by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
‘Thank you.’ She smiled at him. ‘That was the most wonderful meal I’ve ever had in my life.’
‘Of course,’ he said with splendid insouciance.
Philibert’s restaurant crouched on the edge of an inky dune lake, still and smooth, surrounded by the low, pale-trunked trees the Australians call wallum scrub. An immense darkness pressed against them; listening to the silence, Hope felt she understood a little of the mystery and age of this enormous, ancient continent.
The evening had been an experience she’d never forget. Yet although the food and wine had been magnificent, Keir had overshadowed their impact; enthralled by his potent, masculine charm, she’d been trapped in a dazzling spell.
‘Coffee?’ Philibert asked.
‘Another storm’s on the way,’ Keir said, getting to his feet. ‘They make Hope a bit nervous, so we’ll head back to Noosa now.’
Philibert didn’t try to press them. ‘Then enjoy the rest of the evening.’ He smiled at her. ‘And stay in contact now that we know you.’
As they drove away, Hope eyed the stakes that indicated the depth of any floodwater over the road. A slow, potent excitement built within her, making it difficult for her to control her tone. ‘What made Philibert decide to live here?’
‘He lives to cook, but he hates the organisation of a large kitchen. After he’d spent time in France and Singapore he came here for a holiday, and fell in love with the place and a local girl.’
‘I gather you’re his backer?’
‘Yes. He deserved his chance. He and his wife have worked their hearts out getting to their present position’
‘He’s a superb cook, and that was a magical evening; thank you very much.’ A slash of lightning at the edge of her vision made Hope stiffen. The white, fierce light vanished, to be followed by a roll of thunder and a sudden spatter of drops on the windscreen. ‘More rain!’
‘The locals keep apologising about the unusual weather.’
Long needles of rain lanced down, rapidly wetting the road. Hope usually worried about driving in these intense downpours, but she settled back into her seat, safe because Keir would know how to deal with it.
Unbidden, unwanted, a thought sneaked into her brain. Was this the way her mother had felt when she’d first met her father? He too was competent, a man you could trust in an emergency.
Not that it mattered, because she didn’t plan to fall in love with Keir. Every time he looked at her she felt the impact of those ice-coloured eyes right through to her soul, but next week he’d be back in New Zealand, or wherever his headquarters were, and she’d be working out her notice, ready to move on again.
Shivering, she glanced at Keir’s hands on the wheel. Lean, experienced. She could imagine them only too vividly against her skin.
‘Cold?’ he asked without taking his eyes off the road. ‘Put on the heater if you want to.’
‘I’m fine.’
They were almost in Noosa when he asked casually, ‘Would you like a nightcap?’
‘No, thank you.’ Her voice sounded odd—both rough and languid. She cleared her throat and went on, ‘I’ve eaten enough delicious food and drunk enough superb wine to last for months.’
As the car drew up outside the house she looked with some dismay at the rain. When Keir switched off the engine he said, ‘Wait there. I have an umbrella.’
The engine died; in the glow of the headlights she saw him reach over into the back and produce a long black affair. ‘Courtesy of the concierge,’ he told her with a caged smile, and got out.
In the glow of the headlights he strode around and opened her door; pudding in hand, she scrambled out, and as the headlights clicked off he pulled her against him. Sheltered by the umbrella and his body from the rain, she tried to match his strides before realising that he was adjusting his to hers.
For once the top of the house was dark; her landlady’s lights would have been a help.
She unlocked the door, switched on the light and hurried straight into the kitchen, depositing the pudding in the fridge. When she stood up again Keir had pushed the door closed and was coming across the room, focused on her with disturbing intensity.
Some time during the kiss Hope’s heart flipped over and she lost whatever intelligence she’d been born with, yielding to the carnal hunger that smashed through her defences with the violence of the storm raging outside.
Chapter Seven
AS HOPE’S hands tightened onto his shoulders she gasped, ‘Your shirt’s wet…’
‘To hell with my shirt,’ Keir growled over the rumble of the rain, and found her mouth again.
