The Trusting Game

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Negative emotions can be just as addictive, just as dangerous as any other kind of drug.

  ‘Think about it,’ he told her as he started to move away from her.

  Christa stood up angrily, determined to refute what he had just said, and then cried out in startled pain as the wind blew dust into her eyes, causing her to blink and automatically start to rub her streaming eye.

  Daniel had turned round the moment he heard her cry, hurrying quickly back to her.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing…Just something in my eye,’ Christa told him.

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘No.’

  She started to move back from him, her brain already anticipating the havoc his proximity would cause to her senses, but it was already too late because he had closed the distance between them, one hand cupping her face and the other turning it slightly into the light.

  Even through the pain of her watering eye, Christa was acutely conscious of the slightly rough texture of his palms and the pads of his fingers where they rested against her skin.

  She shivered, her nipples peaking, bristling against the thin fabric of her silk shirt, a reaction which had nothing at all to do with being cold.

  Had Daniel seen her body’s betraying response to him?

  ‘Look up…’

  Instinctively she fought the calm command, blinking even more rapidly instead and rubbing her eye a second time, causing the dirt trapped against her lid to irritate the tender area even further.

  Her eye flooding with tears, she tried to pull away from Daniel’s constraining hold, but he wouldn’t let her.

  ‘Keep still,’ he told her.

  ‘Let go of me,’ Christa demanded. ‘All I need to do is blow my nose and that will get rid of it…’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Daniel corrected her. ‘I can see what’s causing the problem; there’s some grit lodged under your lower eyelid…’

  ‘I know that,’ Christa ground out irritably. ‘It’s my eye—remember…’

  ‘What we need to do is get you inside so that I can bathe it,’ Daniel said to her, ignoring her childish comment. ‘Try not to blink too much, if you can.’

  As he released her Christa turned to face the house, and immediately cried out as the grit moved, causing her further pain.

  ‘Don’t move…’

  This time she obeyed Daniel’s brief command, more because she didn’t have any choice than because she wanted to. With both eyes screwed tightly closed against the pain, she could hardly do anything else.

  ‘Now lean on me,’ she heard Daniel instructing her as his arm came round her, holding her firmly against the side of his body, causing her heart to miss several beats and then thud erratically against her chest wall. ‘You can keep your eyes closed if that feels better. Now, let’s get you into the house…’

  ‘I can’t,’ Christa protested. ‘I can’t walk with my eyes closed.’

  ‘You can if you lean on me,’ Daniel told her. His voice sounded far too close to her ear, just as his body felt far too close to her own. She was acutely conscious of the warm weight of his arm around her, of the sound of his breathing, the scent of his skin. ‘All you have to do is trust me…’

  ‘No…’

  Could he hear the sharp panic in her voice as clearly as she could herself? Christa wondered as she fought down the pain and opened her streaming eyes.

  ‘I can manage by myself,’ she told Daniel huskily.

  ‘Maybe you can,’ he agreed. ‘But you aren’t going to…’

  Christa gasped in outraged shock as she felt him lift her bodily off the ground and into his arms. He was going to carry her into the house…Impossible. He couldn’t possibly do it…

  Only it seemed that he could, and with far less effort and exertion than she had expected.

  It was only as he put her down in the middle of the kitchen floor that Christa suddenly realised something. She blinked experimentally and then a second time.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she told him triumphantly. ‘It’s gone…’

  ‘Let me see…’

  Obediently she turned her face up towards him, gulping shakily as she realised just how close to him she was and that the touch of his fingertips against her face had somehow subtly changed and become far less clinical and far more…She gulped in another breath of air, her emotions suddenly in chaos. Her brain and her sense of self-preservation urged her to move away from him just as quickly as she could, while her body, her senses, her other emotions whispered yearningly to her to stay and risk the consequences.

