Читать книгу Modern Romance October 2016 Books 5-8 - Ким Лоренс, Kate Walker - Страница 17
ОглавлениеWHEN BEN FINALLY straightened up, tearing himself away from Lia’s intoxicating taste and scent he was not prepared for the glorious sight of her looking so shocked. Her hair was a dark cloud around her head. The blue silk dress was crumpled beside those lush curves.
The realisation that she looked so stunned stopped him from automatically moving his hands to his belt to seek his own relief. He ignored the insistent ache in his pants and rested his hands on her knees. ‘Are you okay?’
After a moment her eyes seemed to clear and she nodded. But he noticed that she reached for her dress with visibly shaking hands, pulling it over her as much as she could. The heat in Ben’s blood cooled a little and he moved back so that she could pull her dress down, concealing that glorious body from view.
‘What is it, Lia?’
She looked at him for a moment, almost accusingly, but he just looked right back. Making a little huffing sound, Lia scooted back on the couch until she was sitting upright. She bit her lip, but then eventually said, ‘One day I walked into my ex-fiancé’s office and found him with his secretary. He was doing what you just did to me to her...’ She trailed off.
Ben tried to make sense of what she was saying. ‘That’s why you broke it off? He was unfaithful?’
She nodded jerkily, her face crimson now. ‘Yes, but the thing is I’ve only ever slept with Simon...’
Ben would have never envisaged this scenario in a million years. In one fell swoop any remaining misconceptions he might have had about Julianna Ford were blasted apart. She was inexperienced, and she was achingly vulnerable right now, even though he could tell she hated it from the way her hands held her dress together in a white-knuckled grip.
And instead of feeling the urge to get up and run in the opposite direction Ben got up and sat on the couch beside her, feeling something close to protective.
Lia looked at him. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not very experienced.’
Ben felt something dark rise up. ‘What happened with this ex-fiancé?’
Now she went pale. ‘When we made love for the first time...it hurt. A lot. After that I didn’t really want to...to make love.’ She grimaced. ‘It wasn’t as if we were in love. We’d both agreed to the marriage for our own reasons. But he told me that I was frigid, and that was why he was sleeping with his secretary. I couldn’t...didn’t want to get married after that.’
Ben reeled. He wanted to find that man and punch him for betraying this woman, for leaving her confidence in tatters. Never in Ben’s life had he been remotely interested in the notion of taking a woman’s virginity, but now he felt a ridiculous sense of loss, just imagining the way her rutting fiancé had probably not even realised the jewel he’d had in his hands. This woman was not frigid. Not remotely.
Then he thought of what else she’d just said. ‘Why did you agree to a marriage of convenience?’
As if the questions were probing too deeply, Lia got up off the couch, still graceful even while she was deliciously dishevelled. She turned her back to Ben and pulled the dress around her, tying it in front.
When she turned around again it was all Ben could do not to yank her back down onto his lap.
She folded her arms over her chest, as if she could hear his lusty thoughts. ‘It was primarily for my father. I told you...he’s traditional. He believes I’ll only be secure if I’m settled. He was sick a while back and I got a fright... He begged me to give Simon a chance—he knew he’d been asking me out on a regular basis.’
She shrugged and looked down, scuffing the floor with her toes. ‘I went out with him and it turned out that we were both happy enough to agree to something more...clinical than a romantic relationship.’ She looked back at Ben, almost defiant. ‘At the time it seemed like a good idea.’
‘You don’t need to convince me,’ Ben said with a bitter edge to his voice. ‘After seeing how little there was to hold my parents’ marriage together when the crisis hit, I’m under no illusions about the myth of a romantic ideal.’
For a long moment neither said anything else and then Lia took a step back.
Ben stood up. ‘Where are you going?’
* * *
Middle Earth, hopefully.
Lia had been ready for the ground to open up and swallow her right from when she hadn’t been able to stop the verbal equivalent of This is My Life from spilling out. She blamed Ben, and the fact that he’d wrung a response from her body that she’d never believed she’d feel.
He was looking at her now as if she had two heads, and the thought that he might pity her after what she’d just told him was making her burn with mortification. Of anything she might have expected from this man, she’d never expected that. Nor wanted it.
She struggled to look cool and calm, even though she was in tatters. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Ben shook his head. ‘We’re not done here.’
Excitement and trepidation warred in Lia’s chest. Ben was unmistakably alpha. Maybe he saw her as some kind of challenge?
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know this isn’t what you expected when you thought of indulging in a weekend fling. I think we’ve established that I’m not exactly cast from the same mould as your usual women.’
