His hand tightened against her breast, and he made a thick sound of pleasure in his throat, his fingers tugging at the b.u.t.tons on her shirt until he had them unfastened and could slide his hand inside it and push aside the barrier of her bra to caress her bare skin.
It was everything she had known it would be, and yet like nothing she had ever dreamed she could feel; she felt both angry and elated that she had not experienced it before, as she felt the sensations roll over her, experiencing them with the same intensity she had once given to her studies-so sharply alive, so intensely aware, so swamped by feeling that she actually felt tears of sharp pleasure spurt in her eyes as his fingers found her nipple.
As her tears touched his mouth, Silas lifted his head and stared into her eyes before she could conceal the expression in them from him, and then said ^ unsteadily, "Your first time . . . the first time anyone"s touched you like this . . . shown you you can feel like this .
. . Oh, Hannah, have you any idea what you"re doing to me?"
And then it seemed to Hannah that he went a little wild, picking her up with an ease that in other circ.u.mstances would have surprised her, but which now seemed wholly natural, carrying her to the sofa, where he nestled her against its cover and proceeded to cover her face with small kisses, and then her throat, so that she arched beneath the heat on his mouth in trembling awareness of her feminity. Then he moved to the open V-neckline of her shirt, and then lower, until his mouth teased the hard peak of her nipple through the silk of her shirt, until she cried out at the unbearable torment, held his hand in her palms and tried to push him away so that she could remove the barrier between them and feel the exquisite sensuality of his mouth tugging at the swollen heat of her nipple. But as she looked down towards him, she saw how the wet silk clung to her body, revealing the pale flesh of her breast and the dark, tormented hardness of its aureole. Silas was breathing heavily, his weight pressing her into the sofa, his body, she now recognised, fully aroused. Her heart missed a beat, and then another. She took a deep breath and shuddered as she felt the drag of the damp fabric against her breast. Her eyes wide and dark with arousal, she removed her hands from his face and down to her blouse. He didn"t break the mesmeric hold of his eyes on her own by so much as a flicker of an eyelid, but his face suddenly went dark under a hot rush of blood, and he said thickly, with an urgency that fired her own senses, "Yes, Hannah . . . Yes . . ."
And, with a deliberate wantonness she had never suspected she might be capable of, never mind actually enjoy, she sat up smoothly, and slowly removed her shirt and then her bra.
No man had ever seen her naked, and she had never desired, nor imagined, that any man would. What she was doing went totally against everything she had planned for her life, and yet, while part of her mind registered the fact, another part gloried in her feminine triumph, telling her to be proud of the beauty of her body and the power it had to make Silas suddenly start to shake and reach for her, burying his face against her throat and groaning as he gently kissed the soft hollow at its base.
"I knew you could be like this, the first time I saw you," he whispered rawly. "I wanted you to be like this then, and yet I didn"t. I was terrified of the intensity of my reaction to you. You weren"t what I wanted in my life. I wasn"t ready for a woman like you. In fact, I"d already decided that my life was better off without love. Far less complicated. I felt I owed it to my aunt to concentrate on the business. And then I saw you and it seemed that fate was mocking me."
Her hand touched his head, stroking the clean, dark hair, a tremor of understanding and compa.s.sion rocking through her. All he was doing was echoing her own thoughts. How much less complicated they seemed when they were shared with someone else. How much less important everything seemed when she held him like this and felt the easy warmth of his breath against her skin.
He raised his head abruptly and cupped her face in his hands.
"Hannah, if I stay, I"ll make love to you. There"s no way I"ll be able to stop myself. For over a week I"ve kept away, telling myself that you don"t want me, that your decision was the right one, and then this morning when I woke up I knew I just couldn"t go on any longer without you." He leaned his forehead against hers.
"I don"t want you just for today, Hannah. I don"t want an affair... a relationship without commitment or promises. I may not have wanted to admit it at first, but I love you, so think carefully now, because unless you can open your life to me completely . . . unless you can make enough s.p.a.ce in it for me on a permanent basis, it"s better that we part now."
Hannah stared at him. How could he do this to her, torment her like this, while her body ached for him? She didn"t want to talk . . . She wanted . . .
She flushed darkly as she realised exactly what she did want. Silas was only being sensible, and it wasn"t his fault that half of her wished that he wouldn"t be, that he would simply take her and make love to her.
The primitiveness of her own thoughts shocked her. What had happened to her beliefs?
"What is it to be, Hannah?" Silas pressed her. "A shared life, with all the pain and pleasures that implies? We can work together, side by side, but inevitably there could be times when your career will take second place. I"d be lying if I pretended not to know how much it means to you, and I"d also be lying if I said that I didn"t want children."
Children. Her heart leapt, something raw and elemental twisting inside her. Her hand touched her stomach, almost as though she could already feel Silas"s child growing there.
"I want you as my true partner in life, Hannah. As my wife ... in my business . . . with our children.
