A Woman To Remember

Now he had the answers.

Or did he?

Just because she’d been married four years ago it didn’t mean that she’d still been married eighteen months ago. There was such a thing as divorce, wasn’t there? Maybe she wasn’t an adulterous little tramp. Maybe there were other reasons why she’d acted the way she had that night—why she’d chosen to disappear while he was asleep, without leaving a trace of her true identity.

And maybe pigs might fly, came the blackly cynical thought.

‘Dr Evans is ready for you now, Mr St Clair.’

Luke schooled his face into what he hoped was a normal expression, snapped the magazine shut and placed it back on the pile in the corner.

Forget her, common sense whispered. She’s bad news.

He stood up and walked over to where the dental nurse was waiting for him in the now open doorway. Her petite prettiness didn’t even register. He no longer felt nervous either. She dominated his mind again, turning his thoughts from the present.

Luke distractedly settled in the dental chair and closed his eyes, his mind whirling with memories. But how could he forget her now? Now that she had a name.

Rachel.

He hadn’t known her name when she’d picked him up at the exhibition that night eighteen months ago. Hadn’t known it the next morning, when he’d woken to find her gone.

Rachel...

It didn’t suit her, he decided viciously.

Oh, it suited the bride in the photograph, but not the sultry feline creature who had undulated into his sight that night. Rachel sounded like a lady—but it had been no lady who’d boldly approached him within seconds of spotting him leaning against a pillar, who’d stolen his drink from his hands and taken a deep swallow, who’d smiled seductively at him over the rim before uttering the most astonishingly forthright proposal he’d ever heard from a woman.

And he’d heard a good few in his time.

The dentist was talking to him as he worked, but Luke didn’t hear a word. He was back at that exhibition, hearing her say those astonishing words again, reliving every moment of that unforgettable but ultimately soul-destroying night.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I HAVE a hotel room nearby,’ she said in a huskily sexy voice, her incredible green eyes locked to his all the while. ‘If you’re as bored as you look, perhaps you’d like to join me there.’

Luke straightened, glad that his drink now rested between those long, elegant fingers with the equally long bronze-tipped nails. Otherwise he would surely have spilt his drink down his front. Though perhaps that might not have been such a bad idea. Things were happening down there which could do with a spot of cooling down.

He stared deep into those exotic green pools, because it was safer than looking at the rest of her. Not that he hadn’t already had a damned good look as she’d slowly sashayed towards him across the gallery floor.

She had a stunning face—exotic perfection framed by a wild tawny blonde mane—but an even more than stunning body. Tall and slender, with high, firm breasts, a riveting cleavage and long, long legs which ran right up to her tiny waist. Or so it seemed.

Dressed a touch obviously for his usual taste in women, her leopardskin-print mini left nothing to the imagination. Hell, if she was wearing anything underneath he couldn’t spot it. The silky material clung like a second skin, the halter-necked style leaving her shoulders and arms bare, the short, short skirt showing an expanse of firm tanned thigh which would do a stripper proud.

This last thought made him wonder what she did do for a living. Though perhaps it was better if he didn’t know.

Normally he was attracted to cool, classy types, sophisticated career women who exuded an understated and challenging sexuality which left it up to him to do the chasing. They sent out silent and very subtle messages for him to follow. They didn’t openly invite, like this bold creature.

‘Are you in the habit of propositioning perfect strangers?’ he drawled, trying not to sound as shocked as he was feeling. Or as aroused.

He told himself that it was because he hadn’t been with a woman since he’d broken up with Tracy a couple of months before. But underneath he knew this wasn’t so. He’d wanted this she-cat the moment he’d set eyes on her.

A slight frown drew her perfectly arched eyebrows close together. ‘You’re American,’ she said.

He could have enlightened her, but something... some indefinable tension which this mistaken conclusion was evoking in her, made him keep his Australian heritage to himself. He’d been told that he’d picked up an American accent, but he hadn’t believed it till that moment.

‘You don’t like Americans?’ he asked, taking the drink back from her suddenly still hands and draining it dry. He had a feeling he might need to be a little drunk to get through this evening.

