The Contract

by Avril Tremayne

  He checked his watch. “I’ve got to be somewhere at eleven-thirty, so we’d better hurry if we’re going to squeeze in your lesson.”

  Adam stepped across the threshold and Lane caught his hand. “Adam, is something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “Because we could just talk tonight. We could…” Lane’s words tapered into nothing as he liberated his hand from hers and checked his watch again.

  He seemed not to have listened to her halting words, because he hurried into the bedroom as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve been on site today and I’m sore and tired as hell, so I’ve brought this—” He handed her a small bottle. “It’s oil. I’d like you to give me a massage. Lesson… Look, let’s not number them any more, since we’re nearly done.”

  Adam covered the bed with some towels and proceeded to undress.

  “I can do that,” Lane said.

  “Faster if I do it,” Adam said. When he was naked, he lay face down across the towels. “Now, pour a little oil into your hands and start running them over my back. I’ll tell you what feels good and what doesn’t.”

  “But I’m not trained.”

  “This is sensual massage, not remedial.” His voice was muffled against the towels as he added, “And David won’t care.”

  Lane started shrugging out of her dressing gown, but Adam said, without lifting his head, “No need for you to undress.”

  Something was wrong, very wrong. “I’m not. Just the robe.” She finished removing it as panic trickled like ice through her veins. “I—I’m wearing a shirt. Your shirt. Because you said, you know, that women in men’s clothing… Lesson Seven…”

  When Adam didn’t even bother opening his eyes to see, she trailed off.

  Massage. All he wanted was a massage.

  She poured some oil into her palms to warm it, then ran her hands over Adam’s broad, bronzed back.

  Gradually, as she worked her hands over his skin, sliding them across his shoulders, down his sides, to his buttocks and down his legs, the lump that had lodged in her throat ceased to matter. Time became meaningless as she reveled in the feel of Adam’s flesh, in the sound of his quickened breaths—which meant, she was sure, she was doing well.

  She leaned close to his ear. “Turn over,” she said, and Adam—after a tiny pause—obeyed.

  Her hungry gaze traveled down his body then back up to his face, catching a look of such intense longing in his eyes she wanted to climb on top of him and kiss him. But the next instant—contradicting what she was sure she’d seen—he looked pointedly at the watch he kept strapped to his wrist.

  “All right, I’ll be quick,” she promised, trying to appear as nonchalant as he, as she hovered over him, tipping a small amount of oil onto his chest.

  The string of amber swung loose from beneath her—his—shirt.

  He reached up and touched the beads. He closed his eyes for an instant, and when he opened them, they were expressionless.

  Lane’s heart felt bruised. Really, actually bruised. He was so different. Almost as much a stranger as he’d been that first night when he’d signed the contract. She swallowed another lump in her throat and redoubled her massaging efforts. She massaged every inch of his chest, his stomach, his arms, the front of his thighs and down to his feet. Trying hard, so very hard, to reach him.

  At last, when she was sure the part of him she’d deliberately left until last must be ready to burst from strain, her hands closed over him. Her palms were slick with oil. He felt hard like iron, but alive. Pulsing. Beautiful.

  Please, please, please, please, she chanted in her mind. She wanted to feel him come. To have him spill into her hands as she watched his eyes…

  * * *

  “That’s enough, Lane.” The words came out harshly, like he’d smoked a thousand cigarettes. “I don’t want…that.”

  Adam hated the sound of his voice. The way it betrayed his need for her.

  She looked at him, her eyes glazed with passion. She was breathing hard and fast, but his heart was thundering so loudly he couldn’t hear it, could only tell by the rise and fall of her chest.

  Their eyes caught for an endless moment, and then, almost in agony, Adam sat up and reached for his jeans and shirt which he’d draped over the end of the bed.

  He saw in her eyes that she’d finally realized he wasn’t going to make love to her. They were huge, unhappy, perplexed whirlpools. Nothing cold about them.

  “But don’t you want… I mean, aren’t you going to…?” She couldn’t seem to finish a sentence.

  He steeled himself against giving in. “Not tonight. I thought you wanted to learn new things, not go over the same old ground.”

  “Yes, but…I would have thought sex would be a natural consequence of… I mean, it certainly made me feel—” She broke off. “Didn’t I do it right?”

  “You were fine, Lane,” Adam said then very deliberately checked his watch again.

  He watched as she took the amber from around her neck and placed it on her dressing table. “All right,” she said, suddenly poised and cool. “I know you’re in a hurry, so I’ll leave you to see yourself out while I take a shower.” She nodded to the bedside table. His bedside table. “I bought you a present.”

  Once she’d left the room, Adam gave up all pretence of getting dressed and reached greedily for the gift. It was wrapped neatly. So neatly—so Lane. How hadn’t he seen it when he’d been lying so close to it? Easy, he answered himself as he tugged the gift tag free, because his mind had disintegrated into a swirling vortex of lust.

  He read the tag. An apple for the teacher. A joy that was almost painful settled in his chest as he unwrapped the present. “Ah, Lane,” he breathed, running his fingers over the smooth jade, “don’t do this to me.”

