A Little Seduction Omnibus (18 page)

Dee could feel herself starting to tremble, while her body had become taut with responsive desire.

‘Of course, some of the men get a little bit impatient waiting to be chosen, and then they snatch away the girl of their choice in case she chooses someone else. They seduce her with gifts and kisses.’

His voice was dropping as he spoke to her, becoming lower and raw. Dee made a little husky sound of protest, and as her lips parted Hugo warned her thickly, ‘
Don’t
do that. Otherwise
I
shall be the one stealing
you
away. Have dinner with me tonight,’ he begged her abruptly, and then, when she hesitated, he told her, ‘You needn’t worry. I’m not suggesting... It will be somewhere safely public,’ he told her gravely, ‘for both our sakes. The way I feel about you...’ He stopped and shook his head.

‘In Africa a man considers himself to be very much a man, and his woman very much
his
woman, very, very responsive to
him
, and their love a sacred thing if she conceives his child the first time they make love. Here, in our so-called civilisation, things are different.

‘Once you were in my arms I know that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from responding to man’s most basic instinctive urge, to bury myself as deep inside you as I could, to give my seed, give our
child
the very best chance it could have of being conceived. And I know, too, that that would be the very worst thing that could happen to it and us right now... I’ve seen students struggling with domesticity and a baby. It doesn’t work,’ he told her flatly.

Dee was too shaken by his earlier comments to say anything. Deep down inside her body she could feel her
own
very basic response to
him
, and she knew that what he’d said had touched a deep cord within her.

Of course she didn’t want to get pregnant. Of course she didn’t. But of course she did—oh, how she did. But she couldn’t...wouldn’t...

‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say to you?’ Hugo was asking her tenderly. ‘Dinner is all that I can let myself give you tonight, Dee, even though it’s very far from all I
want
to give you. Very, very far. So will you, please, please have dinner with me?’

‘Yes,’ Dee responded simply.

After she left him she made a detour on her way back home to call at her doctor’s surgery and ask for an appointment to discuss birth control. She knew she was blushing as she made her request, but the receptionist was completely matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

Dee knew that most of her fellow students were using one form of birth control or another.

‘You
can’t
leave it up to the men,’ one of her house-sharers had commented bluntly as she had hunted in the bathroom for the small white pill she had lost as it popped out of the packet. ‘After all, they are
our
bodies, and
we’re
the ones who have the right to decide.’

‘The right and the responsibility,’ another girl had chimed in, a little bitterly. ‘The two go hand in hand.’

* * *

Hand in hand... Dee looked down at where
her
hand was linked with Hugo’s.

To her relief none of the others had been there when he had come to collect her.

‘Nice place,’ he commented as Dee closed the front door behind them. ‘Must be quite pricey to rent, though, even sharing...’

‘Not really...and it isn’t rented. I’m actually buying it,’ Dee told him casually. ‘It’s a good investment. Dad is helping me. I haven’t made my mind up yet, but I may keep it on even when I’ve finished my degree course. The rental I could get will cover the mortgage and the running costs, and property prices are rising at the moment, so... In fact, I think it could be an idea to buy a few more, but to do that I’d have to ask Dad to let me break into my trust fund and I’m not sure—’

‘Your trust fund?’ Hugo gave her a sharp look. ‘Now you’re scaring me. That sounds like pretty serious money.’

Dee stopped walking to look uncertainly at him. She didn’t normally speak so unguardedly to people about her personal background, but she felt so relaxed with him, and besides, he had talked about his days at public school and his own background, so she had assumed that his parents were financially well off.

Now it seemed she had been wrong.

‘My family is land-rich but money-poor,’ he told her dryly, correctly interpreting the questioning uncertainty in her eyes. ‘They’re rich in family connections and the ability to trace the family tree back to the Norman Conquest. There is money—yes—but it doesn’t run to providing each of us with our own private trust funds...’

‘Oh, but my father did that because without him I’d be on my own,’ Dee protested, anxious to defuse what she feared was going to become a thorny issue between them.

