She had to!
‘Did you and Jones stay in a hotel in Hualien?’ Luke asked tightly.
Once again the abrupt change of subject unfocused her mind for several seconds, but then her eyes flashed as she guessed what lay behind the question.
‘We had separate rooms, Luke,’ she told him tartly. ‘Booked by Nicky, when she still thought she’d be with us.’
‘Separate rooms don’t mean a thing,’ he retorted with a glimmer of a sardonic smile. ‘Have you become lovers again?’
‘No, we have not! I don’t have to do this, Luke!’ Maria added tempestuously, her pride rebelling. ‘I don’t have to endure this sort of interrogation, or explain a single thing about——’
His slight movement towards her silenced her, and she looked at him apprehensively, noting the way decision marked his face now.
‘I don’t suppose it matters whether you’re telling me the truth or not, but I think you probably are. Why should you lie?’ He paused, and Maria saw decision become intention. ‘It’s just as well. Do you know what it’s doing to me, standing here seeing you in that robe and wondering just how much you’ve got on under it? I can’t wait for you any longer, especially when I consider how long it might take to extricate you from another relationship if I give you time and you use it to involve yourself with Jones or whoever else you might have in mind…They’ll just have to wait for you. I’m first this time. I’ve waited six years already, remember. That’s why we’re not really rushing into this, however precipitate it might seem on the surface.’
He was making intolerable assumptions about her character, and rage flooded Maria’s mind in a scalding cascade. Her initial instinct was to hit out at him in violent retaliation, the insults unendurable and unan-swerable in any other way, and yet at the same time, some still, small place of recognition at the centre of all that red-hot emotion was acknowledging the kernel of truth hidden within the offensive words.
This crucial point in their relationship had not come too soon, for either of them. Six years…
‘Don’t touch me!’ she said sharply as Luke reached for her.
‘How can I not?’ he returned savagely, his hands on her shoulders stilling her and seemingly stopping her heart for an instant. ‘Six years, and then burning up this last week I’ve spent in Singapore, regretting the entrenched prejudices that stopped me making love to you last time we were together. God! I had this idea I had to be civilised, and wait until I’d obtained spoken as well as physical consent from you—and then spent days regretting it! I warned you I wasn’t going to be able to consider you and any doubts, hesitations or scruples you might have this time around, and I should have remembered that. I can’t afford to.’
‘Another thing you’ve forgotten,’ Maria supplied waspishly, agitatedly conscious that she had to go on resisting him. ‘And so soon after we were discussing it, too, but then you keep doing it. I hate you, Luke.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten, and I’ve come round to being sorry that you do, but as it’s unlikely that the hatred is going to change, and since we both know that this is ultimately inevitable, it might as well happen now.’
Luke’s fingers worked at her shoulders, their warmth penetrating the smooth fabric of her robe, beginning to burn into her, and she felt herself swaying.
‘No—’ she began desperately, but couldn’t continue.
‘Oh, yes, I accept that you hate me,’ Luke went on tautly. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference, does it? I can still seduce you.’
The utter confidence of the claim incensed her, but then came the pain of knowing that it was all too true. Luke could seduce her. He was seducing her already, pulling her close, and there was nothing she could say or do to still the instant leaping hunger he incited.
She heard the shaken sigh that was torn from him as he brought her body up against the length of his, and the urge to go on fighting him faded as she grasped at fresh knowledge, accepting the fact that this was entirely mutual. She affected Luke in the same way as he did her.
Mentally, she gave an ironical bow to whatever maliciously sadistic fate had done this to them, throwing them together and adding this towering, ungovernable desire to the other emotions existing between them, the hatred and resentment on her side, contempt on Luke’s.
As she felt the sensual warmth of his mouth touching hers and then taking it, Maria knew that the situation was already out of control. Her arms were finding their way about him, hands lifting, and the pleasure her mouth took from his could not be kept localised, a rapid tide of rich sensation spreading and sweeping through her whole being.
They had spoken of exorcism, with reference to Luke’s desire for her, but now Maria acknowledged bitterly that it too would be mutual. Making love would be an exorcism for both of them.
As a justification for indulging the imperative demands of the flesh it was pathetic, and she knew it, but she didn’t think she could go on fighting the passion they awoke in each other. She wanted Luke too badly, her skin on fire and an even more intolerable conflagration deep inside her, stoked by the possessive mastery of his kiss, an inferno of need, consuming her.
‘I want you!’
She admitted it tempestuously as Luke deprived her of the erotic stimulation of his mouth, opening her eyes just in time to see the blaze of triumph in his as he heard her.
She hated it, and hated him, but she was no longer resisting him, so she accepted it in aching silence, desire overwhelming pride at last.
‘You always have,’ he asserted arrogantly.
‘I didn’t know that I did.’
The heat of humiliation rose with that final admission, but it was pale fire, swallowed up in the flames of the passion engulfing her and making her body stir provocatively against him.
Defeat—and yet not truly defeat, Maria realised as she felt Luke’s response. Hearing his feverish mutter of gratification as his hands parted her robe and found her flesh unconfined beneath it, save for a little pair of loose silky pants, she accepted a power almost equal to his over her.
