For One Night

Diana stared at him, nonplussed, and then remembered the desk clerk telling her that she was lucky to get their last empty room.

“Look, you’ve obviously got a home you can go to,” Marcus pointed out. “I haven’t—at least not locally, so why don’t I call you a taxi …?”

Spend the night alone in the flat? Diana shivered. No, she couldn’t, not this night.

“No, please … I …”

Please. His eyes had darkened over her whimpered plea, and he was looking at her with an expression she had no difficulty in interpreting. He wanted her. This tall, dark-haired man, a complete stranger, wanted her.

This was the point where she normally turned on her heel, and ran. She was used to male desire, and at twenty-five had had more than her fair share of potential lovers, but after discovering how callous and cruel men could be, she had rebuffed them all, keeping them at a distance. So why was her body turning all soft and molten inside, simply because this man was mentally stripping the toweling robe from her body, and caressing it with his eyes? Why did she feel this almost savage urge to go to him and lose herself in the maelstrom of desire?

She felt an uncontrollable need to experience the resurgence of life that only sexual communion could bring, she did want it, she realized fatalistically, she wanted … no, needed that communion, that renewal of life; she needed it if only to prove to herself that death can be conquered, that life does ultimately triumph.

In this stranger’s arms, she could forget the trauma of these last weeks; she could celebrate the reality of life; she could renew herself and feel really alive again for the first time in months.

At any other time Diana would have been shocked by her own thoughts, but now they seemed natural and normal.

The way she was staring at him made him feel almost as though she was looking through him, Marcus thought. He looked at her mouth, her lips half parted and quivering slightly. The bathrobe concealed the shape of her body and he suddenly longed to wrench it from her and take all the feminine sweetness of her in his arms.

He fought to control himself, his voice grating slightly as he warned her, “Stay here and there’s no way I’m going to be able to stop myself from taking you to bed with me—you know that, don’t you?”

Diana hesitated briefly, knowing she was teetering on the edge of a chasm, but unable to do the sensible thing and pull herself back.

In a dream she heard herself saying huskily, “Yes.” And then there was no going back. She took a step toward him, and heard him groan. Fired with a wild determination that pulsed through her, she unfastened the tie of her robe and let it slide from her body.

What was she doing? She had never acted like this in her life—she must be mad. But it was too late. She was in his arms, his hands shaping and moulding her flesh, his mouth hotly demanding as it fastened on hers.

He wrenched it away to mutter briefly, in her ear, “I don’t know who you are, or where the hell you’ve come from. What I’m doing now goes against every principle I’ve ever had but, God knows, I can’t stop myself. I know I’m going to regret this like hell in the morning, but all that matters now is the way you’re making me feel.”

He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t feel herself. She couldn’t explain to him what was driving her, what she was feeling; and why should she? They were strangers; they each had a need—after tonight they would never meet again.

He picked her up and carried her over to the bed, lying her down gently, his eyes never once leaving hers as he quickly stripped.

His body was well muscled, sleek and hard, dark hair shadowing down over his chest and his flat belly. Diana looked at him in awe and fierce pleasure. Her previous sexual experience had been limited to clumsy caresses shared with fellow university students; the sensual side of her nature had been slow to blossom; and then before it could flower it had been cruelly destroyed by Randolph Hewitt’s cynical cruelty.

The shock of learning that he had simply been using her had withered away her youthful urge to share her heart and her body with anyone. There had been no one since Randolph, but that scarcely impinged on her consciousness now.

Now she felt, deep within her, nature’s remorseless drive toward the re-creation of life. She knew even as she looked into Marcus’s eyes that the need that drove her was in some way linked to Leslie’s death and the long, achingly unhappy months that had led up to it.

She was like a moth shedding its chrysalis; a phoenix having been destroyed in the flames and now being renewed.

She needed this … this sensation of flesh against flesh, this fierce clamoring of her blood. She needed this man, here and now, she admitted, as Marcus returned her look, studying the naked length of her, making her skin burn with febrile excitement as his glance lingered intimately, like a caress against her flesh.

“I must be mad doing this!”

His thoughts only echoed her own, but they didn’t stop the intimate melding of their mouths, his, hot and demanding, hers, meltingly enticing.

He kissed her with a hunger she hadn’t expected. Somehow she had imagined that for him sex must be a regular and frequent part of his life, but the touch of his mouth against her own, the fierceness of his hands against her skin told her that she was wrong.

