body shaking in panic and reaction to the cruelly abrupt end to their lovemaking. Tremors of fulfilment were still shaking her body, shockingly combined with the need for more than the delights she had experienced, the longing for the total satisfaction of his full possession.
A possession that was to be totally denied her as, ruthlessly ignoring what must be his own body’s still clamouring demands, Angelos stooped and snatched up his jacket and shirt from the floor. Flinging them on, he stamped his feet into the shoes she had never even noticed him kicking off in the height of their passion.
‘Angelos—please—no …’
‘I will not be used for your revenge on your rat of a fiancé!’
‘Angelos—no—it was never like that …’
She struggled to sit up but the cushions underneath her were too soft to give her full support and she only succeeded in writhing in a wild ungainly struggle that got her nowhere as Angelos whirled on his heel and headed for the door.
‘Please …’
But she was talking to the empty air as his powerful, furious stride carried him away from her and out of the room, the door slamming loudly behind him.
‘Angelos …’
Even though she knew he couldn’t hear her, or if he could then he was not going to listen, Jessica still called out after him as she stumbled to her feet and started to rush after him. But, tripping over the tangle of clothes on the floor, she was reminded of her embarrassing state of undress and the impossibility of running after him like this.
But her trousers and underwear were knotted together and she was still struggling to get them fit to put on when she heard the main door in the hall bang hard against the wall as if Angelos had wrenched it open with a strength and force that revealed every burning degree of the fury that gripped him
‘Wait!’
She knew it was useless but still she had to try. She had managed to get her trousers back on, abandoning the knickers as useless time wasting, and she was still pulling them up and struggling to fasten them as she ran on bare feet out into the hall and towards the main door that was still coming slowly to full closure. ‘Angelos!’ she yelled after him in the vain hope that he might hear her, but deep inside she knew it was already too late.
A fear that was confirmed as she reached the far side of the hall, got her fingers on the door handle … only to hear the full-throated growl from the engine of Angelos’s powerful car as he swung it away from its parking space out in the courtyard and roared off down the drive at breakneck speed.
But still she couldn’t stop herself from wrenching open the door and stumbling out into the darkness of the night.
‘It wasn’t like that … Please—it wasn’t like that at all …’ she cried despairingly, knowing that there were only the owls in the trees or perhaps a whirling
bat flying through the air to hear her as she watched the red tail-lights of the car disappear down the winding drive and out of sight into the darkness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE grandfather clock that stood in the hallway was chiming yet another hour as Jessica prowled restlessly round the library, checking once more out of the window in the hope that there might at last be some sign of Angelos’s return. Her ears strained to hear the sound of his car engine, her eyes hunting for the gleam of his headlights in the pinkish light of dawn but to no avail. She’d followed exactly the same routine only a few moments before and there had been nothing to see. There was little point at all in trying again.
And yet she just could not keep still.
It had been like this all through the night. Ever since the moment that Angelos had stormed out of the house, she had been unable to settle, unable to concentrate on anything. She had paced up and down the hallway, half longing and yet half terrified that she would hear the sound of the car and know that he had come back. He had to come back so that she could explain to him that she had not meant her wild, foolish words in the way that he had taken them. But, knowing the mood in which he had left, she dreaded actually confronting him and seeing his face, reading the fury in his eyes. She suspected that, no matter how hard she tried, he would never believe her. But she had to try.
She’d seen that look in his eyes—the black fury, the total contempt, the absolute rejection of everything about her—once before, on that dreadful night when Marty had found them together. And then, so much younger and more naïve, she hadn’t acted on it. Instead, she’d reacted out of fear—being so desperate for her stepfather’s approval—and pain as a result of the bitter hurt of Angelos’s stinging rejection of her that she had lashed out unthinkingly.
She had been knocked for six from the first moment that she had seen Angelos at work in the stables. Nothing in her few immature connections with the boys she knew had prepared her for the sheer physical impact of a fully adult male, dark and dangerous and oh so sexy.
She’d followed him round like a puppy, had tried to flirt and been so bad at it that she had blushed and stammered her way through any conversations she had had with him. She’d even bought tickets for a show, claiming they’d been a gift, and invited him to join her. He’d said that he had to work but that night she’d seen him walking back from the pub with Lucille, one of the maids. He’d taken the girl into his flat, where she could just imagine what sort of ‘work’ they’d be doing.
Burning with humiliation and jealousy, she’d determined that she would show him.
She’d got hold of the spare key to his flat, gone up there when she knew he was out, wearing just some brand new underwear under her coat. She’d had a long, nerve-racking wait until she’d heard his footfalls, heavy, weary, coming up the stairs. Then, just as he’d come into the room, she’d stepped forward into a patch of moonlight and thrown her coat off.
His reaction had been far from welcoming.
‘Go away, Jessica,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’
But of course she couldn’t do that. Having nerved herself to get this far, she wasn’t going to back down, not unless she had to. And so she flung herself into his arms, pressed her mouth against his, insisting that she was all woman, every bit as much a woman as Lucille. And, just for a moment, she could have sworn that he responded.
