Response

‘And you want me to persuade you into bed with me?’ He stood up, shaking his head, his breath brushing her ear as he leaned forward and murmured softly, ‘No, Sienna, I won’t do it. You must come to me of your own free will. You must give of yourself freely, or not at all.’ He moved back and she could see how his eyes had changed from light to dark with the intensity of his feelings. Tears clogged in her throat. How could she have doubted him? How could she have harboured such thoughts about a man who said openly that he would not put any pressure on her?

‘Well?’ He was guiding her out of the hotel, to where his car waited. ‘Have you changed your mind? Do you want to return to London and your virginal bed?’

The warmth of his arm felt so right against her waist, his hip hard against her softness, and she raised her face to him shaking her head. ‘No.’ Her voice was husky, tremulous with all that she felt and could not say. ‘No, Alexis, I want to go on.’

He smiled and in that smile she saw all his male triumph, all his pleasure in her admission, and yet she could not begrudge it to him. As he opened her car door for her he bent towards her, brushing the softness of her lips with the hardness of his own. ‘You can’t know how much it means to me to hear you say that, Sienna… but later… tonight, I will show you.’

The cottage was perfect, remote, surrounded by the sounds of the forest, intimate and cosily furnished so that she felt at home the moment she stepped down into the small living room and felt its warmth enclose her.

There was a kitchen, beautifully fitted out with warm oak units, a meal had been left prepared for them and merely needed heating up. Although the cottage was centrally heated it was cool enough for her to be tempted when Alexis offered to light the open fire in the living room. The ceiling of the room was so low that when he stood upright his head barely scraped under the ancient beams.

‘I’ll see to the fire while you unpack,’ he told her, getting down on his knees, his back to her. She was sure he had done it deliberately, sensing the panic that had been building up inside her at the thought of going up those narrow stairs with him behind her. The cottage only possessed one bedroom, prettily decorated by someone with a liking for Laura Ashley, and the bathroom adjacent was decorated to match. The room felt warm and homely, so much more intimate than a hotel would have been.

The perfect place for a honeymoon, Sienna thought yearningly, then caught back the thought. She was being so silly behaving like this as though she were the victim of some seduction plan and about to be transformed into a scarlet woman! She was free to leave even now if she wanted to. She was here with Alexis because she wanted to be. She dawdled over unpacking what little she had brought with her. There was no need for her to change, the suit she had travelled down in was a soft heather tweed and was perfectly suitable for spending the evening in.

‘Fire’s lit. Do you fancy a drink?’ Alexis’ voice, so calm, calmed her frenzied nerves, his mundane question taking her to the head of the stairs to give an assent. ‘While you’re up there will you unpack for me?’

Ridiculous to feel so embarrassed about touching his clothes. How many times had she packed for Rob or her father and never given it another thought, but these things belonged to the man who would soon be her lover, and it was different. She noticed that he hadn’t packed any pyjamas, and felt her skin flush even though there was no one there to see it, or to witness the way her eyes darkened at the thought of his body against hers. She felt as though she knew him already, but she didn’t and she hurried over her task, anxious to return downstairs and reassure herself that the whole thing wasn’t just a dream.

‘Tired?’

The Beethoven had come to a close, and there was really nothing to keep them downstairs any longer. The fire had burned down and Alexis’ glass was empty. They had finished dinner three hours ago, and now as she listened to the dying crackle of the last apple log Sienna lifted her head from his shoulder.

‘Mmm… a little….’ She felt the laughter shake his body and tensed, feeling childishly hurt. He must have done this so many times before, while she….

‘Ah, no, you are wrong.’ Again he had read her mind and he turned to her in the light from the fire, cupping her face with his hands, his eyes sombre, brooding almost, reminding her of that ancient heritage she had seen in him earlier. ‘There have been other times, but none before like this… none that have meant as much to me as this does. I shall ask you again, Sienna, do you come to me willingly? Do you?’

