BARELY fifteen minutes later Vanessa was numbly allowing herself to be put into the passenger seat of Benedict’s BMW.
Even while a detached part of her brain despised herself for her meekness she seemed unable to fight the old sense of helplessness that had come flooding back at his final verbal thrust on the dance-floor.
When he had taken her back to the table, propelling her blind progress with an iron hand in the middle of her back, Richard had instantly been concerned.
‘Vanessa? What is it? You look as white as a sheet!’
‘I feel ill,’ Vanessa had replied thickly, her dark eyes unconsciously pleading. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Of course; let me get the bill—’ Richard had risen to his feet, extending an anxious hand only to find her moved firmly beyond his grasp.
‘No need to rush, Wells. I’ll take her home with me. No sense in your making an unnecessary trip. Say goodnight to Richard, Vanessa.’
Even through the veil of her shock Vanessa had sensed the deep satisfaction in the man beside her as he began to draw her away from the table. He was enjoying thwarting all Richard’s expectations of a romantic end to the evening.
‘Goodnight, Richard,’ she’d repeated mechanically.
A scandal has wings... Vulture’s wings. She could feel them beating over her defenceless head.
Only when they’d reached the BMW parked on the gravel by some huge pohutukawa trees did Vanessa summon the presence of mind to protest. ‘I had a coat—’
‘We’ll pick it up some other time. They’ll keep it safe. Here, take this if you’re cold.’ He shouldered out of his white jacket, placing it around her trembling shoulders, enveloping her in his warmth and male scent. He opened the door and tucked her fluid skirt over her thighs when it slipped sideways as she swung her legs inside.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked as he got in beside her and switched on the headlights.
‘Yes,’ she clipped, looking through the front windscreen at the way the lights were blurred by the faint mist that was drifting in from the Firth of Thames.
He swore under his breath. ‘Damn it, stop looking like that. If he really means that much to you I’ll take you back inside!’
The rawness in his tone pierced her numbness.
‘Who?’ She turned her head. His white shirt shimmered in dimness, the dark tie a slash across his throat; what she could see of his expression was tight and angry.
He gave a coldly exultant laugh at her blank puzzlement. ‘No, he doesn’t, does he?’
He leaned closer to her, so that she could see the fierce glitter in his eyes. ‘What is it you’re thinking about, then, Vanessa? Where’s all that glorious fight gone? What are you hiding? Or should I say, what is it you’re hiding from?’
That jolted her. Fight? Dear God, she was just beginning to realise how weaponless she was where he was concerned. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’
‘Don’t! Don’t lie to me!’ he cut across her sharply. ‘I’ve had enough of it. You know, I always wondered what it was that made you bury your personality under all those layers of stifling pseudo-obedience...”Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.” And don’t hand me that crap about being content with your job. Maybe you were once, but since the judge died you’ve enjoyed ruling the roost here by yourself too long and too much to relinquish your independence easily to me or to anyone else. I think you’re only just beginning to discover your potential. You want something more out of life, but for some reason you’re too afraid to reach out and take it—’
She felt too battered to fend off his quiver of questions; she could only stonewall. ‘Not everyone has your single-minded ambition—’
‘Had,’ he corrected ominously. ‘You’ll be pleased to note I’m rapidly diversifying my interests. At least I look to the future rather than the past for my solutions. That’s why you prefer to steep yourself in history, because it’s safe, isn’t it, Vanessa? No surprises. History can’t hurt you. Only what happens in the present can do that.’
She gave a short, painful laugh. What was in the past could very well hurt you, haunt you; she was living proof of the fact.
Her hand crept to her throat, pressing there to halt the rise of burning bile.
A scandal has wings... How aptly that described the way that lies flew from lip to lip, like the innocent childish whispering game, where the distortion of the original message as it progressed further from the source resulted in great amusement. Except that there had been nothing innocent or amusing in the vicious distortions spread about Vanessa. They had had a very serious intent—to destroy her reputation and undermine her credibility.
Unexpectedly his voice gentled. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you with that stupid threat. You must know that it was only my anger talking. I would never betray you like that. I don’t want a scandal any more than you do; I enjoy my privacy too much. You can tell me anything...anything at all. I won’t be shocked...’