  ‘Have you any idea at all just how damn much I want you?’ The raw, hungry demand shocked through her. The tiny circles Daniel was tracing against her skin with the pads of his thumbs were setting off a dangerous chain of sensual reaction within her body which urged her to press herself even closer against him, to close her eyes the better to absorb the sensation of his touch against her skin.

  ‘You can’t want me,’ she protested in a papery whisper of a voice, but somehow her protest lacked conviction, and his words had already ignited a corresponding need within her, so strong that it threatened to obliterate everything else.

  She did try to fight it, to cling on to rationality and reason, but she could feel the desire in Daniel’s body…its strength and its hardness.

  ‘You want me too,’ he told her thickly.

  ‘No,’ Christa denied, but she knew that she was lying.

  And so, obviously, did Daniel, because he ignored her protest to tell her roughly, ‘And if I let my body have its way right now you’d be in my bed, in my arms, under my body, with not a damn thing to come between us but the air I’d have been fighting to breathe.

  ‘Oh, God, don’t do that,’ she heard him protest in a groan as she responded instinctively to his words, moving her body against his, closing her eyes and letting what he was saying to her shiver against her skin.

  ‘Do what?’ she asked him huskily, luxuriating with feminine triumph in the knowledge of her power over him.

  ‘You know damn well what.’

  She felt Daniel’s hands slide into her hair, tilting her face upwards.

  ‘Shall I tell you what you do to me, Christa?’ he whispered, a breath away from her lips. ‘Shall I tell you how you make me feel…how you make me ache?’

  His hand left her face, his fingers entwining with hers as he lifted them to his mouth, slowly kissing each individual one of them and then, even more slowly, sucking on them.

  Sensual shock flooded her body. She was as powerless to silence her tiny moan of pleasure as she was to stop the shudder of pleasure running through her body.

  ‘You like that,’ Daniel whispered to her. ‘So do I. I love the way your skin tastes, Christa…I love its texture, its scent. And I love the way you respond to me: that soft little moan, the way your body moves against mine. I want to taste every inch of you like this,’ he told her, his voice roughening and dropping even lower. ‘Every inch, starting right here…’ he kissed her forehead gently ‘…and then here…’ and her mouth less gently ‘…and then here…’ she trembled as his lips touched the base of her throat’…and then here…

  Another little moan escaped her as his fingertip traced the hard crest of one breast.

  ‘But most of all…Most of all I want to touch and taste the real essence of you,’ he told her, his voice suddenly thick and heavy with desire.

  It was pointless trying to hide her awareness from him, or her reaction, her responsiveness, the physical and emotional arousal his words had caused.

  I want you too, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words. Instead she reached up and touched him, her mouth trembling slightly as she felt the rasp of his jaw beneath her fingertips, her touch mapping him, learning the strong contours of his face while her heart thudded a frantic tattoo of desire against her chest.

  ‘I’d almost given up believing that I’d ever meet you, do
you know that?’ Daniel told her as he turned his face to kiss her fingertips. ‘The woman who can make me feel like this…’

  ‘Like what?’ Christa asked huskily, her voice almost slurred, drugged, soft and creamy with the satisfaction of her atavistic feminine need to be so intensely desired.

  ‘Like there isn’t an inch of you I don’t want to know. A thought, a feeling I don’t want to share…a second of your life I don’t want to be part of.’

  ‘But you can’t feel like that about me,’ Christa protested.

  ‘No?’

  He was kissing her fingers again, but he was watching her mouth. She could feel the fierce heady excitement and anticipation start to throb through her as she held her breath, waiting, instinctively closing her eyes as she felt his hands cupping her face.

  ‘No, don’t close your eyes,’ he told her. ‘Don’t try to hide yourself, your feelings away from me, Christa. I want to share them, just as you want to share mine.’

  How could it be that the simple act of keeping your eyes open, of looking deeply into the eyes of that other person while you kissed could give such an intense degree of intimacy? An intimacy deeper even than the hungry, open-mouthed kiss they were sharing; the questing search of Daniel’s tongue, the hard arousal of his body.