This time she surrendered, opening to him, forgetting everything but the insistent drumming of need inside her, the vehement craving to take and give.
When his head lifted again she could no longer think. Yet he said harshly, ‘Is this what you want, Hope? All of me, everything? Because if it isn’t, we’d better stop now.’
Stop? How could he even think of banking this honeyed flame of desire? Not again, she thought fiercely, all doubts finally banished in an agony of need.
Lifting her hand, she traced the sculptured outline of his mouth. Beneath her fingertip she felt it shape a kiss; her shiver exploded into inner conflagration when he took the tip of her finger into his mouth and bit it gently.
Sensation scorched through her, kindling a needfire so violent it burned away the last rational promptings of her brain. If only she’d had some experience—but even that thought died, for she was glad she’d never felt like this before, never wanted like this.
Only Keir, and Keir was all her world…
‘You’re wet,’ she said, her voice husky. ‘Take off your shirt and I’ll put it in the drier.’
‘You take it off,’ he said, narrowed eyes gleaming in his set face. He stepped back and held out his arms, challenging her in the most stark, basic way of all the primitive sexual challenge of man to woman.
Take what you want, his tone, his expression said.
If you dare…
For a frozen second they stared at each other, eyes fencing across the space between them.
Then, clamping down on her leaping excitement, Hope lifted a deliberate hand. To the heavy thud of her heartbeats she leaned forward and began to undo the small buttons. Her fingers tingled, yearned for the sleek skin beneath, but she took her time, letting the dampness and texture and elusive male scent build her arousal. The quick rise and fall of his chest told her that her touch was having an equally potent effect on Keir.
‘There,’ she said quietly when she’d freed the last button.
‘Thank you.’ The words rasped, and he shrugged out of the garment, his wide shoulders gleaming with overt power in the subdued light.
Dry-mouthed with tension, Hope took the shirt into the minuscule bathroom and put it in the drier. She’d straightened up when another jagged slash of lightning ripped the sky apart, followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder that vibrated all around and through her.
Keir crossed the room in two silent strides, pulling her into the dangerous haven of his arms. The heat of his body enfolded her in a cocoon of primal reassurance as he said into her hair, ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, Hope. You’ll be safe.’
He wasn’t speaking about the storm. His tantalising maleness—forceful strength, fine-grained, hair-textured skin—bypassed her conscious brain, activating a hidden female knowledge handed down through the generations.
Into the bulge of shoulder muscle she said, ‘I’m not scared,’ shivering as his skin tightened under each tiny kiss. That flash of fear had sharpened her senses to a feral acuteness; intense excitement bloomed as swiftly as a moonflower, unfolding its petals through her until she couldn’t free herself of its wild vitality.
Bending, Keir kissed her throat. Against her clamouring skin his mouth was gentle yet demanding, as though he was afraid to unleash the power smouldering beneath his iron control.
‘I’m not eighteen now,’ she mu
ttered.
His chest lifted sharply. ‘Show me,’ he challenged, eyes gleaming.
At first tentatively, then with more confidence, she explored the arrogant line of his profile with her fingertips, found the furry thickness of his lashes and the curved sweep of his cheekbones, shivered at the tactile sensuousness of the skin over his jaw and square chin, and the curled, elegant shape of his ear with its astoundingly soft lobe.
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice raw. His mouth moved from her throat to the juncture of her neck and her shoulder; there, with infinitely erotic restraint, his strong white teeth closed onto the skin.
Hope flinched. Such a tiny caress to conjure primitive wantonness in her!
Harshly, Keir demanded, ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No.’ Copying him, she bit into the coiled swell of his shoulder, and then licked it, relishing the tang of salt and the scent—purely masculine with a fresh hint of rain.
