Adam winced and his mouth twisted in a wry grin as he acknowledged her censorious frown. ‘Hi, Kate.’ He nodded several times and then silently mouthed, ‘Thank you,’ to Anna.
The glow of pleasure was out of all proportion to the token. Trying to subdue the sudden rush of colour that ran over her pale skin, she waited for him to move. He didn’t, and she fought to regain her composure. Literally pushed into a corner, she couldn’t help but be aware of how disturbing his physical presence was; she was only human.
Anna lost track of the situation on the other end of the line. She was unable to concentrate on anything he said before he finally rang off. He straightened to his full height and looked into her flushed, agitated face.
‘The heroine of the hour.’
Suspiciously she searched for mockery but found none. ‘I have a practical turn of mind,’ she said half-apologetically.
‘And a soft heart,’ he murmured, as if he had just made the discovery. ‘Kate says thank you.’
‘You’ll make me blush,’ she replied uncertainly.
‘You already are.
‘I thought I could cope with any crisis of any description.’ He gave a grimace of self-disgust. ‘Some parent…’
‘I think you show great potential,’ Anna said with an intensity that earned her a quizzical look.
His slow, steady regard was hard to bear. When her mother spoke Anna realised she’d forgotten, in the intimacy of the moment, that they weren’t alone. As well for me we’re not, she thought sternly. I’m about as covert as an earthquake.
‘Anna is one of those rare people who have never forgotten how it feels to be a child. That sort of empathy is rare.’
‘Anna’s rare.’
It was, she thought, almost as if Adam too had forgotten they weren’t alone, from the way he looked at her. A solid lump of hot emotion welled in her throat. A wave of debilitating weakness that had nothing to do with flu swamped her.
‘I’m glad things worked out,’ she said, with the merest hint of a tremor in her voice. She clenched her fists whilst searching for inspiration to dispel the strange intimacy which had built up. ‘Go on, Mother, you were aching to spill the dirt.’
Looking at her mother helped prevent her eyes from straying to the way Adam’s blond hair curled ever so slightly against his tanned neck. Bad medicine—that was Adam Deacon!
‘Simon Morgan is back!’
Anna knew she had been a caricature of startled dismay for all of twenty seconds before she managed to recover from this piece of news. She shot Adam a defensive glare and he smiled back sunnily, all white teeth and benign disinterest. It was too much to hope he hadn’t noticed her monumental slip.
‘That’s nice,’ she floundered.
‘I knew you’d be pleased,’ Beth continued happily. ‘Anna and Simon were really close all through school,’ she explained helpfully. ‘I always encouraged the girls to have different friends and interests. So many people treat twins and triplets as a single entity. Simon went off to Canada about four years ago now. How time flies.’
‘Is the whole family over?’ Anna asked dutifully, even though it was the last subject she wanted to discuss in front of Adam. The whole family… Simon, Rachel and their baby, who probably wasn’t a baby any more.
‘Split up,’ Beth said in a hushed tone.
Anna swallowed. Having Simon unavailable and married she could accept. Knowing the situation was different and that he was right here needed some quiet time for reflection. How did she feel about it?
‘I’m a bit tired; I think I’ll go back to bed,’ she mumbled, regardless of the impression her hasty retreat would give.
Breathless after taking the stairs two at a time, she threw herself on her bed and inhaled deeply, staring blankly at the ceiling. After all these years Simon was back, without Rachel.
Her best friend from the age of eight, she had imagined she knew him better than anyone else. As things had turned out she couldn’t have been more wrong.
She could still see his laughing face as he’d confessed ruefully to harbouring a passion for her for years. To add insult to injury he’d chosen his own wedding day to make the admission.
‘Only I didn’t want to ruin a beautiful friendship, Anna. You were obviously not interested. It seems ridiculous now. I always knew you didn’t have much time for relationships with your dedication to dancing,’ he’d told her.
