by Janet Dailey
"I don't know that I would trust you with my soul," Dirk replied in a dry, taunting voice. "You might get careless with it. But I will trust you to steer the bike."
Victoria put a foot on the pedal in preparation for starting out while the other foot remained on the ground for balance. She glanced over her shoulder to meet the steady and vaguely challenging regard of his dark gaze.
"Whatever happens, happens to me first, is that the theory?" she chided with an unmistakable sparkle of laughter in her gray eyes.
"You guessed it, honey." His mouth curved lazily into a half smile.
The casual endearment was offered indifferently, but her senses responded to it with anything but indifference, stimulated by the natural caressing timbre of his voice. Her pulse fluttered in her chest, briefly interfering with her breath, as Victoria faced the front again and pushed off to start pedaling.
During the continuing ride, Victoria had a greater awareness of the man behind her. This subtle disturbance was not altogether unpleasant. In fact it was vaguely exhilarating, something Victoria couldn't explain and tried to rationalize away as a result of the invigorating exercise.
The rocky ground offered a grass-tufted clearing to the right of the road. When Victoria saw it she pointed to it and suggested, "Shall we stop there for a breather?"
"Why not?"
At his offhand agreement, Victoria guided the bike to the edge of the road. When the front wheel bumped into the uneven ground she braked and stepped off to balance the bike's unwieldy length. With Dirk's help she wheeled it off the road and leaned it against a tree.
In the center of the clearing, a breeze was cooling the sun-warmed air. Slightly warmed herself by the exertion and the morning sun, Victoria moved toward the center and lifted the hair away from her neck to let the fingers of the breeze cool her skin.
"Just a minute." Dirk's voice made her pause. "You have a thread hanging."
"Where?" Victoria stopped and tried to twist around to look behind her, a virtually impossible task.
"I'll get it," he volunteered and started to crouch behind her.
Victoria couldn't see the thread, but she could feel it dangling from the hem of her shorts, just barely brushing the back of her thigh. The discovery of its location coming right on the heels of his offer flamed her skin.
"No, I'll do it," she hurried the protest and tried to turn away.
"You can't even see it," Dirk chided while his hand clasped her hip to prevent her from moving out of his reach. "Stand still."
Struggling would only turn a slightly embarrassing situation into a humiliating one, so Victoria rigidly obeyed his command rather than display an exaggerated modesty. It wasn't easy to stand motionless under the firm touch of his hands. They seemed to burn through the brevity of her shorts as Dirk twisted the thread around his forefinger, a knuckle digging into the bare flesh of her thigh. On the surface his action was impersonal, but underneath there was an implied intimacy dictated by the very location of the problem. With a quick tug his hand pressed against her rounded flesh and the thread snapped. A riptide of heat coursed over her flesh.
"There you are." Dirk straightened and held out the white thread for her inspection.
Victoria couldn't meet his smiling glance. "Thank you." The words were as stiff as her posture.
When she took an escaping step forward, his hand settled on her waist while he kept pace. Her rigidity was transmitted immediately to him. Dirk tipped his head to one side in an inquiring angle, his dark eyes running over her profile.
"What's the matter?" He sounded faintly bemused and curious.
"Nothing," she insisted.
By lengthening his stride, Dirk moved a half a step ahead of her and stopped to block her way. When she tried to go around him, his hand moved to capture her chin and lift it so he could see the expression she was trying to avoid showing him.
"I believe you are embarrassed." A wondering amusement laced his accusation and Victoria couldn't lift her gaze beyond the tanned column of his neck. She was fully aware of the hot stain that flushed her cheeks. Her discomfort wasn't improved by his closeness. "There is no need to be." His hand glided from the curve of her waist to the rounded flesh of her buttock, lessening the distance between them to inches. The ease of his familiar caress trembled through Victoria although she tried desperately not to show he was creating any disturbance. "I'm already familiar with every curve and muscle back there," Dirk murmured. "I've been watching it on that bike for long enough."
