Her One and Only

by Penny Jordan

  She didn’t wait to hear whatever it was he might have to say by way of explanation. What explanation was there, after all, that could serve any useful purpose? She had seen what she had seen and she had certainly seen that James was kissing Rosemary, who he purported to dislike intensely, with far more fire and passion than he had ever shown towards her. All right, so they might not be an item; a couple, but that didn’t alter the fact that he had quite deliberately misled her about the true nature of his relationship with the other girl.

  Feeling both angry and humiliated Samantha turned on her heel and left, too preoccupied by her own feelings to be aware of the presence of anyone else in the foyer, much less the fact that she was about to cannon into him, until the breath was expelled from her lungs with dizzying force and a firm pair of male hands gripped hold of her.

  ‘Liam!’ she exclaimed in shock.

  ‘Where’s the fire?’ Liam joked, and then frowned as he saw her face.

  ‘Sam, what is it? What’s wrong...?’

  Normally Samantha knew that her pride would never have allowed her to admit to any kind of failure but she was still in shock from what she had just seen.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong,’ she told him furiously. ‘My date...the man I thought would be the perfect father for my children, is back there smooching with a girl he told me he didn’t even like.’

  ‘James is here with someone else.’

  Liam looked bemused.

  ‘But I thought you were going to be having dinner with him.’

  ‘So did I, but he didn’t have much of an appetite for food, nor, it seems, for me and now I can understand why,’ she told Liam bitterly, her eyes filling with dismayed tears which she hurriedly tried to blink away. To have caught James, of all men, in a clinch with another woman when he had... When he had what? When he had not wanted her!

  A sharp shudder speared through Samantha’s body. Perhaps Cliff had been right, after all. Perhaps she wasn’t the kind of woman...perhaps she wasn’t any kind of woman enough for a man. Fresh tears smarted her throat.

  How could James do this to her?

  ‘Liam, what are you doing?’ she demanded sharply as she suddenly realised that Liam had guided her towards the lift and had pressed the bell.

  ‘I’m taking you up to my suite so that you can calm down and tell me exactly what’s going on.’

  ‘What’s going on is that James is a lying perfidious beast who... Oh...’ Samantha gave a small soft gasp as the lift arrived and the doors opened, allowing Liam to gently push her into it.

  Since several other guests joined them on its upward journey Samantha was unable to protest to Liam that all she really wanted was to be left completely and totally on her own until they were out of the lift and he was guiding her down the carpeted corridor to his hotel room door.

  ‘This isn’t any business of yours, Liam,’ she told him shortly, ‘so please stop trying to interfere... All I want to do is to call a taxi to take me back to Bobbie’s.’

  ‘You want to go back to Bobbie, looking like this,’ he demanded exasperatedly as he opened the suite door and pushed her in front of the mirror hanging in the tiny entrance lobby.

  Whilst Samantha stared in revulsion at her flushed tear-stained face, Liam closed and locked the door behind her.

  ‘Now, come and take a seat, try to calm down and tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘What’s happened is that James is a lying, cheating rat,’ Samantha told him indignantly, refusing to do as he suggested and instead pacing the carpeted floor in front of the suite’s sitting room fireplace. The suite, she observed absently, was quite obviously one of the hotel’s best ones, lovingly furnished with either genuine antiques or excellent reproductions; the bowl of flowers on one of the console tables was giving off a softly sweet smell but Samantha was in no mood to appreciate the scent of flowers.

  ‘Rosemary is supposed to be engaged to someone else, she’s even wearing a ring, and yet just now, downstairs, well, let’s just say it was no brotherly kiss he was giving her,’ she told him darkly.

  Liam’s eyebrows rose but initially he made no comment, waiting a few seconds before suggesting calmly, ‘Perhaps she’s received some kind of bad news and James was comforting her.’

  Samantha gave him a scornful look.