His mouth found hers again with an unslaked, ferocious insistence. Yielding her first barricade, Hope opened her lips to his passionate mastery. Her hands clenched onto hot skin, stretched taut over tense muscles, and she pressed against him, eager for the power of his body, joyous when she felt the involuntary thrust of his loins.
A low, harsh sound grated in his throat; he pulled her singlet top above her shoulders and lowered his mouth to the skin he had bared.
The light silk across her face emphasised each sensation. Skilful, knowledgeable, his kisses summoned fire. Blind and deaf to everything but the astonishing rapture of his lips against her breast, Hope groaned.
With slow, sensual torment, he found his way to the aching, eager centre. Hope’s head fell back in an agony of anticipation as his mouth unleashed an untamed, incandescent excitement; tossed by the delirium of pleasure, she felt herself melting, loosening, and yet the need to stretch and tighten almost overwhelmed her.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he growled. ‘Honey and fire and spice, sweet as flowers and strong as diamonds…’
Straightening, he flicked the singlet over her head and picked her up and buried his face in her breasts, holding her with barely curbed strength as though fighting for control.
The light snapped off, imprisoning them in a cell of deafening darkness. Jolted into an old childhood nightmare, Hope felt her body clench, but Keir was there with her, his ardent hands supporting her, his presence a cloak against the darkness.
The only sounds she could hear were the pounding of his heart and the harsh intake of his breath. Against her newly aware skin she felt the soft abrasion of his jaw.
‘Keir,’ she said aloud, her voice thick and slow, creamy with desire.
Curving her fingers, she ran her nails lightly from his throat through the fine hair across his chest, down the ironmuscled torso—marking him, staking her claim in the most fundamental way she knew.
‘No.’ The word was flat and constricted. He caught her hand and yanked it away from his flat belly. ‘Let me do this my way. Afterwards you can do what you like to me, but if you touch me this will be short and brutal, and I want to take you long and slow until you die of pleasure, until you can no longer speak or think or do anything but feel.’
Huskily, barely able to articulate, she murmured, ‘Whatever you do—short and brutal or long and slow—you won’t hurt me.’
His arms bunched around her but the pressure didn’t increase. ‘Don’t argue.’
He wasn’t going to give in. Smiling, she lifted her head and kissed him, shaping her mouth to his.
Keir laughed, the short, triumphant laugh of a lover, and held her against him while he yanked back the bedcover and said, ‘Lie down for me, you beautiful creature.’
But she perched on the edge of the bed, glad of the kindly darkness yet wishing she could glory in him as he stripped.
Should she do the same? Embarrassment warred with modesty; in the end she stayed in her silky trousers, her hands linked tightly in her lap. Against the resumed growl of thunder, rapid-fire flashes of lightning revealed tantalising glimpses of long legs and narrow masculine hips, of bronzed shoulders that could shut out the world, and the fascinating scroll of hair across his chest.
Savouring each brief glimpse, storing it in her mind against a lonely future, Hope thought, I’ll never be nervous of lightning again.
Besides the heady anticipation she recognised another emotion—uncertainty about the unknown. So impressive was Keir’s size and his powerful, lithe strength and grace that she wondered whether she was going to be able to satisfy him.
He thought he was making love to an experienced woman. He was going to get a virgin.
Perhaps her stillness warned him, for when he was naked he sat down beside her, not very close, and ran his hand from her mouth to her waist in a caress deliberately modelled on hers. Only he didn’t use his nails; he stroked with the pads of his fingers so lightly that it was like the lightest brush of a feather.
Unbearably aroused, Hope shivered beneath that tender, knowledgeable caress, but she didn’t—couldn’t—move, couldn’t respond.
Audaciously Keir traced with his mouth the route of his fingers, pushing her gently backwards and easing down her trousers. Eventually his lips reached the small cup of her navel.
Slow shudders ran the length of her spine, gathered and intensified in the pit of her stomach. Wide-eyed, she twisted under his measured, lazy exploration. Nobody had told her that her navel was connected by white-hot nerves to that secret passage between her thighs, or that a kiss there could soften her bones and cloud her mind.
