A Scandalous Innocent

by Penny Jordan

  ‘No, damn you, I’m not!’ he told her thickly, reaching for her and dragging her into his arms. ‘Oh, God, it was a crazy idea to do this tonight.’ His fingers were shaping her face, touching her skin as though he couldn’t get enough of the feel of it. ‘Do you know what I want to do right now? I want to take you to bed and make love to you.’

  She started to tremble. She couldn’t help it, and he felt the reaction of her body and his own surged strongly against her.

  She heard James curse, and then he was kissing her as though he was starving for the taste of her, and she was kissing him back, not caring that only the darkness outside the car prevented passers-by from seeing them.

  She felt a rush of cool air against her skin and realised that he had unfastened the buttons of her shirt. His hands cupped her breasts and she moaned against his mouth, instinctively pressing herself as close to him as she could.

  That she would actually have let him make love to her there in the car was something she couldn’t deny, she reflected shakily later, when the sound of a car backfiring some way down the block had brought home to them both exactly where they were.

  James had released her, pushing his hand through his hair, as though he was as confused and disturbed as she was herself by the intensity of their physical communication.

  As he moved to switch on the engine, she saw quite clearly in the light from the street the arousal of his body.

  ‘Don’t,’ he told her in a strained voice. ‘Don’t look at me like that, or I swear to God, I’ll stop this damn car right here and make love to you in the street.’

  After that, neither of them spoke. James drove back to Marble Head at a speed Lark was sure was in excess of the limit, but she said nothing. Her body was aching just as much as his, every tiny pulse reminding her that it was a week since they had made love.

  There was a note for them in the hall.

  ‘Decided to have an early night and take a sleeping pill,’ Mrs Mayers had written, ‘so that I can be up in time to see James in the morning before he leaves.’

  Was Mrs Mayers being extraordinarily tactful, or had fate simply decided to be kind?

  Without a word, they walked upstairs. When they reached her bedroom door, James paused very deliberately. He was giving her the opportunity to change her mind, Lark realised, and her heart soared. She must mean something to him, after all. She wasn’t just someone for whom he felt physical desire.

  ‘Did you really know that I was a virgin?’ she asked him when they were undressed and lying on her bed, bathed by the moon shadows from the window.

  ‘Yes,’ he told her rawly.

  A faint shadow touched her face, and she shivered slightly. He was such an experienced man. Had she disappointed him with her lack of skill?

  ‘I’d been thinking about you while I swam.’ The words were low, and she had to strain to catch them. ‘And then, suddenly, there you were. You looked at me, and you went on looking, and I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to stop myself from touching you.’

  He touched her now, stroking her hair and then caressing the smooth curves of her body.

  ‘On the beach I made love to you, Lark.’ His mouth touched her skin, drawing bursts of fire from her nerve-endings as its moist warmth trailed down over her jaw to her throat. ‘One day soon I’m going to teach you how to make love to me.’

  She swallowed hard and then demanded breathlessly, ‘Show me now, James.’

  How elastic time could be, stretching to unimaginable lengths and then concertinaing into little more than the blink of an eye. In retrospect, that was how that night seemed to Lark: short, fevered bursts of passion when she cried out beneath the skill of James’s hands and mouth; seconds which seemed to encapsulate whole lifetimes when their mutual desire caused the firmament to explode around them while they floated free; oases of peace while they slept, only to wake and touch again; and then a time when James left her just before dawn which seemed to stretch into eternity as the last minutes before his departure taunted her with what she was going to have to endure once he was gone.

  He left immediately after breakfast, refusing to allow them to accompany him to the airport. Lark stayed in the background. Her eyes were heavy with passion and lack of sleep, and she didn’t want to draw attention to her appearance.

  And then, abruptly, he was gone.

  ‘How empty the house seems without a man in it,’ Mrs Mayers commented wistfully when the car had left. ‘James is far too old to live at home, of course, and I hope I’m not a clinging mother, but at times like this I do miss him quite dreadfully. Are you all right, Lark?’ she asked kindly. ‘You look pale.’

  Lark froze, unable to say a word until Mrs Mayers, oblivious to her shock, added, ‘Did you enjoy our famous Boston clam chowder?’

  Lark hated to lie. She swallowed hard and then said huskily, ‘Actually, I never had any. Neither of us were hungry when we got to Boston, so we came back.’

  She went flame-red as Mrs Mayers turned to look at her. After giving her a shrewd look, her employer said calmly, ‘Well, Mary did rather excel herself with dinner, and I’m sure there’ll be another opportunity to taste it before we leave.’

  * * *

  Two weeks later, as their plane circled above Heathrow, Lark reflected that she had still not tasted the famous Boston dish, but she didn’t really mind.

  Two brief and unsatisfactory telephone calls from James had left her aching to see him, and in his absence all her doubts had come crowding back into her mind. It had never been Lark’s habit to discuss her private feelings with other people, but now she longed to have someone with whom she could share her insecurities.

  It was early evening before they arrived back at the St John’s Wood house, and, despite the mountain of post in the study, Mrs Mayers insisted that neither of them were going to touch it until the morning.