She almost responded to that soft, enticing invitation, almost weakened, almost trusted him, but then she looked into his eyes, saw the ruthless curiosity there, and instinctively shrank from it. For a moment, in his place, she saw other hungry eyes, avid for her version of ‘the truth’, promising justice but delivering whatever served them best.
‘I won’t be shocked’. No, given his worldly sophistication he probably wouldn’t be, but the sordid little story still had the power to shock Vanessa, to make her feel again that writhing self-contempt and crippling sense of vulnerability.
‘I feel ill,’ she said through stiff lips.
‘Vanessa—’
‘If you don’t get me home I’ll probably be sick in the car,’ she said with bitter relish and he hastily turned the keys in the ignition, expressing his frustration with a loud gunning of the engine as he pulled out into the road.
‘Don’t think this is the end of it, Flynn,’ he brooded as they surged forward into the darkness.
‘Make up your mind,’ she muttered sullenly.
‘What do you mean?’
She risked a glance at his dark profile. His hearing was as acute as his perception. ‘You call me Vanessa when you want something and Flynn to threaten me. To put me in my place.’
‘I have yet to discover what your place is,’ he said cryptically. ‘Now, be a good girl and shut up while I concentrate. It’s been a bloody long night.’
She remembered then where he had been and felt a small flicker of reviving malice. ‘Who beat you for the award?’
A flash of light from an oncoming car revealed a sardonic curl to his lip. ‘That pleases you, doesn’t it—the thought that I didn’t win?’
‘Of course not.’
‘One day I’m going to teach you to stop telling me lies,’ he clipped. ‘You like the idea of my pride being trampled in the dust. For your information I didn’t nominate myself, Dane did. And I didn’t lose.’
‘But you said—’
‘I didn’t say anything; your prancing stud made the assumptions. I told you he was a bit thick.’
‘You can’t blame him!’ She flew to Richard’s defence. ‘You didn’t appear to be in a very celebratory mood.’
‘I was until I found my butler hiding under his table,’ he said grimly, ‘and discovered why.’
Vanessa shivered at the reminder and hugged his jacket more tightly around her. He had a one-track mind. ‘If you won, why on earth did you leave early?’
‘What should I have done? Stayed to be smothered under the avalanche of sycophantic flattery that goes hand in hand with these things? Is that what you think is important to me? It isn’t the first award I’ve won and it won’t be the last. I know exactly how much and how little they really mean.’
Vanessa would have taken issue with that breathtaking piece of arrogance except that she knew that in his case it was justifiable. She had seen a photograph of his array of plaques and awards in one of the Architectural Digests and read his offhand comment that winning was ‘good for business’.
‘But your plans. You were going to stay overnight at the apartment—’
‘I changed my mind—I know you think I’m rigid and inflexible but I am capable of acting spontaneously on occasion,’ he said irritably. ‘Maybe I just wanted to celebrate my victory with someone who had no axe to grind, about whose opinion I might actually give a damn!’
There was a fraught silence while Vanessa dared to consider what that meant. He couldn’t be talking about her? While she sought for a delicate way of finding out he made another impatient sound.
‘I might have known you wouldn’t be impressed. I suppose you’d prefer to think of me as a valiant loser. As a disappointed man I’m less of a threat, an object of compassion rather than any positive emotion.’
‘Don’t be silly—’
‘Why not? I’ve already made a fool of myself over you once.’
‘This is ridiculous—’
‘I agree, totally absurd.’ He stopped the car with a skidding jerk and unclipped his seatbelt to turn towards her.
She stiffened, fighting off a dangerous pleasure, all her senses focused on the man now lifting his arm to rest along the back of her seat. He had come back because of her. Because of some boyish desire to impress her with his cleverness... Benedict Savage, who took his enormous successes with cynical casualness, had been proudly bearing his honours home on his shield. She moistened her lips and asked nervously, ‘Why have we stopped?’
He was silent for a long moment. Then the furious tension that gripped him seemed to relax. ‘So that I can seduce you on a dark and lonely street, Vanessa; why else?’
His words sent a wave of heat rolling over her. ‘I— Oh!’ She looked out of the window and was mortified to see that they were parked on the gravelled driveway at Whitefield, right before the front door. And she hadn’t even noticed! ‘Oh.’
‘Disappointed?’
