Cry Wolf
Page 10
With each urgent thrust of his tongue, she felt an answering stab of pure agonised pleasure rocket through her body, which seemed to have a mind of its own but for her full conscious agreement. Her body was wiser than she, as her knees collapsed and, with a groan, he wrapped his tough, strong arms even tighter around her, thighs flush on trembling thighs, hip to hip, breasts pressed to masculine, heart-racing chest. Her body was wiser again, as it came in contact with a full throbbing aggression pressed against the pit of her stomach and writhed, leaving her bewildered mind to catch up belatedly as he gave a sharp gasp, then held tight to both hips and thrust against her.
Oh, my lord, of course. Her blind blue eyes stared up at the night sky, head cradled in the cup of one hand as he sweetly, hotly ravaged down the side of her neck. The other hand he brought up to rake lightly across the tip of her breast, a lightning-quick plundering that brought her to a shivering fever pitch. His fullness, her aching emptiness; his plundering, her enticement, his aggressive need, oh, how she needed.
As if in echo, he groaned against her ear, “For God’s sake, Nikki!”
“I know!” she cried hotly, burying her face into the abundant grey hair that was so much softer than she had imagined. “But I don’t know what to do!”
He froze, panting, just held her tight while the stroke of his heartbeat thudded into her like the heavy stroke of a bronze gong, then slowly came the most agonising part of all as his arms loosened in torturous withdrawal. “No, you don’t know what to do,” whispered Harper, and it would have destroyed her except that he had managed even then to reach past passion to tenderness. “You don’t even know how to use birth control, do you, darling? And here I am, the sophisticated, mature man who would have lain you down right here and taken you in spite of it.”
He let go of her, stepped back, hands clenched into fists at his sides, and when she would have touched his face he recoiled as if lashed by a whip, whispering through bloodless lips, “As you value your safety, don’t touch me now.”
He stared as she flinched, and she felt when it ran over her and read what she knew to be there. Eyes too dilated, for the light was too bright; lips too swollen, for how they pulsed; skin too flushed, for she was burning inside like a torch.
In fact she must look much as he looked, and, heavens, it was a case of either throwing a screaming tantrum to relieve the terrible pressure, or laugh, and she was so busy trying to make up her mind between the two that she was totally unprepared for how he pivoted sharply on one heel and strode away. He threw over one shoulder, very quietly as he melted into insubstantial shadow, “Goodnight, Nikki.”
That’s it? she wanted to shriek, and in fact, as the air resounded, realised she had. Harper’s voice came to her, with the amusement she hadn’t achieved, “Darling, that isn’t the half of it, but it’s more than enough, I think, for now.”
She heard it quite distinctly, the latch of his balcony door clicking into place as he shut it behind him, and her world tumbled around her eyes with a crash, going from ecstatic eroticism to frustrated pique in what must have broken the world record for the swiftness of mood swings.
He was so horribly well-adjusted, so fiendishly considerate, so damned right! Of course he would not take her right then and there; they had all the rotten time in the world. Oh, she wanted to kill him!
And she knew, naturally, that she wanted to do no such thing. She knew exactly what she wanted, and had been denied for all the best of intentions, and for all she knew might never be offered again, and she knew as well that laughter had no place in this desperate let-down.
And she had been concerned only a lifetime ago yesterday about how he would behave when they got here. Harper had behaved like a gentleman. Nikki stalked into her room, threw herself on to her bed, buried her head deep into a soft pillow and screamed out her rage of frustration and anguish. And, as if that weren’t enough impetuosity, she had to top it all off by bursting into tears.
She told herself she wanted to die, but she fell asleep instead.
Some time between the night and the morning Nikki burrowed her way underneath the heavy blankets, and for the second time in a row woke up to disorientation. She was still in the clothes she had donned yesterday, and they had become extremely uncomfortable.
The memory of last night seared her mind’s eye even as she came to the belated realisation of what had disturbed her sleep. The knock on her door had been light and unobtrusive; if she hadn’t been so close to waking anyway she would have slept right through it.
She stretched and rolled over with a huge yawn, and called out in a sleep-blurred voice, “Come in.”
She had expected Charles, but the door opened on Harper instead.
He was dressed in a tailored grey suit, the sleek severity of which emphasised the breadth of shoulders and lean hips. He looked aggressive and sophisticated, and dangerously attractive. Nikki bolted into a sitting position, her eyes large and self-conscious for her rumpled state. At the best of times Harper was unsettling; at that time, when she was relaxed and undefended, the impact of his presence hit her like a brick.
His eyes ran leisurely over her and a slow, smoky smile creased his face. “Oh, dear,” he said with mock chagrin, “did I wake you up?”
An answering smile, sweet and malicious, spread across her lips. “Yes,” she told him limpidly, “you did. My, I must have slept like a rock. I don’t remember a thing once my head hit the pillow. How did you sleep?”
She had meant to wipe his smile away; instead it deepened with amusement. “Very well, thank you,” he murmured, excessively polite, as he thrust open the door and strolled into the room.
