Settling The Score

‘Of course,’ she said stiffly, and deliberately turned her back on him, feeling absolutely mortified—aware that for a moment back then she had very much wanted him to kiss her. Had he been aware of her wish, too?

Was that another sign of pre-wedding nerves? she wondered worriedly. Wanting total strangers to pull you into their arms and to kiss you to within about an inch of your life? Tight-lipped, she stared at the blank wall, feeling disgusted with herself.

Dominic looked at the tense set of her shoulders, his mouth hardening as he recognised the hypnotic pull of sexual attraction which was building up in the confined space with all the speed of cells multiplying.

He tried to rationalise the situation. He had given little time or thought to pleasure over the past year, and this overwhelming need to crush her against him was probably just his body’s reaction to such self-imposed denial.

He had been working flat out for months and months, taking on a job in a law firm in Hong Kong for which he had been much too young and too unqualified, but in which he had absolutely triumphed—to everyone’s astonishment bar his own.

For Dominic was determined to succeed, to be the first member of his family who didn’t live in fear of the bailiffs.

He had grown up in poverty—real, abject poverty—with a mother who was proud and hard enough to let her only child go hungry. And Dominic had never forgotten hunger. Memories of that great aching emptiness gnawing away at the pit of his stomach had driven him on and on. He had vowed to stop only when he had made enough never to have to worry about hunger again.

The only trouble was that he had reached that stage a long time ago, but had blinded himself to the fact.

His whole life was work. Women did not feature in his grand scheme of things. Women distracted you with their beguiling eyes and their soft bodies. And women like this one—with her honey-blonde hair rippling like moonbeams over pert, high young breasts—well... Dominic could imagine never wanting to work again if he lost himself in her arms.

Oh, he dated occasionally—but in relationships he could control. Completely. And for this reason his affairs usually tended to be with older women.

Women who knew the score. Women in their early thirties, with established careers of their own, who were not looking for a permanent partner. Or, at least, that was what they always told him at the beginning. Three months down the line, when they started talking babies and houses, Dominic would be forced to end the relationship as gently as possible.

Settling down was simply not an option at this time in his life and he sometimes wondered whether it ever would be. For he had never known happiness or security in his own childhood and so had no idea how to create it.

He shifted his weight as he felt the uncomfortable heaviness of desire building up, but unfortunately there was nowhere to look at that moment, except at the source of that desire.

His eyes lingered reluctantly on the pure, clean sweep of her neck. Noted the way her simple blue T-shirt and denim mini-skirt flowed down over her slim, healthy curves. God, but she looked so young and so beautiful! And so impossibly innocent, too!

But innocent she could not be, he decided grimly—not from the way she had looked at him just now. He had surprised a wide-eyed look of pure invitation on her face. This happened to Dominic with such monotonous regularity that it usually left him cold, however beautiful the woman. And yet for some reason, with this woman, it was taking every bit of will-power he possessed not to succumb to it.

Romy had started to feel hot Tiny pinpricks of heat began to scratch irritatingly at her forehead, and surreptitiously she drew the back of her hand across it.

‘Perhaps we should sit down,’ he suggested.

She turned, suddenly aware of how close he was, the scent of him invading her nostrils like the sweetest perfume. ‘Wh-why?’

‘Because it’s hot and stressful in here.’ Very stressful, he thought ruefully as he watched the tiny pulse at her temple beat so frantically. ‘Confined space, and all that. Aren’t we supposed to conserve oxygen and energy in such a situation? I don’t want you fainting on me.’

Romy smiled. ‘Do I look like the fainting type?’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘You look...delicate, if you must know. Too pale with those shadows bruising your eyes—as if you haven’t been sleeping much lately.’

‘I’m sorry I asked!’ she joked, but she slid to the floor as he had suggested, and looked rather pointedly at the space beside her. ‘But if all you say is true, then shouldn’t you be joining me?’

As soon as Dominic saw her coltish young legs sprawled in front of her, he knew he had made a mistake. A big mistake. He tried to will the desire away, but by now it was in such an advanced state that it stubbornly refused to go.

And she was right; he really ought to join her. Standing was no help to his discomfort at all. From here he had a too tantalising view of what her breasts might be like if they were bare. Whenever she moved, the thin blue material of her T-shirt moved fractionally with her—so that he caught an occasional glimpse of the creamy flesh above the luscious swell of her breasts.

He reluctantly crouched down and arranged his long-legged frame in the cramped space with difficulty. And found that sitting beside her was the only sensibly way to stop him from staring at her more than was absolutely necessary.

‘Are you frightened?’ he asked her conversationally, in an effort to distract himself from the rapid rising and falling of her breasts as she tried her best to act unconcerned by his proximity.

‘I’m not sure,’ she hedged, because she found it difficult to lie, and in truth she was very frightened indeed—though more by the intensity of her body’s reaction to a man who was a complete stranger than by her entrapment.

She could feel the heat pricking her skin, the insistent peaking of her nipples beneath the gossamer-fine lace of the bra she wore. ‘Are you?’ she asked, more urgently than she had intended. ‘Frightened?’

