Dare

by Glenna Sinclair

  Imagine that you are the rose gifted to me under similar circumstances, and you will understand something of the feelings that I cannot express to you.

  You will find this in the morning, by which time my driver will have prepared the car to take you into town. He has instructions to do so regardless of weather.

  Thank you again for your invitation. Even if I cannot accept it, I will always remember it.

  Simon

  It appeared as if there had been more written toward the end, but it had been hastily scribbled out.

  Cara stood in the doorway, clutching the rose and Simon's note tightly in her hands. If Simon thought she was such a brilliant detective, then surely he knew she would read between the lines of his words. He wasn't planning on being around in the morning when she left. The conversation in the dining room was to be their last real conversation.

  Cara's temper returned. How dare he decide the terms for her departure? Obviously it was his house, and obviously he had every right to send her on her way whenever he wished, but did he really get to dictate the terms of their final goodbye?

  No, Cara decided. No, he did not.

  She roamed the darkened halls for ten aimless minutes before she found Melinda. "Oh! Melinda, excuse me," Cara greeted the elder woman with an apologetic smile. "I just needed to let Simon know where the driver will be taking me tomorrow. Do you know if he's downstairs?"

  "He's just retired to his room for the evening," Melinda replied, pointing up a smaller flight of stairs that Cara had completely missed in the corner. "I'm sure he won't be bothered if you go and knock on his door. Mr. Banning is a bit of a night owl, you see, and I'm afraid he doesn't like storms much. I've just dropped off a nightcap for him."

  Cara climbed the stairs to the top floor of the mansion. She was greeted with fewer doors on this story than the seemingly innumerable ones below, but she was uncertain of which was the door to Simon's room. She moved quietly out to the middle of the hallway, before noticing an empty silver tray lying in front of the centermost door.

  Cara raised her fist and knocked.

  CHAPTER 9

  Simon was relatively quick in answering the door; she assumed this was due to the fact that he probably thought she was Melinda returning with more alcohol. Just like her, he was still wearing his clothes from earlier in the evening. His shirt was untucked, and his dinner jacket hung off one shoulder as if he had been in the process of undressing.

  Cara slipped by him before he could say anything, or worse, bar her from entering. It was a rude thing to do in either of their cultures—enter without an invitation—but she assured herself that she was only doing what he had been too hesitant to do when he had hovered before her own door.

  "I got your note," she said unnecessarily; she was still holding it clutched in her hand. "I know I have to leave in the morning. I know you didn't want to see me again, but I couldn't just let it end with where we left it. Simon, I—"

  "Of course I did," he interrupted her fiercely. "Of course I wanted to see you again. But I knew what would happen if I did."

  Cara had crossed to the center of the man's bedroom. She turned now, and in the next moment, she dropped his parting gifts to her and forgot about them completely as he swept her up into a heated kiss. He dragged a hand down the side of her face, cushioning her head in his shoulder as he forced her mouth into submission to his; she tasted the burn of alcohol on his tongue, but noticed that he had set aside his glass to come to her. Cara threw her arms around his neck as she reclaimed his lips with hers—or was it the other way around?—her head spinning with the final, intoxicating realization that she had brought down his last defense. Deep dark secrets or not, he was as helpless to resist the pull between them as she was.

  Simon whipped his dinner jacket off, never breaking from the kiss long enough to allow either of them to catch their breath. Cara grasped his face in her hands, and they moved backward together through the darkened room as he undressed. His shirt came off next, although she hadn't noticed when he had unbuttoned it; the sound of small scattering objects in their wake implied that he had wrenched it from his body without bothering to save a member of his staff a future repair job.