But then he wrenched his mouth from hers, grabbed at her arms to push her away.
‘Don’t delude yourself, child,’ he flung at her in a voice thick with contempt. ‘I have no interest in you in that way at all. I don’t play with little girls.’
In her mind she could see the scene all over again. The way that the light had flicked on so shockingly unexpectedly, and the appalling tableau that it had revealed. Herself in Angelos’s powerful arms, her hair mussed into tangled disarray, her inexpertly applied lipstick smudged all over her face, her only clothing the white lace knickers and bra—one strap falling down over her arm, almost at her elbow.
And she could still hear her stepfather’s shocked voice, the fury that threaded through the words, as Marty bellowed, ‘Just what the hell is going on here?’
For a second her mind went blank in total panic. The next moment she reacted in unthinking fear and desperation. Pushing hard at Angelos’s chest, she struggled in his arms, frantically trying to get away.
‘I didn’t mean to …’ she said. ‘I never wanted to—he made me …’
And it was on those words that Angelos let her go, flinging her from him as if her touch defiled him, so that she spun halfway across the room, stumbling hard against the arm of a chair as she came to a clumsy halt. One corner rammed into her naked thigh, making her head spin with pain, her eyes blurring with instinctive reaction to the throbbing bruise so that she heard her stepfather’s roar, saw the blow he aimed at the younger man’s jaw, through a haze of distress.
‘Get out of here and don’t come back …’
She had tried to convince herself that Angelos had less than her to lose. That as a man, and older than her, he was more likely to be able to shrug off the unpleasantness of the night, to turn his back on things—on her—and walk away without a mark on his arrogant hide. His skin was too thick, his pride too strong to feel the pinpricks of the petty arrows she had fired at him and that Marty had taken up and used as weapons too.
Now, older and more experienced, there was no way she could look at it like that. She’d been stupid, immature, totally selfish. She’d thought only of herself and of putting herself in a good light, and she’d never stopped to think of the possible consequences for Angelos. And she should have done. She should have told Marty the truth so that at least he could have offered Angelos his job back. She doubted that he would have taken it—but at least she should have tried to make reparation.
She still should. Even if Angelos had made a brilliant success of his life after Marty had fired him, she had still been responsible for him being thrown out without a job or a reference—without even a roof over his head.
And now she knew how that felt.
She knew one other thing. And that was, whether he listened to her or not, this time she had to stay and face him. Then, she had let Marty bundle her up in his jacket and half walk, half carry her away and back to the Manor House where, after making sure that Angelos had not actually harmed her, he had given her brandy ‘for the shock’ and stayed with her until the fierce spirit had taken effect and she had fallen asleep.
When she had woken she had been told that Angelos had gone. That he had left Manorfield for good and she had nothing to worry about any more. And, weak as she had been, the mental lacerations of Angelos’s rejection of her still burning in her soul, she had accepted that and had hoped that it was true.
Now, she could no longer let that easy explanation satisfy her. Angelos was back with a vengeance and she had to face him this time. She couldn’t run away again.
If he ever came back.
Once again, she made the weary trek to the window and looked out. The dawn was almost complete now, the sky a glowing pink, and the old saying, ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd take warning’ echoed ominously inside her head. Never mind the shepherds. She strongly suspected that the warning implied in the sky’s bright colouring was just for her.
She wasn’t going to watch from the window any longer, she told herself. All the watching and waiting in the world wouldn’t bring Angelos back to the house any quicker than he wanted to come so there was no point in staying there, staring out into the brightening dawn. Besides which, the last thing she wanted was for him to drive up to the house and see her standing there, watching for him.
Sighing, she made her way back into the library and curled up on the settee before the big fireplace there. The leather was old and worn, the stuffing battered from long wear so that it was far from the most comfortable place she could sit. But there was no way she was going to be able to settle in the sitting room, not with the settee there
holding such shocking memories, reminding her of how she had lost all control, abandoning sanity completely and giving herself up to Angelos’s sensual mastery. And, by doing so, she had given him a power over her that she knew he would never forget—and neither would she. She would only have to look at him to remember how it had felt to be in his arms, feel his touch, his kisses. Just the burn of his eyes on her would reawaken the fiery need that she had experienced in response to his caresses. And he would be able to look into her eyes and know just how she was feeling because, now that she had let him know the truth of how much she hungered for him, she would never, ever be able to hide it from him again.
And a night without sleep wouldn’t help either.
If she had any sense of self-esteem then she would go upstairs now and try to pick herself up. A shower and a change of clothes might give her some mental strength with which to face Angelos when he came back.
If he came back.
Oh, of course he would come back. He had gone to so much trouble to get his hands on this place; there was no way he was going to abandon it just because of a complete loss of his temper.
A huge yawn took her completely by surprise and had her blinking suddenly heavy eyelids as she fought against the thick waves of tiredness that swept over her.
She really should get cleaned up, make herself look respectable …
She really should …