The breath Victoria tried to take never got farther than her throat, lodging there at his provocative comment. Her gaze rushed up to become trapped in the enveloping blackness of his. At the catapulting leap of her pulse, a flurry of sensations left her defenseless. When his mouth opened possessively on her lips, Victoria was launched into a heady plane where only man and woman existed. She responded hungrily to his devouring kiss, feeding his desire and being fed.
His hand moved in a long, leisurely caress from her chin, down her throat, across her shoulder, and around her back. Its sensual persuasion brought her fully against his length, her soft curves imprinted by the hard, male contours of his shape from the muscled wall of his chest flattening her breasts to the oak-solid trunks of his legs scraping the bareness of hers.
The drugging mastery of his kiss was narcotic and Victoria felt its addictive prowess asserting its hold on her. Under the languid domination of his mouth, she was dazzled by the slow-burning flames that grew ever more consuming. Her arms had encircled him. Her hands were reveling in the feel of the flexing and distending muscles in his shoulders and back.
An inner voice was trying to remind her of something unpleasant. Victoria knew if she listened to it, it would spoil the delicious joy she was experiencing. So she ignored the unintelligible warning in favor of the dangerous pleasure of the moment.
Disappointment raged when Dirk's hunger for her lips became satiated and his mouth was slowly removed from hers. Pride lowered her face to hide the fiery needs his kiss had kindled. Trembling with a blissful weakness, Victoria had to cling to him for support. Beneath her cheek, she could hear the hard thud of his heart and derived some measure of satisfaction from its loud beat.
His warm breath stirred the hair on her forehead and she inhaled his intoxicating, earthy smell. When his hand cupped the side of her face, Victoria didn't resist the pressure it exerted to lift her head. Those few minutes had given her time to conceal the wild disturbance his embrace had caused. Now. Victoria found herself needing the reason why Dirk had initiated it.
The simplest and possibly the quickest solution was simply to ask. "Why did you kiss me?"
While his hand slowly caressed her cheek and jaw and the little hollow below her ear, his thumb lazily traced the outline of her lips, feeling the warmth and moistness that remained from his kiss.
"For a multitude of reasons," Dirk replied with a husky pitch to his voice. "The most obvious one is that you are a beautiful woman. I wanted to feel the softness of your body and mouth against my own."
Victoria needed something more complicated than that. It was too close to her own very basic reaction; therefore, the elemental attraction became too dangerous a premise to accept. Besides, his exploring thumb had parted her lips to probe at the white barrier of her teeth, its investigation too blatantly sensuous. Withdrawing her arms from around him, Victoria reached up to pull his hand from her face, and the thumb from lips that tasted the rough, salty texture of its skin.
"Your other reasons?" she prompted as the male hand she had been holding reversed the possession to hold her hand within its grip.
His mouth quirked briefly before he bent his head to press her fingertips against his lips and peer at her through the thick, male screen of his lashes. "To discover what I already suspected. There is a strong streak of liberalism in you, Tory. That cool composure of yours is only a mask worn by a warm, vibrant woman to hide the rawly passionate side that she hasn't learned to deal with yet." There
was something very seductive in his veiled, but steady regard.
Her heart began beating at triple speed, instinctively knowing that Dirk could expertly teach her how to deal with her passions. With a fluttering of panic, Victoria freed her hand from his evocative nibblings and stepped away. Folding her arms in front of her nervously churning stomach she walked to the center of the clearing. Apprehensively, she sneaked a backward glance at Dirk to see if he was pursuing. He had moved generally in her direction, but he had stopped on a stretch of grass-carpeted earth to lower his muscled frame to the ground. Victoria felt a twinge of regret and hated herself for it.
"There's plenty of room." Dirk indicated the wide patch of grass to his left. "Why don't you join me?"
Chapter Seven
VICTORIA WAS TEMPTED, but the knowing glint in his eyes revealed that he expected an affirmative response. "No." With a quick shake of her head, she refused. The length of rough green earth reminded her too much of a blanket on the ground. Dirk continued to watch her, waiting for an explanation. She didn't want to admit it was his nearness combined with a horizontal position that bothered her, so she chose a much more mundane excuse. "I don't want grass stains on my white shorts. They might not come out."