  To look into his eyes and to allow him to look into hers when she was so emotionally vulnerable, so emotionally as well as physically aroused, was a far more intimate act than if she had stood naked before him; an act as intense and private in its way, as much an abandonment of self, requiring almost as much trust as the act of orgasm itself.

  Abruptly her emotions overwhelmed her, her eyes closing, her whole body trembling as she leaned against him and whispered shakily, ‘No…I can’t…I…’

  Immediately he seemed to understand, holding her, soothing his hand gently over her, rocking her almost as though he knew that it was comfort and reassurance she needed rather than raw sexuality.

  If he could make her feel like this just by kissing her, what was it going to do to her when…? How would she feel…?

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she told him, her throat threatening to close up on the admission, her emotions pushing down her normal barriers of reticence and mistrust.

  ‘I know. I’m afraid too.’ He smiled ruefully at her as she lifted her head from his chest to look at him, but his smile disappeared as he asked her quietly, ‘What is it you fear the most, Christa? The fact that I might only want sex from you, or the fact that you know I want one hell of a lot more.’

  Her expression gave her away.

  ‘I don’t want to love you,’ she told him wildly. ‘I don’t want to take that kind of risk…’ She shook her head helplessly and then cried out in panic, ‘I’m not ready for this…’

  ‘Do you think I am?’ Daniel asked her grimly. ‘Do you think anyone ever is?’

  ‘I can’t go to bed with you,’ she told him. ‘I’m not…I haven’t…I don’t…We have to think about safe sex,’ she finished miserably.

  ‘I’m not asking you to go to bed with me,’ Daniel told her. ‘We’ve three more weeks of this course to go, and until then…I want things to be right between us, Christa. I want us to be able to concentrate on ourselves, each other, without any barriers between us.

  ‘And as for safe sex…’

  The look he gave her made Christa’s stomach churn like a washing-machine on full spin.

  ‘Safe sex is the last thing I want to have with you,’ he told her forcefully. ‘There’s nothing safe about the way I feel about you, about the way I want you, and as for sex…Sex isn’t what I want either. What I want from you…what I want to give you, to share with you, is just about as far removed from safe sex as it’s possible to get. I want to take you in my arms and make you cry out with joy and pleasure. I want to hold you and watch you as I make you part of me in the most intimate and complete way that a man and woman can discard their separateness and come together. I want to cherish you and protect you. The delicacy of your skin, your body, stops my breath and makes me almost afraid to touch you and yet, at the same time, I want to penetrate you so deeply that your flesh will hold the memory of me within it forever. I want to wake up in the morning and see the faint bruises of my lovemaking colouring your skin. And whatever those needs are, whatever they say about me, they are most definitely not safe sex…’

  ‘No, they aren’t,’ Christa agreed huskily.

  No man had ever spoken to her like this before, aroused her so intensely, both emotionally and physically, simply by the sound of his voice, the message of his words.

  She could actually feel the sharp, excited pulse of her own arousal deep within her body, and the need to place her hand over her stomach, her womb, where she ached physically from Daniel’s explicit description of the way he wanted her, was too strong a compulsion for her to resist.

  ‘And as for the rest of it,’ Daniel continued, his voice softer, more controlled, ‘I promise you there isn’t anything you need to worry about. For one thing—’ He paused and looked gravely at her. ‘The last time I slept with a woman, I’m ashamed to say that it was more out of compassion than desire. An old friend—we were students together—who came to me for…comfort when her husband left her.’

  Daniel turned his head away from her as he told her gruffly, ‘She was feeling very vulnerable, all too aware of the fact that the girl her husband had left her for was many years her junior, afraid that she was no longer a sexually desirable woman. To have rejected her…’

  Christa swallowed hard. She suspected from what Daniel was not telling her that he had not been the one who had instigated their intimacy. Tears momentarily blurred her eyes. What woman could resist loving such a man? Certainly not her.

