Читать книгу Sharon Kendrick Collection - Sharon Kendrick - Страница 22

CHAPTER THREE

TRISS came up for air, though it wasn’t easy when all she wanted was for Cormack to carry on kissing her like that. In that mad, passionate way—as though he had just discovered kissing for the very first time. ‘Cormack!’ she gasped.

‘Not now!’ he growled, and lowered his head again.

And oh, the sweet power of that kiss threatened to submerge her in its tantalisingly sensual waters. Triss struggled back to reality with difficulty. ‘Cormack, please—’

‘You don’t have to beg me, Triss, sweetheart,’ he murmured, with a trace of that hateful irony. ‘The pleasure is all mine, I can assure you.’

‘But...’ Oh, it was hopeless! Hopeless! Triss found her head tipping back, giving Cormack greater access to her neck, which he was now covering with tiny, tiny butterfly kisses so exquisitely delicate that they made her shudder with frustrated longing.

‘Triss,’ he groaned, and shaped the palms of his hands voluptuously down the sides of her body, as if he were a sculptor creating and forming her out of pliant clay. ‘Beautiful, beautiful Triss. God, but you feel good. So good that I want to eat you up.’

Triss fought feelings of intense desire and intense frustration, frantically sucking in air through her mouth as Cormack cupped one of her breasts through the linen dress she wore. She had forgotten just what a master he was at this. If men could take a course on how to drive a woman out of her head with wanting then Cormack Casey would graduate with honours!

Her hips began to move distractedly, as if of their own accord. Tiny, rhythmical little circles, just designed to bring her into contact with the unmistakable evidence of Cormack’s growing passion.

This had not been what she had planned. She was supposed to feel angry with Cormack, for heaven’s sake. He had let her down in every which way.

She had brought him here today solely with the intention of informing him that he was the father of her child. She had planned to tell him not coldly, or judgmentally, just matter-of-factly. As a teacher would explain something to a class.

But nothing more than that—certainly not this. She ran her tongue over her parched lips in despair as she felt her nipple peak beneath the kneading movements of his fingertips.

She tried one last time. ‘Cormack, this is wrong...’

He stopped then, lifting his dark head to stare at her accusingly, and she found herself dazzled by the brilliance of his blue gaze. ‘No!’ He halted her with a negation that was almost savage. ‘Whatever else may have happened between us this was never wrong...never could be wrong... You know that, Triss. In your heart you cannot deny it.’

She gave up. It was too much to ask—to deny herself what she wanted more than anything else in the world. And why not now? Why not this one, last, glorious time?

Because Triss knew with a certainty which sickened her that Cormack would not make love to her ever again—not once she told him about Simon.

For he was the father of her child. And she knew Cormack well enough to know in her heart that not only would he be livid with her for having concealed that fact, but that he would find it impossible to forgive her for having kept his baby a secret from him for so long.

But hadn’t that been her intention? To hurt him as he had hurt her? What some people might have called revenge, but what she had convinced herself was only right and fair.

‘Triss, let me make love to you,’ he coaxed. ‘What we have between us is too good to throw away. Sure, isn’t it a crime not to when we feel this way about each other?’ And all the while he spoke he was sliding those sensuous fingers over her breasts with such unerring accuracy.

Perhaps another woman with more backbone than Triss might have halted those delicious caresses... might have stopped him from inciting each exquisitely aroused nipple into honeyed life. Would a woman who had not fallen so completely under Cormack’s spell have pushed him away?

Well, Triss was certainly not pushing him away. Instead she was kissing him back. Frantically. Almost as frantically as she scrabbled to unzip his leather jacket, to reveal the muscle-packed chest which the grey cashmere sweater could not disguise.

Her hands burrowed right up beneath his sweater and she homed straight in on those tiny, flat nipples, stroking them in the teasing way he had always adored—and the familiar and intimate touch felt like coming home after a long, long journey.

‘Sweet Lord in heaven!’ He drew in a long, tortured breath. ‘Beatrice...Beatrice. My beautiful Beatrice. Don’t you know what you’re doing to me, sweetheart?’

His words came at her in a haze; he might have been speaking another languages for all the sense she made of them.

She could not speak or hear or think. All she could do was clutch onto him for support while he roughly unbuttoned her linen dress so that her aroused breasts were visible, straining madly against the champagne lace of her brassiere.