‘Yes… yes!’ She said it fiercely, pushing back all her doubts and fears, willing him to help her to sweep them away with the magic of his touch. His mouth brushed hers, gently, slowly, his thumb probing the softness of her lips until they parted and his tongue ran lightly over the fullness of her lower one. Her breath caught in the back of her throat, the faintest sound, but he heard it and responded to it, his hand sliding along her throat, tangling in the thickness of her hair, bending her head back against his arm, the hunger building in him as his mouth closed on hers.

She was melting, dissolving, turning into something that wasn’t flesh and bone, but just feeling, under the heat of his kiss. She was drowning in her response to him, lost beneath the fiery trail of kisses that tormented her skin, shivering beneath a need so great that she was deaf, dumb and blind to anything else.

‘Sienna…. Tell me you love me…. You do love me, don’t you?’ The words were punctuated with kisses that turned her mindless with frenzied hunger, the feel of his hands on her body beneath the silk of her blouse making her arch and mutter his name.

‘Totally, completely,’ she told him breathlessly, responding to the demand of his questions, shivering beneath his touch.

‘Ah, I do not think you have done even this many times before, have you?’ His fingers stroked the racing pulses under her skin, his mouth suddenly gentle.

‘Never,’ Sienna told him.

‘Never?’ His eyes darkened with openly perceptible arousal. ‘How innocently you say the word, not knowing that you are offering me the most potent form of temptation I have ever endured! Do you really not know what it does to me to know that I shall be the first to teach you the meaning of desire, to see passion blaze in your eyes….’

‘You have already taught me,’ Sienna told him shakily, and she was lost amidst billowing clouds of pleasure as he laughed and said softly, ‘You think this is pleasure? You have much to learn, and suddenly I am in a very great hurry to teach you.’

He picked her up, carrying her as lightly as though she weighed nothing, her face buried against the warmth of his shoulder, the scent of his skin filling her senses.

He placed her on the bed, leaning over her, smiling down at her. ‘How you tremble in my arms—with willingness or with fear, my sweet virgin?’

‘Both,’ Sienna admitted honestly, ‘but willingness overrides fear….’

‘As desire shall override both,’ he promised her. ‘I do not want you as a sacrifice, not matter how willing, but as an eager participant, as a woman who wants a man—the man! How you tremble still,’ he muttered, feeling her response to his words, and bent his head to place his lips against the warm hollow between her breasts, his fingers deft on the remaining buttons of her blouse. Against the fine silk of her camisole the burgeoning arousal of her nipples was clearly discernible. ‘But there is nothing to fear but fear, and for the brave the ultimate reward is unquantifiable; there is no price, no limit, no standard that can be placed on the pleasure of giving and receiving love’.

Through the thin silk his thumb probed the thrusting outline of her nipple and fierce pleasure throbbed through her, burning in a hot tide as he slid the silk away and brushed the dark aureole of flesh with his tongue, circling and stroking until she clutched mindlessly at his shoulders, gasping his name and shivering with the awareness of all that passion could be and the paucity of her ability to imagine what it might have been beforehand.

Hours, or was it only minutes later, she really didn’t know because time seemed to be suspended, Alexis was guiding her hands against his body, smiling at her wide-eyed awe at its beauty, as unembarrassed at his nudity as she was shy of hers, his mouth slightly skimming her skin, teasing, tantalising, arousing until she forgot all her anxiety about what she did not know and remembered only that he was the man she loved and that his skin tasted warm and salt against her lips and that her touch had the power to make him tense and shudder as vulnerable to her as she was to him.

His hands framed her face, his mouth hot on hers, compelling her response, sweeping her into the fierce surge of pleasure swirling through her body, the full powerful weight of him against her, the tension uncoiling from her body and a deep aching need taking its place.

She needed no urging to return his caresses when his hands and mouth roved over her body, inciting it to arch and echo the soft pleas mixed with the kisses she scattered against his skin. A voice inside her cried out that this was what she had been made for, and not even the powerful thrust of his body against hers had the power to frighten her.

‘Do you love me?’ He murmured the words against her mouth, moulding her hips with his hands, and then sliding them beneath her as he felt her body’s rhythmic response, and her moaned ‘Yes… Yes….’