  ‘Comforting her? He looked more like he wanted to...’ She stopped, her face flushing as she recognised just what it was James had looked as though he wanted to do with the woman in his arms.

  Samantha closed her eyes, willing the tears she could feel filling her eyes not to fall.

  Suddenly she remembered the lipstick that had stained James’s mouth when he had returned from parking his car and his earlier preoccupation. Had he and Rosemary...?

  ‘How could he do this to me?’ she cried, furiously bunching her hands into protesting little fists. ‘How could he when...’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t realise just what you had in mind for him,’ Liam suggested dryly.

  Samantha shot him a bitter look.

  ‘He lied to me,’ she told him fiercely. ‘If I had thought for one moment that he was...that there was...

  ‘What’s that?’ she demanded suddenly, staring at the ice bucket with its complimentary bottle of champagne which was standing on the coffee table.

  ‘Champagne,’ Liam told her unnecessarily. ‘Look, about James...’

  ‘You haven’t opened it yet,’ she pointed out.

  Liam frowned as he looked at her. Although not a total non-drinker, Samantha had a notoriously low tolerance of alcohol and for that reason tended to avoid anything more than an aperitif followed by a single glass of dinner wine.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he agreed urbanely. ‘And if you’re suggesting that you’d like a glass... I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’ Samantha demanded truculently. ‘I’m an adult now, Liam, remember, and if I want to get drunk...’ Before Liam could stop her she reached out and removed the bottle from the ice bucket, inexpertly managing to prise the cork free.

  The bubbling liquid spilled down over her hands and when Liam took the bottle from her it ran down his own, as well. Eyeing him challengingly Samantha raised her fingers to her mouth and slowly started to lick the spilt champagne off them.

  Liam felt as though someone had hit him good and hard in the solar plexus.

  ‘Cut it out,’ he told her sharply.

  ‘Cut what out?’ Samantha demanded.

  Liam shook his head. Did she really not know what she was doing to him, what images she was conjuring up inside his head with her actions? Just watching the way her tongue curled delicately over her fingers made him want to...

  ‘Well, if you won’t give me a drink then I guess I’m going to have to go down to the bar and buy my own,’ Samantha was telling him aggressively.

  Liam thought fast.

  ‘Okay...okay,’ he told her appeasingly, ‘hang on a second whilst I pour it for you.’

  With any luck she wouldn’t even notice that he hadn’t done more than half fill the glass, only it seemed she had and what was more she was letting him know in no uncertain terms that she had.

  ‘Sam, I just don’t think this is a good idea on an empty stomach,’ he warned as she tilted the glass and drank quickly from it.

  ‘No? Isn’t it supposed to be the classic reaction to finding out that you’ve been betrayed by...’ She stopped. She couldn’t say by her lover because James wasn’t that. ‘Not, I suppose, that you’ve ever had to drown the pain that loving someone who doesn’t love you back has caused you,’ Samantha challenged Liam recklessly.

  She was beginning to feel oddly light-headed and reckless, as though someone had taken the brakes off her reactions and emotions. It was a heady, powerful feeling and one she decided she could quite
get to enjoy. With James the last few days she had found that she was constantly having to watch her words, to be careful and tactful so that she created the right kind of impression on him, but with Liam, none of that mattered. Liam knew already just what she was like. With Liam she could be as outspoken as she wished, there was no need, no point, in trying to convince Liam that she would make good wife material.

  ‘Not in alcohol I haven’t,’ Liam told her sternly.

  ‘You mean, you have loved someone who didn’t want you?’ Samantha asked him curiously. ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re going to regret this in the morning,’ Liam told her wryly as he recognised the effect the champagne was beginning to have on her.

  ‘Champagne doesn’t cause a hangover,’ Samantha told him loftily.

  Liam looked unimpressed.

  ‘Why was he kissing her when he should have been kissing me?’ she demanded mournfully as she eyed the champagne bottle.