She was aware of a silence, and a stillness, and she opened her eyes in alarm, wondering why on earth he had stopped now. And she disturbed an odd kind of watchfulness on his face as he stared at her body.

‘Wh-what is it?’ she managed, from between lips which felt swollen to twice their normal size. ‘What’s the matter, Cormack?’

The rapt look of absorption had given way to one of narrow-eyed but unmistakable approval. ‘Nothing,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Then?’

‘Your breasts.’ He dipped his dark head to flick his tongue tantalisingly against the champagne lace which was stretched taut over one nipple. ‘They’ve changed.’

‘Have they?’ she questioned lazily as she allowed him to unclip the bra, so that her breasts sprang free into his waiting hands and he immediately began to caress them.

‘Mmm. They’re lusher, fuller—they look...’

Triss froze as the meaning of his words seeped into her addled brain. Any minute now and he would guess the reason for the change—that she had suckled his baby for the past five months.

But Cormack did not seem to be in the mood for any guessing games—in fact there seemed to be only one thing that he was in the mood for, and he shifted uncomfortably before taking her resolutely by the hand.

‘Where’s the bedroom?’ he demanded, in a voice laden with the heated fragility of sexual tension.

Triss wanted him so much that she could not even summon up the simple co-ordination to lift her hand and point to the far door. ‘Over th-there,’ she whispered falteringly.

Cormack had always been a man to make instant decisions, and there wasn’t a trace of doubt on his face as he led her over to the door and pushed it open with all the force of a barnstorming hero from a stage musical.

He didn’t wait, pause, look at her, question her, quiz her or try to reason with her. He simply pushed her down onto the bed and then followed as if it was his every right to do so. And he kissed her and kissed her until the need in her grew unbearable.

‘Cormack, please—’ Was that really her voice? Triss wondered. That husky, sensual pleading sound—was she making it?

‘Please what?’

‘You know what!’

‘No, I don’t,’ he growled as his teeth made provocative little mock-bites on her earlobe. ‘Not unless you tell me!’

She sensed that if she put into words what she wanted him to do to her, then she might give away how much she feared she still cared for him—despite all her vows and determination to remain immune to the manipulative rogue!

So where did that leave her?

Vulnerable, that was where.

Now he had freed the rest of the buttons of her dress so that it flapped right open, revealing the high-cut champagne lace panties which matched her bra. She brought her knees up instinctively to cover her bare belly, but from the renewed darkening of his eyes she saw that the movement had excited him even more.

‘Beatrice,’ he groaned. ‘You’re so lovely. Come here and let me love you.’

And that was her downfall. ‘Come here and let me love you,’ he had said, and Triss allowed herself the foolish luxury of believing him. She went into his arms like an animal seeking refuge from the elements. There she was warm and safe and cosseted.

And very turned on, too. Especially with the flat of his hand roving over her stomach like that.

‘Is that good?’ he murmured.

If she wasn’t going to fight him, she was going to jolly well enjoy him! ‘You know it’s good,’ she answered, on a protesting sigh of enjoyment.

‘Do I?’ He smiled against her neck.

‘Yes.’ Her voice sounded slurred as she began to unbuckle the belt of his jeans, and she felt him shudder where her fingers grazed the taut muscle of his abdomen.

‘God, that feels like I’ve just died and gone to heaven,’ he sighed.

‘Well, don’t die just yet,’ she teased him.

‘Not if you carry on doing that—’

‘This?’ she whispered provocatively as she began to jerk the protesting zip down.

‘Triss, sweetheart,’ he moaned. ‘Your enthusiasm I love—but if you could find it in your heart to be a little more gentle with me...’

She saw immediately what he meant, and it made her feel strangely shy to be confronted by the very obvious signs of how much he wanted to make love. She found that her fingers had started to falter, and that her cheeks had become stained with a mixture of desire and embarrassment.

She looked down to find that the black leather of his jeans was stretched almost indecently over his arousal, and she suddenly felt an overwhelming need to have him deep inside her.

She felt her body stir into life with the soft, silken rush of desire—instinctively reacting to him in a way she had been half afraid she might have forgotten for ever. But oh, thank heavens, she hadn’t.

She felt tears prick the backs of her eyes and found her body trembling uncontrollably, and Cormack must have felt it too, for he halted the slow caress of his lips around the curved line of her jaw to look down at her questioningly.

‘What is it, sweetheart? Are those tears I can see?’

She turned her head away. ‘No,’ she managed, on a broken little gulp.