Neither had she expected the sudden spiral of excitement and anticipation running over her nerve endings as he kissed her. Her need to purge herself of the horror and pain of Leslie’s death in the act of procreation was something she could accept and understand—just about—but the desire she felt for this particular man wasn’t.

She pulled back, tensing slightly, and heard him growl deep in his throat. “No, damn you, you aren’t changing your mind now. You’ve already made me want you too much.”

But despite his words, the silken glide of his hands over her rib cage and against her breasts was almost hesitant, as though he was waiting for her to tell him to stop. His thumb brushed against her nipple sending a savage surge of desire stabbing through her. She saw the gleam of triumph glittering in his eyes as he caught the betraying sound.

“You liked that?”

She shuddered finely as he repeated the caress and then bent his head to roughly brush the aroused areola with his tongue.

Flames—spears of sensation pierced her, making her cry out and cling despairingly to him, her nails etching sharp crescents in the flesh of his shoulders. His mouth absorbed the whole swollen bud, bathing it in moist heat, drowning her in awesome pleasure.

She cried out, her body arching like a bow. Tiny droplets of sweat dampened her skin and made it glisten beneath the soft illumination of the bedside lamp.

“Beautiful … you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, do you know that?”

He was slurring his words faintly, like a man under the influence of drink or drugs, his breath quivering over her sensitized flesh as his lips continued to caress her breasts, tormenting them with brief kisses and tiny delicate bites, frustrating her growing desire to have her flesh taken deep inside the hot cavern of his mouth.

His touch was unleashing a wildness within her that she had never known existed. She wanted to scratch and bite, to cling and demand; she wanted …

Her hands slid over his sweat-slick back; her fingers drawing his head down to her breasts, a sharp cry of pleasure breaking the thick silence as he correctly interpreted her silent demand.

When the pleasure he was giving her became almost too sharp to endure she bit frantically into his skin, and felt his body shudder in open response.

His hands shaped her waist and hips, and then molded her against his aroused male form.

The heat of him was dangerously exciting, firing her own blood, making her ache for the culmination of her driven need. His hand touched her intimately, caressing and enticing her to abandon herself to him, his softly murmured words of praise singing in her ears.

Under his guidance she caressed him in turn, but both of them were too impatient to linger over the preliminaries, no matter how pleasurable. After all, they weren’t lovers, content to simply adore one another’s bodies, but two people driven by different emotions but similar needs, to find together an elemental completeness.

At the first surge of his body within her own Diana was filled with a wild exultation. She moved instinctively beneath him, hearing the savagery of his indrawn breath, and glorying in the fierceness of his possession.

She didn’t experience any pain, contrary to everything she had ever anticipated; her virginity might never have existed, so joyfully did her body welcome his.

Together they strove to reach the shimmering pinnacle of human experience; together they shared the awesome reality of the apex of human desire, Marcus’s deep-throated cry of release mingling with her own husky sob of delight.

It was over. Diana lay, trying to steady her breathing, while the world righted itself around her. In the wake of physical satisfaction came exhaustion, so complete and so numbing that she was deeply asleep within seconds.

Marcus looked down at her broodingly. He had just experienced the most physically intense pleasure he had ever known with any woman, and she had fallen asleep!

Now for the first time, reality hit him. She had used him as a substitute for her dead lover. It was like being tipped into a pool of iced water. When he surfaced he felt totally disorientated. Man was the predator, the hunter, the user and abuser of the female sex, so why did he feel as though he was the one who had been used? Why did he have this disquieting fear that his life was never going to be the same again?

They had had sex, that was all. He didn’t even know her name … She had simply been a body—a very beautiful and sexy body—but a body nonetheless. He must be crazy to be lying here in this emotional stupor. He ought to be worrying about far more mundane things. He reached out, unable to stop himself from tucking a stray lock of amber hair behind her ear. In sleep she looked like a little girl.

She mumbled something and moved in her sleep. The sheet slipped and revealed one creamy, rose-tipped breast, still swollen and flushed from his caresses.

Suppressing a fierce shudder, Marcus covered her again, and then swung himself out of the bed. He never wore pyjamas, but there was a spare robe in the bathroom. He put it on, and then eyed the bedroom’s one easy chair in grim determination.

He had behaved foolishly enough for one night—he would spend the rest of it alone in that chair, otherwise God alone knew what might happen. He had been stupid enough as it was—insanely so. He ought to have thrown her out when he had had the opportunity. Against his will he remembered the look of aching desolation he had glimpsed in her eyes earlier. It must be hell to lose someone you loved to death. Who could blame her for wanting to hang on to life in the most basic way possible?