His mouth brushed hers again as he lifted her towards him, parting her thighs with his, rasping the softness of her flesh. ‘Then give yourself to me,’ he demanded hoarsely. ‘All of you, Sienna… I want it all.’

The words echoed and resounded through her body and it responded elementally to them, welcoming his penetration, and then recoiling from the pain of it, more intense than she had dreamed possible. Alexis’ curse reaching her from far away, the surging pressure of his possession of her now something alien and to be feared rather than welcomed.

She lay beneath him, still trembling, trying valiantly to remember how much she had wanted him and trying equally valiantly to squash her pain and disillusionment and her fear that after all she had been right and she was not a woman who was ever going to experience great physical pleasure.

‘Did I hurt you?’ He sounded cold, distant, angry almost, and something inside her tensed as he moved away from her. Had she disappointed him? She must have done after all the women he had known….

‘A little,’ she lied, ‘but it will be better… next time….’ Her eyes pleaded with him for confirmation, for the words of reassurance and love to bring balm to her aching body, but he was standing up, shrugging the broad shoulders she had so recently worshipped with her lips, his expression bored and cynical.

‘No doubt it will,’ he agreed, ‘but not with me, Sienna. You will have to find another lover to teach you pleasure.’

She couldn’t take it in at first. She simply stared at him while the words played over and over in her numbed brain. ‘You mean….’

She tried to formulate her thoughts, but he cut across her husky, whisper and said curtly, ‘What I mean is that I have achieved what I set out to do, and I have taken your viginity just as your brother took my sister’s, but with a little more grace. She was brutally raped!’

‘Raped!’ Sienna struggled valiantly to make sense out of what he was saying, unable to comprehend what was happening; where the man she had believed to be her lover had gone, and who this stranger who had taken his place was. ‘But you said you loved me… you….’

‘So naïve! Didn’t your mother ever warn you that that’s what all men tell you when they want you go to bed with them? You were so easy to deceive,’ he told her cruelly. ‘Almost too easy.’

Sienna stole a glance at his dark, taunting face, her eyes drawn with a compulsion it was impossible for her to master to the cold clear outline of his mouth. Sickness and self-contempt welled up inside her. Dear God, what a fool she had been! He was right, she had made it easy for him, easy to steal her heart and destroy her precious daydreams with his words of love which had been nothing more than cruel lies.

‘Drink this.’ A glass of water was thrust in front of her, the liquid faintly cloudy. ‘You should be thankful that I didn’t take you as your brother did my sister; brutally, despoiling her….’

‘Rob wouldn’t do that—I know he wouldn’t! I think I hate you!’ she added vehemently, her voice low and shaken.

‘Hate me?’ His mouth was wry ‘Not half an hour ago you were telling me how much you loved me, that I and I alone held your heart. Sleep now. In the morning….’

In the morning? Did he honestly expect her to stay here with him after what he had just said to her? Shock had robbed her of the ability to feel real pain, but she knew it was there waiting for her and when it began she wanted to be alone. She loved him, and he had just been using her, callously and completely without regard for her feelings. She had loved in ideal, she told herself fiercely, a dream image of a man who didn’t exist. She must not love him, she must force herself to face the truth.

‘I want to leave now,’ she said curtly. ‘I’ll ring for a taxi.’ She saw the surprise he couldn’t quite conceal and said bitterly, ‘What did you expect? That I would plead with you? Break down and beg you to love me? I’ve already made a fool of myself once tonight!’

‘Sienna.’ Incredibly he dared to touch her, frowning when she froze beneath the touch of his fingers on her arm. ‘You must understand that I meant you no personal harm….’

‘No, I was just the means by which you accomplished your revenge,’ she agreed tightly. ‘What would you have done if Rob hadn’t had a sister? If I hadn’t been a virgin? How would you have played God then?’

She had the satisfaction of seeing his face darken in suppressed anger. ‘I made it my business to find out everything I could about your brother and his family. Had you not existed I would have found another way, but this was the most fitting.’