He looked very definitely surprised at her persistence. She could read a mixture of things in his eyes—arousal, amusement, and—yes, definitely— he was a little bit shocked!
‘That wasn’t supposed to happen,’ he said wryly, circling her proud nipple with one long finger. ‘You just happen to be very responsive…’ And his mouth found hers.
But only to you, she thought as she felt his nakedness beneath her, remembering other men who had tried to arouse her, who she hadn’t even been able to bear kissing her.
‘Oh, God, Kimberley!’ he sighed as he tightened his arms around her naked waist. ‘You’re so gorgeous. Gorgeous.’
She could feel the tension and excitement growing, could feel herself growing dizzy with the pure delight of the touch she’d craved for so long. She could scarcely believe that this was happening to her, that she was lying in a tangled and naked heap with Harrison. Her heart soared as he kissed her until the blood thundered in her ears, and she felt as though she would die unless he took her. Daringly she shifted her body slightly, so that she was lying directly over him, and now only one movement, one tiny little movement, was separating them from the ultimate intimacy.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ he whispered urgently, but for answer she pushed her hips provocatively against his. Through her passion-glazed eyes she saw his own snap open, and a helpless look crossed the rugged features as he realised the fight was up.
‘You witch,’ he whispered softly against her mouth. ‘You beautiful little witch.’ Then he swiftly turned her over on to her back, all masculine arrogance and domination as he thrust into her with sweet, wild power.
Kimberley awoke in the bed, and as soon as she regained consciousness she remembered exactly where she was. Lying over her thigh was an unaccustomed weight…Harrison’s leg—and the rhythmical sound she could hear beside her was Harrison’s breathing.
She lay stock-still, holding her breath, afraid that he might be able to sense by instinct alone that she was now awake. Because—she had to face it—he had guessed just about everything there was to know about her body during that long night of lovemaking. To think that she’d been a complete and utter novice before they’d started—now she felt fully qualified to be able to rewrite the Kama Sutra—and throw in a few extra chapters besides!
Her heart quickened. She had never dreamt that it would be so…so wonderful, blissful, heavenly— every single superlative in the English language, in fact. She’d actually lost count of the times he’d made love to her. And each time it seemed to become more special, more intense, the kisses deeper, gentler. She had found herself wanting to murmur sweet nothings into his ear, to tell him that he was the most wonderful man in the world, that she adored him. She wanted to invent silly names for him. She wanted to make him boiled eggs for breakfast! She was in love!
Oh, Kimberley! What have you done? Her glorious, glowing happiness disintegrated like an icecube dropped into a glass of boiling water. Just because she had become unbearably affected by last night it didn’t mean that Harrison had. He had said ‘one night’. Just because he had been so sweet and gorgeous and sensational during that one night it didn’t mean that he was about to start prowling around jewellers’ or estate agents’ windows, or flicking avidly through Tupperware catalogues!
She had to think calmly.
And then she nearly screeched aloud as she remembered her car.
Her car!
Her scarlet sports car was at present sitting in the drive outside Brockbank House, drawing bold attention to the fact that she hadn’t gone home last night and advertising to even the least discerning just how she had spent the last few hours.
She suppressed a groan as she glanced over to the bedside table where the luminous dial of Harrison’s watch was just visible. It was four a.m.
Far better if she crept out and took the car back home to London now. If anyone saw her she could say she’d had a bit to drink and had slept it off. She would have to hope they wouldn’t ask where.
The alternative was falling back to sleep and meeting up with Mrs Nash, Duncan and Caroline over the kippers and kedgeree.
And Harrison.
She glanced again at his naked sleeping form. Dragging herself away from him was going to be sheer hell, but it had to be done. If he’d decided that one night was enough she would be saving face by disappearing now, rather than having to undergo the humiliating experience of him saying goodbye to her in the morning—and meaning it.