  Three extremely busy days followed when she didn’t see or hear from James at all. She knew that he was involved in an extremely complicated court case being tried out of London, but even so, every time the telephone rang, she found herself tensing in anticipation of hearing his voice.

  Would it have made it better or worse if her employer had known of their relationship?

  Right from the start, Lark had been opposed to Mrs Mayers’ knowing about their involvement, and yet, when James had asked her why, she hadn’t been able to give him an answer.

  Perhaps it had something to do with the way she had been brought up, and the very physical nature of the bond she shared with James.

  Or was she perhaps worried that, if Mrs Mayers knew about their relationship, she might feel obliged to dismiss her should it end? Lark didn’t know, and, although James had not been able to understand her feelings, he had given way to them in the end.

  By the end of the week she was exhausted—the combination of her sleepless nights aching for James, and the sheer volume of work she was getting through during the day, draining her of every last bit of energy. On Friday evening, all she wanted to do was to go to bed and sleep.

  Mrs Mayers had gone out for dinner, her final words to Lark being an instruction that she was not to carry on working.

  That had been at six o’clock. At eight, Lark took the final letter out of her typewriter and switched it off. In their absence the new computer equipment had been installed, but it was having a few teething problems which meant that it wasn’t working at full efficiency as yet, and Lark had not had any time to spare to play around with it. That would have to wait until the backlog of work was cleared.

  The meal that Cora had brought through on a tray was still untouched on her desk, and she grimaced faintly at the congealing contents of the plates.

  It was Cora’s evening off, but, even though Lark hadn’t eaten anything since her early lunch, she felt too exhausted to go into the kitchen and raid the fridge.

  What she intended to do was to go and have a long soak in the bath and then go straight to bed. It had even cro
ssed her mind to ask Mrs Mayers for one of her sleeping tablets, but she had resisted the impulse.

  She had just switched off the lights in the study when she heard a key in the front door.

  Perhaps because she was so tired, it never even occurred to her that it might be James, and so she was totally unprepared for the sight of him in the doorway, tall and imposing in a formal dark suit, his face tired beneath its tan.

  The shock of seeing him held her motionless, simply watching as he dropped the briefcase he was carrying, and kicked the door closed behind him, at the same time reaching with his free hand to tug off his tie and unfasten the top buttons of his shirt.

  It had been a hot day, with the threat of thunder making the air oppressive and tainted with the smell of sulphur. Lark could smell the heat on James’s body as he came towards her, shedding his jacket which he threw casually on to a chair.

  Her heart started to beat far too fast, her voice slightly breathless as she exclaimed, ‘James!’

  ‘Oh, God, I’ve missed you!’

  She was in his arms without really knowing how she had got there, thrilling to the muted savagery of his kiss as his mouth closed over her own with hungry dominance.

  She felt the thrust of his tongue and teased it daringly until James pushed her back against the wall, leaning into her so that she could feel the pulsing hardness of his body, his fingers tangling in her hair, holding her head so that she couldn’t move while he proceeded to demonstrate how dangerous her teasing had been. The grinding movement of his body against her own was evidence of his frustration. His hands gripped her thighs. Her body went weak, melting with pleasure.

  She heard him groan as he fitted himself against her, and she gasped with shock as she felt his hands on her skirt, trying to manoeuvre it out of the way.

  ‘James! No, not here…’ she protested, but her body did not share her shock, wantonly welcoming his urgency. Her breasts pushed eagerly against the fabric of her shirt, her nipples plainly outlined, tight and hard. The sight of her arousal momentarily distracted him, and he released her skirt and, instead, unfastened her shirt, his fingers clumsy and urgent, so that he tore one of the buttonholes in his eagerness to touch her.

  What had happened to the finesse of his earlier lovemaking? Lark wondered dazedly, as he tugged at the confining fabric of her bra to expose the soft globe of her breast.

  She heard him mutter something she couldn’t catch, and then the breath left her lungs in a gasp of shock and pleasure as he took her nipple into his mouth, raking the tender flesh with his teeth, over and over again, until she was crying out in arousal and moving her hips against him with quick, jerky movements, caught up in a thundering race of desire that obliterated everything else.

  She had forgotten where they were, racked by the need to feel his flesh plunging within her own, filling her, pleasuring her, and finally easing the ache that had suddenly become the focus of her world.

  Somehow James’s shirt had become undone, although she had no remembrance of doing so. The soft, dark hair on his chest was soaked with sweat. She could feel it dampening her palms as she pressed them against him while she returned his kiss, this time responding feverishly to the ever-increasing thrust of his tongue.

  She felt his hands on her clothes and pressed eagerly against him, sliding her arms around his back so that she could rub her breasts against his chest, her body writhing as though it were beyond her control when she was finally free of the constriction of her underwear.

  She heard the rasp of his zipper as he lifted her off the floor, and she instinctively wrapped herself around him, welcoming each shuddering thrust of his body, feeling him fill her and surround her with his maleness.

  Outside, thunder crashed and rolled, but neither of them heard it, oblivious to everything but the storm they themselves were creating.