He barely heard her. His thoughts were all taken up with the dewy appearance of her skin. He found himself mesmerised by the fine beads of sweat which were beginning to mist the magnolia-pale area beneath her neck. ‘Am I what?’ he asked her distractedly.

‘Frightened.’

He found himself mesmerised by her eyes now. Great big pixie eyes—as rich and dark as the most expensive chocolate. He leaned forward, unable to stop himself, and removed a non-existent speck of dust from her nose. He saw her begin to shiver violently, as though she was unable to control herself, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sensation of inevitability which was almost primitive in its intensity.

The air crackled; the silence was like thunder in their ears.

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Fear is just about the last thing on my mind right now.’

’D-don’t.’ She stumbled over the word, even though he was no longer touching her, but the grey eyes were suddenly blazing into hers with a fervent silvery fire which thrilled her.

‘Don’t what?’ he queried, so neutrally that the question seemed to pose no threat. ‘Don’t marvel at your exquisite beauty—when not to do so would be a crime? Or don’t kiss you—when we both know that’s what you want more than anything else in the world right now?’ His voice deepened to a husky caress. ‘What we both want,’ he finished.

‘You—can’t,’ Romy breathed in thrilled disbelief.

‘You can’t just come out and say things like that!’

‘Oh, I think I can,’ he contradicted her, with a glittering and arrogant confidence which renewed the racing of her heart.

And then the lights went out.

Instinct made her leap into his arms, and instinct made him clasp her tightly against his chest. And when instinct had been replaced by reason, and Romy tried to move away from him, he refused to let her go, his mouth irresistibly drawn to the scented silk of her hair.

‘My prayers have just been answered,’ he murmured softly against a blonde satin strand.

Mine, too, thought Romy guiltily.

‘It’s all right,’ he murmured soothingly as he felt her heart beat out a loud tattoo which thudded intimately against his own chest. ‘They’ll come looking for us soon. They’re bound to find us.’

But she didn’t want them to find them; that was the trouble. She had discovered her own little piece of heaven on earth, as far removed from reality and understanding as heaven itself, and oh, nothing could have made Romy stop him from holding her the way he was holding her right then.

‘Now, what were we talking about when the lights went out?’ he whispered.

Afterwards Romy would attempt to justify what had happened next. She would tell herself that it had been her first close encounter with an experienced man who was able to seduce her with just the right mixture of desire and restraint.

She would also try to convince herself that it had been curiosity. And pre-wedding nerves. She had never kissed another man apart from her fiance and what harm would one kiss do? A brief moment of madness before the lifelong commitment which was marriage was perfectly natural.

In the strange, private world of the broken-down lift events took on an unreal quality. There in the warm darkness it was all too easy to give in to this elemental desire without any feeling of shame.

‘This,’ she whispered back, and raised her face to his.

Her mouth tasted of toothpaste, and a faint scent of rain-washed meadows clung to her skin and her hair. To Dominic, she tasted and smelt so clean and so pure and so fresh. She was like a long shower at the end of a grimy day’s work in the city. A refreshing drink after being parched for so long.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, he silently remonstrated with himself. Is it abstinence which is making you so fanciful? Because you haven’t had a woman for over a year? But then he felt her lips parting beneath his, and an overwhelming rush of desire made him give a small, tortured moan as he deepened the kiss.

Romy had meant only to kiss him, but a need far stronger than her good intentions soon had her threading her fingers luxuriously through his thick dark hair, gasping with a kind of compliant greed as his fingers drifted over the taut, straining mounds of her breasts.

‘You shouldn’t!’ she gasped, the words wrung reluctantly from her lips.

‘I know, but you’d kill me if I stopped, wouldn’t you?’

Say no, said some remote section of her mind which was still thinking logically. Go on, say it...say it! ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes, I would kill you!’

He laughed, but a little unsteadily, as though the strength of her desire had startled him. Her passion seemed so at odds with her blonde, scrubbed innocence. Unless the innocence was a sham, he thought reluctantly...

He let his mouth slowly drift along the gentle curve of her jaw, anointing her with tiny, feather-light kisses which seemed to incite her even more. Her head fell back helplessly, so that her breasts were offered up to his mouth with a kind of wanton abandon.

Romy was on fire as he peeled the T-shirt up her torso until her pert breasts in the lacy bra were revealed. She felt the cool rush of air to her heated skin as he freed the front fastening of the bra and impatiently pushed the filmy fabric aside.

And when he began to suckle her the pleasure was almost as unbearable as the frustration she felt, knowing that she must call a halt to this madness.

In a minute, she promised herself. I’ll stop him in a minute.

But he pulled her roughly against him and she felt her body writhing against the hard pressure of his. Frantically, their mouths collided, their kisses fiery and passionate as they both fruitlessly attempted to derive the ultimate satisfaction from kissing alone.

If there had been enough room to turn her over onto her back and take her right there and then, then Dominic suspected that he would have done. As it was, he knew that he must be the one to call a halt to things. And quickly.

He drew a long, shuddering breath. ‘If we don’t stop,’ he warned her huskily, ‘you know what’s going to happen?’

The sound of his voice should have brought Romy back to her senses, but it did no such thing. She felt as though she had wandered unawares into an enchanted place, which she had no desire to leave.

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