Almost equal, but not quite, because Luke still seemed to retain a vestige of control while she trembled wildly as his hands slid adroitly up over her ribcage to cup her breasts from beneath, lifting them to the swooping descent of his dark head; and she heard him mutter intensely again just before his mouth took voluptuous possession of the heated hardness of one exquisitely sensitive nipple.
She thought she would fall to the floor, or faint, standing there at the mercy of his ravishing mouth, and perhaps he sensed something of her helplessness, because he raised his head again almost immediately.
‘The bedroom?’ he questioned her urgently.
Once there, Maria let her robe slide from her shoulders before stepping quickly out of her pants while Luke undressed swiftly, tantalising shadows playing over his flesh, revealed and then tormentingly concealed as he moved in and out of the circle of soft golden light that came from the lamp at one side of her low, wide bed.
There was a savage splendour to his aroused body, and Maria called his name faintly, from far away, it seemed, as blood drummed in her ears and he took her into his arms again, sinking to the bed with her.
There was a fractional gap in time in which she went blind and deaf and limp, a second that was almost a miniature swoon in essence, but so infinitesimal that she wasn’t even aware of the fleeting relief, the madness in her again instantly, the craving, unbearably heightened by this first knowledge of his nakedness in contact with hers.
‘Ah, Maria, six years is a long time to wait,’ Luke murmured with a faint sardonic smile as he registered her frantic response. ‘And it was six years for both of us, but you’ll understand if I can’t sympathise with your waiting when it was all unknowing—ignorance being bliss—whereas I’ve known precisely what it was that troubled me through all those six years.’
‘Please…’
She sensed his need to avenge that waiting, but she couldn’t form words to protest, pul
led in to him, her mouth and then her breasts captive to the erotic magic of his lips and tongue, the writhing of her body an explicit demand for more. Luke’s fingers were maddeningly light on her buttocks, tracing a complex pattern over the smooth skin, and she gasped, mindless with pleasure now and moving through desire to something beyond, urgent and undeniable.
Fingers entwined in the dark hair of the head still at her breasts, Maria cried out softly, shifting her position instinctively as she felt his hand circle her hip and then slide urgently to the softness at the top of her thighs and accept the invitation implicit in her movement. A finger traced the secrets of her sex, coming to where heated flesh pulsed rhythmically in readiness, already anticipating the entrance of his manhood.
A wild, violent delight that had intolerable hunger as its other side spasmed through her as the deep, slow throb low down in her slender body became a pounding, yearning ache that must be soothed, or she thought she would die.
‘Oh, God, Luke!’ The desperate words, both protest and plea, were torn from her. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing to me!’
‘Don’t I?’ It came unevenly, an odd bitter anger roughening his voice. ‘And have you got any idea of what it is you do to me, Maria? What you’ve done for six long years, and more especially what you’ve been doing to me ever since we met again?’
As he spoke, he was drawing back slightly, capturing her hand and carrying it to tumescent flesh pulsing with vigorous life.
‘Luke!’ Maria’s voice was reduced to a strained, aching whisper, ‘I want you so much…’
‘As much as I want you?’ The demand was harsh, almost accusing, and his dark face was taut, pulled into lines of resentment. ‘I’ve never wanted anyone this much—to the extent that I can disregard everything I know about you and believe about myself…And now it’s finally happening. At last, incredibly, I’m going to find out what it is I’ve been missing…wanting! All of you. God——’
As she moved her fingers passion detonated. Maria had never dreamed that two people could generate so much sheer sensation between them. This was a rage of feeling, carrying them out of themselves, beyond the confines of their mortality.
She had never known anything like the need that rent her, and she knew it was the same need that was racking Luke’s rigid body; and still it escalated as they succumbed to a welter of tumultuous embraces, caresses and kisses, their staccato breathing punctuated by the sharp sounds of desire, their skin damp with perspiration.
Their passion precluded tenderness, their lovemaking nearly fighting, and Maria could almost believe that that was really what it was, else how could Luke continue to deny her and himself like this?
And yet, self-denied, he was still dominant, rampant male, she the one reduced to mindless begging for the release she now knew could only ever be temporary because she was an addict already, enslaved by him as he fed her again the fatal taste, the bitter-sweet of his passion, and her own.
The slide of bodies bathed in perspiration ceased as Luke shuddered and stilled momentarily before moving to kneel over her, surveying her with glittering eyes, his shadow cast over her, and Maria fell back against the pillows with a hoarse sob, wordlessly pleading with him to end the torment, aching for him, needing to feel him inside her, hating him for prolonging her agony like this and resenting the control that enabled him to do it.
Shaking violently in the intolerable hold of a passion as bitter as it was irresistible and torrid, she looked up at the man who had done this to her, his body before and above her, glistening and dark, darker still where it was shadowed with hair. He looked alien and powerful, the master of her pleasure, giving and denying, tormenting while he delighted—about to become her lover and desired as such, although still a stranger.
‘Does it hurt you to wait, my darling Maria?’ he challenged her harshly. ‘To be denied?’