She blushed, groping awkwardly for the door-handle and rattling it desperately when she discovered it wouldn’t open.
‘It’s still locked,’ Benedict pointed out.
‘I realise that,’ she said, her damp fingers slipping in panic on the lock as she tried to disengage it.
‘Vanessa—’
She heard the rustle of his movement and whirled round in her seat, only to discover that she was still trapped by her seatbelt and that he was leaning across her to deal deftly with the recalcitrant lock.
‘What?’ To make up for the sharpness of her response she subsided in her seat, reassured by his obvious willingness to let her go.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what the award was for?’
‘Oh, yes—what was it for?’ she asked hurriedly, feeling ashamed of the self-absorption that had led her to misjudge his motives so blatantly badly.
‘Are you really interested?’
Typical of the male injured ego—he was going to make her work for his forgiveness. ‘Of course.’
‘I thought you didn’t like my work.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Dane. When he was here last year you told him that you thought the Serjeant Building was a boring monolith, exhibiting the kind of concrete-slab mentality that made modern cities universally the same.’
‘He just showed me a photo and asked my opinion,’ she said weakly, remembering the amusement the other man had displayed when she had unwisely abandoned her customary reserve around her employer’s guests and proffered an honest rather than diplomatic response. ‘I didn’t realise you had designed it.’
Benedict didn’t seem in the least offended. ‘One of my earliest commissions, when I was still working for my father’s firm. He had a stern rule that one supplied clients with what they wanted, not what the architect thought they should want. In that case the client was a hidebound reactionary who thought that Frank Lloyd Wright was a dangerous lunatic. That building fitted him like a second skin.’
‘I don’t mind some of your later designs,’ Vanessa said comfortingly.
‘Thank you for that damningly faint praise,’ he said wryly. ‘I realise commercial architecture is largely a soulless business...precisely because it’s such a big business, cost-driven to the point that anything new and untried or unusual is usually feared. Plans often have to be approved by a board, and committees are notoriously more conservative and difficult to please than individuals. Only those with real foresight, who want to make a permanent impact on the landscape rather than a smooth turn-around profit on construction, are interested in allowing an architect full artistic freedom. That’s why I left my father’s firm and branched out with Dane. I wanted to create a separate professional identity for myself...concentrate on smaller commissions calling for greater individualism. I still do the big—’ a taunting semi-bow to Vanessa ‘—”boring” bread-and-butter ones, but these days I supplement the stodge with a good leavening of the off-beat. The award was for a private residence at Piha. Would you like to see it?’
‘Go to Piha, you mean?’ Vanessa was startled.
His white teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘I was talking about something a little more convenient—the plans are up in my studio.’
‘Oh. Yes, that would be very interesting,’ she murmured, trying and failing to imagine what kind of houses Benedict Savage would design.
Palatial homes for millionaires and pillars of society, no doubt—they were probably the only ones who could afford his magnificent fees. But at least his dangerous mood seemed to have evaporated now that she had given his ego room to flex. ‘I’d like to see it, some time when it’s convenient...’
His eyes glittered as if he sensed he was being ‘handled’. ‘I’d better put the car in the garage. Would you like to open up the house? And here, you may as well take this.’
He scooped up something from the back seat and thrust a cool, metallic object into her hands. She found herself looking down at a slender, stylised sculpture. ‘Oh, is this your award? It’s very nice.’
She heard the smile in his voice. ‘Yes, very nice. Run on in, there’s quite a chill outside. Have you got your key?’
‘I’m not a child.’ She opened her door to get out and found herself pulled up with a jerk that made her gasp with pain.
‘Here, allow me.’ Kindly, Benedict freed her from her seatbelt and she scrambled out in a flurry of black crêpe de Chine, still clutching his jacket around her, conscious of his chuckle pursuing her up the steps.
She was acting like a nervous teenager for no reason at all, she simmered as she flicked on the lights in the foyer and stairwell. He must have known that she thought he was going to pounce on her. But then, what was she supposed to think after the things he’d said to her at the restaurant? Beneath the challenging interplay of words there had run a definite current of sexual awareness, heightened by his obviously vivid recollection of their lovemaking.