‘That depends,’ she said, a touch warily. ‘Are you holidaying here? Or staying indefinitely?’

‘Holidaying,’ he said, quite truthfully. But I might stay indefinitely, came the dark thought. If it means I can spend every night with you.

Already he could feel the blood rushing hotly to his loins. Already...

His flesh might have become a painful and obvious embarrassment if he hadn’t been wearing a longer-line sports jacket loosely over casually fitted dark trousers which also had plenty of room. Luke could put up with the discomfort, if it was his alone to contemplate and suffer in private.

He had no intention of letting this feline huntress see that he was ready prey for her animal-like sexuality. As much as he was turned on by her amazingly forward approach and absolutely knockout body, his male ego insisted that he play hard to get for a decent amount of time.

At least a minute, came the drily self-mocking thought.

‘Does that disqualify me?’ he said lazily.

‘On the contrary,’ she murmured, her husky voice rippling down his spine like a mink-gloved hand. ‘I love tourists. Especially tall, dark, handsome ones with sexy black eyes. You are alone, aren’t you? No little wife or girlfriend back at the hotel, or in the States?’

‘I’m so alone,’ he told her, trying to sound cool but feeling anything but, ‘that it’s positively indecent.’

‘Nothing about you is indecent, handsome,’ she murmured. ‘You’re positively gorgeous and positively perfect. Come with me...’

She pried the empty glass out of his suddenly frozen hand and bent to place it on the floor, giving him an uninterrupted view of her quite perfect breasts. Rising again, she smiled a siren’s smile, slid her right hand into his still frozen left and began leading him away, across the upper gallery floor then down the wide white staircase.

The shredded remnants of Luke’s common sense finally burst through his paralysed brain and he ground to a halt, momentarily resisting the hyp- . notic pull of the softly feminine fingers entwined through his.

‘You’re not a hooker, are you?’ came his harsh-sounding question as they faced each other on the stairs.

He could not have mistaken the momentary shock which flared within those gorgeous green eyes, or his own inner shudder of relief. For what would he have done if she’d said that she was?

Still have gone with her, came the appalling admission.

‘My mistake,’ he muttered. ‘Lead on, lover.’ Obviously she was just a good-time girl, out on the tiles for the night. She wanted a one-night standwithout—complications, without strings.

As much as that was not usually his style, Luke could see that it was going to be for tonight. It was no use pretending that he wasn’t bowled over. More than bowled over. She seemed to have bewitched him with the primitive and alluring sexuality which emanated from every pore of her body. It wafted from her in waves, weaving a spell around his senses, teasing his flesh and his imagination, making him wonder what it would be like to spend the night with her.

She kept glancing over her shoulder at him as she drew him down the rest of the stairs and through the crowded foyer, her eyes sometimes smiling invitingly, sometimes seemingly checking that he was still there—as though she too could not believe he’d come with her so readily.

It was those glimpses of unexpected vulnerability which began intriguing Luke. The suspicion that this was not her usual style either began to form in his mind. She looked at him that way one time too many after they’d finally made it outside into the street, and he suddenly whipped her over into a darkened doorway, pulling her against him in a jolting embrace.

Her shocked gasp and almost frightened eyes confirmed his opinion that she was not used to playing such dangerous games. Either that, or she had never run into real trouble before.

‘You little fool,’ he snarled, infuriated by this last thought. ‘Don’t you know the risks you run in going off with a stranger?’

Her chin whipped up, green eyes glinting an answering fury at him. ‘I take it you’ve changed your mind—is that it?’ she snapped. ‘If so, then say so, damn you.’ She began to struggle to free herself from his arms. ‘I have no time for cowards tonight.’

‘Cowards! Why, you little...’ Red spots of fury went off in his brain like flashlights, and before he knew it he’d grasped a large clump of her hair and yanked it back so that her chin tipped up all the more.

Before she could do more than cry out through startled lips, his mouth clamped down over those lips and he was kissing her as he’d never kissed a woman before. With anger, not passion, with a desire to punish and hurt, not seduce.