“Was there anything in particular you wanted?”
He laughed at her very gently. Nikki’s malice scampered out of her head as she flushed a very deep red. Her traitorous tongue; she should have it cut out at the earliest opportunity. “Only to say goodbye,” replied Harper, halting at the side of the bed. “I’m off to London. The material you need to look over is on my desk downstairs. I’ll call in the week to see how things are going.”
“Fine,” she said tightly, vibrating with the urge to shift under his penetrating stare. The back of her neck was beaded with moisture.
He bent over her and tilted up her unresisting chin with one long finger. “Well, Nikki, visiting with you has certainly been—stimulating,” he murmured. “So sorry to kiss and run. Miss me just a little?”
Damn it, her skin was so thin; what would it take to get under his and wipe that unholy expression off his face? An evil genius prompted her to say innocently, as she opened her eyes very wide, “But of course—who else will tuck me in at night?”
She saw the heat that darkened his skin and simmered in his eyes, and her triumph backfired on her, as she was helpless to control her own reaction. “Hold that thought,” he advised, planting a swift, hard kiss on her softened mouth. He pivoted on one heel, neat as a dancer, and exited the room.
Nikki expelled an explosive breath and fell back against her pillows, as limp as if she’d just run a marathon. She felt again that incredible throb of physical hunger, an empty, barren ache that was actual pain. How amazing and disturbing, and how badly she needed to think this through.
It transpired that Charles had already gone complaining off to his school and wouldn’t be seen again until later that afternoon. Anne’s husband Gavin was mysteriously busy in the flat above the garage, and Nikki found, as the housekeeper fixed her another huge breakfast which she polished off almost guiltily, that the resulting peace in the house echoed with emptiness.
At first time weighed heavily on her hands and she moped, but then as the week progressed she began to get a sense of balance for the freedom from her usually hectic schedule. It became a freedom to think ahead, and plan, and sort out just what the significance was of the last week, and also come to terms with Harper’s appearance in her life.
She found herself filing away incidences, little snippets of gossip, ridiculous things Charles said, as she thought to herself, I must tell Harper about this. And then she immediately told herself not to be stupid. He was far too busy to be committed in such unimportant trivialities.
But when, over the phone, he asked her about her day and she found herself telling him, and she heard the warm, delicious sound of his laughter break through the terse, glacial distance that had built up around him in London, she knew she had been wrong. He was vitally interested. London was only his power base, and he missed his home.
Each morning she woke up bounding with energy. She gobbled up the huge stack of concise information Harper had left for her and began to make preliminary plans for new designs.
She called Peter, who called her back three times, visited a local doctor blushingly to eradicate the latest barrier Harper had thrown in her face on Sunday, abandoned the dressings over her hands as the cuts closed for good, and, after receiving Harper’s amused approval, took Charles several times into Oxford for a bit of sightseeing and shopping.
Charles was an amazing shopping companion. He had very definite ideas about what he would wear and picked out several summer outfits for himself, but what she hadn’t expected was for the six-year-old to be so patient and enthusiastic about her needs and desires. As Nikki recalled, her brother Johnny had been nothing of the sort. But Charles was, in fact, quite fashion-conscious and possessed an inherent sense of good taste.
Once, when she hovered thoughtfully over a tight-waisted, full-skirted green dress, Charles remarked very casually, “Harper doesn’t like green.”
Nikki’s startled gaze flashed to the boy’s dark eyes. He knew what she was up to, all right; it was written all over his thin young face, and if he had smirked at the thought she would have wanted to hit him. But Charles’s irrepressible smile was conspiratorial, his expression one of a gleeful accomplice. She realised then that she had his full seal of approval, unlooked and unasked for, and she surprised them both by throwing her arms around his small, sturdy body.
Again he amazed her for he giggled, the worldly young man collapsing giddily into the child, and he hugged her back. It was then that she knew with quite simple amazement that not only had she fallen madly in love with the older Beaumont, but she loved the younger one as well.
By Friday morning she had recovered so much mobility in her hands that she’d already begun to make sketches of the various designs Harper required. She worked in the library, over the large table which was littered with papers and pencils, and the various examples of the outdated material his company had formerly produced.
Charles was home that day due to school closures for teacher training, and instead of roaming about outside in the sunshine seemed quite content to mimic Nikki. He was sprawled underneath the table, with several sheafs of the paper she had given him, scribbling busily with his crayons, dark head bent intently over the spaceship he was drawing.
Loath as she was to disrupt the serenity of the morning, Nikki decided over lunch that she had to go into town again for better art materials. “I need to pick up some pens and watercolours, and the right kind of paper so that I can do my sketches properly,” she told Anne. “Do you know a shop where I can buy them?”
“Try Broad Street in town,” said the housekeeper after a moment’s frowning thought. “I think there’s an art shop along there somewhere.”
Charles was munching on an American-style hamburger, a glass of chocolate milk beside his plate, while he kicked incessantly at the legs of his chair. “I need some pens as well,” he hinted slyly, to which Nikki laughed.
“Oh, do you? What happened to your crayons?”
