Craving Jamie

She wanted to kick him. She wanted to kill him. She wanted him to want her because she was Beth. Damn him! Damn him to hell for closing his door on her! Forgetting her!

“Feeling hungry?” he growled, his hands scooping her bottom and squeezing her into more aggressive contact, a blatant and unashamed pressure against her stomach.

“Yes,” she hissed, uncaring what he thought.

He swung her around and lowered her onto the passenger seat of the Porsche, lifting her legs in with a smooth economy of movement. “Then let’s get to the feast,” he said, his eyes challenging her appetite for it as he stood back and closed the door.

One night, she thought fiercely. One night to make up for what she had missed. One night to take all she might have had if circumstances had been different. She felt cheated, bereft, pumped up with wild and perilous purpose.

He sank onto the seat beside her, closed his door, started the engine with a roar. “Fasten your seat belt,” he rasped.

“You’re right,” she snapped, whipping the belt across her body and clicking it into place. Her eyes clashed with his in fiery challenge. “It could be a bumpy ride.”

He revved the motor, his foot playing with the accelerator as he assessed the glitter in her no-holds-barred gaze. “You pack one hell of a punch, golden girl,” he said, then turned his attention to getting the Porsche on the road.

They took off into the night.

The tension in the car jangled every nerve in Beth’s body.

She didn’t care.

She didn’t care where they went or what they did.

She was going to see this night through with Jim Neilson.

Then, maybe, she could bury Jamie once and for all.

CHAPTER THREE

“TAKE off your jacket.”

The casual command kicked another burst of adrenaline through Beth. She bit down on a blistering retort and gave him a veiled look that hid lethal thoughts.

He leaned indolently against the side wall of the private elevator he’d just activated, assessing her with hot, lustful eyes. They were zooming to the top level of some tall building at Circular Quay. Beth didn’t have to be told he wasn’t taking her to a restaurant. He wanted control. Absolute control.

She shifted her stance, relaxing against the wall facing him, her eyes simmering with the need to strip him naked. In every sense. “Take yours off,” she commanded.

A quirky little smile gave his mouth a more sensual curve as he pushed forward enough to shrug his shoulders out of the jacket and drag it off his arms. “Leather doesn’t turn you on?”

“I prefer the touch of human skin.”

“Then I’d better get rid of my shirt, too.”

The jacket was dropped on the floor. She watched his hands start on his shirt buttons, his fingers nimbly making short work of opening up the black silk, revealing a tantalising arrow of black hair zeroing down to his jeans.

“You’re lagging behind,” he taunted, his gaze fastened pointedly on her breasts.

Beth slid off the shoulder strap of her handbag and let it fall. She smiled as she thought of the sexy lingerie she was wearing, a gift from her younger sister Kate, along with the advice it was well past time for Beth to get herself a red-hot lover. Kate had not been enamoured with Gerald. No doubt she would think Jim Neilson fitted the bill.

His shoulders needed no padding. There was nothing weedy about his arms, either. His skin gleamed like polished bronze over tightly packed muscle. He had a torso that would draw admiring stares from both men and women. The thought of touching him, running her hands over his magnificently delineated chest, was so attractive, Beth told herself clawing would be more in order. She drew off her jacket, and defiantly matching his carelessness, tossed it on top of his clothes.

“Very saucy,” he commented, his gaze sizzling over the provocative swirl of black lace, cunningly designed to focus the eye on the flesh-coloured fabric stretching over her aureoles.

Beth felt her nipples tighten.

“Delectable.” The throaty murmur reflected his arousal as he suddenly crowded the space between them, taking her hands, lifting them above her head, pinning them to the wall with such swift action Beth was caught by surprise.

The elevator stopped.

The doors opened.

His eyes mocked her distraction. Nothing deterred him from bending his head to her upraised breasts, tugging her nipples to more distended prominence with his teeth, sucking on them with stomach-curling power, leaving the thin fabric of her bra hot and wet and totally transparent. It was so incredibly erotic, Beth held her breath and let it happen, fascinated by the movement of his mouth, enthralled by the sensations arcing from it.

She didn’t want him to stop, but he did, straightening and sliding her arms down the wall to her sides as he stared at the effect he’d had on her, smiling in satisfaction at the dark, hardened nubs. His eyes flicked to hers, black, brilliant, piercing in their intensity.

“Was the entree to your liking?”

Beth swallowed, collected her scattered wits and answered, “I hope the main course lives up to it.”

