Название: Tempestuous Affair
Автор: Кэрол Мортимер
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Контркультура
Серия: Mills & Boon Modern
isbn: 9781474030304
isbn:
Love-nest! That was a lie in itself. She loved, Joel just wanted, only she had been too much in love to see that was all it was. Joel had her to run his office efficiently, Maybury to see that his apartment was kept clean and comfortable, and that his meals were served when and if he wanted them. The only thing left for the woman in his life to do was share his bed, and after a while that could become a little degrading. They didn’t share their thoughts, and they didn’t share their dreams, even Lindsay’s usually open manner learning caution after Joel’s first half a dozen lukewarm responses to her mentions of her family and friends. He didn’t want to meet either, feeling it would be highly hypocritical when most of them disapproved of their relationship. And maybe it would have been, but it would also have made Lindsay extremely happy!
Most of her family and friends would tell her she was a fool, that everything she now knew about Joel, his independence from all emotional relationships, his arrogance when he felt he had been slighted, his cold-blooded disregard for anyone’s feelings but his own, had all been there for her to see before she took the irrevocable step of moving in with him. And she did know it now, to her cost.
Joel looked even more angry than ever. ‘You aren’t telling me you left me simply because I didn’t have the time to call you in the evenings?’ He sounded disgusted.
Her eyes flashed. ‘I hope you know me better than that,’ she said stiffly.
‘I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all,’ he ground out.
‘I left you because it was time to leave.’ She refused to be antagonised into losing her temper. ‘We want different things from life,’ she told him wearily.
‘I want you!’
‘But you don’t love me.’
His eyes narrowed to wary amber slits. ‘You knew that from the beginning, I told you then how it would be.’
She deserved this, although she hadn’t expected Joel to be the first to tell her, ‘I told you so’. ‘Yes,’ she sighed acknowledgement of his honesty about his feeling from the first.
‘But you expected more.’ His mouth twisted contemptuously.
She flinched at the derision in his voice. She hadn’t been expecting a belated declaration of love from him, not even for him to ask her to go back to him, but neither had she wanted him to scorn her desire, her need, for affection. He had never scorned her before, and it hurt.
‘I didn’t expect it,’ she replied quietly. ‘Although I wouldn’t have repulsed it either,’ she added huskily.
‘Lindsay?’
She stood up impatiently, her hands tightly clasped together. ‘We agreed to try living together, to see how it worked out. As far as I’m concerned it didn’t. So let it be the end of it.’
Joel swung her round, his hands rough on her arms. ‘Do you love me, Lindsay?’
Tears swam in her eyes as she looked up at him, so much taller than her despite her own considerable height. ‘And if I do?’ she asked softly.
His face became a shuttered mask, his eyes bleak, his hands falling away from her as he stepped away. ‘Love was never part of our agreement.’
‘Then it’s as well I don’t love you, isn’t it?’ She looked at him with challenge in her eyes, knowing by the narrowed suspicion of his that he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. Pride came to her rescue as she sensed his indecision. ‘I only made a supposition, Joel,’ she dismissed lightly. ‘I don’t love you or any other man. But I do want more from a relationship than you can give me.’
His mouth was a thin angry line. ‘Such as?’ he rasped.
She shrugged, putting her hands in the hip pockets of her dress so that he shouldn’t see them shaking. ‘Like sharing, giving, maybe even a little fun.’ She met his gaze steadily. ‘You’re so intent on keeping your emotions in check that you’ve forgotten even how to have that! Do you realise that the only times we’ve been out you’ve taken me to respectable restaurants or equally respectable clubs?’
‘Would you rather I’d taken you to unrespectable ones?’ he demanded exasperatedly.
‘You’re missing my point, Joel,’ she sighed.
‘I’m not sure you even know what that is!’
She blushed at his scorn, knowing he would never understand what she was trying to tell him, his emotions so firmly controlled that he couldn’t understand her need to share laughter and tears with him. ‘Okay, so maybe those two examples weren’t very good ones,’ she admitted. ‘All I’m trying to explain is that you never shared things with me. You shut me out of everything but your bed. And although that may be enough for some women it isn’t for me!’
‘Isn’t it?’
Lindsay swallowed hard at the dangerous softness of his voice, her senses instantly alerted. And she was right to feel nervous as she was pulled back against him, his arms about her waist as his lips nuzzled against her throat.
She groaned as the usual lethargy possessed her when he took her in his arms, trembling as his hands moved up to cup her breasts over the green silky dress, her nipples flowering to his touch after the weeks without him. He knew her so well, knew that her breasts were the most sensitive part of her body, gently squeezing her nipples between thumbs and fingers with just enough pressure to cause the pleasure-pain that made her weak at the knees.
She turned eagerly into his arms, needing to feel his lips on hers, wanting so much more than he was giving.
‘You see, Lindsay?’ He looked down at her triumphantly. ‘This is all that really counts.’
She was too aroused to be alarmed by his obvious satisfaction in her instantaneous response, already able to see them together in her imagination, their legs entwined, their naked bodies pressed together as they gave each other fulfilment that went beyond even the imagination.
All her plans to remain immune to him were forgotten as he plundered her mouth with ruthless intent, his fingers nimbly releasing the buttons down the front of her dress, smoothing the material down her arms to fall unheeded about her narrow waist. He cupped her bared breasts in his hands, his thumbtips moving across the already hardened tips to cause spasms of delight to course through her body, his tongue now penetrating the warm cavern of her mouth with rhythmic eroticism.
As he bent his head to claim first one nipple into his mouth with a sucking motion, and then the other, Lindsay’s fingers became entangled in the dark unruliness of his hair, pressing him against her as his tongue flicked erotically over the hardened nipple, barely aware of him unbuttoning his own clothing until his mouth moved back to hers, the heated dampness of his chest crushed abrasively against her extremely sensitive breasts.
‘Touch me, Lindsay,’ he encouraged with a groan. ‘Touch me the way I’ve dreamt of you touching me the last four weeks I’ve been away from you!’
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