Master Of Pleasure. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ her long hair, with its amateur blonde streaks, was still damp from the shower Gabriel had insisted she have. She was watching him watching her, overwhelmed by the feeling, the longing suddenly shooting through her; knowing for the first time in her life what it felt like to experience physical sexual desire. And she wanted him, desired him so very badly.

      A door had swung open on her past. She didn’t want to see what lay behind it, but it was already too late. She remembered how she had been too impatient to wait for him to come to her, running to him instead. He had caught hold of her, holding her at arm’s length whilst he studied her naked body. Even her flesh had signalled its eager readiness to him, her breasts firming and lifting as she imagined him touching her there. But when he did she had realised that her imagination had not had the power to tell her just how his touch would feel, or what it would do to her. The flesh of his fingertips had been hard and slightly rough, the flesh of a man who worked and lived physically, not just cerebrally. She had shivered, and then shuddered with uncontained delight when he had slowly explored the shape of her breasts. The erotic roughness of his touch had increased her arousal so much that she had suddenly become aware of not just how much she wanted him, and how excited she was, but how ready her body was for him, how hot and wet and achingly sensitive that most intimate part of her had felt. As though he had sensed that, too, Gabriel had trailed his hand down over her body, smoothly and determinedly. When he had allowed it to rest on her hip, cupping the gently protruding bone, she had been seized with impatient urgency and the need to feel him caressing her more intimately.

      Had she then moved closer to him, openly parting her legs, or had he been the one to propel her closer to him, moving his hand to her thigh? She couldn’t remember. But she could remember how it had felt, how she had felt, when he had bent his head to kiss the smooth column of her throat at the same time as he had stroked apart the swollen lips of her sex to dip his fingers in the slick moist heat that was waiting for him. She had almost reached orgasm there and then.

      A shudder punched through her. What was she doing, thinking about that now? She could feel the strain of her own emotions. Fear? Guilt? Longing? No, never again. The girl she had been was gone, and with her everything that that girl had felt.

      Sasha looked down towards the beach, where her sons were still playing, oblivious to what was happening, and then looked quickly away, instinctively not wanting to contaminate them with what was happening to her. Her sharpest and most urgent need was not to protect herself but to protect them. As she looked away she stepped to one side, as though to draw Gabriel’s attention to her rather than her vulnerable young. There was nothing she would not do to protect her sons. Nothing.

      Gabriel tracked the involuntary movement she made away from the two boys. Carlo had claimed that she was a very protective mother, but of course she would have been while she believed that Carlo was a wealthy man and her role as their mother gave her unlimited access to that wealth. Carlo, like many men who come to fatherhood so late in life, had worshipped the flesh of his flesh, evidence of his potency. His heirs…Now the heirs to precisely nothing. Gabriel’s tiger-eyed gaze pounced on the visual evidence of their privileged cosmopolitan lifestyle—expensive Italian clothes, healthy American teeth, upper-class English accents, their flesh and bones that of children who had from birth been well fed and nurtured. At their age he had been wearing rags, his body thin and bony.

      He switched his gaze from the beach to the woman in front of him. She too had good teeth, expensive teeth—paid for, of course, by her doting husband. Her doting and now dead husband. Her hair was cut in the kind of style that looked artless but, as Gabriel knew, cost a fortune to maintain. The ‘simple’ linen dress she was wearing, with its elegant lines, no doubt possessed a designer label, just as her hands and feet with their uncoloured but carefully manicured nails spoke of a woman who had the kind of confidence that came from enjoying position and wealth. But not any longer. What had she felt when she had learned of Carlo’s death? Relief at the thought that she would no longer have to give herself to an old man? Avaricious pleasure at the belief that she would now be wealthy?

      Well, she would have one of those two feelings to keep, he acknowledged brutally, although probably not for very long. She must be close to thirty now, and if she wanted to find another rich old man to support her she would discover she was competing with much younger, unencumbered women. The kind of women who fawned around him wherever he went.

      One of Gabriel’s mistresses had once told him that it was his Saracen ancestry that gave him the dark and dangerous side to his nature that his enemies feared and his women loved. For himself, he believed that any child growing up as he had done—unwanted, harshly treated, both physically and emotionally—quickly learned to give back as good as it got. A child who had to literally fight off the farm dogs for a scrap of bread was bound to develop a hard carapace to protect both his flesh and his spirit.

      An unexpected smile dimpled his chin as he watched Sasha swallow and saw the telltale darkening of her eyes, but there was no warmth to that smile. ‘Yes, it must have been hard for you, lying there in bed, letting an old man take his pleasure with your body and being unable to give you any pleasure back. But then, of course, you had all that money to pleasure you, didn’t you?’

      ‘I didn’t marry Carlo for his money.’

      ‘No? Then why did you marry him?’

      Ah, now he had her. He could hear the uneven ratcheting of her breath escaping from her lungs. How well he knew that fierce need to protect oneself from a death blow. Unfortunately for her it was too late. There was no protection for her here.

      ‘It certainly wasn’t for love,’he taunted her unkindly. ‘I saw him just before he died. He was in the hospital in Milan. You, I believe, were in New York—shopping. Very conveniently you had also boarded your sons at their school, in order to give yourself the freedom to do so.’

      All the colour bled out of her face. Infuriatingly Gabriel recognised that even now, almost bleached of blood and life, she still managed to look impossibly beautiful.

      Sasha was terrified she might actually faint, so great was the pressure of her anger. She had gone to NewYork in secret, to meet with yet another specialist to see if there was some way that Carlo might be saved. She might not have loved her husband as a woman, but she had been grateful to him for all that he had done for her and for the twins. The decision to ask the school if the boys could board was not one she had made without a great deal of soul searching. For her, the boys’emotional security was always paramount, but she and they had owed Carlo a huge debt. What kind of person would she be if she had not done absolutely everything she could to find a way to give her husband more time with them? It wouldn’t have been possible to travel to NewYork to seek a second opinion with the boys. And then there had been the added worry of how it would affect them to watch Carlo slowly dying. She had needed to be on hand to visit the hospital and then the hospice sometimes twice or three times a day. Carlo had wanted to die in Italy, not London, where the boys were at school. She had made what she had believed was the best decision she could at the time, but now Gabriel was pin-pointing the guilt that still nagged at her for having had to leave the boys at school for a term.

      ‘You know, of course, that the business is ruined and that all he has left you is debt?’

      ‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed bleakly. There was no point in even attempting to conceal the reality of her financial situation from him, or trying to explain to him how she felt about Carlo. He would not understand because he was incapable of understanding. Their shared experience of damaged childhood years, instead of forging shared bonds of mutual compassion, had turned them into the bitterest of enemies. He would never understand why she had left him for Carlo, and she would never tell him—because there was simply no point.

      ‘I suppose I should be honoured that you’ve actually come to gloat in person. After all, you weren’t at the funeral.’

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