But seduction was the final result.

His, not hers. For as his tongue drove repeatedly into the depths of her mouth she moaned a moan which moved him as no woman’s moan had ever done before, making him want to protect her, not punish her. Hold, not hurt.

He found it impossible to keep kissing her with such ferocity. His tongue gentled to a series of sinuous slides against hers, his free hand finding the small of her back and pressing inwards. He thrilled to the feel of her sinking weakly against him, then to the sound of another longer, more sensual moan—this one signalling total surrender to his male domination over her body. It brought a dizzying sense of sexual power, and he simply could not wait to have her naked and trembling beneath him.

‘This hotel room,’ he muttered thickly against her mouth. ‘Is it far?’

She shook her head in the negative, the movement brushing her lush lips to and fro across his.

He shuddered as a rush of blood almost had him doing what he hadn’t done since he was fifteen. Gulping, he drew back from the raw heat of her body to stare down into wildly dilated green eyes. She looked... stunned, he realised. Stunned, and totally at his mercy. It was an exhilarating and intoxicating thought—a male fantasy come true. Impossible to resist.

‘Then take me there,’ he muttered. ‘And take me there quickly...’

The drill contacting his tooth brought Luke back to the present—physically at least—but his mind continued to chum over his still vivid memories.

Had she deceived him with that air of vulnerability, with her seemingly mindless surrender? Had she been so diabolically clever, so skilled in seducing strangers that she had made it seem as if he had been master of what had happened that evening? Whereas in reality she had been the one pulling the strings and making all the moves?

He desperately wanted to believe that she hadn’t been married at the time—although it seemed likely that she had. Given that assumption, he clung to the idea that it had been her first foray into adultery.

Even so, he could not deny that she had come to that exhibition right and ready for a night of casual sex, dressed for the occasion and armed to the eyeteeth with the equipment necessary to reduce fools like him to instant mush.

Looking back, he could see that she’d also gone to great pains to protect her true identity—to cut down the risk of ever being caught out in her outrageous behaviour. She’d wanted a mad fling of some kind, but she hadn’t wanted any evidence of that mad fling left behind. The only part of the puzzle which remained was why she’d taken that appalling risk during the middle of the night.

It couldn’t have been deliberate, he decided, unless it had been part of some crazy fantasy she’d wanted to fulfil. He preferred to think that she’d simply been carried away—as he had been carried away.

It was one of the reasons why she haunted him. Because he’d never been carried away like that before. Or since...

‘I don’t even known your name,’ he said when he finally closed the hotel room door, neither of them having said a word as she had led him swiftly down two blocks and into the foyer of a small but surprisingly elegant hotel. Not at all the sort of place for a cheap rendezvous.

The lift-ride up to the third floor had been tense, the presence of another man in the lift stifling any conversation or physical contact. Luke had hardly been aware of his surroundings as he’d eagerly followed her down the corridor. He had absorbed little but a brief impression of red-patterned carpet and black and white prints of ships on the walls.

‘My name?’ she repeated, almost as though she were in a fog.

He liked her disorientation, liked the way she gasped when he pulled her abruptly into his arms. ‘Never mind,’ he growled. ‘No names for tonight. We’ll exchange names in the morning.’

He kissed her again before the fog could lift.

God, but he liked the woman his kisses turned her into, liked the sounds she made under them, liked the feel of her lips melting along with her body. He’d never known a woman become so pliant in his arms before. Her sweet surrender to his mouth and hands filled him with the heady power to do as he pleased with her.

He pleased to take off all her clothes. What little there was of them.

He pleased to carry her over to the king-sized bed and stretch her, seemingly dazed, out on top of it.

He certainly pleased to sit beside her gloriously naked body and touch her all over... at will... and very, very thoroughly.

She didn’t stop him, merely gazed up at him all the while with glazed green eyes, her lush lips gasping apart occasionally. Her pleasure was obvious, as was a bewildering amount of surprise. Hadn’t she expected to enjoy his touch so much? Or was it that she wasn’t used to a man giving her pleasure first this way?