The irony of the situation had made her unable to reply without making a total fool of herself. She’d been crazy about him for years! She had vowed at that moment never again to waste an opportunity for happiness by hiding her feelings. Life was filled with ‘if only’s. But sometimes she wondered… Now he was back—and alone!
CHAPTER FOUR
‘WHAT are you doing here?’ Anna swung upright, hugging her knees to her chest as she registered a hostile presence in her sanctuary.
‘Your mother sent me with your tea; you forgot it.’ Adam calmly placed the cup on her bedside table and looked around with interest.
‘Don’t let me detain you.’
‘Not very tidy, are you?’ He picked up a delicate bra from the floor and swung it around on his finger.
‘Give that here,’ she snapped, grabbing for it.
Adam took a step back, holding the scrap of peach satin just out of her reach. ‘Please.’
‘Go to hell!’
‘So unladylike,’ he murmured regretfully.
‘What do you think…?’ she began furiously as he sat down on the side of her bed.
The cheek of the man! She stifled a flurry of alarm as the bed creaked under his weight. Her bed and his weight linked themselves in her subconscious and gave birth to a whole series of connected images that she fiercely hoped weren’t reflected in her expression. Beads of perspiration broke out over her upper lip and she dabbed them gently with the tip of her tongue.
‘Tell me about Simon,’ Adam said abruptly, annoyed to find his attention riveted to the pink tip of her tongue. He couldn’t explain the animosity he felt towards this faceless person. This young woman’s lovers were nothing to him.
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she said coldly. ‘Lurid’ hardly described the pictures in her head! 60
‘Sure,’ he drawled, his face harshly sceptical. ‘You should have seen your face back there.’ His expression grew sourly cynical. ‘Did he dump you? Or don’t you have staying power?’
‘For your information Simon and I were just…’
‘Good friends?’ he completed for her with a sneer. ‘No one looks like that hearing a “good friend” is back in the country. If you gave off the same signals back then as you do now he must have been extraordinarily dense if that is true.’
‘Simon is not dense!’ she responded, angry at his disparaging air.
The thin smile was sly and calculating. ‘Just available,’ he observed silkily, watching her from beneath his heavy eyelids.
Lashes as long and thick as her own cast a faint shadow across the curve of his cheekbones. He gained little comfort from her guilty flush at this jibe. Why the hell couldn’t he leave well alone and keep away from Anna Lacey? he asked himself angrily. He had no right to be thinking about her. Let her make it up with her old flame.
Anna watched Adam as he looked, grim-faced, around her feminine room with its clutter, some of it left over from her teens. She felt as if signs of her immaturity were all around them. How was he squaring his opinion of her with the teddy bear minus an ear? She could suddenly sympathise with people who suffered from claustrophobia. Having Adam in the confines of her bedroom was making her feel trapped and panicky.
‘I’m sorry if he’s having marital difficulties, but I’m sure they’ll be resolved.’
I’m not the sort of person who’d want happiness from others’ misery, she thought, resenting his implication. Unless that misery is Adam Deacon’s, a nasty, spiteful voice in her head added. One minute she felt fiercely protective of him, the next she felt spitefully vicious.
It left her in a constant state of confusion.
When Adam ran a finger along the delicate arch of her foot she bit back a yelp and retracted it. ‘How selfless of you.’
‘I don’t know where you get off questioning me about my affairs,’ she said, glaring at him furiously.
‘I thought we were talking pure friendship, untainted by the spectre of sex, here.’
‘Don’t be childish!’
‘That would never do, would it?’ he mocked, picking up a threadbare rag doll from the foot of the bed. ‘I’m only returning the compliment, you know—you were so very interested in my personal life, it only seems polite to show some interest in yours. I have to admit I thought you’d be silk sheets and see-through lingerie, not patchwork and winceyette.’ He gave a low chuckle.
‘It’s cotton,’ she retorted, her pride stung by his amusement. As much as it angered her to be thought of as some oversexed vamp she found she preferred it to being stigmatised as a frump.
