Beyond All Reason

by Cathy Williams

  He wasn’t going to take no for an answer. She lay down, with her back to his stomach, being very careful to avoid any bodily contact, and trying to ignore the warmth of his arms around her. Her head was swarming with a mad whirlwind of thoughts and she was breathing quickly and nervously. Of course, she was never going to get to sleep. She would have slept better if she had remained upstairs in the bedroom, even if that entailed her slowly freezing into a block of ice.

  ‘Better?’ he asked, and she didn’t say anything. ‘You’re very fiery underneath that icy veneer of yours, aren’t you?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I want to get some sleep.’

  ‘I knew that there was more to you than what you wanted to show,’ he carried on in a murmur. ‘There’s a lot of truth in the saying that still waters run deep. Every so often I used to catch glimpses of something quite different from the cool, efficient secretarial mask.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Abigail asked. The panic inside her was so sharp and alarming that she didn’t dare move. In fact, she hardly dared breathe. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said bitterly. ‘I wish you’d never come.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this is…wrong,’ she told him. ‘I work for you. I’m your secretary!’ She hoped that that would put things back into perspective, but it didn’t. ‘You’re involved with someone else,’ she continued desperately. ‘We’ve been through all this!’ she virtually wailed.

  ‘So we have,’ Ross said huskily, and she was glad that he couldn’t see the tremor of despairing excitement that crossed her face. ‘Why are you so afraid? That boss of yours, the one you used to work for, well, you may have been attracted to him but basically I don’t think you liked him very much, and you may have liked your exfiancé—you’ve told me enough times what a thoroughly warm and wonderful human being he is—but face it, you weren’t attracted to him. That, in fact, may have been one of the things that you liked so much about him. Somehow, between the ex-boss and your mother, you’ve come to the erroneous conclusion that physical attraction between a man and a woman is somehow undesirable.’

  ‘That’s not it at all,’ Abigail replied with a mixture of desperation and despair, ‘that’s the conclusion that you’ve come to because you feel as though you’ve somehow lost your challenge unless you’ve succeeded in psychoanalysing me from head to toe. Please,’ she said in a whisper, ‘won’t you leave me alone?’

  There was a heavy silence, then he did something that she was not expecting. He moved closer to her and folded his arms around her body, and she stopped breathing, every nerve in her body alight.

  ‘I can’t,’ he muttered, not explaining what he meant.

  ‘This won’t do.’ Her voice was high and pleading. This was circumstance, she wanted to tell him, this was an intimacy that had nothing to do with real life, just as Boston and what happened there had been a misjudgment brought on by being in a strange place. An abridged version of a holiday romance, she thought with scorn, the sort of thing that she had always abhorred. Foreign places, unfamiliar situations could make people lose their minds and do things which they would regret in the cold light of day. Her affair with Ellis had been cut off from reality as well. She hadn’t seen it at the time, but he had made sure to point it out to her all right, the minute he thought that she might have started taking their affair too seriously. Reality had been the girlfriend from his own social stratum.

  ‘No, it won’t, will it?’ he agreed, and there was an edge of excitement in his voice that raced to her brain like adrenalin and made her feel suddenly weak.

  His hand moved slowly down her body, smoothing along her thigh, then slipped beneath her pyjama top, caressing the flat planes of her stomach, and she groaned with a mixture of protest and wanting.

  He must know what she was feeling, he must sense the sickening intense desire inside her which was stirring into life and growing by the second.

  There were so many reasons to be fighting this, and they were all clamouring inside her head, a jumble of thoughts that seemed to be locked away inside a box, audible but incoherent, uselessly warning her that every touch, every sigh, every moment of forbidden pleasure would have to be paid for in pain.

  She shuddered convulsively as his hand warmly trailed down to her briefs, teasing and tantalising, and with agonised abandon she rolled over on to her back, allowing him to part her legs and then drawing in a deep, sharp breath when he found the moist warmth of her womanhood and began to caress it.

  They weren’t speaking but they didn’t have to. His body was giving off the same urgent messages as her own. They were both breathing thickly, their eyes locked, while their bodies obeyed orders from a different source.

  She closed her eyes as his fingers explored the depth of her being, a slow, rhythmic exploration that sent darts of pleasure shooting through her.

  She unbuttoned the top of her pyjamas, to reveal her aching breasts, and as he continued to excite her with his fingers, he took one swollen nipple into the warm cavern of his mouth, sucking and teasing until she couldn’t bear the peak of desire to which he was sending her.

  ‘Touch me,’ he ordered her, and she did. Her ignorance of the male body was complete, and she felt his hardened member with an incredulous thrill.

  He groaned and lay back and she felt the cold ache of withdrawal as he slipped off his clothes, then he roughly removed hers, his hands as impatient to continue the lingering caress of her body as hers were for his.

  He knelt over her, kissing her mouth, her neck, slipping down to lick her breasts, her nipples, then lower, circling her navel, trailing downwards until she felt a spiral of intense, erotic pleasure as his hands caressed the inside of her thighs and his tongue found the hot, burning centre of her need.