She was getting close, he knew; her thighs were beginning to tremble. When her back began to arch from the bed he stopped abruptly, and she moaned her frustration.

It was only when Luke stood up that he realised his breathing was as hard and fast as hers. God, he hadn’t been this excited in years, he realised. Or this enthralled with a woman. Stripped of those sluttish clothes, she had taken on a totally different persona. There was nothing cheap about her any more. She was all classical curves and sweetly fragrant beauty. She was even a genuine blonde!

He couldn’t wait to bury himself in those softly golden curls, to have those lovely long legs wrapped tightly around him, to see those lush lips form a gasping O at the moment of her orgasm.

Funny, he had no conscious thought of his own satisfaction—which was a first for him. In the past, his priority when making love to a woman had always been what he would get out of it.

But not this time. This time he wanted to give even more than to receive.

Luke hardly recognised the man he’d become since entering this room. He felt all-powerful, yet that power was tempered with a strange tenderness. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought he’d finally really fallen in love. Even if not, it was certainly an experience outside his normal realm of experiences.

He could not even remember the first time he’d made love to Tracy, though he’d fancied himself in love with her back then. Yet already he knew he would never forget this night, not as long as he lived.

‘You haven’t done this before, have you?’ he remarked as he began undressing himself, slipping out of his jacket and draping it over one of the bedposts.

She licked her lips, her eyes wide upon his. ‘Why do you say that?’ Her voice was husky, as though desire had dried her mouth and throat. But not the rest of her. The rest of her was far from dry, he recalled, with a lurching in his stomach.

‘You seem too nervous.’

‘I’m no virgin,’ she protested, though shakily.

‘I never said you were.’ But her gaze was definitely close to virginal as it clung to his half-naked body.

Luke found her mixture of fascination and fear a real turn-on. He knew he had a good body, knew it was well equipped to satisfy most women’s fantasies. So there was no hesitation when he finally stripped off his underwear. He actually saw the swallowing action in her throat, and revelled in her reaction.

‘Where have you put the condoms?’ he said as he joined her on the bed, running a gently caressing hand down her body as he did so.

She quivered uncontrollably and closed her eyes.

‘Hey,’ he prompted, quietly but firmly. ‘The condoms?’

Long lashes fluttered open; the green eyes were pained. ‘Oh, God,’ she groaned, shaking her head from side to side. ‘I didn’t think. I just didn’t think.’

Her distress touched him, despite his flash of annoyance at her naivety. He would have to make sure that she never did insane things like this again. There again, she wasn’t going to have any lovers other than him after tonight. He was going to make sure of that. Come morning, there would be no more of this ‘stranger’ nonsense.

‘It’s all right,’ he reassured her, trying not to sound irritated. ‘I always keep one in my wallet.’

And that was what was annoying him. One. Only one! They would need more than one before this night was out. He tossed up between dressing now and finding a twenty-four-hour chemist or doing it later.

Later, his intense desire told him. Much later.

He could not wait another minute. Or even another moment.

‘No!’ she cried out when he swung his legs over onto the floor.

His glance over his shoulder carried impatience and puzzlement. ‘No, what?’

‘No, I can’t,’ she rasped. ‘I can’t...’

Luke had no intention of letting her change her mind at this point. It was beyond bearing just thinking about it.

‘It’s all right,’ he murmured, turning back to cup her face with firm hands and stare deep into her anguished green eyes. ‘I understand. You’ve only just realised what a very silly girl you’ve been tonight. But I’m a good guy. Really. I won’t hurt you, loveliness. I’m going to make beautiful love to you,’ he promised, pressing her back against the pillow and kissing her.

He kept on kissing her till she began clinging to him and squirming with renewed desire. But he didn’t dare leave her even then, reinforcing his temporary triumph by sliding down her body and kissing her all over till she was beyond stopping him, even when he had to abandon her for a short while.

She reached for him when he returned to the bed, pulling him down on top of her and not letting him indulge in any further foreplay. By this time Luke was ready to explode anyway, so when she opened to him, winding her legs high around his back, there really wasn’t any option.