Taking the comment as an invitation, he reached out and pulled the tie on her dressing gown, and proceeded to take the fabric of her nightdress between his thumb and forefinger. His knuckle moved against her collar-bone as he rubbed the material. The buzzing in her ears became a loud hum as his eyes captured her own fluttering gaze.
‘How is Jessica?’ Instinctively she used the key to break the spell. Ruthless reality did it every time. She almost whimpered with relief—or was it regret—when he straightened up.
‘She’s coming up to see the house tonight.’ The timely reminder made his expression grow cold and shuttered.
‘Meaning she hasn’t yet?’
‘She trusts my judgement.’ He frowned at her critical tone.
In truth he wasn’t entirely sure about what Jessica’s response to the Old Rectory would be. It didn’t fit the criteria for a home they had both so painstakingly agreed on, but somehow the place had seemed right the moment he’d seen it. He wasn’t prone to making emotional decisions based on gut reaction, and it intermittently bothered him that he’d done so over such an important matter.
‘Sounds pretty wet to me,’ she observed with disgust.
‘We want the same things.’ Hearing the betraying defensive note in his own voice brought a self-derisive twist to his lips.
‘How sweet,’ she trilled mockingly.
‘Spite, Anna?’
‘Go away; I’m ill,’ she mumbled, turning her head and pushing it into the pillow.
She felt ashamed of her acid retort, but wasn’t about to let him see her contrition. The pillow was suddenly yanked out from beneath her head. She sat up indignantly to see Adam standing holding it beside her.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell her that her future husband is a lecher.’
‘Your concern is misplaced; Jessica doesn’t get upset about insignificant details. After all, what are a few kisses,’ he said dismissively, ‘when compared with what Jessica and I have?’
‘Insignif…?’ She inhaled as wrath widened her eyes. She picked up a pillow and swung it in a wild arc, hitting him directly in the midriff. That’ll wipe the supercilious smirk off his face, she thought. He grunted with surprise at the impact; she’d put all her wiry strength behind the blow.
‘Ouch!’ she yelped as he retaliated in kind, swinging the pillow he still held at her. ‘You bully!’ she cried indignantly, scrambling to her feet on top of the bed.
This time she aimed for his head, but he neatly ducked and simultaneously scooped her in a fireman’s lift over his shoulder. Letting go of the pillow, she hammered her fists against his back and swung her feet in an equally vicious assault on his front. ‘Let me go!’ she gasped furiously.
Adam was breathing heavily; he swore and pushed aside the loose folds of her dressing gown which were effectively blinding him. The blows Anna was landing were by no means innocuous. He tipped her unceremoniously onto her back on the bed and came to rest above her on his knees, with his hands at either side of her head.
The anger slowly faded from her face as she found herself staring up at him. Beneath the anger there was a fierce, raw expression; it was riveting. A slow, seductive lethargy seeped insidiously through her veins. Nervously, her breath coming in short gasps that had little to do with the recent exertion, she licked her dry lips. Adam’s eyes faithfully followed the action. Anna could see the light burning under the heavy droop of his eyelids.
‘How did we get here?’ he asked in a hoarse voice, as if he’d lost track of the events that had brought them to this position. He hadn’t moved since the moment their eyes had collided, but his gaze moved continually over her supine form.
‘You called me in…insignificant.’
His voice held a bitter edge of irony. ‘Well, that was a lie, wasn’t it? Insignificant is the last thing anyone could call you.’ One of his hands moved to gently skim the side of her face. ‘If the circumstances were different…’ Frustration was evident in his deep voice. He moved his fingers clear of her skin, but they flexed as if they wanted to return.
‘Different?’ she echoed, feeling as strange as this conversation.
‘But they’re not!’ The high, sharp lines of his cheek-bones seemed more prominent as his expression tautened. Denial warred with want in his eyes, and no victor emerged. ‘I have responsibilities, commitments; I can’t permit myself…
‘It’s wrong of me to blame you.’ She was literally shaking under the onslaught of deep, primitive need. ‘You can’t help being who you are, what you are… You go through life reacting to stimuli without any thought of the consequences.’