‘You taste like flowers and wine,’ he said against the gentle curve of her stomach, and deftly peeled back her trousers, taking her briefs with them so that she lay before him as naked as he was, her body storming into exultation.
The thunder was moving away, the lightning less garish in the darkened room. Hope’s shallow, rapid breathing resounded in her ears. She put out a shy hand and touched his hip, smoothing over the jut of bone and down the muscular thigh.
‘Not yet,’ he said, a jagged undercurrent roughening his voice.
But she wasn’t content to lie like a doll. For answer she ran a fingertip from his hip to his nipple, and from there to his solar plexus, the centre of his chest. His heart raced beneath her questing palm; she liked that, enjoyed her power to move him.
Abruptly he bent and kissed her, deeply, deliberately, with such sexual confidence that for a fleeting moment Hope wished he was as unpractised at this as she was.
Afterwards she could never remember the exact sequence of events; Keir wove about her a sensuous thrall that kept her constantly afire with new sensations. Dazzled and bewildered by her unleashed responses, she discovered the many and various pleasure points in her body.
Not only a skilful and considerate lover, he made the outrageous seem inevitable and infinitely seductive, until at last he moved over her and eased himself gently into the panting, shaking body he’d prepared with his accomplished mouth and his knowledgeable hands.
Hope had heard that it often hurt the first time, but she was lucky; although acutely stretched, she was so lost in carnal delight that she accommodated him, and found that sometimes there was no end to pleasure.
‘No,’ he said in a heavy, labouring voice. ‘Stay still.’
She froze.
On a ghost of a laugh, a humourless catch of breath, he said, ‘You’re going to kill me with—’ He stopped, then resumed, ‘I’m not going to last if you move, and I want to make it…’
When his voice tailed off she looked up with night-attuned eyes.
Beads of sweat stood out on his brow as he said through gritted teeth, ‘I want to make it perfect for you,’ and pushed deep, deep inside her, taking her with one flowing thrust delivered with all his force.
A voice cried out; astonished, Hope realised it was hers. Although she tried to stay still she couldn’t prevent the instinctive, mindless rhythm of her hips as her body arched to meet him and enclose him, take him into her. Li
nking arms and legs around him, she met his thrusts with her own in a powerful, age-old union that both gave and took, joined and separated, growing more and more heated until she was aware only of sensation, pure and intense and violently rapturous in every cell of her body.
Yet she sensed that there was still something missing, even though she didn’t know what it was. Beyond this ferocious pleasure lay another height, another pleasure even more intense. Her mind didn’t fully understand, but her body obeyed an imperative older than thought, older than consciousness; she tensed as Keir thrust again and again, hard and fast and deeply.
Slow waves gathered between them, spread through her, then suddenly exploded, filling her with an anguished ecstasy that only increased when he cried out and poured himself into her.
And then it was over—too brief, too sudden rapture—and she came down to the sound of rain and the feel of him as he turned on his side and held her against his chest so that she rose and fell with it as he fought for breath.
Stupid tears ached behind her eyes. From now on she’d never be able to enjoy the rain at night without remembering this transcendental experience.
‘It’s called post-coital blues,’ he said, startling her as he kissed her damp lashes.
‘I don’t like it,’ she retorted childishly, unable to think of anything intelligent to say. ‘I thought you were supposed to be sleepy and sated after sex.’
And a tiny voice in her mind mocked, Oh, clever Hope—you’ve just admitted that you’ve never done this before!
‘Some people are. Some cry. Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?’
Had he realised before she’d betrayed herself? She peered at him, able to make out every harsh contour of his face—everything but the expression in his ice-grey eyes. ‘Does it matter?’
There was no pat answer. He thought about it before saying, ‘If I’d known I wouldn’t have been so brutal.’
‘You weren’t brutal,’ she protested, appalled. ‘It was wonderful. What was it like for you?’