  She felt the flush of his naked chest against her, the tension in his coiled abdominal muscles, and thought she would go insane if she didn't find an expedient way to strip herself out of her own clothes. Favorite dress or not, Cara was so afraid of any little hitch halting the proceedings now that she was very near to tearing it off herself. Thankfully, Simon got to it first. He pulled the dress up and over her head, as if he had known all along that was how to get it off her; it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that his earlier study of her that evening had been for the express purpose of figuring out how to best get her naked. The thought made her shiver with barely contained happiness. No more swimming pool challenges—she had placed herself entirely in Simon's very capable hands.

  "You weren't wearing anything underneath it?" His breath caught at the sight of her standing in the spill of moonlight before him. Shadows from the rain outside raced across her pale, slender figure. "All evening?"

  Cara raised an eyebrow and bit her lip, but she gave no response. Simon's hands roved down her, dipping into her every curve as he explored her thoroughly for the first time. This wasn't a stolen moment in one of the downstairs rooms, where they risked discovery at any moment—this was the privacy of the master's bedroom. And I'm here to be mastered, was Cara's fleeting thought, as she twined her arms around his neck and allowed Simon to carry her down onto the bed with a worshipful kiss.

  He trailed his lips down every exposed inch of her. Cara basked beneath his attentions, reveling in the articulation of that talented English mouth. When Simon made his next pass upward to kiss her lips, she arched against him and flipped him over. He was clearly the bigger and the stronger of the two of them, but he gamely allowed her to top him, and in the next instant she had his pants off. Cara raised her eyes to him, taking in his expression, before lowering her mouth down to encase his rigid length.

  Simon reacted immediately by bucking his hips up to meet her. An explosive moan tore from his throat, and Cara guessed that it had been a very long time since anyone had done this for him. She took him fully into her mouth, lowering her head back down as Simon's hand came up to grasp her hair by the roots.

  "Cara…" he moaned. "Cara, come here."

  She raised herself off him and kissed her way back up the length of his body. "What's wrong, Simon?" she murmured against his lips. "Too intense for you?"

  "If you want to make me come already, that's your prerogative," Simon gritted out through his teeth. No sooner had she surfaced from beneath him than he was throwing her over onto her back and climbing on top of her. The box spring protested loudly beneath their bodies; Cara kicked her leg out as Simon lowered himself down between her thighs, aligning his pelvis with hers. He kissed her punishingly, before drawing away to whisper huskily: "But I'd rather shag, if it's all the same."

  "Finally," Cara gasped. "I've been waiting days for this. You really know how to keep a girl in suspense."

  "And you really know how to keep a bloke running to the cold showers," Simon muttered as he attacked her beneath her jaw. Cara turned her head sideways and gasped into the pillow, twisting and writhing in expensive and thoroughly sweat-soaked sheets. Her thighs felt slick with wanting as Simon thrust along the outer crease of her entrance. Cara gasped, pleaded, swore at him in turns for teasing her when she knew neither of them could bear it any longer. She could feel his hot breath on the sensitive shell of her ear, his lips murmuring words that she could scarcely put together anymore.

  "How badly do you want it, Cara?" Another thrust against her clitoris, and stars exploded behind her eyes and beneath her skin. It wasn't enough. She was in utter agony left unfulfilled like this.

  "Please," Cara begged him in a whisper. "God, Simon, I'll say anything you want if you just fuck me."

  She felt an a
lmost unbearable pressure between her legs, and then a rush of release as Simon slid himself inside her. Cara cried out and clenched instinctively, and Simon groaned as she tightened around him. He drove into her, burying himself inch by agonizingly slow inch, drawing a long and uninhibited moan from Cara. She really hoped that Melinda had gone to bed; at this rate, Simon was liable to wake the whole household with her. She felt helpless to contain her cries of pleasure as she contracted around his thick length. She had never been filled so completely. It was everything she had ever wanted, but her body told her it still wasn't enough.

  "You feel amazing," Simon murmured in her ear. He pushed a sweat-slicked curl back from her feverish forehead, and Cara moved her hips needfully. "God, Cara, you're going to make me come just by looking at me like that."

  "Fuck me," she whispered. "Please. Like you wanted to in the pool."