She went to walk past him, instinctively seeking a place where she could be alone and deal with her sense of exposure without that incisive gaze watching her every move. He’d laid her bare—completely. She’d been right to resist him.
A hand on her arm stopped her. She looked up.
Ben pulled her around in front of him. ‘There are no other women. There’s only you. Are you saying you don’t want this?’
Lia flushed at his words. ‘There’s only you.’ And how could she deny she wanted this when she’d just been writhing and moaning under his expert touch?
She said tightly, ‘You really don’t owe me anything, Ben. If you just feel sorry for—’
His hands tightened on her arms so much she stopped talking. He looked incredulous. ‘Feel sorry for you? Believe me...that’s the last thing I’m feeling right now. I want you, Lia. Because you make me feel like I’ll combust if I don’t have you. And that’s not pity. That’s desire.’
Suddenly she didn’t have anything to hide behind. He was calling her out.
She felt nervous. ‘I’m not experienced enough for you... I’ll disappoint you.’
He speared her with that bright blue gaze, like two flames. ‘You couldn’t disappoint me if you tried, Lia. And there’s no such thing as inexperience—there’s just how two people fit together. You’re not frigid—not remotely. That man was an idiot, and he couldn’t recognise a brilliant precious gem when it was right in front of him.’
Ben’s words reached deep inside her and melted the insecurity Lia had been carrying around like a weight.
He moved closer, as if sensing her vacillation. ‘I want you, Lia, more than I’ve ever wanted another woman. But if you can say that you truly don’t want this, then I’ll let you go.’
He took her elbows in his hands and pulled her gently to him until they were touching. If she’d had any doubts about how much he wanted her, or thoughts that he just pitied her, they fled when she felt the hard, thrusting evidence of his desire against her soft belly.
Her heart started to pound and her blood heated. Her defences were annihilated. And then she felt a spike of anger. Anger that he’d brought her here and laid her bare, forced her to delve deep inside herself to where she ached and wanted...so much. Where she wanted him. Forcing her to admit it.
She felt fierce. ‘I can’t tell you that.’
Ben was intense. ‘What can’t you tell me?’
She looked up into his eyes and drowned. ‘That I don’t want you.’
Lia didn’t care any more how or why she’d got here, just that she was, and she didn’t want to be anywhere else. She desperately wanted Ben to show her again how she could respond to a man. That she wasn’t frigid.
As if reading her mind, Ben bent and lifted her into his arms. And then he was carrying her up the stairs.
She was mesmerised by his jaw, by the play of the powerful muscles of his chest under her arm. Breathless at the thought of what she was doing, and so far out of her comfort zone that it wasn’t funny, she pushed all her trepidation down.
Ben shouldered his way into his room, and Lia was vaguely aware that it was just as palatial as hers but more masculine in tones and colours. And then her gaze fell on the massive bed in the middle of the room and her mouth dried completely.
A part of her wanted to leap from Ben’s arms and run away fast, but a stronger part realised that she wanted to be strong—for this, for herself. Her confidence had been eroded when she was a young child, when her own mother had rejected her, forcing her to shut away a part of herself for fear of rejection. Then she’d let Simon decimate her confidence as a sexual woman. It was time to restore the balance.
Ben put her down near the bottom of the bed. His voice was deep, rumbling in the silence. ‘You can let your dress go.’
Lia looked down and saw her almost white-knuckled grip on her dress. She uncurled her fingers, undid the tie and let it go. It swung open, catching on the slopes of her breasts.
She heard a sharp intake of breath and looked up to see Ben’s eyes on her.
‘So beautiful,’ he muttered as he brought his hands to her shoulders and pulled her dress off them and down over her arms, until it fell to the floor in a sibilant whoosh of silk. Her undone bra followed.
Now she was naked, the ends of her hair tickling the bare skin of her shoulders. Ben’s eyes had darkened and Lia gritted her jaw to kill the instinct to cover herself with her arms; she didn’t want him to see how vulnerable she really felt. No doubt he was used to women parading themselves in front of him.
Instead, just to do something to break the almost overwhelming tension, she reached out and touched his chest tentatively. It was muscled perfection, broad and strong. Defined pectorals with a dusting of dark curling hair led down to the ridges of a six-pack and his flat belly, with its single line of dark hair dissecting the muscles and disappearing under his trousers.
Ben sucked in a breath and, emboldened, Lia explored further, spreading her hands across his chest. They looked tiny and pale next to that burnished skin. She could feel his heart thumping solidly, and some nameless emotion gripped her tight. But she ignored it. Now was not the time for emotion.