Unconsciously she placed a hand over her flat stomach. He had actually sounded quite smug when he’d raised the question of pregnancy, as if the idea of her bearing his child wasn’t at all dismaying. In little more than a week he had invaded her body and wrapped himself around her consciousness to such an extent that the certainties that had been her strength and her protection over the last few years had begun to crumble. She was losing control and somehow she had to find a way to regain it.
She put the award carefully on the hall table beside the telephone after studying the engraved plague and was still hovering there uncertainly when Benedict slipped through the front door, which she had left ajar. He must have parked the car with remarkable speed, she thought as he closed the door behind him and locked it, then leant back against the stripped-wood panels just looking at her.
She moved restlessly under that steady gaze. ‘I was just wondering whether you wanted me to serve you coffee—’ She faltered as he pushed away from the door and began to walk slowly towards her. Automatically she backed away, until she reached a wall and could retreat no further.
It took all her will-power not to shrink back as he came to an unsmiling halt in front of her and reached out to unhitch his jacket from her shoulders with a single finger and draw it away. The slippery silk lining slid down over her bare arms like a caress. He tossed the jacket over the elaborately carved newel post at the bottom of the stairs and casually leaned against the wall, his hand planted beside her tense shoulder.
‘Now who’s trying to put whom in their place?’ he mocked softly. ‘After tonight you won’t ever dare call me sir again. Get used to it, Vanessa.’
‘Used to what?’ Her eyes were slightly higher than his but she felt small and surrounded.
‘The new relationship between us. If you’re going to run this inn for me, you’re going to have to do it with authority. You have to decide whether you want to be a butler for the rest of your life or whether you’re ready to move on and up.’
‘Me? Run the inn?’ Vanessa said faintly, pressing herself back against the supporting wall to try and escape the heat of his body.
He had loosened the black tie on the way in from the car and unbuttoned the top pearl stud of his shirt. The white pleated shirt was so thin, she could see the shadow of his torso outlined through the silk. His chin was dark with regrowth. He looked tired, disordered, and disturbingly sexy. It was incredible, but this man, with his only mildly good looks and his spectacles and his studied emotional colourlessness, harboured a smouldering sexuality that was as electrifying as it was astonishing. Vanessa was bewildered. Why had she never seen it before? And why, now that she could see it was so obvious, wasn’t he smothered in women wherever he went?
His eyebrows rose. ‘Isn’t that what you had in mind when you suggested a manager?’
She shook her head. ‘No, it never occurred to me!’
‘Not even in your secret dreams?’
Her eyes slid away from his. She had no intention of telling him what her secret dreams involved. ‘How could I?’ she asked huskily. ‘I don’t know anything about running a hotel—’
‘The job you’re doing now isn’t so far removed from it,’ he pointed out quietly. ‘You provide accommodation services for my guests, manage staff and purchase supplies. You do accounts and supervise building and maintenance. I think you’d be surprised how well-equipped you are for the job. A small hotel like this needs an intimate, highly individualistic management style, preferably by someone attuned to its unique atmosphere. Who better than you? You love it here, don’t you? Wouldn’t you like to know that you didn’t have to leave? That you could stay on and build it into something that we can both be proud of? If you feel inadequate in any way, there are always courses you can take to improve your management skills...’
It was such a powerfully seductive offer that Vanessa was afraid to question the motives behind it.
‘Why me?’
‘Because I’m already used to having you around.’
‘Oh.’
She was convenient. That hurt and she lowered her lashes against him. From the corner of her eye she watched his free hand move up to finger the velvety loop on the open edge of the neckline which lay against her collarbone, his knuckles almost brushing her chin, and he continued, softly chiding, ‘You should be flattered. I don’t let people into my life very easily. My mother elevated emotional manipulation to an art form, and to this day I still have a natural disinclination to trust my feelings for fear they’ll be used against me, particularly where women are concerned. I think we’re alike in that respect—slow to trust—which is why I’m willing to forgive you for playing games with my head. I realise you were only trying to protect yourself. But I’m offering you a unique opportunity here and the beauty of it is, you don’t even have to leave home to take advantage of it.’