  Sensations exploded inside her, not in ripples, but in huge, crashing waves that made her bite frantically into James’s skin, her nails digging sharp crescents into his body as they shared the feverish culmination of their lovemaking.

  Her body was reluctant to let him go; a tiny echo of sensation, a sensual promise of pleasure still to be, made her cling to him, holding him within her with a wantonness she had never dreamed she would ever know.

  ‘Again.’

  She heard herself say the word, and was shocked as much by the drunken, satiated satisfaction in her voice as by what she had actually said.

  Her eyes opened wide, shocked and confused, her gaze trapped in the glittering, metallic brilliance of the look James returned.

  What she had said had excited him, possessed him almost, and she protested when she felt him move inside her, shocked both by what she had said and how she had felt.

  ‘James. No…’

  It wasn’t really her, that wild, wanton creature who had cried out for him to kindle that taunting flicker of sensation until it became full-blown need, who had been aching to experience, over and over again, the thrill of knowing that the sensation of moving within her brought him to mindless subjugation to his need.

  But he wasn’t listening to her protest; his gaze was fixed steadily on her as he moved slowly and deliberately.

  A tiny thrill of fear-edged pleasure fluttered through her. She was unable to drag her gaze from his, unable to stop herself from responding to what he was doing, and yet conscious of a moment’s stark recognition of the complexity of emotions, for she had just done something she would once have sworn she could never do.

  She had just said ‘no’ when they both knew she meant ‘yes’, but even as she tried to come to terms with the anomaly she saw James’s eyes darken and glaze, and knew that he was slipping just as out of control as she was herself—both of them slaves of a need enforced by nature itself.

  This time the climax was long and slow, leaving her so drained that she was completely unable to move, and it was James who picked up their discarded clothing and guided her upstairs to her room.

  ‘I can’t stay much longer,’ he told her quietly. ‘In fact, I shouldn’t be here at all. I hope to God the jury is still out, otherwise I’m going to end up being disbarred.’

  Lark couldn’t believe what she was hearing; he had actually driven all the way from the trial to be with her, risking his career and reputation simply because his need for her drove him so intensely.

  It reassured her and yet disturbed her at the same time.

  Despite the time they had spent together, it seemed almost as though they had no point of contact other than as lovers.

  James was far too intelligent a man not to want much more from the woman to whom he gave his love, and that made Lark shiver a little, conscious of how little she actually knew about James’s hopes and ambitions. Had she been wrong to believe him when he said that he loved her, that he wanted their relationship to grow? Was it only as a bedmate that he really saw her? Had she been deceiving herself in thinking that he would come to return her love?

  It all went back to one thing: a lack of trust. For differing reasons, neither of them trusted the other. If they did, she would have been able to ask him freely and openly how he envisaged their future; as it was…

  As it was, she had to hide her insecurities from him, and watch as he walked away from her, promising that he would get in touch with her as soon as he could.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SHE loved him. Lark had no doubts at all about that. What she did have doubts about, though, were the very basic inequalities in their relationship. Those inequalities gave rise to doubts, all the more painful because of her inability to express them. Her instincts and her upbringing shrieked to her that two people who did not share mutual trust and respect could never have a successful relationship, and James did not respect or trust her. He couldn’t do.

  Despite the backlog of work, which proved to be even more heavy than Mrs Mayers had forecast, Lark still had time to brood on her personal doubts. If James was really serious about allowing their relationship to develop
, surely he would have wanted to discuss with her the court case, to hear her side of the story, to have her exonerate herself? Yet the subject was never mentioned. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. Perhaps he was waiting for her to raise the subject, but Lark was reluctant to do so.

  He had already disbelieved her once, publicly, in court, and when she was honest with herself she was forced to admit that, if he refused to believe her, she wasn’t quite sure what she should do. Pride would demand that she should terminate their relationship, but did she have the strength of will to do that?

  She knew that it was possible to love someone without respecting them, but did she honestly want that type of love, or was she just being unrealistic? Perhaps James was quite content not to know the truth. After all, one didn’t necessarily have to like or respect a person with whom one had a brief affair.

  Was that all she was to him? A brief affair? He hadn’t led her to think so, but then, she acknowledged cynically, few men would. Yet, as she had come to know James better, she had judged him to be a man scrupulously honest in his dealings with others, no matter how painful that honesty might be to himself or to them.

  It was six days before she saw him again, and six days was a long time in which powerful doubts could fester. They nagged at her at her most vulnerable moments, mute but goading voices that wouldn’t be denied.

  Mrs Mayers remarked with concern that she was looking tired, and asked if she was working her too hard. Lark denied it instantly.

  She was well organised with the preliminary arrangements for the ball. A date had been arranged at Mrs Mayers’ suggestion for herself and Lark and the company who were to provide the marquee to visit James’s house to check on the suitability of the site. Mrs Mayers had not said if James would be there, and Lark hadn’t liked to ask.

  He telephoned her unexpectedly one afternoon, her heart racing at the sound of his voice. He told her that the case was over, and then went on to add that he wouldn’t be able to see her that evening.