I"ve spoken to your mother," he added quietly. "I went to see her, hoping that you might have gone home. She told me how you feel about marriage . . . about your career. We both know that I could make love to you now, and for a s.p.a.ce of time nothing would be more important than the private world we can create together, but we can"t inhabit that world for the rest of our lives. The decision must be yours, Hannah."
She wanted to protest that what he was doing wasn"t fair. That she didn"t want the burden of making such a decision, especially not in her present weakened state. Marriage and a career . . . Silas and his children ... To work with him as his wife and as his partner . . . She had seen the strains those kind of claims put on her s.e.x, and now for the first time she could see why they endured them, why they willingly took on the double burden of marriage and a career, why they claimed that despite the hardships and the sacrifices they still considered themselves doubly blessed and fulfilled.
Without Silas, her life would be hollow and empty. With him, it would be fraught with the inevitable tensions of living and working together ... of two highly intelligent people, each with their own and sometimes opposing views ... of juggling different roles and needs.
For the first time since she could remember, the thought of living her life alone held no appeal. Tears stung her eyes as she reflected how often she had seen her mother reach out and touch her father, or vice versa. How often she had witnessed tenderness and caring between couples and deliberately turned her back on it, not wanting to see it.
It wouldn"t be easy, but then nothing worth having ever was. If she denied him, turned him away, it would be impossible to wipe him out of her life as though he had never been. She could not simply go on as she had intended, this last week had shown her that.
"Don"t be afraid," he whispered lovingly. "We can do it together, Hannah."
Afraid? Suddenly, illuminatingly, she knew that he was right, that she had been afraid .. . afraid of giving herself, of committing herself, of sharing herself with another human being, and most of all afraid of failing, of loving and then losing, of pain and loneliness.
She had tasted all of those this last week, and now she was being offered a chance to put them behind her, to reach out and embrace life fully.
She took a deep breath and then said unsteadily and warningly, "We"ll have to be married in my father"s church. The whole village will be there and . . ."
"And you"ll have roses in your hair," Silas told her, kissing her fiercely. "And you"ll wear a cream silk dress and not a white one, because no matter what else our lives together hold . . . they"re going to hold this night and our memories of it."
She put her hand over his heart and felt it give a fierce leap, and then he pushed her down into the warmth of the sofa, covering her face and throat and then her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with fierce, stinging kisses.
Then, when her blood was at delirium heat, his mouth slid over her nipple and she felt the hard pulse of his body against her own.
Her skirt followed his suit on to the floor; her tights and silk briefs joining his discarded socks and shorts.
He let her study him and then touch him until his self-control broke and he started to touch her with his hands and then his mouth, so that there wasn"t a centimetre of her silky flesh that he hadn"t explored.
When she tried to reciprocate, he wouldn"t let her, muttering thickly in her ear, "Next time . . . It"s too late." And then he moved, taking her with him, spreading the tremulous softness of her thighs, touching her with his body where he had already touched her with his hands and mouth, so that her flesh melted instantly, eagerly antic.i.p.ating his penetration.
It was unique and special to them alone, and yet at the same time it was the beat of the whole universe, the pulse of its tides, the movements of its planets, the strength of its storms and the spiritual ecstasy of all its G.o.ds, so that she felt elevated beyond anything she had ever known; privileged and humbled; knowing that if this one night was the sum total of her life"s pleasures then it was more than worthwhile, and equally knowing that it would not be. This sweet, immortal pleasure was something they would have all their lives.
She looked drowsily at Silas and saw that he was looking back at her with love and pleasure.
"You didn"t mind . .. that there hadn"t been anyone else?"
"No. . . and neither would I have minded if there had, just so long as he hadn"t been given the rapturous joy you"ve just given me. I"ve been lucky.
My previous s.e.xual relationships have all been good-and all ended by mutual agreement-but their pleasure was physical and fleeting.
Nothing like this."
He touched her bare arm while he spoke, running his forefinger along her flesh and laughing softly as the tiny hairs stood on end.
Hannah knew quite well that, against the moist heat of his chest, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were already hardening -and swelling, that inside her body she was already growing soft and moist.
Silas bent his head and lazily licked her skin-like a lion grooming its mate, Hannah thought sensually, abandoning herself to the delicious movement of his tongue as she reached out to caress him in turn.
"It won"t always be like this," Silas warned her seriously. "There"ll be times when you will hate me, when you will resent our lives together."
"When I"m frightened of the depth of my emotional dependence on you," Hannah agreed slowly.
"Don"t ever be frightened of that. I"m just as dependent on you. When you handed in your notice, I felt as though the bottom had fallen out of my world. I tried to tell myself that I was glad, that your going solved a problem I hadn"t wanted to face. I knew d.a.m.n well there was a mutual danger there, but I hadn"t wanted to acknowledge it.
"I fought against what I felt for you, just as you fought against what you feel for me. And I"m glad we both lost."
"So am I," Hannah agreed in a heartfelt voice. "So am I."
end.