  Simon groaned and slid into her again. "Is that what you wanted? When I had my fingers inside you? God, that made me so hard. Just thinking about it later…the way you moved against my hand, wanting more…"

  "And in the living room," Cara gasped as he thrust into her. "When you had your hand beneath my skirt. I thought you were going to bend me over and take me right in front of the fire."

  "In front of the servants?" Simon asked as he bucked between her legs. Cara raised her hips off the bed and moaned in pure bliss at the friction he commanded. "Is that what you wanted?" He pumped into her again, and she cried out beneath him as his hand slid behind her back and kept her elevated. Each angled thrust hit something deep within her, something secret, and she could feel a sweet, unbearable pressure starting to build inside her. No man had ever made love to her with such unrestrained intensity, and she doubted any man ever would. She was putty in his hands, moving as he dictated, certain that they had both imagined this scenario enough times to have the choreography memorized. Her hands stroked down his straining back, running over the scars, clutching at every raised muscle she could find.

  Cara was beyond returning his dirty talk. Her tongue felt heavy, and she was breathless with exertion; her ribs rose and contracted, her breasts slid and bounced beneath him, as he pushed her closer and closer to climax. Simon must have read something in the tensing expression on her face, because an irregular, penetrating thrust sent Cara unexpectedly over. Her eyes flew open, and she arched against the hand cradling the small of her back. The hands that gripped his shoulders dug into tendon and bone, and Simon hissed—not with pain, but because the vision of her own orgasm had ripped any control out from underneath him. He came hard, thrusting into her repeatedly as he spent himself. They gasped and moved together, until the rush of their shared pleasure slowly started to fade away again.

  Cara fell back against the pillow, raising a disbelieving hand to her forehead as Simon fell into bed beside her with a groan. Her heart raced as if she had just run a marathon, pumping blood through her still-singing veins. Had she really just come that hard, and in Simon's bed? Had they rbeally just done that? The sex was beyond description… Cara had never felt so physically satisfied in all of her life. And to think she had found complete gratification in the arms of the one whom she found completely infuriating.

  Speaking of arms, Simon's right arm snaked around her midriff now to pull her against him. Cara, still distracted by the intense level of what they had just accomplished, was surprised by the move. She cemented against him snugly; of all the things to pass between them that night, it seemed ridiculous that this should be the thing that made her blush, but she could feel herself growing red all the same. "Aren't you going to kick me out?" she whispered. "I have to be gone in the morning, remember?"

  "Don't go," Simon muttered into her neck. She could feel her heart flutter up in her ribcage like an eager bird at his words, but she knew he didn't mean it. He looked half-asleep already, and his eyes were closed. She turned over in his arms and planted a chaste kiss on his lips in response.

  They would just have to see what the morning would bring. If there was one thing Cara was certain of, it was that absolutely everything had changed.

  CHAPTER 10

  Cara woke to weak sunlight and driving rain the next morning. She stirred groggily, raising a hand to the mussed-up left side of her hair, before her eyes flew open with the memory of the night before. She glanced wildly around for Simon. There was no one in the room with her; the sheets beside her were wrinkled, but cool to the touch. Wherever Simon was, he had left a while ago.

  She got out of bed and dressed herself, slowly, in the discarded number from the night previous. She then tiptoed out of the master bedroom and down the stairs to her own room to change. She shot frequent glances out the window as she did so, hoping to catch a glimpse of the master of the estate walking out on the grounds in the distance. It was hard to see anything through the continuous rain. She doubted Simon would have gone out in such weather, but where else would he be?

  As she came down to the foyer, she saw more servants than she had known were employed at the mansion assembled near the front doors. She moved immediately to Melinda, who made room for her by the window; the older woman hadn't taken her eyes off the pouring landscape outside.

  "What's wrong?" Cara murmured. She kept her voice low.