He turned her head back very firmly. ‘Yes,’ he contradicted her. ‘And what are they for?’

‘You’ll laugh...’

But he shook his head unhesitatingly. ‘Oh, no, I won’t,’ he told her grimly. ‘Believe me when I tell you that I’ve never felt less like laughing in my life.’

Did that mean he wasn’t enjoying himself? Triss found herself wondering nervously, in spite of her emotional state. Wouldn’t it be terrible if he decided to stop?

‘Tell me, Triss,’ he urged softly. ‘Please.’

‘It sounds so stupid to say it...’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

‘It’s just that this—this feels like the first time all over again,’ she admitted helplessly, and then could have kicked herself for leaving herself so raw and exposed. ‘For me, anyway!’ she finished, with a small sniff of defiance.

‘For me too,’ he told her gently, his gaze very steady.

She shook her head from side to side. ‘You’re just saying that!’ she objected. ‘You’ve had so many women, Cormack, that you probably can’t even remember what the first time was like!’

‘Yes.’ He frowned down at her and his mouth thinned into a critical line. ‘You always did have a rather over-active imagination where my sex life was concerned.’

‘But you’re surely not denying—?’

‘That I’ve had other lovers apart from you, Triss? Oh, no, sweetheart, I’m not denying that. How could I? But the reality is a lot duller than you might think. Or do you imagine that I experience the same kind of mind-blowing reaction to every woman as I do to you? Well? Do you?’

Triss shrugged restlessly, the directness of his gaze allowing her to acknowledge that in bed, at least, what they had shared had been unique. ‘No,’ she admitted quietly. ‘I guess not.’

‘And I certainly have not been responsible for the endless list of conquests which you seem to have attributed to me!’ he finished softly, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners in that heart-stoppingly cute way which Triss had always found utterly irresistible. ‘Do you understand that, Triss?’ he quizzed softly.

At that precise moment, Triss felt that she had been lured so far into his web of enchantment that all she could do was nod dumbly.

‘So...’ He kissed the tip of her nose, but she could see the strain of longing which showed on his face. ‘Are we going to ruin this by dragging up boring and familiar old arguments?’ he queried softly. ‘Or are we going to make love?’

It had always been the same. On the one hand Triss was appalled by the outspoken way he came out with things like that...

And on the other?

On the other she thought he was nothing short of wonderful. Still, she realised despairingly. After all this time, the effect he had on her eclipsed just about every other feeling.

Cormack was a man of action. He saw. He asked. He wanted. He took.

And sometimes she took too.

She opened her eyes very wide; their faces were only inches apart. ‘We’re going to make love,’ she told him.

‘Well, thank God for that,’ he murmured.

Was that triumph she read in the light which flared briefly from the narrowed blue eyes? Suddenly Triss didn’t care. She needed Cormack now as never before, to fill this great emptiness inside her.

And afterwards?

Afterwards didn’t matter. She would accept the pain if she could just taste the pleasure one last time.

‘Cormack—’ she said, but she could hear the tremor in her voice and she recognised how tense she still was.

‘Shh,’ he soothed, and gathered her in his arms—not to begin removing her clothes, as she might have expected, but instead to lay her head against his chest, and to stroke her hair in that rhythmical way of old.

It was both comforting and sensual, and Triss felt all the tension slowly leaving her body. ‘Does it feel strange?’ she ventured.

‘What?’ His voice was deep and reflective. ‘Having you in my arms again?’

Triss bit her lip as she told herself firmly not to start wishing that things were different—they weren’t, and that was a fact of life. ‘You stroking my hair—only there’s hardly any hair to stroke!’

She could hear the gentle amusement which softened his voice. ‘It’s interesting,’ he mused. ‘I can feel the shape of your head—and it’s a very beautifully shaped head, I might add.’

‘Is it?’ she asked, ridiculously pleased.

‘Mmm. Nearly as beautiful as your back.’ He moved his hands down to illustrate the point, and the strong fingers began to caress and massage her back through the linen of her dress.

Triss wriggled into the warmth of him, aware that her body was beginning to react to him again. Cormack was very astute, she acknowledged—not for the first time. He had instinctively sensed her apprehension. And he was a master at slowing the pace right down when he needed to.

At least, she had no other lover to compare him with, but her instinct told her that no one could better Cormack Casey when it came to making love.

She had no idea how long they lay there, but she could pinpoint exactly the moment when she began to want him to do something more than just idly stroke at her back like that—much as she liked it. She began to move restlessly against him, but he did not take up her invitation.