  ‘I want another drink, Liam,’ she told him plaintively. ‘No, don’t stop me,’ she demanded as he started to shake his head.

  ‘I need to get drunk. After all, I’m suffering from a broken heart.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sam, you don’t love James,’ Liam told her acerbically.

  Angrily Samantha tried to focus on him, to tell him just how wrong he was but discovered, to her bemusement, that he was simply refusing to stand still and was, for some reason, swaying from side to side in front of her.

  No, of course she didn’t love James, but she wasn’t going to have Liam tell her so.

  ‘Don’t I?’ she demanded, frowning fiercely at him. ‘And just how would you know that.’

  ‘For several reasons,’ Liam informed her softly, ‘all of which I’d be more than happy to discuss with you—when you’re sober.’

  ‘I’m sober now.’

  ‘No, you aren’t,’ he corrected her.

  ‘What reasons? Tell me. I want to know. Tell me, Liam,’ Samantha insisted, crossing the floor between them, taking hold of his shirt-clad arm and giving it an angry little shake.

  Liam closed his eyes.

  This close he could smell the heart-wrenchingly familiar scent of her skin and what was worse, he could feel the way his body was reacting to it and to her. It was just as well, perhaps, that Samantha was so tipsy, otherwise she would be able to see just what her presence, her proximity, was doing to him.

  ‘Tell me, Liam,’ she was still demanding, her eyes a dark, deep, drownable, fatally alluring heavenly blue. ‘What reasons?’

  She was standing so close to him now that— Liam took a deep breath and then another but it was no good, there was no way he could stop what he was feeling.

  Almost angrily he took hold of her, pinioning her arms at her side.

  ‘This reason, for one,’ he told her grimly as he bent his head and expertly silenced the shocked protest she had been about to make with the firm pressure of his mouth.

  Samantha’s head was spinning, her thoughts, her reactions, her whole self going crazily out of control. This was Liam who was holding her, kissing her, she reminded herself. Liam who was just about the nearest thing she had to an elder brother, but her body didn’t seem to be aware of any barriers her mind was trying to throw up between them. Her body... Samantha gave a delicate little shudder as she felt pure female sensual longing pour through her body.

  ‘Mmm...’

  Beneath Liam’s mouth she made a soft appreciative sound of pleasure and encouragement, lost in the awesome wonder of what she was feeling.

  Liam’s lips, Liam’s tongue, were expertly prising apart her closed lips. Dizzily Samantha leant into him.

  ‘Oh, this is pure heaven...’

  ‘Heaven! It’s been hell for me,’ she thought she heard Liam muttering. ‘Wanting you, knowing...’

  Liam wanted her!

  Bemused Samantha opened her eyes to their widest extent and then closed them quickly again as she realised that Liam’s were open and he was looking straight back at her.

  Delicious shivers of pleasure were darting all over her body. Why had she never realised before now that being kissed could be such a wonderful sensual experience? The hot pressure of Liam’s mouth against her own was doing things to her that she never ever wanted to end.

  ‘Don’t say that.’ She heard Liam groan against her mouth and realised with a small sense of shock that she must have spoken her thoughts out loud.

  Dizzily she recognised that she was perhaps not quite as in control of herself as she really ought to be, but somehow it felt like far too much effort to do anything about it and, anyway, why should she want to when she was having such a wonderful, gorgeous, heavenly time in wonderful sexy Liam’s arms?

  ‘Mmm... Why have you never kissed me like this before?’ she heard herself asking him huskily.

  ‘If you need to ask that, then you really have had too much champagne,’ Liam responded thickly.

  Dreamily she looked up into his eyes.

  ‘Mmm... Liam, you are just so sexy,’ she breathed happily.

  Abruptly he released her.

  ‘Am I? Not five minutes ago you were telling me that you were in love with James. Isn’t he the one you should be...’