‘Yes, I can understand that,’ Hugo responded gently. ‘If you were mine
I
would want to protect and safeguard you too. I’m just surprised that he allowed you to come to university. From the sound of it I imagine he would have preferred to have you privately educated at home.’

Dee gave him a quick look, warily conscious of the irony beneath the seemingly sympathetic words.

‘Perhaps he
is
a little bit old-fashioned,’ she responded with quiet dignity, all her protective instincts coming to the fore as she sensed Hugo’s unspoken criticism of the father she loved so much. ‘But I would much rather have a father like that—a father I can look up to and admire...and trust, a man of...of compassion and...and honour...of integrity—than someone...’

Her voice became suspended with emotion at the thought that she and Hugo might already be on the verge of a quarrel, but immediately Hugo soothed her, gently stroking her hand as he apologised. ‘I’m sorry... I shouldn’t have implied... I guess I’m just jealous...’ he told her whimsically. ‘And not just of your trust fund...’

Of course that made her laugh, as he had intended it would, and she was secretly pleased he kept on holding her hand as they walked down the street together.

He hadn’t said exactly where they were going, but Lexminster was a relatively compact city, and after the revelation about her trust fund she was reluctant to suggest that they could take her car to their destination.

Later, when she discovered the cavalier attitude Hugo had to driving-he had learned to drive in an ancient Land Rover on his grandfather’s estate and further honed his ‘skill’ driving across the dry, mud-scarred ribbed and ridged empty riverbeds of the drought-ridden area where he had done his voluntary work—she would be glad she had not been subjected to it on their first date.

It was a late November evening, with just a warning that frost might be in the air later. The autumn had been fine and dry, and the leaves were still at the delicious stage of rustling pleasurably beneath one’s feet when walked on, their scent evocative and slightly pungent on the clear air as they walked down the tree-lined main street of the city.

The restaurant Hugo had chosen was a small Italian family-run place, down a narrow side street, and Dee fell in love with it and the family who owned and ran it the moment they walked in.

They greeted Hugo like a member of the family, Luigi, the burly grey-haired patron, punching him genially on the shoulder and then wincing in mock pain and shaking his arm.

‘He is built like an ox...like a bull,’ he amended, with a laughing look in Dee’s direction.

Of course she blushed, and of course Bella, his wife, tutted and protested that Luigi was embarrassing her, smothering Dee with warmly maternal concern and protection as she assured her that she was not to take any notice of Luigi’s poor attempt at humour.

‘What? You mean to say that you do
not
think of me as a bull?’ Hugo teased Bella, lifting his arm and tensing his muscles in a mock display of male strength.

‘Aha, it is not the size of this muscle
here
that counts,’ Luigi warned him. ‘Is that not so,
cara
?’ he asked his outraged wife.

Dee listened to their byplay with a mixture of delight and self-consciousness. Luigi was barely her own height, and Bella was even smaller, both of them plump and round and very obviously well and happily married. So much so that it was impossible for Dee to take offence at Luigi’s references to Hugo’s sexual machismo. He was as proud of him as though Hugo had been his own son, as proud of Hugo’s maleness as though it had been his own, and it was a simple and honest pride, with nothing offensive or prurient about it.

‘She is
bella
, very
bella
,’ he told Hugo approvingly, after he had subjected Dee to a thorough and very malely appreciative visual inspection, his eyes twinkling as he made this report to Hugo.

‘She is indeed, and she is
my bella
,’ Hugo retorted warningly.

It was the start of one of the most magical evenings of Dee’s life.

She ate and drank with an appetite that was totally unfamiliar to her. Hugo, she noticed, whilst he enjoyed his food and his wine, was careful not to drink too much nor to allow her to do so, and she acknowledged that she loved his protective attitude towards her. It made her feel so...so safe, so cherished...so loved.

So loved.

There was no doubt in Dee’s mind that she was in love. She had been in love from the moment Hugo had picked her up off the gravel, she suspected, and it was the most intoxicating, the most exciting, the most life-enhancing emotion she had
ever
experienced.

