He looked at her for a long time, and then said rawly, ‘I can’t, but…’
She didn’t want to hear any more. Stupidly, one tiny part of her had still hoped, had still prayed desperately that by some miracle she might have been wrong. Hating herself for that weakness, she wrenched herself away from him, surprising them both by her sudden surge of physical strength.
She heard the sound of fabric tearing as she moved, and froze, her eyes widening in shock as the shoulder seam of her dress split beneath the pressure of Daniel’s grip and the silky velvet fabric slid downwards over her body, revealing first the pale gleam of her collarbone and then, while she stared at Daniel in frozen shock, the soft curve of her breast, her skin robbed of its colour by the moonlight, her throat, shoulder and now fully exposed breast turned to alabaster in its pale gleam.
An odd tension filled the room, a heavy, preternatural silence that seemed to press down on her, making it hard for her to breathe. Her heart started beating erratically. A pulse jumped in her throat and, unable to drag her gaze from Daniel’s, she reached up to cover it protectively, only then realising how much of her body was revealed to him.
A fine shudder that had nothing to do with the bedroom’s cool air ran through her body; she gulped in air and fumbled for the torn bodice of her dress, but it was too late. Against the chill of her breast she felt the warmth of Daniel’s palm. Her pulse-rate rocketed into sharp acceleration.
‘Daniel…No…’ she denied huskily, but he wasn’t listening to her. The air seemed to pulse with the sheer intensity of the emotional vibrations they were each giving off. Desire, anger, pain, and love.
As his hand slid caressingly around her breast, Jessica tried to draw air into her constricted lungs and found that she couldn’t. Even before his thumb touched her nipple it was already erect and pulsing with an ache she prayed he couldn’t feel. A channel of hot, feverish sensation ran like a cord from her breast to the pit of her stomach, tightening in a sharp spasm of sensation when he touched her, galvanising her flesh like a small electric shock. Instinctively she tensed against it, thus intensifying its power, her eyes turning dark and wild as she forced back the betraying reactionary shudder.
Half-paralysed with tension, she heard Daniel say her name and looked at him, trembling as she recognised the desire glittering in his eyes.
She hadn’t bargained for this, hadn’t allowed herself to think that a man hard and cold enough to deliberately plan to deceive her in the way Daniel had deceived her might be vulnerable to the overwhelming physical hunger she could see so plainly etched into his face.
He wanted her, and that wanting was real.
She lifted her hand to push him away, but somehow what should have been a gesture of repudiation became a tremulous caress as her fingertips trembled against his jaw and then slid helplessly towards his mouth, touching it as though she were reading braille. Mindlessly she absorbed the messages of this contact between their flesh, her body as still as that of a statue while she traced the fullness of his bottom lip, the clear-cut indentations at the corners of his mouth, the roughness of the skin above his top lip.
She felt him shudder and focused on him, her eyes betraying her bewilderment at her own behaviour. What was she doing?
She moved to snatch away her hand, but Daniel moved faster, his fingers closing round her wrist. She curled her fingers into talons, anger striking through her at this imprisonment, but his tongue was tracing spiral patterns against the soft flesh of her palm, ignoring the threat of the nails poised to rake his skin, and she discovered that the silk cord of desire linking her breast to the deepest, most female part of her body extended into other areas of her flesh. Her resistance melted, her body suddenly boneless, formless, pliable and soft, silently inviting him to mould it as he wished.
Without knowing she was doing so, she leaned towards him. His mouth found the pulse beating frantically in her wrist, and her hand touched the deeper, more vulnerable one in her throat, wondering what it would be like to feel his mouth there, claiming the hot pulse of her life’s blood as though he knew that he was the one who gave it force.
An odd light-headedness engulfed her. She shivered and pressed herself closer to him, tensing as she felt the abrasive brush of cloth against the tenderness of her exposed breast. The cloth was in her way, a barrier that tormented her tender skin. Impatiently she pulled her hand free and tugged at the buttons on Daniel’s shirt.
His skin wasn’t like hers, pale and washed to silver by the moonlight. It was warm and golden, his chest deep and broad, silky with the fine dark hair that felt so soft to her fingertips, and yet when he seized hold of her, dragging her almost roughly against him, holding her mouth under his own while he kissed her with a suppressed violence that made her head spin, that same soft hair against her naked breast created such a wanton, delirious sensation within her that she wanted to tear off the rest of her dress and experience that same delicious friction on every centimetre of her skin.
As though her thoughts communicated themselves to him, she felt him reach behind her for the zip on her dress, and quickly strip it from her.
She shivered once as night-cooled air replaced the feverish heat of his body, and then reached towards him, silently and imploringly, beyond reach now of the voices that might have warned her against what she was doing.
As she lifted her hands towards him, Daniel caught hold of both of them, placing a kiss in each palm, and then holding them against his waist where the remaining closed buttons and his belt pressed into her skin.
Kneeling over her in the darkness, he was at once familiar and unfamiliar, and the tension that made her shiver was woman’s age-old thrill of excitement-cum-apprehension as she looked into the face of her lover and saw there the uncontrollable quality of his desire, thrilling to it, and yet at the same time apprehensive of it.