  She squirmed, abandoning herself to the waves of pleasure, moving against him as the waves crashed harder. When she knew that she could take no more and her body was screaming out for release, he straightened and thrust inside her, gently at first, then building to an urgent rhythm that repeated hers, so that their bodies moved as one.

  She wrapped her arms around his muscled body and her legs over his and they reached the point of no return with shuddering delight.

  ‘Ross…’ she said weakly, and he placed one finger over her lips.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ he murmured. He pulled the blankets over them, although she was warm enough without them.

  ‘We can’t lie here in silence indefinitely,’ she said on an amused sigh. She was waiting for the guilt to come; she knew that it was there, biding its time, but right now she felt no guilt at all, just a wonderful feeling of deep contentment.

  He moved to lie alongside her and stroked her hair with his hand. In the shadows, his eyes were gleaming pools. You could drown in them, she thought, if you hadn’t already.

  ‘No regrets, Abby?’ he asked. Underneath the casual voice there was a hint of hesitancy and she shook her head slowly.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  She laughed huskily. ‘No regrets.’ Not yet, anyway, she amended silently to herself.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ he asked, and she said lightly,

  ‘To the logs? So that we can get a fire going? It’ll be daytime soon.’ She didn’t want to discuss where they were going because she knew where they were going, and that was precisely nowhere. They might have slept together, they might have shared the ultimate bond between a man and a woman, but their paths were not parallel, and they still stood on opposite sides of a huge divide. Ross didn’t want the things that she wanted out of life: he was a wanderer, a predator who never cared to stay too long in one place, while she wanted stability, needed it.

  Their worlds were also light-years apart, and there was no point in kidding herself that their making love had altered that in any way. He moved in circles which she had only ever glimpsed from the outside, and when and if he did decide to settle down he would neve
r settle down with her. That was the way it was. She had had many lessons on the nature of it from her mother over the years and Ellis had simply driven the point home.

  But she hadn’t been lying. There were no regrets. Later would come the time for those.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT WAS light when Abigail next opened her eyes. The fire was roaring, and she had kicked off the blankets in her sleep. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, blearily noticing that it was still snowing. It took a minute or two before she remembered where she was and what she was doing here, downstairs in front of the fire, when she should have been upstairs in her own bed.

  ‘Up at last, I see.’ Ross’s drawl from the direction of the kitchen was lazily amused, and she turned round, as memories of their lovemaking flooded back into her head.

  He walked across to her in his jeans and T-shirt and handed her a cup of coffee, which she took warily, not meeting his eyes.

  ‘I see it’s still snowing,’ she said neutrally, and he laughed, a low, sexy laugh that made her blood run hot.

  ‘Is that the best you can do for conversation after last night?’

  He twirled a few strands of hair around one long finger, then cupped her face with his hand.

  Abigail raised worried eyes to his.

  ‘I’m not sure…’ she began.

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m going to say.’

  ‘Of course I do. You’re going to tell me that you’re not sure about last night, that things look different in the morning, that our lovemaking was another one of those errors of judgement which seem to be your favourite excuse for anything you do that you might possibly regret.’

  She smiled shyly at him. ‘I’m not sure if I like what you’re saying about my personality. One minute I’m an enigma, the next I’m a predictable old bore.’

  ‘I simply know you better than you think,’ Ross murmured, stroking her cheek with his thumb.

  She sighed and drank some more of the coffee. In fact, she didn’t know what to think or what to feel. She had given herself to him the night before, without reservations, and she didn’t regret having done so, but she was too sensible to see it as anything other than a fling for him.

  ‘You analyse things too much,’ he said huskily, his eyes warm. ‘You should just sit back and enjoy life.’

  ‘Don’t you mean lie back and enjoy it?’ Abigail asked, and he grinned, bending his head to kiss her, a slow, lingering kiss that made her think that he had a point. Why ask uncomfortable questions when she could just keep silent and go with the flow?

  ‘I should get up,’ she murmured against his mouth, not moving, and he drew back to look at her.

  ‘Why? It’s still snowing, there’s still no electricity, and there’s no point trying to be industrious and work out some plan for leaving this place because we won’t be able to. At least not yet.’ He sat down on the floor beside her.

  ‘I have to get changed,’ she protested.

  ‘You will. In due course.’ He kissed her again and traced a feathery line along her lips with his tongue. While he kissed her, he began to undo the buttons of her pyjama top and she groaned in heady anticipation.

  ‘I never thought,’ he muttered a little unsteadily, ‘that I could find old-fashioned, striped pyjamas so damned sexy.’

  ‘They’re not meant to be sexy,’ Abigail breathed, laughing a little, ‘they’re meant to be sensible.’

  ‘You don’t have a very sensible body.’

  He held her breast in his hand and began massaging it gently, and she tilted her head back, balancing her body on her outstretched hands behind her.

  He kissed her again, and she wrapped her arm around his neck, pulling him down beside her and slipping her hand underneath the T-shirt to stroke his chest. He moaned as her hand travelled downwards and toyed across his stomach, playing teasingly against the waistband of his trousers, and she laughed under her breath.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, are you?’ he asked, breathing quickly, and she smiled.

  ‘Wasn’t that your advice?’