His finger counted down to the next empty loop and the next, not touching anything but the fabric and yet managing to make her feel as if her skin was being brushed by a thin trickle of fire. At her sharply indrawn breath he looked up from his fascinating tracery and murmured persuasively, ‘I do trust you, you see. Will you trust me? If not as a man then at least as a businessman. I’ll be totally honest with you, Vanessa. I’d very much like to have you back in my bed, but neither offer is contingent upon your accepting the other. Whether we become lovers or not has no bearing on the fact that I think you’re the perfect person to run the inn. I won’t make it difficult for you if you choose to make profit with me rather than love, and I certainly won’t attempt any emotional manipulation. Ask Dane—I might not like losing, but I’m graceful in defeat.’
His finger flicked down the rest of the open loops to wedge into the fabric V where the bodice was fastened between her breasts and he paused before adding slyly, ‘Although you may have to bear with me a little; I’m so rarely defeated that I might be a little rusty about my graces...’
Her mouth came open but nothing issued forth from her parted lips. She was very conscious that the boning of her bodice had made wearing a bra unnecessary and wondered if he had guessed. Her breasts rose and fell, the inner slopes caressing his relaxed finger. He watched the expressions flitting across her face with a faint smile and delicately curved the other fingers of his hand under the smooth edge of the bodice, rubbing his thumb lightly over the top of the fabric. The backs of his fingers moved delicately against the silky swell of her breast in a secret caress that they were both intensely aware of. Only millimetres away from his touch, the soft, satiny peak tightened in an agony of anticipation. Blood rushed to her head, making her feel dizzy with unimagined pleasure.
‘This is a very elegant, sexy dress. It looks as if it’s melting over you,’ he purred, bending a knee so that it touched hers through the folds of her skirt.
‘I made it myself,’ she heard herself whisper inanely, thinking that it was what was under the dress that was melting.
‘Resourceful Vanessa.’ His praise curled around her ears and stroked across her senses. ‘Your hands are obviously as quick and clever as your tongue.’
She blushed right down into her cleavage and he laughed huskily, his whisky-warm breath teasing her mouth.
‘I was complimenting you on your wit, Nessa. What did you think I meant?’
‘Exactly what you wanted me to think,’ she said, simultaneously hot with excitement and shivery with fear.
Benedict probably thought she was able to hold her own with this kind of dangerous sexual banter but Vanessa knew she was already in over her head. The only other time she had tried it she had been badly hurt. What had started out as a seduction in which she had willingly participated had become little better than rape when Julian St Clair had become brutally impatient with her inexperience. Her slowness to respond to his physical cues had made him lose his temper and abandon any further attempts to arouse her.
He had taken what he wanted and left her bleeding and in pain, telling her flatly that virgins were more trouble than they were worth. This despite the fact that her innocence was what had attracted him in the first place. He had deliberately set out to make her fall in love with him and then abandoned her as just another of life’s challenges that hadn’t lived up to his jaded expectations.
‘I don’t know what happened between us so you shouldn’t tease me about it,’ she said uneasily. ‘It’s not fair.’
His fingers stilled their delicate by-play. ‘Does that worry you?’
She swallowed, pulling her mind back to the present. Benedict wasn’t anything like Julian. For one thing he was older and more discriminating, a man who had achieved brilliant success on his own terms, not a spoiled, idle playboy trading on his family name. And he was as patient as he was tenacious, as demanding on himself as on others. He wouldn’t hurt her, not physically, anyway...
‘Of course it worries me...’
He sighed, and to her aching disappointment withdrew his hand from her dress. He removed his glasses and hung them carelessly from his hip pocket, then curved his fingers around her throat as he looked deep into her eyes. Once again, she succumbed to the spell of his mesmerising gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured meaninglessly as he applied gentle pressure to the nape of her neck, drawing her down to his mouth.
She couldn’t have resisted even if she had wanted to; the mysterious shadows in those deep blue eyes were simply too alluring. They made her want to know who the man really was behind his self-controlled mask, to find out whether the strange, shivery sensations that radiated through her body at his lightest touch were real or merely the illusion of desire. She forgot that he was her employer, that there were very sound and sensible reasons why this should not be allowed to happen. She drifted into his embrace with a thrilling knowledge of her own daring. He hadn’t been disappointed in her as a lover... She had obviously pleased him and now it was time to discover if he pleased her!