He drove deep into her hot, honeyed flesh, shuddering with pleasure at her exquisite tightness. He’d barely moved within her when her first fierce contraction seized his flesh, and it was all too much. He could not hold back another second, tremors racking his body as he climaxed uncontrollably, his spasms totally in tune with hers, going on and on for simply ages.

At last it was over, and he sank down upon her, feeling sated with pleasure. Yet even in the aftermath there was more pleasure, a sweet intimacy rising between them as her arms stole around him then squeezed, holding him tightly to her flattened breasts. His lips nuzzled her left ear and she sighed her satisfaction with him. He felt deliciously loved and loving, every limb and muscle flooded with a warm and wondrous peace.

He never wanted to leave her, but he had to in the end, though he returned from the en suite bathroom as quickly as possible. He began to see what the Bible meant about man and woman cleaving together to make one flesh. He felt only half a man away from her, already addicted to the feelings she evoked in him.

She was lying on her side watching him as he came back into the room, her position showing the delicious female curve of waist, hip and leg. Her breasts looked swollen, he noted, her nipples still hard, and her eyes were heavy-lidded and incredibly sensuous as they travelled slowly down his body.

His heart kicked over when her gaze drifted down past his navel, having an immediate effect on his till then flaccid flesh. The thought hit him immediately then he should dress and go in search of that chemist before another moment passed, but then she smiled that siren’s smile at him and stretched out a beckoning hand. She drew him down onto the bed beside her and began to caress him with that hand, bringing him to full erection within an amazingly short time.

Transfixed by this sudden reversal of roles, Luke simply lay there, stunned and speechless as she continued to kiss and caress every inch of his body. There was nothing even remotely virginal about her now; everything she did was designed to tantalise and torment him to the point of no return, yet without granting him release.

He knew the enveloping heat of her mouth, the flickering torture of her tongue, the teasing touch of fingers which knew exactly what to do to drive him mad then stop him in midstream.

He tried closing his eyes against the sensations growing within him, and it proved to be a disastrous mistake. For during those seconds of desperate darkness she moved to straddle his hips, taking the full length of his pained hardness deep within her. His eyes flung open on a raw cry of panic, but already she was riding him, green eyes glittering wildly.

‘No,’ he groaned. But weakly. Pathetically.

‘Yes,’ she hissed back. ‘Yes...’

His hands found her hips, and he should have heaved her from his body. Instead he gripped her flesh and urged her on to a stronger, faster rhythm. His own hips began to rise and fall, and it felt incredible.

God, but she was so hot in there. So hot. He could feel his own blood heating even further, racing along his veins like molten lava. The volcano of his desire would not be contained this time. Or controlled. It surged higher and higher with each drumbeat of his madly pounding heart, and then it was erupting, flooding into the already spasming heart of her womanhood, dredging raw groans from his parched and panting lungs.

When the climax had passed, he reached up to bring her down so that he could kiss her, wanting to feel the heat of her mouth as well.

He was startled to encounter the wetness of tears running into the corners. He didn’t know what to say; could think of nothing but to cradle her close, to stroke her back and say whatever came to mind.

‘Don’t cry, darling. Please don’t cry. God, but I can’t bear it. Hush, sweetness. There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing. As I said before, I’m a good guy. And I can see you’re a good girl. We’re good people. Hush, my loveliness. Hush. Go to sleep, there’s a good girl. Yes, that’s it. Go to sleep.’

They both went to sleep... eventually... though Luke took quite a while to come to terms with what had just happened. He hoped he was right. Hoped that she was a good girl. If not, he’d just done the stupidest damned thing he’d ever done in his whole life. Slept with a perfect stranger. Without protection. Then, to top it all off, he’d fallen in love with her...

‘All finished, Mr St Clair.’ The chair snapped upright and the nurse moved to unclip the paper bib around his neck.

Luke’s black eyes blinked open to stare blankly into her smiling face. His gaze went to the clock on the wall. Eleven-fifteen. He’d been at the dentist over half an hour and he hadn’t felt a thing! Unless one counted what had been going on within his head. And his heart.