It amazed Rafe that Jennifer still had the capacity to blush and he couldn’t resist the urge to constantly test her helpless response to his flirting. He had assumed that a writer of erotic novels would be casually blasé about sex and sexual banter—that was what had thrown him when he had begun suspecting Lacey Graham’s real identity—but Jennifer’s sizzling fantasy life seemed to make her more, rather than less vulnerable to blushing confusion. She was a strange mixture of sophistication and innocence, boldness and caution, soft feminine yielding and infuriating female stubbornness, and the heady combination had proved deeply alluring to his jaded soul.
‘I’m afraid I have other plans for this evening,’ Jennifer said, tilting her nose loftily in the air. ‘I have a slave-driving editor hounding me to finish my next book.’
‘I’m sure he’d want you to get all the proper research done for it first. Perhaps he’d even be willing to offer himself up to the delights of whipped cream—purely in the interests of literary accuracy, of course...’
He walked away, taking with him the immensely satisfying picture of Jennifer drenched in pretty pink.
Jennifer’s smile faded as she cleaned her glasses and watched her lover pick his way down the bank to help some of the other raftees lift the big yellow inflatable rafts out of the water and carry them up the steep grade of loose stones, slippery with muddy ash, to where the rafting company’s four-wheel drive and trailer were waiting to tow them back for the next group of paying customers.
Her lover.
She still couldn’t believe that she, Jennifer Jordan, was having a scorching affair with a man who had threatened to cause her such grief.
Was still threatening to, for that matter.
It was four days now, since he had found out her guilty secret. Four entertaining days and three, long, glorious, passion-filled nights. Long enough for her to realise, to her delight and despair, that he was a man she could love...and did love...not wisely but far, far too well.
It wasn’t the steady, slowly unfurling emotion she had felt for Michael. This time love was hot and strong and fierce, and it had burst upon her with the impact of a bomb—a time bomb which had lain ticking away inside as she had cut Rafe’s photos out of magazines and written him into her fantasies, as she had exchanged friendly and stimulating letters with Sariel, and as she had silently coveted the son of her husband, and secretly yearned for the father of her baby.
It was a love that cared nothing for logic or for reason, and as she watched him walk down the hill Jennifer acknowledged that it was a sight that she would have to get used to: Rafe walking away.
She hadn’t asked him how much longer he was staying, for she hadn’t wanted to know, and to her relief her mother had not pressed them for their future plans, seeming to assume that husband and wife needed time and privacy to reassimilate their marriage and that they would broach the subject when ready.
Meanwhile Jennifer had given herself permission to suspend her despair and devote herself to basking in the delight. She would sort out the emotional tangle she had created later. In spite of the grief that opening her life to him was storing up, Rafe was a delight simply to be with, to talk to, to challenge and even to quarrel with...
He was
also good at making sure she didn’t take herself too seriously, as she had learned that night in bed, when Rafe had mentioned the negotiation of a contract.
She had bristled with suspicion, demanding to know what contract he was talking about. Looking down into her belligerent face, he had told her it was quite simple: as long as she continued to sleep with him, he would keep all her guilty secrets safe.
‘That’s blackmail! You’re trying to blackmail me into having sex with you!’ she had screeched at him in a spasm of astonished outrage.
‘Yes, and unless you agree to satisfy my evil lusts, you and your mother will be thrown starving into the snow,’ he had hissed sibilantly, twirling an imaginary moustache.
‘Oh.’ She had subsided, mortified by her gullibility, as she’d recognised his wicked amusement. She would have to learn not to bite at every piece of tantalising bait he dangled in front of her eyes, she’d told herself as his grin widened.
‘Wanna try it?’ he had drawled provocatively, scraping his whiskers on her naked shoulder. ‘Me, the ruthless deflowerer of virgins, and you, the helpless innocent, quivering and begging as I ravish you within an inch of your life?’
‘No!’
But he had seen the glint of professional interest in her eye and had fallen back on the bed, shaking with laughter, until she had muffled his mirth by stuffing a pillow into his mouth. Rising to the challenge, he had romped her into giggling submission and made love to her again, in a very simple, straightforward, very satisfying way.
So, in the end the only contract there was any negotiation over was the one between their alter egos, Lacey Graham and Sariel. Rafe wanted to offer her a greater advance for her next three books, but was suggesting tighter controls on her output, and Jennifer was dubious.
‘I’ve always only written at my own speed; I don’t know if I could work to someone else’s deadline,’ she had said. ‘How fast I write depends on what’s happening around me, and with the baby coming I need to stay even more flexible.’
She had propped up her elbows on her desk, where they were discussing the draft contract Rafe had produced from his suitcase the morning after they had engaged in a very different form of negotiation on the very same battered surface!
Rafe, having discovered a miracle within his own grasp—his pet protégé, the reclusive authoress he had suspected he would never meet—was determined to make the most of his unexpected opportunity.
‘I want to enjoy this baby,’ Jennifer told him firmly. ‘It’ll probably be the only one I have, so I want to spend as much time as I can being a mother.’
Rafe frowned at the wistful inflection. ‘You want more children?’ He sounded faintly hostile, as if he couldn’t understand such a desire.
‘I would have liked some more, yes,’ she said sharply. ‘Michael and I planned to have three.’
The frown turned to a scowl. He tapped his gold pen, slotted between his finger and thumb, on the notepad in his lap. ‘You’re lucky it didn’t get that far. He’d probably have ended up walking out on you and the kids, hooking up with someone else who wouldn’t make demands on him and skimping on his maintenance.’