Element Of Risk

‘For a year or so,’ she said, ‘and then no.’

‘What are you going to do?’

She shrugged again. ‘I’ll find something. I might go to university.’

His hard mouth suddenly twisted into an enigmatic smile. ‘You’d cause a riot,’ he said softly.

Perdita’s breath caught in her throat. No, she thought. No! She had to remember that this was just a hangover from adolescence.

‘As you see,’ she said with unhurried self-possession, ‘I don’t look the way I do in the magazines.’

His brows lifted, but he said merely, ‘Modest as well as famous.’

A sudden weariness fogged her brain. She managed to contrive a yawn and an enquiring look. He understood and his smile became even more sardonic. ‘I’d better go. Goodbye, Perdita.’

‘Goodbye,’ she said, trying to sound businesslike and dismissive, but courteous nevertheless. An unnerving glint in his eyes told her she hadn’t succeeded.

She watched him go, her eyes unconsciously straying to the breadth of his shoulders, the lean hips and taut buttocks, the long, powerfully muscled legs. Closing the door behind him with a sudden vicious jerk, she turned and leaned back, her hands spread against the smooth, cool wood, her breath locked in her chest. She had lied when she said she didn’t remember his lovemaking.

He had been tender, his hands slow and skilful as he caressed her into wakefulness. Bemused, her whole being singing with delight, she hadn’t even thought of Natalie; she was lost to everything but the wonderful sensations that were rippling through her at the behest of those clever, experienced hands.

Darkness had hidden him, yet she hadn’t been afraid. She’d known who he was. His scent, she thought now, trying to be objective. He had a particular male scent that still had the power to liquefy her bones. That night it had been spiked with the flavour of wine.

Her slow awakening had been something spun out of the fantasies she’d indulged in during the warm, welcoming nights of that summer. Still dreaming, her heart thudding like a piston in her chest, her mind drugged by the lazy tide of desire his touch summoned, she’d been gathered into his arms while his mouth searched for and finally, after a series of kisses, found the frantic pulse in her throat.

He hadn’t spoken. If he had, she thought now, she’d probably have woken up to her danger, realised what was happening to her. She’d always loved him with the uncritical adoration of a child, but those holidays her serene, unashamed affection had altered into something deeper, forbidden. During the slow, heated days she had watched him, knowing that he never saw her, yet longing for him with a growing woman’s intense passion, her ripening body aching with hidden, unfulfilled needs.

And each night just before she had dropped off to sleep she had called up images in her mind, telling herself guiltily that she was hurting nobody because nobody knew; nobody, especially Natalie, would ever know. Young and inexperienced though she was, she’d understood that such feverish emotions couldn’t last, but when she’d woken in his arms she had had no defences from needs she had only just recognised.

His mouth seduced her into acquiesecence, his hands stroked a feverish response from her body; the fumes of her hunger hazed her brain to banish any moral restrictions she might have felt. Enslaved by the passion that shimmered through her like molten silver, the first love that until then had been so rigorously disciplined, she surrendered mindlessly.

His mouth on her breast set her shuddering, not with fear but with an awed delight at the exquisite pangs her body was capable of. She writhed voluptuously, seeking more, seeking something to ease the throbbing ache between her legs, pressing herself against the lean, heated body so close to hers. The unfamiliar pressure of his erection didn’t shock her; instinct produced a swift, provoking answer from her hips, setting off chills through every nerve cell.

‘Darling,’ he’d said, ‘such enthusiasm…’

Thinking about it made her heart weep. There had been such love, such lazy, amused tenderness in his tone.

Looking back with the awareness of experience she understood now that he had been immensely gentle, using his practised expertise to ready her until finally he had moved over her, and taken her in one slow, compulsive thrust, measuring the length of himself in her.

It hadn’t hurt at all. Instead, everything within her had tightened in anticipation, sensations intensifying into a white-hot explosion, and she had gasped and opened herself to him, hips rotating, enclosing him with the force of her strong young body.

He had hesitated, his body rigid, but when she moved beneath him and around him he had groaned, and settled into a driving rhythm.