  He would have laughed at her little joke with the apple-teacher thing…except that the thought of being her teacher had lost any allure.

  Carrying the apple, he walked over to the dressing table and picked up her amber. It was still warm from her body. He raised it to his face and inhaled the scent of her perfume. That damned ungovernable male part of his body tortured him by growing even harder, which he wouldn’t have believed possible!

  He smashed the amber back down onto the dressing table, set the apple beside it and dressed hurriedly.

  The images rushed at him, and he tried to block them.

  But there was one he couldn’t seem to block: the look on her face when he’d arrived. Beside herself with worry over him.

  But it didn’t mean she loved him.

  At least he’d managed to pretend he didn’t care.

  And he could take comfort from the fact that only he knew how difficult it had been for him to keep still, to not leap right off the bed the instant her hands had touched his skin when she’d started that damned massage. That had to count for something, right?

  He ran his finger over the cool green jade. An apple for the teacher.

  The teacher. He was the teacher. But David was the man Lane loved. And she would soon—too soon—be in David’s arms. Nothing was going to change that.

  He sighed heavily. His grand intention tonight had been to not let her get to him. Tonight he was supposed to prove to himself he didn’t need her.

  “Well that sure worked,” he muttered, glancing down at the front of his jeans where he half expected to see a fire blazing.

  Even though his body seemed on the verge of rising up and killing him in revenge for what he’d put it through tonight, he thought he could just about manage to leave the house.

  But then he heard her sob.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lane couldn’t seem to stop crying. All she could do was jam her fists against her mouth to stifle the sound of her sobs.

  Not that Adam would hear them, because he’d be gone by now. She could wail, she could beat her hands on the shower screen, she could scream, she could—

  Gulp.

  The door to the bathroom was opening…and through the
glass door of the shower she watched Adam enter. He started stripping as though it were the most important task of his life.

  He didn’t speak as he slid open the shower door and closed it behind him, cocooning them together in the steam. Then he took her in his arms.

  “Don’t cry, Lane, please,” he breathed against her neck. “God help me but I want you. I want you so much. I—” He stopped, dragged in a breath. “I want you,” he repeated.

  “I want you, too,” she whispered back.

  He kissed her. “And it’s true, what I said about women in men’s clothing.” He looked through the glass at the shirt she’d thrown on the bathroom floor. “Especially you in mine.”

  Then his lips were everywhere, his hands tangling in her wet hair and running over her body, plastering her naked body against his. “Come to bed,” he said.

  “What about your appointment?”

  Adam laughed—an odd, harsh sound—and shook his head. He led her out of the shower. They didn’t pause to dry off, just kissed deeply from the bathroom to the bed. He pushed her down, followed her. His hands were at her breasts, hovering, stroking, smoothing.

  “I want to touch you, too,” Lane whispered.

  And Adam forced his hands away from her, lying back on the bed, opening himself to her. “Then touch me, sweetheart.”

  She knelt over him, pushing her damp hair back over her shoulders impatiently. Her lips found his small, firm nipples, suckling, loving the feel, the taste of him. Her hands ran up and down his rib cage, along his sides. Then she moved lower, kissing a path down over his stomach, her hands moving to his thighs, between them.

  Adam stopped her before her mouth could move lower still—he’d never last. He pushed her onto her back beneath him. “My turn,” he said, and Lane moaned as his tongue found her nipple, making her body shake and the damp heat spread between her legs. “Do you like that, Lane?”

  “Yes,” she said on a shuddering breath.

  He moved his mouth to hers. Long, slow kisses. Closed his eyes, aching for her. “Tonight is not for him. It’s for me. I want tonight for me.”

  “For you, yes.”

  He kissed her again, even more deeply. For long moments his tongue stroked within her mouth, curling around her tongue. And then his mouth moved down the way hers had, and he kissed her chin, her throat…and down again.

  “I love this row of freckles,” he murmured as he moved past her collarbone, kissing each small brown dot before detouring to each breast in turn. “I love your body…. I love the taste of you…the feel of you on my tongue….”

  He moved again, over her ribs and down, his tongue dipping into her navel, circling until she clutched his head, then moved lower.

  “And here,” he said, kissing the coppery tangle of hair at the apex of her thighs. “And here.” He slid his hands between her thighs, feeling the slick heat of her. “Open for me. I want to taste you.”

  Shaking, Lane parted her thighs.

  “More,” he said, and her legs fell apart.

  And his tongue was inside her, and around her and over her, licking, sucking gently, sliding, and she was crying again.

  Adam felt her body contract as she shouted his name, shuddered her climax, then he rose up, preparing to plunge within.

  Lane stopped him. “No,” she said.

  For one awful moment, Adam thought she was going to deny him.

  But she gave him a look as seductive as sin. “I want to taste you, too.”

  Just as he’d done to her, so she did to him. She kissed him deeply, dipped to his neck. Paused to say throatily, “No freckles, but I like your hair here. And here,” as she twirled her tongue around his nipples. “And here,” she said as she followed the narrowing dark line to his navel, lower.