Some dark emotion, as brutal as a physical assault, made her skin break out into an icy sweat. Had he meant it literally when he had said ‘one night’? And if he had could she possibly bear it? She bit her lip very hard. There was no alternativeshe would have to bear it. She swallowed as she determined that if he wanted nothing more to do with her, even though she might be breaking up in a million pieces inside, externally at least she would maintain her pride and her dignity. She certainly wasn’t going to beg him to see her again.
Very carefully Kimberley wriggled out from beneath Harrison’s leg and rolled over to the side of the bed, holding her breath to hear whether he’d wakened.
He hadn’t.
She slid off the bed and shivered as the cool night air hit her naked flesh, and she narrowed her eyes in search of her discarded clothing.
Silent as the night itself she put her bra on and pulled the black dress over her head, before slipping her bare feet into her shoes. She would carry her stockings and suspender belt and…In the darkness she blushed as her gaze fell on the ripped panties, and as she bent to pick them up, her fingers quickly closing around the tiny crumpled ball of scarlet lace, she couldn’t help giving a grimace of regret. To have him make love to her was one thing, but had she really needed to respond quite so uninhibitedly? Surely it couldn’t be right for a virgin to feel intensely turned on by having her underwear torn off her?
‘Send me the bill,’ came a flat, drawling voice, and Kimberley glanced over at the bed to find a pair of very cold, speculative grey eyes watching her every move. Something in the harsh set of his face immediately made her frantic thoughts alight on his statement with confusion.
‘Bill?’ she demanded. ‘What are you talking about?’
He put his hands behind his head and continued to subject her to that coolly impartial scrutiny. ‘Send me the bill,’ he repeated indifferently. ‘For your underwear. I have to tell you that I’m not usually in the habit of ripping the clothes from a woman’s body, but I’m afraid that you really do bring out the worst in me, Kimberley.’
It was the most damning testimony to their night together. And Kimberley was stung and hurt and horrified that she had had the naivety to imagine that he might have woken to contemplate some sort of future with her.
She gave him the kind of empty smile she would have conferred on the lowest form of life. ‘The feeling is entirely mutual,’ she said coldly. ‘I hate you, Harrison.’
‘Not half as much as I hate myself, my dear. But, as I told you, what we have between us has very little to do with liking,’ he added bitterly.
Cheapened and ashamed, she moved away, sick to the depths of her heart.
‘Oh, Kimberley?’
She stilled, some foolish little hope flickering into doomed life inside her. ‘What?’ She turned to look at him, and the arrogant indifference on his face told her everything she needed to know.
‘I’m afraid that you didn’t really give me the chance to discuss this last night,’ he said matter-offactly. ‘And…Let me see—how can I put this without being offensive? In view of your eagerness to consummate the act, I assume you’ve already taken care of contraception?’
She froze, wanting to sob, to scream.
To die.
She stared at him. What the hell? She had already told him the ultimate lie; she had told him that she hated him. One more wouldn’t hurt.
‘Naturally,’ she answered coolly, and left.
Left the room and, finding her handbag on a table in the hall,
left the house and ran out, cold and despairing as she let herself into her tiny scarlet sports car, and drove to London as if the devil himself were pursuing her.
CHAPTER FIVE
KIMBERLEY lay on the bed perfectly still, waiting for the sickness to pass.
Outside the cherry tree, with its glorious snowy blossoms, danced in the light breeze of the perfect late April afternoon.
Morning sickness, she thought woozily, she could have coped with—this late-afternoon sickness did not fit in at all well with her timetable! Fortunately James, her boss, had been surprisingly accommodating—letting her evolve her own flexi-hours so that she started work at six in the morning and knocked off at between three and four, when the sickness usually started.
The doctor had told her that the nausea and vomiting she’d been having would probably ease off by the time she entered the second trimester, but she was nearly five months pregnant and it showed no sign of abating.
She remembered back to when she’d first discovered she was pregnant.