She raked her nails over him experimentally, catching a nipple, making him take another sharp intake of breath. He caught the back of her head, his fingers tangling in her hair. She looked up and felt drugged.
Not taking her gaze off his, she let her hands feel their way to his lean waist and found where his belt was buckled. She looked down and undid it, and then her hands were on his button and the zip. She could feel the insistent thrust of his erection through his clothes, and a wave of heat scorched her from the inside out and between her legs, where she felt damp again. Hot.
She pushed his trousers down over his hips and he stepped out of them, letting her go momentarily. Then he pulled down his briefs until he too was gloriously naked. She’d never been more aware of herself as a woman. There was something very elemental about this moment, with everything stripped away.
Unable to resist, and not even recognising herself any more, Lia reached out and encircled his hard flesh with her hand, stroking him up and down, mesmerised by the vulnerability of his erection and also the steely strength. The velvet texture of his skin. She touched the bead of moisture at its head and spread it with her thumb.
At that Ben took her hand from him and she looked up.
‘I won’t last if you keep touching me like that.’
He caught her hand and brought her around the side of the bed, urged her down onto it, following her. He looked massive from where she lay, all wide shoulders and chest and long, lean body.
Every nerve in her body was tingling. She could feel Ben’s erection against her thigh, hard and heavy. Big. She felt a shiver of trepidation, remembering the discomfort she’d felt with her fiancé and how she’d failed to excite him, but again, as if reading her mind, Ben distracted her by moving between her legs, spreading them wide.
With his elbows trapping her, he cupped both her breasts and teased her tingling nipples with his thumbs, before lowering his head and sucking first one and then the other into his hot mouth, torturing her with his wicked tongue.
As the flames of lust licked higher and higher Lia moaned softly. She wanted to squirm, to arch her back, but her movements were restricted by Ben’s big body holding hers down. It was an exquisite form of torture, and as he lavished attention on her breasts he moved subtly against her, notching his hips higher, until she could feel the blunt head of his erection move against her where she was slick with desire.
She widened her legs even more and tried to move her hips up, wanting him to fill the part of her that ached. Then she heard a muttered curse and Ben suddenly rolled away.
Lia lifted her head. She realised she was panting. ‘What’s wrong?’
For an awful second she went cold, imagining that he’d realised she wasn’t enough for him... But then she saw him extract something from a drawer beside the bed, heard foil tear, and then he was rolling protection onto his thick length.
Relief flooded her and she lay back. Ben knelt between her legs. Lia was all but splayed before him, like some kind of offering. But then, instead of coming over her again as she’d expected—as she wanted—he reached out a hand and touched her where she ached most. Where she was embarrassingly wet for him.
He circled her with his thumb, ratcheting up the tension inside her. Dipping inside, and out again, lubricating her with her own juices.
‘You want me.’
She wondered how on earth he could doubt it. Then she gasped and her back arched as he slid two fingers into her. She said jerkily, ‘I told you I did.’
Lia could feel her muscles tighten around his fingers. Heard him curse softly. She felt too exposed. She didn’t want him to make her come like this, while he watched.
She reached out and wrapped her hands around his arms. ‘Please... Ben, I need...’ Her back arched again as he thrust his fingers deeper, playing her like a violin. She lifted her head, hating the power he had over her right now, and said fiercely, ‘I need you.’
Ben finally took his hand away, and then he loomed over her, his thighs pushing hers apart, and she slid her hands up to his shoulders.
‘Look at me,’ he said roughly. ‘Don’t ever doubt that you are a very desirable woman, Lia.’
She looked down and saw him take himself in his hand as he guided himself towards her, and then he fed himself into her body, slowly, inch by inch, making her draw her breath in on one long inhale as he impaled her...utterly.
He was big...bringing her almost to the edge of discomfort. But he held himself still for a long moment, letting her body adjust to him. And then, when she took another breath, he started to move, and everything in Lia’s world was reduced to the here and now. This moment. This man. And the exquisite sensations rushing through her body.
She’d never felt anything like it as a wholly new tension built inside her with every movement of Ben’s body in and out of hers. She wrapped her legs around his back, heels digging into his taut muscles. His hand gripped her thigh and his movements became less careful, a little rougher.
He came closer, moved down over her, making his chest hair abrade her still sensitive nipples. She reached up and found his mouth, and as everything inside her coiled to a point of excruciating pleasure/pain she pressed a desperate kiss to his mouth until finally she was broken apart into a million shattering pieces.