  "They're worried about Mr. Banning," Melinda replied. "He went out with the car several hours ago and hasn't been back since. He's not supposed to drive, you know. One of the servants overheard him telling Gerald that he was going into town to get a spare tire."

  It took a moment for this information to sink in. Simon had left early, then, to procure the means to help her get home to her family.

  Cara pulled her hood up and grasped the spare pair of galoshes that were still stationed by the door from yesterday. "You know, I have to go down to my car anyway," she lied breezily. "Why don't I take a look anyway? Maybe his car got stuck like mine did, and he needs a hand getting it out."

  "Oh, would you, dear?" Melinda pressed her. "I would hate it if he was out there all alone. These country roads flood so easily, you know. Just be careful."

  Cara nodded and pulled open the door. The rain was far, far worse than she had realized—it fell in a torrential downpour around her that felt almost biblical. She might as well have been walking through hanging gray sheets.

  "I can't believe none of them came out here to check on you themselves," Cara muttered as she reached the bottom of the driveway. "Simon?" she called down the road. She could see the hulking figure of her own car outlined in the rain. Cara turned and shaded her eyes beneath her hood, trying to improvise a visor so she could see farther down the road.

  She saw it, then—the outline of another car careening halfway out of the ditch. Cara gasped in horror. She was already running before she knew she had directed her legs to move.

  "Simon!" she screamed into the downpour. As she reached the car, she saw that the driver's side door was ajar, and that the cabin was submerged in gushing brown water. She couldn't get any closer to look without risking falling into the rushing water of the flooded roadside ditch.

  Cara turned frantically to scan the horizon. Whichever way she considered, she could see nothing to indicate that the man had escaped safely back to the road."Simon!"

  Her boots were bogged down in mud, and there was water rushing past her ankles. Cara looked back down the road toward the estate, and saw that the ditches were spilling over and beginning to flood the street. She needed to leave, now, if she stood any chance of making it back before she was swept away.

  "Simon! Where are you?"

  Only the driving rain answered her.

  CHAPTER 11

  The water rushed past Cara's ankles. She looked back over her shoulder down the road, cursing, before doing something both incredibly brave and incredibly stupid: she climbed on top of Simon's car.

  The vehicle listed dangerously beneath her and gave a groan at her additional, albeit slight, weight, before settling once more into position. Once she was on the roof, Cara straigh
tened carefully, striking out with her hands to keep her balance as she navigated the slippery surface of the top. The rain still made it hard to see things up here, but she had a better vantage now—besides, she would rather not be in the road proper with all that rushing water coming toward her. All it would take was a fallen branch big enough to knock her off her feet to send her straight into the flooded ditch, and who knew how easy it would be for her to struggle out after that.

  Cara cupped her hands around her mouth to improvise a megaphone: "Simon!"

  She was drenched and miserable and frightened, and had more than a few unkind things to say about those servants keeping dry back at the house, but all of that was forgotten in an instant when she thought she heard someone calling back to her. Cara started, and nearly slipped down from the roof of the car in the process; she caught herself at the last minute and eased herself back into the road. The water was above her ankles now, but the galoshes she had borrowed from the house managed to keep most of it off her. She began to run as best she could, slogging through the mud and the rain that never seemed to want to let up. As soon as she graduated, she was moving the hell out of Connecticut.

  "Simon, where are you?" Cara cried frantically. She turned, before hearing the voice again. It was still far enough off that she couldn't understand the nature of the words being yelled—or pick up on an English accent, for that matter—but whoever it was sounded in desperate need of help.

  She saw it then: a dark, collapsed figure in the field across from her, barely distinguishable through the rain. Cara made to run to it immediately, when she saw what the trouble was—the figure was pinned beneath a fallen tree. Not only that, but a dangerously flooded ditch lay between them. The man must have spun out while driving and crashed off the road; when he opened his door to bail out, the floodwaters must have swept him down the road. It seemed the only viable explanation for him having managed to crawl out on the other side.