It was late when they left the restaurant. The promised frost had become reality, sparkling on the ground and the trees, vaporising their breath as Dee gave a small gasp at the cold shock of it against her face.

‘It’s so cold,’ she protested as she huddled deeper into her coat.

‘Mmm... Come here, then,’ Hugo told her, wrapping his arm around her as he drew her as close as he could to his own body.

Happily nestling close to him, Dee laughed when he tucked his hand into her pocket.

‘Aha...all you
really
wanted to do was to keep your hand warm in my pocket,’ she teased him.

‘Wrong,’ Hugo corrected her huskily. ‘All I
really
want to do is to keep
all
of you warm in my bed, with my body...my hands and my mouth. Has anyone ever made any kind of love to you, Dee? Has anyone ever touched you...kissed you...?’

‘Of course they have,’ she squeaked indignantly. Just because she was a virgin that didn’t mean she was
totally
sexually ignorant.

‘In my last year at school I went to loads of snogging parties...’

She could see the little puffs of white air appearing from Hugo’s mouth as his body gusted with laughter.

‘Oh, snogging parties... That wasn’t
exactly
the kind of kissing I meant. What I meant was, has anyone kissed you...intimately, caressed your body with their mouth, explored you with their hands and their tongue, made you...?’

Frantically Dee covered her ears, torn between excited shock and self-conscious chagrin that he had to explain to her so graphically just what he meant. She knew what he was describing, of course, had even wondered in her most private intimate moments just how it would feel to have a man,
her
man, make love to her in such a way, but she had never dreamed that she would walk down a public street whilst he, that man, teasingly described to her an act which she had assumed was something a man only did for a woman if she was very, very fortunate or very, very loved.

‘Do I take it that that’s a no?’ Hugo asked her, still laughing, but Dee could hear the rusty betraying note in his voice, and she could see the way he was looking at her. She might not be sexually experienced, but she was no fool. Hugo wanted to touch her, caress her, taste her, in the way he had just described, and unless she had got it wrong he wanted to do it very, very badly indeed and very, very soon...like now, in fact. Her heart started to thud. She felt dizzy with excitement and the euphoria-inducing realisation of her own female power.

‘Oh, it’s going to be so good for us,’ Hugo groaned as he drew her into the shadow of a convenient side street and swept her promptly and expertly into his arms. Not that Dee was attempting very much resistance, and she didn’t offer any either a few seconds later, when he slipped his hands inside her coat and wrapped his arms around her body so tightly she felt she could hardly breathe. Their kiss was everything that a first kiss should be—tender, exciting, passionate, their mouths eager and hungry, their bodies urgently hungry for the feel of the other. But even though Hugo had put his hands under her coat, a little to Dee’s surprise he made no attempt to do anything more than simply hold her.

‘I daren’t,’ he told her gruffly, his voice muffled between kisses as though he could read what she was thinking. ‘God knows I want to, but if I touch you now... Remember what I said to you this afternoon?’

‘About...about making babies...’ Dee responded shakily.

‘Don’t. Don’t even say it,’ Hugo groaned as he moved his body even closer to her own, swiftly unfastening his own coat. Dee could feel his hard arousal. Immediately her own body quickened, revealing a capacity for sexual responsiveness which she had never guessed she possessed. The nature and the intensity of the ache raging through her shocked her, and yet it excited her as well.

Her fellow students’ lusty comments about sharing their beds and their bodies with Hugo slipped warningly into her mind, and instantly she was seized with such a strong surge of female determination and possessive jealousy at the thought of someone daring to try to take away her man that the primitiveness of her emotions bemused her.

‘What is it...? What’s wrong?’ Hugo asked her. He had buttoned up her coat and was smiling tenderly down at her as his hand cupped her face, and his forefinger firmly tilted her face up to his so that he could look into her eyes.

‘I was just thinking about something one of the other girls said and how jealous it was making me,’ Dee responded honestly.