Boldly she raised her head and began to seek the smooth curve of his jaw with her mouth, momentarily stilling as she felt the first rough graze of his chin.

‘You need a shave,’ she murmured automatically.

‘I had a shave first thing. And don’t pretend, Triss. You like to feel my face rasping roughly against you, don’t you? You like it best when it scrapes that silken skin hidden at the tops of your long legs. That exquisite contrast between your soft femininity and my—’

‘Hard masculinity?’ she interrupted, and let her hand brush fleetingly against the rock-like throb of his desire, thrilled to see his eyes close immediately in almost pained rapture.

‘Triss!’ he gasped.

‘Mmm?’ she purred.

He had clearly decided that he had exercised enough restraint, for he simply knelt up on the bed, peeled his grey cashmere sweater over his head and flung it carelessly over his shoulder like a seasoned stripper, treating Triss to the first glimpse of his magnificent bare torso.

Now it was her turn to gasp. He looked harder, somehow, and leaner and... It was difficult to describe, but after fourteen Cormack-starved months he seemed more vital than she could remember, and Triss forced herself to blot out the question of why she had not fought harder to keep him...

He gave an arrogant smile at her wide-eyed reaction and then turned his attention to the linen dress. ‘Take it off,’ he instructed softly.

Triss swallowed. Her co-ordination was shot to pieces, and even while her body was crying out for his possession her intellect despised this mindless yearning which Cormack had always been able to produce in her.

She shook her head, and, even though she had cut her hair off fourteen months ago, at that moment she desperately missed the thick red tresses which would have tumbled over her face at this point. She doubted her ability to breathe right now—let alone take her dress and knickers off! ‘No!’

‘No?’ he questioned, curiosity quietening his deep, lilting voice. ‘Want me to do it?’

Her hazel eyes flashed resentful green fire at him. ‘You know I do—damn you!’

He laughed softly as he began to pull the linen dress down her arms and then dropped it carelessly to the floor.

‘That dress cost me a fortune!’ she felt duty-bound to inform him.

He shrugged. ‘You wasted your money, sweetheart. A body like yours should wear as little as possible. Like now.’ His eyes narrowed and darkened with a fleeting look of perplexity as his gaze raked hungrily over her lace-clad body. ‘Dear God, Triss,’ he breathed, and she had never heard his voice sound quite so unsteady before. ‘Whatever you’ve done to yourself, I like it, sweetheart. I like it a lot.’

What would he say, Triss wondered as she closed her eyes to conceal her secret from him, if she flippantly announced that having his baby had been the prescription for giving her the curves she had always longed for, but which, paradoxically, had probably put paid to her modelling career for ever? ’D-do you?’ she stammered.

‘Mmm...’

But Triss could detect the oddest note in his voice, something she had never heard before, and her lashes flew open to find that the blue eyes were searing into her like sharp, piercing arrows, an unmistakable query in their lapis lazuli depths.

‘What is it, Triss?’ he questioned softly, and the tone of that question was a close approximation of the way he used to speak to her in those early days, when she had been certain that he loved her—before schedules and jealousy and scheming women had left their indelible scars on their relationship.

‘Tell me,’ he prompted softly.

And even while she knew that this was her opportunity to tell him about Simon she also knew that she was not going to take it.

For Triss was a woman as well as a mother. And for the last fourteen months she had quashed every womanly desire in her body with all the ruthlessness of a road-builder chopping down trees.

‘Triss?’

‘I need you,’ she whispered, and that was not a lie, simply an evasion. And thank God it seemed enough for him to stop probing any further, for he gave her a hard, assessing smile as he contradicted her brutally. ‘You want me, Triss—there is a difference, you know.’

She opened her mouth to protest, but it was too late, for he was lowering his dark head to capture her parted lips with his own and she could have wept with the beauty of that kiss. She was lost in it, drowning in it, the reality surpassing even her memories of his kisses—and she had thought that she had exaggerated those.

But no. They said that your memory could play tricks, and hers must have been about as devious as it was possible to be, because nothing, nothing could have prepared her for the great, swamping surge of feeling which that kiss produced.

‘C-Cormack,’ she gasped, unable to stop herself as she put her hands up to his shoulders to pull him right down on top of her. She no longer cared how hungry or how desperate she might seem to him, because right now she was being controlled by a force far stronger than the idea that perhaps a woman should not behave this way. Well, this woman did!