She had arrived back in London, sick and despairing over the disastrous incident with Harrison and feeling as though she’d lost every last vestige of pride. She knew that she could never see him again. But Christmas had been looming, and she couldn’t possibly have left her mother in the lurch.
So, the following week, having mentally girded herself for a possible encounter with Harrison, whom she had assumed would stay on with his mother for Christmas, Kimberley had returned to Woolton. But he had not been there.
Harrison had returned to France the day after the party, according to her mother.
And, in a way, the finality of his abrupt departure had helped; she had known that there were no more false hopes to be cherished.
It had been a week after Christmas when Kimberley had experienced her first fears, and within a day—although she’d had no experience of such matters-—she had known that she was pregnant.
She had found out for sure at the weekend and had spent almost all of the two days lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling while her mind had tried to take in the enormity of this event, which was going to change the whole pattern of her life.
She had decided within the first day that she was not going to tell Harrison. There wouldn’t have been any point. He wouldn’t have wanted to be troubled with the repercussions of his famous ‘one night’—especially when that one night had been nothing but the settling of an old score with a sexual chemistry which had been too strong for either of them to resist.
She had doubted whether he’d want anything to do with a child born to a mother he despised, and so the only point of telling him would have been to try to get some kind of maintenance from him— and she certainly wasn’t going to grovel around asking for his money.
If she needed money she had enough of her own. But she wasn’t going to need any money, because she had also decided something else that first weekend—that she was going to have her baby adopted.
The doctor had been surprised. Adoption was a fairly radical step, he’d told her—traumatic for the mother, to have to go through nine months of pregnancy then have to give the baby up. He had advised her that in these times a woman had a choice. But the choice which he had offered her had been one which she had passionately rejected without giving it more than a second’s thought. She could not have killed her child—Harrison’s child.
The doctor had gently asked whether she’d thought of keeping the baby herself, had said that society accepted single mothers these days.
She had thought about it, of course she had. But wouldn’t keeping the baby be worse in the long run? Was it fair to bring a child up with one parent out of choice? A parent, moreover, who would need to work long hours to be able to support a baby? Wouldn’t the child become a typical ‘latchkey’ kid, with all the inherent disadvantages? Ferried from pillar to post, dumped on childminders she wouldn’t really know—perhaps wouldn’t even trust?
She would do the best for her baby; she would have a happy and healthy pregnancy and then she would give the child up for adoption. Give it away to some nice, loving, childless couple who would be able to offer him or her so much more than she could.
And, apart from the doctor, James was the only person she’d told. The others at work and the girl-friends she met up with at her health club would find out soon enough, when she started to show. There was no point in telling anyone else, especially not her mother—for wouldn’t it only break her heart to discover that she had a grandchild on the way then to have to say goodbye to that grandchild forever?
James had been super—utterly supportive and pleased that she would be going back to work.
There were only two things which Kimberley had insisted upon. The first was that James never talked to her about the baby. Talking about the baby only seemed to make him or her more real, and she knew that the more real it became the harder it would be for her to have to give it up. The second was that she didn’t want any baby paraphernalia—no tiny mitts or bootees—for exactly the same reason.
Kimberley dozed on and off for an hour, until the sickness had gone, then got up and had a shower to try and wake herself up. She had dressed in leggings and a sweatshirt and switched on the TV, deciding idly that now that the sickness had passed she really ought to start thinking about getting something to eat, when there was a sharp ring on the doorbell.
Because it was still light, and because she hadn’t got round to it, she hadn’t put the chain on, and she opened the door without a thought, the blood draining from her face as she found herself staring at Harrison.
He was dressed formally in an amazing oatmealcoloured suit, which looked like an Armani, but his hair was untidy and his silk tie had been loosened.
His eyes were glittering as they surveyed her but she could read nothing in his face. Absolutely nothing.
‘May I come in?’ he asked coolly, but there was a strange quality to his voice, an odd edge—some-thing she should have recognised, but failed to do so.