"Is that all that's stopping you?" But Dirk said it as a statement despite its question form.
His reply puzzled her, but not nearly as much as his following action when he began unbuttoning his shirt and tugging it free from the waistband of his slacks. Her gray eyes widened as his bronze torso began to be revealed.
"What are you doing?" The faint tremor in her demand exposed her own susceptibility to the sight of so much masculine flesh, and the feathery cloud of raven chest hair.
Dirk shrugged out of the shirt, muscles rippling in the sunlight, and spread it on the ground beside him. "You can sit on my shirt and you won't have to worry about grass stains."
"B-but…" Victoria searched helplessly for another reason, stunned by his action, while trying to maintain her poise.
"Isn't that chivalrous enough for you, little princess?" he mocked. "Wouldn't a true gallant spread his coat over a mud puddle? I don't have a coat, and there isn't any mud puddle. So the shirt and grass will have to do."
"Your shirt will end up with grass stains." She sought in vain for a convincing excuse to refuse.
"My shirt is considerably less expensive than those designer shorts you are wearing. Besides, a highborn lady like yourself shouldn't be concerned with a lowly servant's clothes." He was deliberately taunting her.
Victoria guessed that Dirk expected her to refuse his shirt and sit on the grass beside him to prove she wasn't a spoiled snob. She intended to show him that she wasn't so easily maneuvered. Her mouth curved into a smile, but there was a hard glitter in her gray eyes.
"You are quite right," she declared. "Why should I worry about your shirt?" She walked over and sat down squarely in the middle of it, wiggling a little to rub the cotton material into the grass and guarantee a stain.
"You little brat." Instead of being angry, Dirk chuckled with open amusement at her audacity.
"You said it," Victoria reminded him. "Better your shirt than my shorts." She leaned back on her hands, challenging him with a look.
"You don't think you are going to get away with it, do you?" Dirk turned to face her. Suddenly the distance between them wasn't nearly as much as it had seemed as a wall of bronze flesh loomed beside her.
Victoria regretted the desire for retaliation that had brought her to this half-horizontal position. An uneasiness sifted through her bones, followed immediately by a quivering awareness of how it had been to be in his arms.
"I'm sorry about your shirt," she apologized. "You made me angry when you said those ridiculous things about me. I really don't care about sitting on your shirt."
She would have moved to pull it out from beneath her, but his hand spread itself on the bare flesh of her thigh, on the opposite leg from where he was reclining.
"No, you don't," Dirk warned. "The damage is already done, Now you are going to sit there."
"It's your fault," Victoria defended in a voice that wasn't as steady as she wanted it to sound.
"No, it's your fault," he countered and leaned toward her, "for teasing me with one kiss and walking away."
"I wasn't teasing." With the hand on her thigh she couldn't scoot away, so Victoria attempted to escape his continuing approach by leaning farther and farther backward.
"I'm relieved to hear you weren't teasing." His dark eyes mocked her as he followed her down.
When his mouth was inches from hers, tantalizing her with its silent, male promise, Victoria whispered, "I don't want this to happen."
"Liar," Dirk murmured and let his mouth do the rest of the convincing.
Under its pervading skill she tried to summon a resistance, but his mouth claimed hers with a sensual, leisurely thoroughness. Its intoxicating potency sent a tremor of weakness through her limbs. Fingers that had wound into the blades of grass released the green tufts to hesitantly seek the warm male skin stretched so firmly across the muscled expanse of his shoulders and back. He penetrated her lips to languidly possess the inner reaches of her mouth and rekindle the hot fires that had consumed her only moments before.
The crushing weight, of him was eased to one side as he forced an arm under her to mold her to his will. Victoria shifted to more easily accommodate his arm and enjoy the searing fire of his kiss. His free hand had left her hip and was exploring her waist. Having enslaved her lips, Dirk left it to wander to her throat, nibbling at the highly sensitive skin at the hollow.