  “And here,” she whispered hoarsely, digging her fingers into the base of him, just before her tongue flickered and slid across the tip. He groaned, and she grew bolder, sliding her mouth fully over him, sucking gently.

  He tried to last through the joy of it—the feel of her mouth on him, her hands holding him and the sound of her voice as she praised the taste of him, but in the end he had to grab her shoulders and pull her up to him. He groaned into her mouth as he kissed her, as he thrust into her with exquisite slowness. Once, twice, again, again. Drawing out each movement, making it last, wanting it to go on forever. Again, again. “Lane,” he breathed against her lips, and kissed her again as he spilled himself inside her. Her name again, “Lane.”

  * * *

  Lane felt like crying again as Adam adjusted her body to fit with his. Her head was on his chest, his hand in her hair, her leg across his, her arm hugging his waist. Entwined, almost one, as they prepared to share the night together amongst the damp, tangled, love-soaked sheets.

  Lane could feel her heart swelling with something…swelling, opening, surging…flooding her with the most glorious sense of rightness.

  She loved him. Whether he stayed with her forever, or for weeks, or days, or only moments, she loved him. How stupid she’d been to think she could control this feeling.

  How could she control this deep, wrenching, terrifying, magnificent longing for the man who had taught her how to love?

  Chapter Sixteen

  As notes went, the morning missive from Adam wasn’t exactly sentimental: Is Friday OK? I’ll call you. A.

  What was that, after the night they’d shared?

  I want tonight for me, he’d said, and she’d hoped…

  But from that impassioned plea to Is Friday OK?

  Lane sighed.

  Well, what had she expected? She’d let herself fall in love with a man who had no interest in anything permanent—a characteristic she’d been insane enough to think was going to be a blessing—no matter how many impassioned words he whispered to her in bed.

  Two weeks. That was all she had left.

  Well forget the two-times-per-week restriction they’d been working to. She was going to jam their last two weeks full to bursting so that when the time was up, she would at least have the maximum number of memories, if nothing else, of what it had felt like to be wanted.

  On the bright side—she was no longer a 1.5 out of 10, that was for sure!

  And the not-so-bright—Adam would move on to a new lover.

  Adam will move on to a new lover. She repeated those words to herself, over and over, hoping that if she said it enough, it would have some magical desensitization effect, making it easier to bear.

  But all it achieved was to make her want to scream.

  The scream was still inside her, locked in her too-tight chest, when she got home that evening.

  Her phone was ringing, but she was hesitant to pick up. She needed to speak to Adam if she was going to start that jamming process, but she wasn’t entirely sure she could keep the scream in.

  It rang again a few minutes later. But…nope—she still didn’t feel ready to pick it up.

  Five minutes later, it rang again, and she did scream. Once.

  It didn’t make her feel better, but at least it snapped her back to reality and she looked at the caller ID.

  Brad. Not Adam.

  She wasn’t sure if that made her want to scream more or less. But she answered, with a brisk, “Hello Brad.”

  A choked off sob was the only return greeting she got.

  “Brad?” Alarmed now. “What is it?”

  “It’s M-Mum. We had an argument, because I was thinking about starting another course. She lost it, tore into me, said she would tell you not to give me one more penny. We fought—about you—and then—” Another sob.

  “Brad! Tell me.”

  “She…she…collapsed. A stroke.”

  The scream nudged at Lane again, but she fought it back. “Have you called an ambulance?” she asked, and was stunned at the calmness of her voice. She didn’t feel calm. She felt battered, and useless, and frightened.

  “We’re at the hospital now. But you have to come, Lane. They say—They say she’s no
t going to make it.”

  Instinct took over the moment Lane hung up. She grabbed her handbag, mobile phone and car keys. She let herself out of the house, got in her car and drove, forcing herself to push forward, go, get there, just get there, no thinking.

  As she parked, the heavens opened, rain pelting her as she ran from the car. She didn’t care, just concentrated on getting inside, finding where she had to be, keeping the panic inside her chest.

  Somehow she kept it crushed there as she comforted her brother, discussed organ donation, signed consent forms.

  Somehow…until her mother slipped away.

  * * *

  It was still pouring when Lane left the hospital. And Lane still didn’t care.

  She had spent so long keeping the scream, the panic, inside that now she didn’t think she could dredge up any emotion at all.

  Brad had gone to stay with friends. Erica was on a flight.

  Lane was sitting in her car. Wet, numb, and alone. With no idea what to do.

  She remembered what Adam had said about curveballs all those weeks ago. That when life sent you curveballs, you could choose to either catch them or let them go.

  Catch them…or let them go.

  How did her relationship with her mother fit within that analogy? All those fruitless attempts to make her mother proud? And now…the ultimate curveball had taken away any chance.

  She needed someone to help her make sense of it.

  Needed someone to tell her if she was supposed to catch this curveball or let it go.

  She needed…Adam.

  Adam.

  The need to see him now, right now, right away, became her whole focus.

  She started the car, drove, parked outside his house. It was still raining. She still didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything but getting to his door. She got out of the car, walked through the stinging rain, all but fell up the steps and knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  Knocked again.

  Nothing.

  Harder.

  No.