‘Triss!’ he groaned as their bodies collided—hers so soft and pliant, his so hard and unyielding. ‘For God’s sake, Triss—slow down!’

‘I can’t!’ It was almost a sob. ‘I can’t!’ As she began to pull the smooth, sleek leather down over his buttocks she felt his hardness grow even more potent, and he ground his hips frenziedly against her, as if he could not stop himself.

‘Dear God!’ she heard him exclaim, and if her hunger was out of control, then his reaction, too, was frighteningly and beautifully unfamiliar. He levered himself up onto his elbows and stared down at her, his breathing already ragged, his face dark and almost savage, his eyes unrecognisable blackened pools of lust. ‘You want it this way?’ he demanded.

‘Yes.’ She trembled as he lowered his mouth to kiss the curve of her jaw, and then reality hit her like a sharp blow as she remembered the repercussions of their last encounter. ‘Cormack,’ she whispered.

‘Mmm?’

‘I don’t want to get—pregnant...’ Like the night when Simon had been conceived.

But then she had been foolish and hopeful and naive. Believing that Cormack intended to resume their relationship, and still so in love with him that she had not given contraception a second thought. With far-reaching consequences...

He uttered something soft as he pulled a small packet out of the back pocket of his jeans and impatiently ripped it open.

Triss found herself alternating between despair that she was allowing this to happen to her, when all it was going to do was remind her of what she was missing, and agitation in case it didn’t happen.

‘Want to put it on for me?’ he whispered provocatively, but Triss shook her head again.

Apart from the fact that her hands were shaking too much to be of any use, it would be much too poignant to do something which would remind her so much of past intimacies. When every bit of him had been hers to explore as she pleased.

Sadness and frustration combined to make her body writhe impatiently beneath his, and she heard his soft groan as he moved fractionally away from her to slide the condom on.

But still Triss wouldn’t let up. She scraped her fingernails with soft, clawing movements over the hard, high curves of his buttocks, and he made a sound midway between a groan of despair and a low laugh of pleasure.

‘You know what’s going to happen if you keep on doing that, don’t you, sweetheart?’

‘Yes.’

‘This?’ And he moved his hand down, slipping his fingers inside her panties to find her so ready for him that it seemed to take a huge effort of will for him to speak another word.

‘This?’ he asked unsteadily as his fingers began to move against her.

She bucked beneath his touch, her head falling back against the pillow. ‘Yes!’ she almost sobbed. ‘Yes!‘

He ripped the panties apart without compunction, at the same time lowering his head to her breast, tearing at the thin, flimsy lace of her brassiere with his teeth. And, just when she thought she might die with the pleasure of it, Triss realised that with his other hand he was freeing himself, that he wasn’t even going to bother taking his trousers off...

‘C-Cormack?’

But it did not sound like Cormack who answered her. ‘You wanted it this way, sweetheart,’ he said, in a voice grim and distorted with passion, and then he thrust right into her, filling her with his potency as he began to move with the rhythm which was as old as time itself.

She had never known him so out of control before, but that excited her even more.

It all happened so quickly that Triss barely had time to revel in his possession before the sweet waves began to wash over her, and as her body began to convulse she felt Cormack’s orgasm too—and how she wished that he wasn’t wearing a condom. Right at that moment, some primitive yearning made her long to feel the wetness of his seed as it spilled inside her.

Afterwards she lay naked in his arms, and a deep sense of sadness and despair flowed through her as she acknowledged how perfectly compatible they seemed to be in bed.

In a way, it might be easier if they weren’t. If she weren’t so fiercely attracted to him—and he to her—then he would not have started stroking her neck in the sitting room. And she would have remained immune to him even if he had.

And they would not now be lying in each other’s arms, listening to the sounds of their breathing and their heartbeats gradually slowing down, like two athletes at the end of a race. He raised his head and Triss was taken aback, hardly recognising the shaken and dazed expression she saw on his face.

‘Wow,’ he said softly.

Triss stifled a groan, just thankful that she had not built herself up to expect tender words from him. Because, while ‘Wow’ could reasonably be taken as testimony that Cormack had enjoyed himself, it wasn’t a word which was even remotely caring.

And she still had to tell him about Simon.

Fatigue washed through her as she went over the words she had rehearsed over and over in her mind for weeks now, and it was something of a relief when the emotional strain finally took its toll of her body and she allowed her eyelids to drift down.