‘You let that big fish go, didn’t you?’
‘I’m surprised you noticed, but yes.’
‘Why?’
Her voice was soft, almost a whisper against the silence. His was equally soft, but not really a whisper. Just … soft.
‘Timing,’ he said. Then the silence thundered down again.
‘I don’t understand,’ Saunders said.
A minute later? An hour? Long enough, anyway, for his hand to reach across the corner of the table, to pick up another hand, turn it over in his long fingers. She could only watch with disembodied, casual interest.
‘It wasn’t the right time. That’s all.’
‘But … but you said you had been trying for … for years,’ she protested, confused more than ever, and yet maybe not so confused after all.
‘And I might be trying for years yet,’ he said. ‘If I’d taken him today, I wouldn’t be able to do that, would I?’
‘You’re saying it’s the thrill of the chase, not the capture that’s so important?’ she rejoined, wondering as she spoke how, if that theory were applied, it applied to her. Was he only chasing her because of the challenge?’
‘Timing,’ he said then, in a voice barely audible. ‘Timing is everything.’
‘You’ve lost me again,’ Saunders said. Now she was becoming increasingly aware of how his fingers were manipulating her own, caressing, stroking, but with an abstract quality to the process; her fingers, she thought, might as easily have been worry beads.
Ford sighed, fell silent, stayed silent for long moments before he tried again to explain.
‘Timing,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders, looking at Saunders with eyes now alive with expression. ‘Today, I didn’t set out to catch that fish. I had … other things in mind, other priorities. Catching him was a matter of luck, an accident, not because I was devoting myself to the situation. I guess what I’m saying is that the fish deserved better than that.’
‘But you were fishing! You were out there specifically to catch a fish.’
His laugh was glowing, mellow, gentle. And now his fingers were at her wrist, stroking her pulse, lifting it, setting it afire.
‘The fish I was setting out to catch were only minnows,’ he said. ‘Bait. I had much bigger game in mind and you know it, Saunders. It was you I wanted to catch.’
‘A game,’ she said, is that all there is to it — just a game?’ She waved in a vague gesture over the table. ‘Is that all this is — just bait?’
‘You know better than that.’
‘I only wish I did.’ The tried vaguely to free her hand, but it wasn’t much of a try. His fingers continued their manipulation of her pulse.
‘But you do. You just don’t want to admit it to yourself, that’s all.’
‘Admit what?’ Stupid question — she knew, and he knew she knew. Which was why he didn’t answer, she supposed, only smiled at her with his mouth and laughed at her with his eyes.
‘You have to stop,’ she finally said. ‘You can’t just keep on doing this to me.’
‘Doing what? Wanting you? Loving you? Teasing? Of course I can. And I will, too, especially the teasing.’ He wasn’t questioning now, but musing. Still holding her with his eyes, with his fingers. ‘Yes,’ he finally continued, ‘I guess you’d know about teasing, Saunders. Out there under that waterfall, driving me crazy deliberately. You’re lucky you got fed; I came that close to letting the tucker just burn so that I could come and join you. I should have, really.’
Somehow, without her noticing, he had lifted her wrist; now he moved his mouth to it, and his lips were brands, searing against her pulse, boiling her blood. And somehow he had left his chair, had drawn her upright from her own chair, his other arm round her waist, his strength countering the fact that her legs were like rubber, melting from the fire in her belly, in her loins.
‘Yes, you should have,’ she managed to whisper, before his mouth swooped down to stop her, before his arms closed round her to pull her against the warmth of him, against the warmth and the strength and the rising tide of lust that met her own.
Then there was only a kaleidoscope of sensation, scattered, fleeing impressions, of clothing coming off to land where it fell, of Ford’s lips as they sipped at her nipples, drawing them to roseate peaks of exquisite tenderness, of his fingers tracing lines of fire along her thighs, her tummy, lines that his lips could follow, and did, as they roamed inexorably to the core of her womanhood.