It wasn’t the fierce, hungry kiss sizzling with passion that Vanessa had eagerly expected, but a long, slow kiss of silky exploration...so long that she nearly suffocated in sweetness before he released her to breathe, only to draw her in again, to taste her with luscious bites of erotic pleasure, his teeth sinking into her swollen lower lip, his tongue unfurling inside her to stroke and linger. A lovely, sensual lethargy dragged at her lower limbs. Her arms slid around his waist to cling to the only solid support in a world of dissolving bliss. She had never known there were so many ways to kiss.
‘Why are you sorry?’ she whispered in blurred tones as his mouth shifted to the side of her throat and slid lower to the little hollow where her pulse fluttered madly. Her breasts were hurting against his chest, tight and unbelievably tender. When was he going to touch her there again?
Instead his arm slid around her back and he drew her away from the wall as if they were dancing, his mouth still moving against her long, slender neck as he swayed towards the stairs. ‘Come with me...’
‘Where?’ It was a dreamy request, without force or curiosity. She knew where he was taking her. Up to heaven in his arms.
‘You’ll see...’
He wafted her slowly up into the darkness of the upper floor, stair by stair, kiss by kiss, as if he was afraid that if he let her go for a moment the sensual spell he was weaving would be broken, but, instead of ending up in his bedroom, when he finally wrenched himself away with a soft groan of regret she found herself blinking owlishly in the harsh fluorescent lighting of his studio.
Dazed and trembling, she reached out, but he was already turning away and unrolling something across the draughting-table and clipping the edges flat. His hands, she was glad to see, were shaking as much as hers.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I want you to see this. The perspective drawings that won the award. And photos of the finished house.’
She stared at him incredulously. He wanted to talk about his work, now? ‘Ben...’
‘Please.’ The look he gave her was both searing and pleading. ‘It’s important to me.’ He held out his hand, steady now, and when she took it he drew her hard against his side, his other hand curving possessively over her hip as he firmly directed her attention to the board.
‘You see—it’s built on a steep hillside covered with native bush. For a couple and their three children. They’re both artists. He works with stained glass—that’s why there’s so much used in the design; they wanted a sense of the bush behind drawn inside the house rather than pushed away by four solid walls. And they didn’t have much money, so I had to incorporate a lot of odds and ends that they’d rescued from demolition sites and make sure that a lot of the building work was do-it-yourself capable. What do you think?’
She could hardly think at all, her whole body attuned to the thumb that was stroking her hipbone through the slippery black fabric, but he seemed anxious, so she struggled for a response that would earn his approval. Then, as her interest was caught, she didn’t have to struggle at all.
‘Why, it’s lovely.’ She bent over to study the higgledy-piggledy juxtaposition of shapes, the way the house seem to mimic the uneven growth patterns of the surrounding bush, taking on odd tilts and angles obviously to avoid the necessity for cutting down the mature trees scattered over the site. ‘It’s fantastic!’ She turned dark, astonished eyes to his. ‘You did this?’
‘I should be insulted by that disbelieving look,’ he drawled unsteadily, his expression strangely grave. ‘But yes, I did that, although you’ll notice it’s not signed Savage. I use another professional name for this kind of work, what I call the fun stuff. It’s a way for me to let off steam, to indulge myself and yet not compromise Dane Benedict’s reputation with our conservative corporate clients... although my identity’s no secret in the trade.’
‘What are these here?’ Vanessa was fascinated by the loving intricacy of his detail. Compared to the slick, water-colour washed sketches of his award-winning commercial work that she had seen these were like illustrations rather than designs, maps of the imagination. ‘They look like ladders up the walls. Where do they go? Are these lofts—?’
‘Play-lofts and tunnels between the children’s rooms.’ He gave them a quick, uninterested glance and then deliberately put his hand down over the section she was trying to interpret. ‘Vanessa, I didn’t bring you here to play twenty questions. I just wanted you to see it, that’s all. So that you’d realise that I am capable of being...whimsical and sensitive to interpreting other people’s needs, even if they’re not completely sure about them themselves. I mean, I may come across as a heartless bastard sometimes but—’
‘I never thought you were that—’ Vanessa was driven to protest, the lovely warmth of passion beginning to drain away. Was he trying to let her down lightly? To explain that he had responded to her only because he thought that she had needed the flattery of his desire?
‘Until now.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked hollowly, not wanting to know the answer.