And then, as his gaze fastened on her and became absorbed by the beauty of her body, apprehension turned to joy, mingled with a sharp surge of power. He wanted her; this man who was physically so much the stronger and less vulnerable of them both trembled at the sight of her body, his skin flushed with desire, his voice raw with need as he groaned her name, a plea for permission to reach out and touch her.
Blind, deaf and dumb to her own vulnerability, Jessica watched him, glorying in her power, her eyes slanting and narrowed like a hunting cat’s, her smile secret and gently taunting. Without knowing what she was doing, she arched her spine, stretching voluptuously, watching him through half-closed eyes, noting the savagely indrawn breath and the hard tension of his muscles. Her hands left his body and one touched her own, hovering over the small triangle of silk that covered the heart of her sexuality. She frowned, her smile vanishing, her eyes clouding as the ache inside her intensified. She looked at Daniel and saw that he was looking back at her. What she saw in his eyes made her pulse leap. He unfastened the remaining buttons on his shirt, pulling it off and unceremoniously dropping it on the floor. The rest of his clothes were equally summarily dispensed with, every action underlined with a fierce urgency that made her heart race. She sat up, watching him, fascinated by the play of light and shadow across his body. When he pulled her against him, moulding her softness into the harder contours of his own body, the shock of the sudden contact with his flesh destroyed the last of her defences. All that she wanted, all that she needed was this—this blissful contact of flesh upon flesh…this heat…this pleasure…this delirium of joy that promised even greater joy beyond its boundaries.
She heard Daniel whispering to her, asking her things that should have shocked her, promising her things that made desire flood through her.
His hands touched her, shaped her, held her, removed from her the barriers of her stockings and briefs, and then shockingly, blissfully, cupped her, stroked her, and finally slid tormentingly against her, where she had ached for them to do, so that all the silver cords of desire running through her body became as taut as an archer’s bow, the sensation dragging pri
mitive sounds of pleasure from her throat, while her spine and her body arched and writhed and his mouth moved slowly and mind-destroyingly down the bared arch of her throat, and then further downwards until it rested between her breasts, ignoring their flagrant, thrusting demand to be pleasured by the raw heat of his mouth until she reached out and slid her hands into his hair, cupping the back of his head, feverishly urging him to give her the pleasure the flushed points of her breasts craved.
When he did, it was like nothing she had ever experienced. Her body trembled and convulsed, the shock of the sensations flooding through her betrayed in her eyes. Her body pulsed, ached, yearned towards him so that there was only intense relief in having the hard maleness of him surging against her.
Her breasts, swollen and tender, pushed eagerly against his chest, delighting in the friction of his movements against her, but that sensation, just like that of his hands on her hips, holding her, lifting her, and the sound of his voice, reassuring her, guiding her, were all subordinate to the need growing inside her.
She arched impatiently beneath him, crying out eagerly as his body responded to the invitation of her own and he entered her, offering her a momentary balm to the sharp intensity of her need.
But with each thrust of his body within her own the ache seemed to recede tantalisingly and tormentingly, always just out of reach of the satisfaction his flesh within her own promised.
Her nails raked his flesh, her teeth sharp and demanding, her body wild with need and inciting a similar savagery within his so that suddenly his movements were no longer controlled and tender, but fierce and elemental, like the eternal, relentless pounding of the sea against the land, driving her closer and closer to that place where the ache could no longer be controlled.
The climax came so quickly and was so earth-shatteringly powerful that it awed and half terrified her. She had a momentary glimpse of Daniel’s face, his control shattered; he cried out something to her, his voice harsh and unfamiliar. She had a swift and terrifying awareness of reality and all that went with it, and then her body slid over the edge into darkness, carrying her mind with it.
She slept heavily and dreamlessly, awoken by the sound of her alarm. Her body felt unfamiliar and alien, voluptuously lazy, and yet at the same time sharply alive. In the harsh morning sun her skin seemed to possess a new luminescence, as though it glowed still with remembered pleasure. She turned her head and realised that she was alone as the memories came flooding back. There was a folded note propped up against her radio alarm with her name written on it.
She reached for it, opening it, her hands trembling.
‘We have to talk. Daniel.’
We have to talk—and she knew about what. How he must be gloating! How he would enjoy ruthlessly reminding her of all that her foolish body had betrayed. He had found the way to entrap her now, and he wouldn’t hesitate to use it again. She had no faith in her mind’s ability to withstand the desires of her body any longer. Panic engulfed her. She had to escape, to get away…
And then she remembered that in a few days’ time she was due in Northumberland. Jane wouldn’t mind if she arrived earlier than planned. Daniel wouldn’t be able to find her there. Neither would her parents. From that sanctuary, she would write to her parents and tell them that nothing on this earth would induce her to marry Daniel. That she would rather cut herself off from them completely than allow him to so much as lay a finger on her ever again.
She shuddered, clutching the bedclothes to her nude body, remembering how eagerly, how wantonly she had sought far more than the brief touch of his hands on her body last night. Far more. Well, now she had to pay for that weakness, that madness.