Somehow the air mattress was lifted from the creaking bed, somehow the fire, at some point in the proceedings, was replenished with fuel, so that it could cast a flickering, warming glow over lovemaking that needed no external warmth, that certainly had sufficient fuel of its own.
Saunders found her skin uniquely sensitised; a touch anywhere from his lips, his wondrous fingers sent spasms of delight through her like ripples in the platypus pond, sometimes raising moans of pleasure, sometimes forcing uncontainable laughter to burst from her swollen lips.
Again and again he brought her to the edge of fulfilment, only to stall there with knowing, frustrating, delightful expertise, attuned to her needs as if she were a fine, delicate living musical instrument, or an orchestra set to play the whole night long.
Beside them the fire calmed to gentle coals, but her own fires and his seemed inexhaustible, never quite calming, just leaping from fever-pitch to furnace-heat with the simplest touch of lip or tongue or teasing finger.
When finally Ford allowed her to plunge over the crest of the wave of passion he had forged, it was only to plunge after her, then to lift her gently, speedily, inexorably upward again. And when they were finally spent there was the sleeping-bag to cover them, the warmth of their bodies to cling to…
~~~
‘Are you going to sleep forever? It’s time to get up.’
The voice was a whisper in her ear, accompanied by tantalising touches of his fingers along her waist, her hip, her thigh. Saunders wriggled closer, revelling in his touch, in the warmth of him against her.
His slow moan of pleasure was shattered by the maniacal laugh of a kookaburra somewhere outside, and she chuckled. ‘Ah, the timing,’ she sighed. ‘We’re back to having an audience again, I see.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ he replied. ‘And it isn’t half as funny as that damned bird thinks it is.’
Then his lips were moving across her own, touching briefly as they roamed down her cheek, following a recent trail along her shoulder, then down to where they could graze at her breast.
Saunders ran her own lips down the line of his neck, smelling the clean scent of his hair, feeling its coarse texture against her cheek. There was no sense of urgency now in their lovemaking; that had gone with the wild freedom of the night. Now his touch, and hers too, was languid, tantalising, teasing.
‘Why should I get up?’ she asked. I suppose you expect me to get the fire going, put the coffee on, cook breakfast?’
‘I’m just a bit worried that if you don’t get up, and soon, we might never manage it,’ he replied from somewhere beneath the sleeping-bag. ‘You expect an awful lot from a man with an empty stomach. Nurse White. Where’s your professional compassion, anyway?’
‘Just about … here,’ she sighed.
And, many, many minutes later, chuckled again, as the kookaburra voiced his hysterical approval.
Then she squealed with surprise as Ford erupted from the sleeping-bag, throwing her over his shoulder as he plunged through the door and charged naked towards the waterfall pool.
‘I’ll teach you to laugh at me,’ he howled. ‘Cold showers all round — that’s my prescription, Nurse.
‘Besides,’ he said a few moments later, shivering just slightly as he laved Saunders’ trembling body with the icy water, adding to the water’s effect with strategic touches of his magic fingers, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this since yesterday. Audience or no audience.’ Then he grinned mischievously. ‘No, since long before that, actually, I’ve sort of wanted to do
this since the first time I saw you, if the truth be told.’
‘You’re a sadist,’ she replied. ‘And, what’s more, I doubt if you even remember the first time you saw me.’
‘Of course I do. You were with that amazingly rude woman, the one who got all strange and abusive because I held the door open for her. You, I might add, were not impressed.’
‘I was very impressed with you; I suppose it’s safe to admit that now. I didn’t think you’d even noticed me.’
‘Oh, yes, you did; you went all flustered, as I recall, when I turned up at your office, I sometimes wonder if that’s why you got so stroppy with me.’
‘I didn’t!’