He turned her, holding her at arm’s length by her shoulders, his face grim. ‘Just this: unless you lied about sleeping with Wells or have some other secret lover hidden away, there’s no way you can be pregnant.’
For a moment she was puzzled and then she realised what he was admitting and why he looked so tense, almost anguished.
‘Oh, Benedict, I’m so sorry...’ Had he thought that she would think him less of a man because of it? She stroked his taut mouth with tender compassion and he recoiled as if her finger were tipped in poison.
‘You’re sorry?’
‘Are you quite certain?’ she asked, seeing that she had jolted him with her swift understanding. ‘There’s a lot that doctors can do about sterility these days—’
He dropped his hands from her shoulders, his eyes blazing with cobalt fire. ‘What in the hell are you talking about? I’m not sterile!’
He sounded so furiously certain that Vanessa’s heart squeezed in her chest. ‘You have children?’ She faltered. It had never even occurred to her. Oh, she was so naïve!
‘No, I don’t have children!’ he shouted at her, so furiously offended that she took a step back.
‘Then—then how do you know you’re not sterile?’ she stammered with what she felt was impeccable logic.
‘Because—’ He stopped and uttered a word that made her pinch her mouth primly. ‘I don’t know—all right? But I have no reason to not believe I’m not—’ He ran a hand through his hair in an uncharacteristic gesture of helplessness. ‘Oh, hell, will you stop confusing the damned issue while I’m trying to make a confession?’
‘I’m confusing it?’ Vanessa couldn’t help an involuntary smile, which seemed to infuriate him beyond bearing. She had never seen him so close to losing control. It was quite fascinating.
As she watched, round-eyed, he took a deep, controlling breath and said very, very carefully, ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Vanessa, is that there is not the ghost of a chance that I got you pregnant that night—’ It was a measure of his mood that there wasn’t even the glimmer of amused recognition of his inadvertant pun.
‘Oh?’ Her limited sexual experience sent her imagination haywire. ‘You mean you—er—withdrew...before you...?’
‘No, I didn’t withdraw,’ he snarled. ‘There was nothing for me to have to withdraw from.’
Vanessa looked at him, appalled. Her colour rose, along with her vivid curiosity. ‘You mean we just...did it without actually—?’
‘We didn’t do anything in bed that night!’ he exploded. ‘Correction, we did do something,’ he amended grimly. ‘We slept.’
‘Slept?’
He shrugged, easing the motion down through the rest of his body as if loosening it up for combat.
‘Slept?’ She repeated sharply. It was finally beginning to sink in.
‘Yes, you know, that state of unconsciousness wherein one is completely relax—’
‘We slept!’
He bowed his head, awaiting the storm. It wasn’t long in breaking.
‘Why, you—’ Vanessa rounded on him like a furious tornado. ‘Are you telling me that I didn’t—?’
‘Ravish me? I’m afraid not,’ he said meekly.
‘That you didn’t—?’
‘Ravish you—no.’
‘That we just spent the whole time sleeping! And you expect me to believe that? What do you think I am, an idiot?’ she screeched.
‘No, an innocent.’ He was unwise enough to expand on that. ‘If I’d made love to you that night, Vanessa, believe me you would have been in no doubt of it the next morning. You would have been aching and tender in places I’m too polite to mention—’
‘You—polite?’ she spat. ‘Was it polite to let me think—? You...you bastard!’ She went bright red at what she had thought. How he must have been laughing at her!
‘Tit for tat, Vanessa,’ he pointed out, but Vanessa was in no mood to be fair. Her temper had reached flashpoint and her hand had streaked out and cracked across his face before she even realised her intention.
‘That’s one,’ he said so coolly that she lashed out again, across the other cheek. His head snapped to the side with the force of the fresh blow. Slowly he looked back at her.
‘That’s two.’
She wasn’t foolish enough to make it three but she had a desperate need to goad him out of that infuriating calmness.
‘What are you trying to do, frighten me?’ she sneered, circling him in a swirling of skirts like a black thunderstorm building up static electricity.
He, perversely, seemed to think he had already weathered the worst. He folded his arms across his chest, slowly rotating to follow her prowling progress. ‘I don’t have to. You’re doing a very good job of frightening yourself. I always wondered what you’d look like in a passion. Now I know. You should lose your temper more often.’
