Fantasy For Two

‘Are you trying to imply that my farmworkers are badly treated?’ Alex asked her.

Mollie’s chin lifted even higher.

‘And if I am,’ she demanded. ‘Are you going to deny that you have turned people out of their homes to make room for new, younger employees?’

‘Yes, I am.’

Mollie blinked. She hadn’t been expecting such a categoric and totally barefaced misappropriation of the truth.

‘You’re lying,’ she told him positively.

Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Her accusations were so ludicrous and so far off the truth that if they hadn’t been such a damned insult, and if she hadn’t been so positive that she was right, then he would have been more inclined to laugh than get angry. However...! Clenching his jaw, he told her ominously quietly, ‘I do not lie.’

‘Liars always say that,’ Mollie replied sweetly.

‘This is impossible. You are impossible,’ Alex retorted. ‘And if you think for one moment that anyone with a shred of intelligence is going to publish this...this rubbish, then...’

As he spoke he was reaching for the article. Instinctively Mollie acted to protect it, to stop him reaching out. Alex got there first, crumpling up the sheets in his fist as Mollie tried to tear his fingers from around them.

Instinctively Alex started to turn away from her, but Mollie, who had reached up on her toes, stretching her body out precariously to try to retrieve the article, started to lose her balance, causing Alex to do the only possible thing he could do.

Mollie’s small, instinctive cry of alarm was smothered against the solid wall of his chest as he dropped the article and reached instead for her.

‘Let me go. Let me go,’ Mollie demanded, hammering hard against his chest with two small bunched fists, oblivious to the fact that but for his chivalrous gesture she would probably have been lying ignominiously in a heap at his feet instead of being held protectively and safely against the marginally less ungiving hardness of his body.

Both the floor and his muscles might be equally tough, but her body was certainly reacting very, very differently to the muscles than it would have done to the floor. The quivering, jelly-like shakiness which had invaded her limbs was certainly not the kind of reaction she could ever remember having after coming into contact with any kind of inanimate object. Come to think of it she couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a mind-boggling reaction to coming into contact with anything or anyone at any time in her whole life before. It really was too bad of her body to react to him in this wretchedly puerile fashion, she told herself sternly. He was, after all, only a man.

‘I hate you. Let me go at once,’ she told him furiously—just to make sure that he understood that the by now openly visible trembling of her body meant nothing whatsoever, and that if he was unwise enough to think that it did...

‘Likewise,’ she heard him telling her through gritted teeth.

So, given that both of them had expressed their dislike of one another so plainly, why was it that they were now locked in one another’s arms, kissing like a pair of starving lovers who had been apart for centuries?

Mollie had no idea. She only knew that the angry, passionate, devouring kisses their mouths were hungrily demanding from one another seemed to feed the need she could feel boiling up inside her rather than satiate it.

She had never dreamed that she could feel like this about anyone, that she could desire anyone so passionately, so intensely, so...so insanely...and so compulsively that she knew that if she didn’t somehow find a way to put a brake on what she was experiencing it wouldn’t be Alex who might be tearing off her clothes in order to make love to her, but she who was tearing off his.

That was what he did to her... That was how he made her feel. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even lust... What exactly it was she couldn’t even begin to put a name to... She only knew it was something explosive. Something dangerous... Something over which she was totally without controt—a starving, famished, aching need that twisted tormentedly through her as she alternately pushed him away and then pulled him closer, her mouth biting hungrily at his, her lips closing around his hot, hard tongue, her hips grinding into his as he grasped them and held her, his body mirroring the fiercely sensual movements of hers.

She could feel his arousal and her own body ached and pulsed in response. A series of frantic mental images crowded her brain, sharply clear flashes...images of the two of them entwined together, their bodies naked, his skin glistening with sweat, sleek, tanned, roughened with soft dark hair, hers paler, softer but no less aroused.

She could feel her nipples hardening, thrusting against her clothes. Her teeth worried at his lower lip. She could hear him groan and felt his answering passion in the way his hands moved over her body, shaping her, moulding her, cupping her breasts, holding them in such a way that she literally shook with aching need.

She could feel herself starting to moan as the force of it possessed her body; a reciprocal shudder racked Alex’s body, and the sound he made, a low, raw groan, reverberated through her as their mouths fused hotly together. And then, abruptly and shockingly, Mollie felt Alex lift his mouth from hers and firmly push her away from him.

Instinctively she resisted, her senses so thoroughly aroused and aching for him that she couldn’t bear to let him go. And then, thankfully, before she could make a complete fool of herself, sanity and common sense came to her rescue, allowing her to shrug off the hands still clasping her forearms and to assume an expression of furious anger as she demanded huskily, ‘How dare you...? How dare you—?’