‘You certainly did,’ he said, turning her with gentle hands so that he could look into her eyes. ‘You were unimpressed — distinctly unimpressed — with my views on diabetes and heredity.’ And then he laughed: hugely, delightedly. ‘And if you’d known then that it was you I had in mind as the prospective mother…’
‘I’d have thought you quite mad,’ Saunders replied rather primly, a difficult thing to do considering their situation and what he was doing with his hands.
‘And I did think I was mad,’ came the reply. ‘But I feel much better about it now, since the discussion has become something more than theoretical; I’m quite prepared to bow to your superior wisdom on the subject. After that fabulous speech you wrote, with us in mind…’ Then he frowned. ‘That’s assuming we’re going to have children; we haven’t really talked about that yet.’
‘I did not write that speech for us,’ Saunders insisted. Perhaps lying just a teeny bit, but safe enough, she thought, in that. ‘Actually,’ she teased, ‘I must admit that I sort of had you and Nadine in mind.’
Ford laughed, the sound gurgling in her ear beside the rushing of the water around them.
‘And you accuse me of fishing? Nadine, I will tell you now, and never mention her again, was quite simply never in the hunt. Nadine is a self-centred, selfish, immature, childish brat — and that’s on her good days, of which there are few. I occasionally used to take her out in deference to her dear old daddy, who is a very good friend of mine and who worries — quite rightly, too! — about the company she keeps.’
‘Ah,’ said Saunders. ‘Just good friends, eh?’
‘Not good friends,’ he replied hotly. ‘More like being saddled with a precocious, spoiled nine-year-old most of the time. But her father helped me a good deal when I was starting out on my own, and I’ve always sort of felt I owed him something.’
He paused, leant down to kiss her, to pull her against the warm strength of him. ‘Now, does that satisfy your curiosity? Or have you got a whole list of questions about the women in my wicked, wanton past?’
‘I’m actually more interested in the future,’ Saunders replied, moving her hands down his chest to flutter her fingers along the muscular ribbing of his torso, those amazingly narrow hips. ‘Like, when are we going to get started on this fossicking business? You promised me gemstones, Ford Landell, not reminiscences from your murky past. And I intend to hold you to that.’
‘So I noticed,’ he replied, his voice quivering as he leant down to capture her lips, his hands moving round her body to pull her closer against him.
#
About the Author
Victoria Gordon is the pseudonym and muse for Canadian/Australian author
Gordon Aalborg’s more than twenty contemporary romances.
As himself, he is the author of the western romance The Horse Tamer’s Challenge (2009) and the Tasmanian-oriented suspense thrillers The Specialist (2004)and Dining with Devils (2009)
as well as the Australian feral cat survival epic Cat Tracks.
Born in Canada, Aalborg spent half his life in Australia, mostly in Tasmania, and now lives
on Vancouver Island, in Canada, with his wife, the mystery and romance author Denise Dietz.
More on www.gordonaalborg.com and www.victoriagordonromance.com
THE BOOKS
As Victoria Gordon
Wolf in Tiger’s Stripes (2010)
Finding Bess (2004)
Beguiled and Bedazzled (1996)
An Irresistible Flirtation (1995)
A Magical Affair (1994)
Gift-Wrapped (1993)
A Taxing Affair (1993)
Love Thy Neighbour (1990)
Arafura Pirate (1989)
Forest Fever (1986)
Cyclone Season (1985)
Age of Consent (1985)
Bushranger's Mountain (1985)
Battle of Wills (1982)
Dinner At Wyatt's (1982)
Blind Man's Buff (1982)
Stag At Bay (1982)
Dream House (1981)
Always The Boss (1981)
The Everywhere Man (1981)
Wolf At The Door (1981)
The Sugar Dragon (1980)
as Gordon Aalborg
Cat Tracks (Hyland House: Melbourne: 1981)
(Delphi Books: U.S. edition: 2002)
The Specialist (Five Star Mysteries: 2004)
Dining with Devils (Five Star Mysteries: 2009)
The Horse Tamer’s Challenge (Five Star Expressions: 2009)
An Irresistible Flirtation Page 16