She knew he was trying to distract her. ‘And you should be ashamed of yourself!’ she spat, clenching her hands in the soft folds of her skirt. All the thwarted passion of a few minutes ago was now channelled into the relief valve of rage.
‘I think I should be complimented for my honesty,’ he protested. ‘I’ll even admit that I looked and I lusted but the flesh was sadly unwilling.’
Was he trying to tell her that no man would want her, even served up on a platter? She flinched, then rallied furiously. She wasn’t going to let him get away with sexually humiliating her. She had promised herself that no man would ever do that again. ‘It damned well wasn’t unwilling when I woke up,’ she flung at him. ‘You were certainly plenty aroused then.’
He had the gall to flaunt a grin. ‘I’m usually at my best in the mornings,’ he said modestly. ‘And I was probably dreaming about what was to come...so to speak. I had every intention of making love to my luscious satin-wrapped present when I’d slept off my jet-lag. I was very disappointed to find her a figment of my lustful imagination.’
‘You’re disgusting!’ choked Vanessa, coping with a rush of conflicting feelings—relief, embarrassment, forbidden delight...
‘I’m a man.’
‘You’re a pervert!’
‘The perversion would have been if I’d brought you up here and made love to you without telling you that it was our first time together. It wouldn’t have done for us both to discover you were still a virgin—’
‘I’ve made love before!’ she flared defiantly.
‘Good. Then I won’t have to worry about hurting you—’
She shuddered at the painful memory that that evoked, wrapping her arms around her waist and hugging herself in a revealing gesture that made his eyes narrow and his mouth thin.
‘Surely you don’t have the gall to think that I’d let you—’ She choked to a halt as he moved closer, his voice gentling.
‘Not let, Vanessa. Fully participate as a mature adult. Nothing’s changed. You wanted me enough to come this far—’
‘No, I didn’t, I was just curious.’
His mouth thinned still further. ‘Was, and still are. Would you like me to prove it to you, Vanessa? At least I’ve been honest with you. More so than you’ve been with me...’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All this outrage about what I did or didn’t do to you. Isn’t it really a mask for your own guilty feelings? Didn’t it secretly excite you to think about how liberated our lovemaking must have been...neither of us in any state to worry about restraint or inhibition? Weren’t you even a little aroused when you woke up to find me beside you?’
She hugged herself tighter. ‘I was shocked—’
‘Of course you were shocked. But there you were, semi-nude, cuddled up with a naked, aroused man who was completely vulnerable to whatever you chose to do to him. You were curious about me then, too, weren’t you, Vanessa? It never occurred to you that it might have been rape, because subconsciously even then you trusted me. So you didn’t scream. You looked at me instead. You looked at my body. Did you touch me? Did you want to touch me? I would have liked it if you had. I would have liked to have been woken that way, liked it more than anything...’
She couldn’t look at him, turning her back and trying to retrieve her badly fragmented composure. ‘I—’
‘Because I touched you, Vanessa,’ he told her with devastating candour as he moved up behind her.
‘When I got into bed with you I fondled you a little before I drifted off to sleep—your long, gorgeous back and especially that beautiful, rounded bottom.’ His arms came around her body to wrap themselves over hers and gently tug them down to her sides, pressing them there as his voice nuzzled in her hair. ‘It was so irresistible...all bare and warm under that flimsy satin slip, like a delicious, downy peach I wanted to bite into... You were lying on your front so I couldn’t stroke your breasts, but I knew they must be ripe and full because your slip was loose and I could see the luscious swell at the side where your breast was compressed against the bed. I went to sleep thinking about turning you over and cupping them in my hands, finding out how your nipples would taste, whether they were big or small, cherry-pink or—’
‘Stop it!’ she cried faintly, far too late for the protest to be effective.
‘Why, am I turning you on, Vanessa?’ He ran his hands lightly up and down her arms and then, taking her by surprise, spun her around, looking deeply satisfied when he saw her flushed face and cornered eyes, the full lower lip that he had bitten so voluptuously earlier now captured by her own nervous teeth.
He touched her hair with a tenderness that made her eyes sting. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to force you to do anything that you don’t want to. Not tonight, anyway. I won’t rush you but I’m not going to let you deny your feelings, either, or mine. I give you fair warning that I have every intention of fulfilling my fantasies where you’re concerned!’