For the most fleeting of moments, she knew humiliation, but then anger surged, and an aching triumph with it because she knew he could not deny her.
‘Yes, damn you!’ she acknowledged, her eyes blazing pure gold.
She reached up for him, clawing at his shoulders, her fingers slipping on his wet skin as her body strained upwards towards his, arching rigidly, jerking and quivering convulsively.
‘And me, Maria,’ groaned Luke, abruptly between her thighs. ‘All of me! All this long time…’
Then their waiting was over. Maria was moist, hot and tight about him as he moved powerfully within her, and the exquisite friction of their joining commanded them utterly, carrying them upwards through rapture and beyond to a soaringly ecstatic climax so intense, so comprehensive that Maria felt it expanding to embrace her mind, spirit and emotions.
Nothing was omitted, no aspect of her being was not party to this miraculous moment of ultimate sharing, and in the final vibration of the after-shock set up by the last incredible convulsion of ecstasy, she heard Luke gasping her name and understood that she didn’t hate him and never had.
Resentment. That was what it had been, what she had felt all along, she accepted a little later when she was in a state to sort and make sense of shocking new knowledge. She had always resented Luke, and feared the way he made her feel—because she must have sensed from the beginning the power he could and did have over her; because he had deprived her of himself when he had had her dismissed from that very first job back in South Africa; because something had led him to misjudge and despise her, and he was unable to see the truth; because she had always known that he could break her heart…
As he had just broken it. Her looted heart, first ransacked of all that she had to give and then shattered.
Having spent himself, he had still found the will and strength to move away after he had withdrawn from her, so that they lay without touching, the space between them painfully eloquent, the gleaming coppery curve of the shoulder that he presented to her even more hurtful.
‘Bastard,’ Maria said softly, noticing the marks her nails had left in his smooth flesh without surprise.
‘Didn’t you enjoy it?’ Luke enquired in a sarcastic murmur, not even turning to look at her.
She sat up, measuring the distance from the bed to her discarded robe lying on the soft carpet. Sighing, she ignored pride’s dictates and sank back against the pillows.
‘You know I did,’ she conceded bleakly, and added flatly, ‘And I hate myself.’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll soon get over it and revert to hating me,’ he offered lazily, still turned away from her. ‘It’s always easier to hate others than it is to hate ourselves.’
‘Is that why you despise me?’ she retorted, languidly caustic. ‘So that you don’t have to despise yourself?’
Luke was silent for several seconds and she began to suspect that he had fallen asleep.
Then he said tiredly, ‘What makes you think I don’t? Stop talking so much, Maria. It was only sex, after all.’
For him. And she had also thought that was all it was, she acknowledged wearily. Fool!
‘If I had any energy left, I’d throw you out,’ she told him resentfully.
‘If I had any, I’d walk out,’ he countered.
‘You were right, I hate you again!’
‘Don’t talk unless you’ve got something new to tell me.’
Maria subsided. It was a strange conversation, sleepily hostile, with both of them drained by the extravagant expenditure of passion that had gone before. She had told him the truth, she discovered, staring at the polished beauty of his shoulder. It was possible to hate at the same time as you loved.
She drifted into sleep, resisting an urge to move closer and press her mouth to his shoulder, combating it by wondering what his reaction might be if she should succumb to an opposing temptation and sink her teeth into the flesh her nails had already marred.
When she woke again, in the early hours of Monday morning, Luke and gone, but she thought he would be back. How could anyone walk away from the sort of passion that existed betwe
en them?
But he didn’t come, either to her apartment or to her office. He didn’t come that day, or the next, and a host of mocking little phrases found their insidious way into her mind.
He had sated his lust, cast out the demon, exorcised the ghost.
Maria was forced to begin believing that they represented the truth on the Thursday when, having first steeled herself to sound casual, she mentioned to Giles Estwick that Luke didn’t seem to be around any longer.
‘He was in Singapore last week, but he came back at the weekend, I know,’ she observed innocently, hating herself for needing to know so badly. ‘Has he left again?’
‘He’s back in Hong Kong.’ Giles had returned from the Colony the previous day. ‘In fact, Ursula and I accepted his invitation to go over to Macau with him and Cavell Fielding on Tuesday evening for dinner and a spot of gambling in one of the casinos, and a very enjoyable few hours they were too.’
Maria kept her face expressionless, but she felt as if merciless fingers were mangling her heart.
Clearly Luke had achieved the exorcism he had sought by making love to her and was now free to either pursue or resume a relationship with Cavell Fielding, with no danger of damage to his self-respect because he respected Cavell.
Whereas she—Maria’s lips tightened, confining a moan of self-disgust. He had used the word necessity in speaking of his desire for her. She had been necessary, but despised, so naturally he had discarded her the moment she was no longer necessary to him, and their single sexual collision was all it had taken to free him.
She hadn’t been so lucky. Instead of soothing desire forever, the shattering culmination of their abandonment to passion had renewed and exacerbated it. Knowledge had betrayed her, because now she would always know what she was missing, and she would never be free again.
Unlike Luke, who had taken his freedom at her expense. Or had she given it to him?
Ransacked Heart Page 10