She broke off as she caught sight of the basket of peaches Alex had brought in with him, thankful to have something other than him on which to focus her attention and her chaotic emotions. ‘And just where did those come from?’ she asked aggressively.

‘I brought them with me,’ Alex told her curtly. ‘They’re home-grown—from the orangery.’

He was still trying to understand just what had prompted him to behave in such an uncharacteristic fashion. He was sexually experienced enough to recognise the potential destruction that could be caused by emotions, sensations as explosive as those he had just experienced, but there had been a feeling, a need within him when he had held Mollie in his arms which had gone far, far beyond any mere desire for sex.

He could tell, too, that even though she was trying valiantly to hide it from him she had been as caught off guard, as unable to control what had happened as he had been himself.

The last thing he needed right now was to get involved with a woman, a situation like this one. He had enough problems in his life already. More than enough.

‘The orangery,’ Mollie repeated bitingly. ‘And how many poor souls have you had to evict from their homes to pay for that kind of luxury, I should like to know?’

‘I’m sure you would,’ Alex agreed.

‘These peaches are rotten—rotten because they’ve been grown and fed on human misery,’ Mollie told him dramatically, tilting her head proudly as she added, ‘It’s all there in my article—the way that people, men like you—’

‘You can’t publish what you’ve written...’ Alex began to tell her, intending to warn her that she had got her facts totally wrong, but before he could finish Mollie immediately interrupted.

‘You can’t intimidate me,’ she told him passionately.

Alex opened his mouth to tell her that intimidating her or anyone else had never entered his mind, nor was it ever likely to do so, and that essentially at heart he was a pacifist, a man who applauded and worked for harmony, a man who respected the views and feelings of others. But instead, to his own bemusement, he heard himself saying in a passably threatening male growl, ‘Don’t be so sure.’

The tiny quiver of sensation that shivered through Mollie’s body as she heard him wasn’t entirely based on fear, but, wisely, she had no intention of investigating just why the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice should generate within her a feeling not unlike the delicious excitement she had experienced as a child when engaging in some activity which she had known to be forbidden.

‘Typical,’ she responded contemptuously to Alex instead, with a provocative toss of her head. ‘But you don’t frighten me.’

Grimacing to himself, Alex turned away from her and headed for the front door.

‘Maybe not,’ he muttered to himself under his breath as he angrily yanked the door open and strode through it. ‘But you sure as hell frighten me.’

No wonder he had stormed off like that, Mollie crowed in mental triumph as she firmly slammed the door after him. He had known she had him routed, that she couldn’t be bullied or pushed or cowed, as he had no doubt expected.

Walking back into her living room, she absentmindedly picked up one of the peaches and bit deeply into it. The fruit was luscious and sweet, with a taste that made her close her eyes in momentary sensual bliss.

‘Mmm...yummy...’

She had virtually finished the peach before she remembered what she had said to its donor. Well, never mind, she wasn’t one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, she told herself stoutly. How many peaches were there exactly in that basket? Three more... Well, it would be wasteful not to eat them, an insult to whoever had taken such care in growing and nurturing them...

The next day, standing in Bob’s office whilst she waited for him to finish reading her article, Mollie was still seething over her run-in with Alex. How dare he threaten her? He was typical of his type: rich, arrogant, completely oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of others.

But it was his threat to her article that concerned her the most and possessed her thoughts, not what had gone before it. In fact that kiss they had shared, and her own regrettably insane and inadmissibly intense response to it, was something she simply wasn’t prepared to dwell on or give any kind of credence to by thinking about it. Everyone was permitted the odd small aberration.

She had been under stress, caught off guard. He had no doubt expected her to reject him, and would have enjoyed having her behave in what to him would have been a predictably female and victimish way. By kissing him back, by showing no fear, she had shown him that she was not so predictable, so easily readable, that she was not the kind of woman who was going to be overawed or daunted by him.

She was no fool. Of course there would be members of her sex who would be silly enough to be taken in by his good looks and by the aura of success and maleness that clung to him, but she was most certainly not one of them.

Bob had reached the end of her article. He put it down and removed his spectacles, and then frowned as he told her baldly, ‘We can’t print this. You do realise that people locally will assume that this landlord you refer to is Alex, and—?’

‘And because he happens to own half the county no one is allowed to say or write anything that might show him up in his true colours? Is that it?’ Mollie interrupted him hotly.

Bob Fleury’s frown deepened as he looked at her.