  ‘You witch.’ He began kissing her urgently, his mouth hard and demanding on hers. She squirmed out of her clothes and moved his hand from her breast to her stomach, opening her legs slightly so that he could explore further.

  He was an extraordinary lover. She had little experience, but he made her feel as though every sigh, every little act, was giving him immense pleasure. When he guided her hand to his arousal, she could feel it throb between her fingers, against the palm of her hand, and was amazed to find that that gave her a heady sense of power.

  How could she even begin to think rationally when her body was on fire and her mind was floating somewhere far above in the heavens?

  He licked the full swell of her breast, then thrust deep into her, filling every pore of her being.

  With a little cry of pleasure, she wrapped her legs around his body and felt his mouth crush against hers in a fierce, hungry caress.

  It was an amazing way to wake up, she thought afterwards, and she looked at him through her lashes.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked lazily, and she half smiled.

  ‘What happens next.’ Her voice was light and careless, but her body had tensed as she waited for his reply.

  ‘What normahy happens next between lovers,’ he murmured.

  ‘What about your girlfriend?’ Abigail asked bluntly, and he frowned.

  ‘Fiona?’ There was a hint of impatience in his voice, but she wasn’t going to let that send her skittering back into silence with the question unanswered.

  ‘You have more than one?’ she asked, keeping her voice light and even, and her expression as carefully uninterested as she could make it.

  ‘There was never anything serious between us. I’ve already told you that.’ He shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair.

  ‘She’s under the impression that you two are destined for wedded bliss,’ Abigail informed him bluntly, and he burst out laughing.

  ‘She said that to you?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Odd. Why would she say something like that to you? Well, she’s wildly off course,’ he said, standing up, then turning towards the fire to warm his hands. Abigail looked at the long, straight line of his back, the muscular length of his legs, the powerful forearms, and shivered with a mixture of dread and desire. Had it been stupid to have taken what she had so desperately wanted? she asked herself.

  He turned to face her and she looked away, sitting up and slipping on her clothes.

  ‘Is she?’ Her voice was casual, and he couldn’t see her face because she was looking down while she buttoned up the pyjama top.

  ‘Fiona thinks I’m a good catch. I told her from the start that I’m not about to commit myself to any woman. She knew the rules of the game.’ He shoved on his trousers, but didn’t bother with the T-shirt, and moved to inspect the weather outside from one of the windows. ‘What kind of car did you get to drive up here? Four-wheel-drive? Not that there’s much chance of us going anywhere just at the moment.’

  Abigail looked at him and stood up, stretching, and his eyes wandered the length of her body in open appraisal.

  ‘Why don’t you believe in marriage?’ she asked conversationally, stooping to pick up the blankets and then folding them neatly, concentrating very hard on the task.

  He didn’t answer and when she looked up at him it was to find his eyes narrowed speculatively on her.

  ‘It doesn’t figure in my plans at the moment,’ he drawled. ‘Why the interest?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘You’re not looking for a replacement for your boyfriend, are you?’ he asked silkily, his dark face unsmiling.

  ‘Of course not.’ She felt sure that that was true, even though she had a second of doubt.

  ‘Good.’ He smiled, his lips curving, and moved across to her. ‘You needn’t be jealous of Fiona,’ he murmured into her ear, putting both his arms around he
r waist.

  ‘I’m not,’ Abigail lied. ‘I feel sorry for her, but I’m not jealous of her.’ The accusation might be true but it made her bristle to think that he suspected her of being jealous on his account.

  Ross looked down at her, taken aback. ‘Why on earth do you feel sorry for her?’ he asked with a puzzled frown.

  ‘Because she thought that what you two had going was more substantial than a romp in the hay, a few meals out and the occasional present.’

  She unclasped his arms and he stood back, with his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Then I’d say that she made a dangerous assumption,’ he said calmly, while she gathered up the folded linen and began walking upstairs.

  When she emerged thirty minutes later, she was wearing a pair of jeans and a red and blue striped cotton jumper, and she had shoved the sleeves up to the elbows. There might not be any central heating, but the log fire was burning vigorously, and giving out enough heat to warm the cottage.

  Ross was in the kitchen and he turned around as soon as he heard her coming down the stairs, his dark eyes flicking over her in a casual but intimate way. He was busy cooking on the gas cooker.

  ‘Brunch,’ he explained, watching her curious expression as she stood next to him. ‘Fried bread, bacon, tinned tomatoes, fried potatoes, baked beans.’

  ‘Sounds healthy,’ Abigail remarked.

  ‘Set the table and don’t be so damned sarcastic, or I shall hand it over to you.’

  Abigail laughed and began putting plates and cups on the table. Actually, it smelled wonderful and she was starving.

  ‘I didn’t think that you could cook,’ she admitted to him as she bit into a mouthful of food.

  ‘I’d hardly call this a gourmet meal,’ Ross pointed out drily. ‘As a matter of fact, though, I may not be brilliant at operating coffee-machines, but I’m a very able cook.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘There’s no need to look so surprised. I’m an unmarried man, of course I can knock up the occasional meal. Believe it or not, I don’t spend every evening dining out.’