  Samantha glared at him. Not for anything was she going to tell him just how disappointed she felt that he had stopped kissing her or just how much she was wishing that he had done more, much, much, more than merely kissed her. If the touch of his lips could make her feel like that, then what would it be like if he were to— A tiny tremor of excited fear ran down her spine as she recognised the dangerous route her thoughts were taking.

  Liam wasn’t the man for her. Liam wasn’t her kind of man at all. Liam was far too...too...too much of a man for her liking. What she wanted was someone...someone kinder, gentler, someone much more malleable. Someone who would not view her with the kind of cynical detachment she was so used to seeing in Liam’s eyes when he watched her. Someone, in short, who could not see into her thoughts quite so easily and dangerously as Liam could.

  ‘I really wanted to love James,’ she told Liam with the mournful honesty of the just-a-little-bit-too-tipsy.

  A muscle twitched at the side of Liam’s mouth but she couldn’t tell whether it was caused by amusement or disgust.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she accused him defensively. ‘You...’

  ‘I what?’ Liam challenged her.

  ‘It’s different for a man.’ Samantha backed down a little.

  ‘Not anymore,’ Liam advised her wryly.

  ‘Maybe not in theory,’ Samantha was forced to agree, ‘but in reality...’

  She closed her eyes. In reality, as she was painfully beginning to learn, a woman was both gifted and cursed by nature in that it was one of her strongest and most powerful basic instincts to nurture and protect the vulnerable life she gave birth to and that instinct went right back to wanting to give that child the very best she could, even before he or she had even been conceived. Even the scientists themselves were agreed, women instinctively and automatically picked the mate who would provide their child with the best start in life, which was why she had wanted— But there was no way she could continue with her plans now. Not after she had seen James with Rosemary. Whatever the truth was about their relationship, what Samantha had witnessed had made it overwhelmingly clear to her that there was unfinished business between them and that James was simply not free to father the children she so much longed to have.

  ‘All I wanted was to give my babies the very best father they could have,’ Samantha told Liam passionately. ‘A father who would put his or her needs first, a father who would be there for them. I don’t want my kids to grow up with only their mommy there, with a father whose career is more important to him than his family.

  ‘I’ve seen what it
does to kids to have an ambitious career-orientated father. It’s like they’re constantly trying to win his attention—his approval. If you ever marry, your kids will be like that, Liam. Oh, no doubt you’ll love them, in your way, but your work, your career, will always come first...’

  ‘Things are changing,’ Liam told her quietly. ‘Men are beginning to recognise just what they’re missing out on...’

  ‘Not in Washington they aren’t,’ Samantha told him cynically.

  She was beginning to feel very tired, oppressed by the weight of her disappointment. She shivered, wrapping her arms around her body and closing her eyes as a wave of physical and emotional exhaustion swamped her.

  She had put so much effort into planning her future with James that now that she was being forced to accept that her plans were not going to be realised, reaction was starting to set in, her mercurial temperament causing her spirits to plummet to the depths of misery and desolation.

  All she wanted to do now was to crawl away and hide herself from the world and everyone in it until she had had time to come to terms with her disappointment. She wanted so badly to have a child...children... She had even mentally pictured their cute little faces, their heads of thick dark soft hair and their gorgeous grey eyes. Grey...but James’s eyes were brown and... Grey eyes—like Liam’s! That was the second time these compelling grey eyes had intruded on her dreams about future children.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Liam demanded sharply as he saw the way the blood drained from her face as she suddenly opened her eyes and focused on him.

  ‘Er...nothing...nothing... I just...I’m just so tired, Liam,’ she admitted. ‘Everything has gone so wrong... Why...what is it about me...?’ She stopped and shook her head, fresh tears of self-pity clogging her throat. By rights she ought to call a taxi and go home to Bobbie’s but the thought of facing her sister whilst she was so emotionally upset, of having Bobbie demand to know what was wrong, was just too much for her.

  ‘I...I think I’ll call reception and ask them for a room,’ she told Liam drearily.