His words stunned her. Her heart was thudding so hard she could hardly breathe. ‘What am I?’ Other than totally unfitted to having a relationship with such an elevated personage as Adam Deacon, she added silently.
‘You’re unorthodox, spontaneous, erratic and…’ she could see the muscles in his throat working… ‘sinfully sensual.’
‘And that’s bad?’ She reached up and pushed her fingers into his hair until her fingertips met at the back of his neck. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for ever,’ she admitted, indulging in some dangerous honesty of her own. Honesty was a luxury these days.
If this was what ‘reacting to stimuli’ felt like, she could recommend it. She felt the muscles in his neck bunch beneath her fingers. She wasn’t being fair, but then, she thought with a sudden flurry of anger, neither was he.
‘You’re an adventure I’d have welcomed before,’ he said hoarsely, allowing her hands to draw him lower. His lips nuzzled the soft flesh at the side of her mouth.
Anna gasped silently as rivulets of sensation followed the sensual stroke of his tongue. She recognised the warm, musky scent of his skin and stared with fascination at the gold flecks in his marvellous eyes.
‘Before you lost your sense of adventure?’ she whispered back. She was having trouble forming words by this point. Every fibre of her being was screaming out for attention from that stern, yet incredibly sensitive mouth.
‘I have a family now.’ The strain cracked his voice, and he allowed his head to come to rest against her chest. ‘I owe it to them. Stability…’ he added almost vaguely. He lifted his head and seemed unable to tear his eyes away from the physical evidence of the tingling she could feel in her breasts.
‘Jessica.’ She made a last-ditch attempt to do the right thing. Part of her hoped it would work, but the other part…!
‘They need a mother, a stable influence. Ben and Tess were fantastic parents.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about what they need. What do you need?’ she persisted. Her soft brown eyes, fierce and hugely dilated, were fixed with reproachful anger on his face.
‘This sort of passion burns itself out as quickly as it…’ He spoke as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
He let out a groan as she ran a questing hand over the taut muscles in his thigh. He caught it and redirected it until she couldn’t mistake his needs.
‘I need you! Is that what you wan
t to hear?’ he demanded bitterly as he thrust her hand away. ‘Well, I do, as badly as some adolescent in the first throes of infatuation. No fool like an old fool, is there?’
‘You’re not old.’ The undertone of anger and resentment in his voice sobered Anna. No wonder he thought her a wanton baggage; she hardly recognised herself these days.
She hadn’t been shocked by the intimacy of moments before, but she had been excited in a dry-throated, heart-pounding, reckless sort of way. It might have been easier to come to terms with indifference! she thought despairingly.
‘When I look at you I feel it.’
‘You’re so stupid!’ she wailed angrily. He spoke as if the foundations of his future were set in cement. He obviously didn’t love that dratted woman—this situation couldn’t exist if he did.
If he loved Jessica, Anna reasoned, he wouldn’t want me. To marry to fulfil some ridiculous idea he had of a perfect nuclear family was a recipe for disaster. What did it matter to her if the man ruined his life? she asked herself angrily. And why did he have to slot her into some wretched category? she wondered. What heading was she filed under? Instability and possible moral degeneration? The possibility that they could have anything more in common than mutual attraction had obviously never occurred to him. I’m the sort of woman children should be protected from, she thought, repressing a bubble of semi-hysterical laughter.
Why should I care? Let him ruin his life. Like a bolt of lightning the answer popped into her mind. She shook her head in mute denial. She couldn’t love him; she didn’t even like him!
Adam’s hand slid beneath her skull and he kissed her hard on the lips. She could feel the desperation in him right through to her bones.
‘Stupid doesn’t begin to cover it,’ he said huskily as he lifted his head. ‘I didn’t have to come up here. Your mother didn’t suggest anything; I did. I wanted to prove I could be alone with you and not…not do this.’ His voice was slurred as he ran his hand down the length of her slender body from shoulder to flank. ‘Or maybe that I could do this and then stop.’
Wild and Willing! Page 6