She was barely aware of Ben’s own shout as his body tensed over hers for a long moment, muscles locked and taut as a paroxysm of pleasure held him in its grip too.
* * *
When Lia woke she felt completely disorientated, recognising that she wasn’t in her own bed, or room. And then she felt the unfamiliar aches in her body and memory came rushing back.
Dawn was breaking outside, bathing Ben’s room in a pink pearlescent hue that didn’t diminish the masculine tones one bit. Gingerly, Lia moved her head, and sucked in a breath when she saw the unashamedly male and indolent sprawl of a very naked Benjamin Carter beside her.
Even like this, in repose, he was magnificent... Dark stubble lined his jaw, making him look rakish. Long lashes should have prettified the stark and strong lines of his face but they didn’t. He looked marginally less fierce, especially when those blue eyes weren’t watching her and gauging her reaction to every little thing. She might hate him for that if she wasn’t feeling so...sated.
Her gaze travelled down over hard muscles and her face grew hot when she saw that most masculine and potent part of him—no less impressive at rest.
They’d made love again last night, after that first cataclysmic time. The second time had been slower, more luxurious, but no less intense. A surge of emotion made her throat tight. She wasn’t frigid. At all. In fact the woman revealed under Ben’s expert tutelage was sensual and voracious...and he had shown her that. As easily as flicking a switch to let light into a dark room.
Lia sucked in a breath. That was exactly what he’d done. He’d shone light into the dark corners of her soul, where she’d felt closed-off. Deficient.
His expert dismantling of her defences had started yesterday. By the time they’d gone to his friends’ party they’d already been crumbling, thanks to their idyllic day spent walking around one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with surely one of its most charismatic and charming guides...
A voice mocked her: who was she kidding? Her defences had been crumbling from the moment she’d bumped into him outside the Algonquin Hotel in New York.
And then something cold flickered down Lia’s spine as she registered the full magnitude of just how easily and completely she’d capitulated. It really hadn’t taken much at all, in the end. She’d proved no less susceptible than any other woman to this man. Finding out about his troubled past had only added another layer of depth to a man who was fast becoming far too complex and fascinating.
And now there was this—the ultimate intimate exposure. She’d slept with him because he’d made love to her mind as much as to her body. He’d delved deep and she’d let him in, far more than anyone else.
Emotions she’d never felt before rushed around her in a sickening mix...fear, exultation, hope.
It was the hope that brought her back to earth with a bang. Hope...for what? The kind of thing she’d always told herself didn’t exist? Hope that she wouldn’t face the excruciating lash of rejection if she opened herself up to someone?
As Ben had said himself the previous evening: ‘I’m under no illusions about the myth of a romantic ideal.’ And neither was she, she assured herself, but for a dizzying moment there she’d felt hope—and that was dangerous.
The thought of Ben waking, and of herself trying to act blasé when she had no idea how to navigate this kind of situation, made her go cold all over. She had nowhere left to hide.
Her mother’s abandonment had not only devastated her father—it had devastated Lia. The knowledge that she hadn’t been lovable enough to make her stay had been indelibly inked into her skin from a young age, and Lia knew now that that was at the heart of why she’d avoided intimacy for so long, and why she’d agreed to a marriage of convenience.
She’d found it easy to dissociate, not to engage, because no one had ever broken down the walls she’d erected...until now. The galling reality that she could be as susceptible to heartbreak as her father after years of avoiding it made her feel nauseous.
Ben would see through her in an instant—see all her weaknesses. And, worse, possibly even see that flicker of hope. The part of her that wasn’t half as cool and collected as she’d always thought she was. Impervious to fickle emotions.
Lia slid out of the bed, making not a sound. Ben moved minutely, frowning in his sleep, but then he relaxed again, and her heart pounded with a mixture of panic and desperation.
Benjamin Carter had somehow managed to slide under her skin enough to make her realise that all the foundations she’d worked so hard to build up were far shakier than she liked to admit. And that was enough to drive Lia as far away from this man as she could go.
* * *
The following morning Ben padded through the villa in a pair of hastily pulled on shorts with an uncomfortable feeling of foreboding prickling along his skin. He’d woken shortly before to find the space beside him in bed empty. And Lia hadn’t been in the bathroom.
When he’d woken, at first he’d registered a deeper feeling of satisfaction than he’d ever felt before. A memory had surfaced: after they’d made love again last night Lia had been draped over his body, her head in the crook between his head and neck, her body a deliciously curved and pliant weight on his.