He laughed and bent to scoop up their clothes. “I wouldn’t rob you of the right setting.” He nodded to the opened passage out of the elevator. “Go ahead. Enter my private world. I’ll show you everything I have.”

Beth willed strength into her quivery legs and preceded him out of the elevator, straight-shouldered, maintaining an air of dignity despite her state of exposure, heart thundering in anticipation of his next move, mind set on holding her own throughout this encounter with Jim Neilson.

He switched on ceiling spotlights as she stepped from a tiled foyer to a carpeted living room. Her high heels sank into the thick, dove-grey pile. She paused to take off her shoes and drink in Jim Neilson’s habitat. It had the obvious luxury of spaciousness and the stark impact of almost characterless modernism.

The furnishings looked clinical—chrome, glass, black leather, a grey vertical blind blocking out the end wall, which was undoubtedly glass for what had to be a spectacular view from this high up. The chairs and sofas and tables were certainly functional, probably state-of-the-art in their styling, but they seemed more like showpieces than home pieces.

A disturbing Brett Whitely painting seemed to leap off the wall facing her, strident in its lines and colour. She was staring at it, feeling it was like some nightmare she wouldn’t like to live with, when she felt hands at her waist, the release of the button at the back of her skirt, the zipper drawn down. A gentle pull over her hips and the garment circled her feet.

For a moment, all she could think of was how much more exposed she was, the sexy lace panties reduced to little more than a G-string slicing between her buttocks, the garter belt holding up her stockings offering no better protection. Then warm palms slid down to cup the soft, naked roundness of her bottom, fingers splaying over it.

Her heart leapt into her mouth. She had to do something and do it fast. No way was she going to be Jim Neilson’s sexual victim. She wouldn’t let him think it, either. He was her chosen lover for the night.

She sucked in a deep breath and swung around, her fingers digging into the waistband of his jeans, her mouth homing in on his nipples as she ripped the stud apart and tore his zipper down. The art of surprise wasn’t all his, she thought savagely, feeling his stomach contract, his chest expand.

She tugged and licked at the relatively small protusions of flesh, exulting in his hardening reaction to the stimulation. She pushed his jeans and underpants down his loins, extracted the taut, hefty piston of his manhood, weighing it deliberately in her hand as she drew back to look at it, a mad boldness seizing her mind.

“The equipment is first class,” she mocked, rubbing her thumb over its moist tip, stroking her fingers along its full length before dismissing it, turning away to sashay to the blind at the end of the room. “I also like to take in every view,” she added silkily, finding the cords that operated the slats and yanking them to sweep the blind to the other side of the window.

A stunning panorama of the harbour gleamed at her, the huge coat hanger bridge looming beyond the busy ferry terminal at Circular Quay, the magnificent sails that roofed the Opera House curving brightly into the night sky, the massed foreshore lights of the northern suburbs winking like thousands of fireflies. The realisation hit her that she was standing in what had to be a million-dollar penthouse apartment. And the owner of such prime real estate was used to having whatever he wanted.

She heard the thud of shoes landing on the carpet, the swoosh of clothes being discarded, the soft pad of footsteps, the crackle of paper being torn. Paper? No, a packet of some sort. He probably carried condoms in his wallet. He’d be mad not to practise safe sex in a situation like this. She’d be mad, too.

She was probably certifiably insane as it was, but normal rules didn’t apply to this night. It was time out of time, and there was a fever in her blood that demanded a sense of completion, come what may.

Her skin prickled with anticipation. The next move was his. She adopted a relaxed stance and ignored his presence behind her, fixing her gaze on the harbour traffic far below. She didn’t care that he could view her naked backside at leisure. In some perverse way she enjoyed flaunting it at him. It excited her, thinking of him looking at her, planning what he would do next, sizzling with the need to reduce her to his plaything again.

Fingertips grazing over the backs of her knees. It was an act of will to remain absolutely still. The tantalising touch sliding up her thighs, muscles tensing. The suspenders of her garter belt unclipped, back and front, fingers trailing up the lacy leg edge of her panties, flesh crawling with sensitivity, belt removed and tossed away, a nail-thin caress up the curve of her spine, raising an uncontrollable, convulsive shiver, bra unfastened, thumbs hooking under the shoulder straps, drawing them down her arms, letting them fall, a soft, silky rolling down of her stockings, ankles and feet tantalisingly caressed as he lifted each one in turn.