  ‘She’s found someone else now and they’re very happy together,’ Daniel was telling her. But Christa only half heard him. She loved him. The knowledge thundered through her in a terrifying flood of emotion and need.

  ‘And before that…before that, I had been celibate for a longer time than I like to admit…’

  ‘Like me,’ Christa heard herself saying chokily. ‘In fact, to be honest, there’s only been…Well, it was just really a college thing…more curiosity than any thing else and because, well, there’s a certain shame to a woman’s remaining a virgin after a certain age. And then I had a brief relationship with someone, but it ended when a friend of mine became…ill…’

  Christa’s voice trailed off and she looked away from Daniel. She and Chris had only just been about to become lovers when Laura had arrived on her doorstep, wild-eyed and in panic, claiming that her husband hated her and had only married her for her money.

  Chris had resented the time she had had to spend with Laura and had claimed that her friend meant more to her than he did, and their relationship had come to an abrupt end almost before it had begun—without any real regrets on either side, Christa suspected.

  ‘I’m not…I’m not very experienced,’ she told Daniel quietly. ‘Sex has never been an important motivating force in my life.’

  She realised that Daniel was watching her and wondered what he was thinking, whether he was put off by the fact that she was not sexually experienced. She knew that some men would be…

  ‘I don’t suppose I should admit this,’ he was saying, ‘especially not in this day and age, but there’s something about a woman who quite obviously isn’t living the kind of lifestyle that means that she’s very sexually sophisticated, a woman who has to tell a man that she isn’t using a regular method of birth control, that is very sexually erotic…that makes a man feel very special…very male. Or at least that’s how it makes me feel.’

  The look in his eyes was making her heart do enough somersaults to guarantee its entry into the Olympics, Christa acknowledged.

  Daniel was smiling at her now, the deep seriousness leaving his eyes as he teased gently, ‘Somehow, I don’t think that even if you could bring yourself to carry the requisite packet of condoms around with you, you’d be t
he type to brag about your expertise in putting them on.’

  ‘I might not brag about it, but I certainly know how to do it,’ Christa told him, blushing a little as she responded to his gentle humour. ‘One of my friends’ teenage daughters has told me all about it. They had a demonstration at school—with a cucumber…’

  ‘A cucumber?’ Daniel burst out laughing. ‘And women wonder why men have such fragile sexual egos. Well, I think we can do better than that,’ he murmured, reaching out and taking her back in his arms. ‘Much, much better than that—in fact…’

  ‘You could give me some real hands-on experience?’ Christa suggested laughingly, teasing him back.

  He was laughing too, but when his body suddenly hardened urgently against her the laughter died out of his eyes and out of hers.

  ‘Three weeks,’ he told her as he lowered his mouth towards hers. ‘God knows how I’m ever going to wait that long. Kiss me, Christa,’ he demanded thickly against her mouth, not waiting for her response, but impatiently probing her lips with his tongue instead, his arms tightening round her. The movement of his body against hers as his control slipped and the delicate exploration of his tongue became an urgent, exciting thrusting, dragging the fabric of her top and bra against her swollen nipples, already oversensitised by her desire for Daniel. The extra friction made her cry cut and tense.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Daniel again said, releasing her mouth and looking down into her eyes.

  Christa tried to fight the wave of hot colour that swamped her as, instead of waiting for her verbal response, he let his gaze sweep her body, intuitively coming to rest on the rounded swell of her breasts.

  To her chagrin, as Christa followed his glance down her body, she could see quite plainly through her clothes the rigid and swollen outline of her nipples.

  ‘There’s no need to be embarrassed,’ Daniel told her gently, correctly interpreting the reason for her flushed face and the protective movement of her arm to conceal her body. ‘No, don’t,’ he added thickly, his hand coming up to move her arm away from her body so that he could look at her. ‘I like seeing you like this…I like knowing that you want me. Like it!’ He closed his eyes briefly and groaned. ‘Like it! That’s just about the biggest understatement I’ve ever made.’