The pounding of her heart had diminished enough for her to draw a deep breath—the intake of oxygen she needed—and answer him in the same cool fashion. ‘What for? I doubt whether we’ve got anything that’s worth saying to each other.’
His mouth twisted with derision. ‘Quite. Talking was never our strong point, was it, Kimberley?’
The sensual implication behind his silky insult made hot colour flare at her cheeks and she began to close the door, but, like a character in a detective film, he inserted one elegant foot in the doorway, preventing her from doing so.
‘What do you think you’re doing? Get your bloody foot out of my door! This minute!’
The foot stayed where it was. ‘I told you that I wanted to come in——’
‘And I told you——’ Her mouth dropped open as he moved her away from the door, let himself in and closed it softly behind him.
Kimberley began to panic as he walked down the hall and straight into the sitting-room as though he were an invited guest. All kinds of thoughts and fears were rushing to assail her—like, He couldn’t possibly know, could he?
Well, could he?
He was looking around the room, at the vivid peacock-blue silk curtains and the matching cushions, which had been slung all over the deep, comfy rose-pink sofa. In a tall blush-coloured vase was an enormous spray of gypsophila, studded with pinks, breathtaking and fragrant. ‘Hmm.’ He gave a little nod. ‘Elegant, but cosy. Exquisite taste, Kimberley. But then I always knew you would have.’
She neither wanted nor needed his approbation—so wasn’t it rather pathetic that his obvious approval of her home should please her so much?
‘What are you doing here? I thought you lived in France?’
‘I did. But I’ve moved.’
‘To—to—England?’ she asked shakily.
He gave a cold smile. ‘The very same—to London, to be even more precise.’
Kimberley’s eyes widened. ‘But why?’
Those m
esmeric grey eyes glittered. ‘I find that I have pressing—business—in England. Why else?’
The effort of trying not to alert his suspicions to her condition was nearly killing her. ‘I still don’t know why you’re here—what the hell do you want?’
He gave a nasty smile, put his face mockingly close to hers, and her heart accelerated out of control as she thought that he was about to kiss her. ‘That depends what’s on offer,’ he said, slightly unsteadily, and Kimberley realised what it was about him which was different—he’d been drinking.
Oh, he wasn’t drunk—somehow she could never imagine Harrison out of control, nor losing touch with that formidable intelligence—but he had obviously drunk just enough to be reckless. She could see that from the dangerous glitter in the grey eyes, and suddenly she felt frightened. He must not find out. He mustn’t.
‘You’ve been drinking!’ she accused.
He sat down in one of the chairs, unasked. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It’s true. Drinking to forget the coldest little bitch I ever had the misfortune to meet.’
‘Have you just come here to insult me?’ she enquired politely, some instinct telling her that if she failed to react then he would leave her. And she needed him to leave her, just as soon as was possible, because she had just found that it was quite possible to hate someone very much indeed and yet to want them to pull you into their arms and never let you go.
‘I’ve come to see how you are.’ He laughed, and the sound of it sent a chill down her spine; it was an angry, bitter, empty little sound that tore at her soul. He stared at her consideringly, his head to one side. ‘And now I’ve seen. You look terrible,’ he said. ‘Awful.’
‘Thanks very much.’ They were on dangerous ground here. He spoke the truth—she did look terrible—but he mustn’t know the reason why.
She had been physically sick every afternoon for more than four months, so that instead of gaining a little weight in the first stage of her pregnancy she had lost it instead. And the sudden weight-loss was reflected in the sickly pallor of her cheeks. Even her raven hair had lost its usual glossy sheen, and she knew that the black leggings and white sweat-shirt only emphasised her colourless appearance. The doctor had told her that lots of women lost weight in pregnancy, that there was no reason why the baby should be harmed, and that she wasn’t to worry.
Part-Time Father (Harlequin Presents) Page 6