“They’re for babies,” he said in disgust, then fixed her with a bright, pleading glance. “Can I come too? I have money, three whole pounds.”
“I thought you were saving that for a skateboard,” she said, having already heard Harper’s pithy opinion on that subject earlier in the week.
“I want pens,” said the boy stubbornly. Monkey see, monkey do, she thought with a smile, and as it was by far the safer of his two desires she acquiesced readily. Charles whooped with delight and wolfed down the rest of his burger, and soon after they headed out into the bright afternoon.
It was a perfect chance to kill two birds with one stone, she thought as they waited for the next bus into town. She really did need the art supplies, for all her things were back in her bed-sit in London, and now she could keep busy with her pride intact until Harper arrived some time that evening, for she couldn’t wait to see him again. To look in his face, to see his smile, to want so desperately to throw herself into his arms—that fierce, disturbing ache which was both emotional and physical, built to an unbearable pitch at the very thought of him, and if she hung around the house all afternoon and did nothing she would be bound to make a fool of herself.
Oxford was beginning to fill up with summer tourists, and as the streets were clogged with people and traffic it took far longer than she had first anticipated to get to Broad Street and find the shop they wanted. Somehow what was supposed to be a simple expedition for pens and art supplies turned into a search for comic books and ice-cream as well, which turned into a very messy business in the heat of the day, so that when Nikki was at last scouring the shelves in the art shop the sun had advanced unnoticed across the wide, cloudless sky.
Charles had happily found a corner of the shop where he could sit on the floor and pore over his comic books. She kept a close eye on him while she moved about the shop, but he seemed content enough to wait however long it took her to pick out the materials she needed.
She was studying the various sizes of watercolour paper in supply, and mentally trying to work out just how much of each she might need, when a dark shadow fell across her line of vision, and she murmured, “Would you mind not standing in my light, please?”
“But, my love, I’ve been standing to one side for the last ten minutes in the hope that you’d look up,” replied a deep familiar voice that splintered her absorption.
Instantly all thought, common sense, and restraint were scattered as well, as Nikki dropped the paper, whirled in an upsurge of uncontrollable gladness and flung herself at Harper. He grunted at the moment her slender body made impact with his, both his hard arms closing around her, and it was such extraordinary, perfect bliss—and in the next instant her face flooded with dismay and she stepped back.
He gave her a cool little smile as he let her go at once. “Of the two, I think I much prefer your first reaction,” he said lightly.
But Nikki was in the throes of deep contrition. “I’m so sorry,” she babbled, her hands hovering as if to try wiping away the damp pink spot she had smeared on his very expensive business suit. “We bought ice-cream, and Charles’s was strawberry flavoured, and there was a slight accident, and now I’ve got it on you as well!”
“So I see,” he remarked, his face unreadable as he looked from her down to the bent head of the boy sitting on the floor in one corner. Charles still hadn’t noticed Harper, but was lost in a world of his own, one filled with bright colours and dramatic pictures, and intergalactic heroes winning battles over supervillains. He looked dishevelled, dirty, smeared with ice-cream much as Nikki was, and actually happy.
Nikki looked as well, but all she saw was how filthy Charles had managed to get, and sudden worry rose up inside for what sort of impression the man beside her might be gleaning from the picture. If he thought she wasn’t looking after the boy properly, he might not let her take Charles out again, and
she said with quick anxiety, “He did have a good lunch before we came out.”
“I’m sure he did,” replied Harper, turning to stare at her curiously.
“And I’m sorry,” she continued in a rush, “I don’t know how he managed to get so dirty, but—”
“Snips and snails and puppydogs’ tails,” he said, and laughed. “You haven’t seen him yet when he goes out into the back garden to play in the rain. This, by comparison, is next to godliness. Besides, my love, have you by any chance had a look at yourself in a mirror recently?”
She glanced down at her smudged jeans and blouse and closed her eyes in deep chagrin. She must look even worse next to Harper’s cultured masculinity, his grey hair sleek and his stern face handsome. She thought of the peacock-blue silk dress she had expected to greet him in that very evening, of what an utter and transparent fool she must have appeared when she had thrown herself into his arms, and felt justifiably bitter.
His interest had quickened at the darkness that had clouded her face; she sensed it and, partly in truth, partly because she wanted to cover up her deeper reactions, she said quietly, “I’m just worried that you might think I haven’t been looking after him properly when I take him out.”
“Worried!” he echoed, his strange expression intensifying. “Whatever put that idea in your head? Every time I’ve called home this last week, Charles has done nothing but talk about what you and he have done together.”
She asked humbly, her blue eyes huge, “Do you mind?”
“Darling,” he said, lifting one hand to pass it over her hair in a feather-light stroke, “I’m delighted you’re getting along with him so well. I couldn’t have hoped for anything better.”
She glanced at her feet, then up again, a swift, shy look as she made the helpless confession, “I adore him.”
The smile that broke over Harper’s face transformed him completely. The expression in his dark eyes was open, and very gentle, and lit from within. He said very softly, “I love him too.”