He’d stroked his hand up and down her back and said gruffly, ‘See? I told you... It’s nothing to do with experience. We fit.’
She’d made a huffing noise into his skin, clearly too exhausted to speak. And Ben had smiled...before falling asleep and waking to find her gone.
Ben didn’t usually wake with the expectation of finding a woman in his bed—he preferred to keep that boundary firmly intact—but it hadn’t even entered his head with Lia.
He frowned now, when he saw she wasn’t in the main living area, but still wasn’t unduly concerned. She had to be here somewhere.
For the first time in days, since he’d first laid eyes on her, Ben’s head was feeling clear again. He’d known he wanted her, but he hadn’t expected their chemistry to be so explosive. And when he found her he was going to convince her to stay another day... He was going to woo her and persuade her to consider marriage—because if she’d considered it once before she’d have to be open to the option again—in spite of the way it had turned out. Clearly it meant a lot to her father, and he obviously meant a lot to her.
Lia Ford was not the one-dimensional person he had believed her to be at the very start. She was bright, sharp, compassionate, passionate.
He thought about how he’d felt claustrophobic when the idea of taking a wife had first been mentioned to him...how he’d felt when he’d sat down to discuss it with the Sheikh and the others. But now the prospect of making Lia Ford his wife appealed to Ben in a way that he hadn’t ever thought it would.
He realised that he’d seriously underestimated how much a woman like Lia could contribute to his life. They had ideals and goals in common. The more he thought about it, the less he felt inclined to take a wife who would just be meek and biddable. He wanted someone with fire, and Lia had that in spades. She was spirited and unafraid to stand up to him, and he liked that.
And for the first time he even found himself thinking of children. Of what it would be like to have a son or a daughter. Something in Ben’s chest grew tight at the thought of a small dark-haired child with sparkling blue eyes running around.
He’d never allowed himself to contemplate it before, because his own experience of watching his parents crumble so catastrophically under the strain of their lives self-destructing had scarred him enough to never want to risk subjecting any child of his to that.
But now he felt he could consider it for the first time. A woman like Lia would never crumble. She would get up and start again. Their marriage would be nothing like his parents’—falling apart like a flimsy structure at the first inkling of trouble.
Ben was in the kitchen now, but that too was empty. He ignored his growing unease and the fact that the villa was too quiet. As much as he admired Lia’s independence, and the fact that she obviously wasn’t one of those women who liked to cling like an octopus the morning after, he just wanted to find her now.
A sense of relief hit him when he thought of the beach—of course she’d be there. But when he walked out onto the pristine sand, he saw that his stretch of private beach was empty. No supple pale body was lying out under an umbrella.
He heard a sound and whirled around, but it was just Esmé, carrying flowers into the villa. She called out sunnily, ‘Morning, Boss. You slept late—not like you at all.’
Ben felt like scowling at the reminder that last night had made its mark, but he forced a smile, following Esmé back into the villa. ‘Have you seen Lia?’
She whirled around, frowning. ‘You don’t know?’
Ben was seriously struggling to hold his irritation in. ‘Know what?’
Esmé put the exotic blooms carefully on a table, her face a picture of quizzical innocence. ‘She left early this morning. When Joao dropped me off, she got a lift with him back into Salvador. She said she had to take the first flight to New York today, then get back to the UK. I presumed you knew... She said she didn’t want to wake you and left you a note. I put it in your office.’
As Ben watched Esmé start to put the blooms in a large vase on the table in the centre of the hall he felt something wide and uncomfortable open up in his chest. And sheer incomprehension. No woman ever walked away from him. But this one had. Twice now.
He turned before Esmé could make anything of his reaction, went to his office and saw the folded-over note with ‘Ben’ written on it in a very feminine script. He opened it to read.
Dear Ben,
Thank you again for your kind donation to the charity. I think after last night the terms of the bid are well and truly fulfilled. After all, this was never going to go beyond the weekend, was it?
I’ve enjoyed my time here in Bahia—thank you. I doubt I’ll run into you again.
Best wishes,
Lia Ford.
The chasm opening up in Ben’s chest snapped shut suddenly and became a hard, heavy weight. The insinuation that she’d slept with him more to fulfil the terms of the bid and less because she’d wanted to was not welcome.
He crushed the piece of paper in his hands as something broke the heavy weight apart—anger.
He’d underestimated her—again. But she’d underestimated him if she thought that she wouldn’t run into him again. He was going to make very sure that she did run into him again—and this time she would not be running away. Because she was perfect for him. And no way was he letting her, or this opportunity, slip out of his grasp.