All the time she was making the preparations for her flight, her mind was punishing her with vivid mental flashes of tormenting memories of the past twenty-four hours, providing them in taunting mixtures of contrast: her anger and determination to eject Daniel from her life after she had learned the truth, side by side with her wanton, eager pleading for his lovemaking—images that made her stomach churn nauseously and her skin burn with hot, bitter misery.
She had no excuse to offer herself, no explanation nor reason; she had wanted him to make love to her, had eagerly and willingly aided and abetted him in her own mental humiliation.
With good reason had he laughed at her when she’d accused him of threatening her with rape.
Her hands shook as she packed the few clothes she would need; her mind wandered as she tried to concentrate on the far more important tools she might need.
Half of her resented her own weakness, in stealing away in fear, in not confronting Daniel and her parents and making her parents see what they were doing to her.
Her father wanted her married to Daniel, and had bribed him into agreeing, but she doubted that her father had realised just what methods Daniel would use to get her to consent to that marriage. She doubted that either her mother or her father realised how Daniel had damaged her, destroyed her. How he had tricked her into trusting him—into loving him.
The nausea rose up inside her again and she fought it down, hurrying through her preparations with a hunted, frantic tension that drove her until she was at last in her car and on her way north.
She was leaving without any letters, any explanations. She would write to her parents from Northumberland. And as for Daniel…She smiled mirthlessly and bitterly.
She had no doubt that once he discovered her flight he would realise how pointless it would be for him to pursue this charade of having some believable explanation for his behaviour. How could there be any kind of explanation? He had already admitted he couldn’t deny that her father had offered him a partnership, and that he had accepted it. He was condemned by his own mouth.
Driven by the relentless pain of her own selfbetrayal, she made good time to Northumberland, not stopping to break her journey other than when she had to refill her car with petrol.
The thought of food nauseated her. Her body was drawn tight with tension and revulsion—revulsion against herself, against her weakness, against that small pocket of rebellion deep inside her which said that her traitorous flesh wanted Daniel as its lover.
Symond Court was several miles away from its nearest village; a gaunt stone edifice that stood with its back to the North Sea and guarded from its vantage-point the empty countryside that surrounded it.
It was a house that had known many changes of fortune. Built originally by one of the Percies, it had passed out of their hands during a game of dice in the eighteenth century.
The man who won it had married a girl twenty years his junior on the strength of its possession, and her family, having discovered that, while he might own the house, he owned no wealth to support and maintain it, punished him for his deception by encouraging his wife into an affair with a prominent Minister of State.
The child of that affair was the only child of the marriage, and in due course he inherited Symond, but preferred not to live there, associating its bleakness with his own childhood.
In Victorian times it had seen a revival of its fortunes and had been sold to one of the new breed of monied men thrown up by the development of the railways. He had shrewdly married his eldest son to a daughter of the Percies, thus establishing for him a social respectability he himself could never attain. The house remained in the hands of their descendants until after the end of the First World War when, crippled by death duties, and having seen the deaths of his father, uncles, brothers and cousins, the sixteen-year-old who inherited it informed his trustees that he wanted it sold. For him the place would always carry too many memories of weeping women, of death and pain; he wanted to escape to somewhere where there was warmth and laughter. The land was sold off to various tenant farmers, the house and a handful of acres gradually falling into disrepair as the trustees sought unsuccessfully for a buyer.
The National Trust had taken it over thirty years previously. It wasn’t a great house, nor a particularly famous one, but it did faithfully
mirror the changes undergone by many English country houses in the centuries since it was built in 1690 to the present day.
The tapestries had been found hidden away in one of the attics, and after a good deal of research it had been established that they had originally been designed for the state bedroom, and that their designs had originated from Daniel Marot, Huguenot architect, who had been such a great favourite with William of Orange and his Queen Mary.
Jessica had been both thrilled and saddened the first time she saw the tapestries: thrilled by their beauty and rarity, saddened by their neglect and the signs of wear and tear. She had discussed then with Jane the work that would be necessary to restore and repair them.
At any other time the challenge of being invited to undertake this work would have delighted her, but during her long drive north it had been her present-day Daniel who had filled her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and not the Daniel Marot whose skill had originally designed the tapestries.
When she’d stopped to fill her car with petrol, she had taken the precaution of telephoning Jane to alert her to her early arrival.
‘No problem,’ Jane had told her warmly. ‘In fact, I’ll be glad of your company. The caretaker and his wife are away on holiday at the moment and the house is closed to visitors, so it’s rather lonely.’
It had started to rain as she left the motorway, and now low grey clouds hung over the house, adding to its outward grimness.
The drive, bare of its avenue of once elegant limes, looked stark and uninviting, and Jessica shivered a little as she looked at the grim façade, aching for the warmth and security of her own home, for Daniel’s arms…
She shuddered tensely, slamming her hand hard against the steering-wheel, hating herself for her own weakness. She had to forget him, to put him out of her mind, to stop thinking about him.
* * *
Jane was waiting for her as she drove round to the rear of the house and parked her car.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked in some concern as she helped her remove her luggage from the car.