Her breath was little more than sighing gasps of reluctant pleasure. Victoria bit her lip to try to keep it from escaping to betray her any more than her flesh and her senses were already doing. When his fingers slipped under the cotton of her T-shirt, her hand slid along his hair-roughened arm in an effort to stop this suddenly intimate exploration of his hand. Her effort was puny at best, and the skin covering her rib cage quivered in traitorous excitement at the caressing touch of his hand.
As if sensing this inner resistance, Dirk's mouth returned to her lips to quell this minor revolt before it gained strength. When he found her teeth in possession of her lower lip, he let his tongue trace the outline, teasing until her mouth was turning to find his. While her senses had been occupied with the tormenting nearness of his mouth, his hand had moved upward to cup her breast and stir the peak into hardness beneath the silken material of her brassiere. A sweet, consuming ache began in her midsection and spread lower. Victoria stiffened at its cause.
"Let go." His mouth laid a molten trail over her face, his caress as seductive as his voice. "Let go, Tory, and let that wonderful aching confusion become rapture."
The temptation to yield to his promise was potent, but Victoria twisted, her head far to the side. "No," she choked out the denial and continued in a hoarse anger. "I am sure it would make quite an exclusive story to have bedded Charles Beaumont's daughter, but you aren't going to get it."
When he lifted his head to glare at her in surprise, Victoria took advantage of his action to roll from beneath him and onto her feet.
"Do you believe what you just said?" Dirk demanded, rising to stand behind her.
"Do you deny that it's true?" she retorted without looking at him.
"It would probably make a hell of a story, but I don't write for the scandal sheets!" he snapped and bent to whip his shirt from the ground. "As a matter of fact, I had forgotten you were even related to Charles Beaumont!"
Turning, Victoria watched him buttoning his shirt. She couldn't tell by his expression whether that barely contained anger had been genuine or faked. Dirk glanced up and caught her narrowed and wary look. Tucking his shirt into his pants, he walked over to her.
"You don't seem to have much confidence in yourself as a woman. Why, Tory?" His dark gaze pinned her.
"Don't call me that." She avoided his question. "It's a name reserved for my family and very c
lose friends."
"And what am I?" His gaze raked her to remind her of how close they had been. "Or is it my background that precludes me from that select group? Maybe I should call you Miss Victoria?" His strong white teeth were biting out the words.
"No!" Victoria angrily denied that she wanted that. "And it isn't your background! It's your profession." She cooled her voice to a more normal level. "I don't trust you, and you have given me very little cause to trust you."
His mouth quirked, grooves slashing deeply at the corner. "Considering the way you affect my blood pressure, I would advise you not to trust me if I was wearing the robe of a celibate monk's order."
"Should I thank you for that?" Victoria resorted to sharpness, having no other defense against him. His provocative candor undermined the wariness she tried so hard to nurture.
"No, I don't want you to thank me for it," he mocked. "I want you to remember it." His hand reached out to snare the back of her neck and hold it still while his mouth bruised her lips in a hard, searing kiss. It ended with the same abruptness as its conception, but his face moved only inches from hers, his dark gaze burrowing deep into the confused gray of her eyes. "I'm told exercise is a more satisfactory release for sexual frustration than verbalizing. Shall we start for the house?" Not waiting for a reply, Dirk turned but didn't release his grip on her neck as he guided her to the tree where they had left the bicycle. "Only this time I'll take the front seat." His hand gently kneaded the back of her neck where his fingers had dug so punishingly into the flesh moments ago. "I think I have a better idea where we're going than you do."
Victoria opened her mouth to protest that statement, but Dirk had already turned away. No longer able to see the enigmatic glint in his eye, she couldn't be sure his comment had been as ambiguous as she had interpreted it.
"Are you ready?" When he glanced over his shoulder his look was bland and unreadable.
Was she imagining the double meaning? Victoria shook away the mental confusion and walked to the rear of the bike.
