A Little Seduction Omnibus (20 page)

She heard him groan deep down in his throat, a male purr of tormented longing. She lifted her fingers to his throat and touched it, feeling the vibration of the noise he was making against her fingertips. She loved the feel of his skin, the feel of his body. She loved it when she closed her hand, her
hands
, around him and felt the satisfying hard swell of his body as he reacted to her touch.

‘Both hands?’ he had teased her, the first time she had wrapped them lovingly around him.

‘Mmm...but you do wonders for my ego.
One
will do, Dee...’

‘One will
do
,’ she had acknowledged. ‘But it feels so good to hold you like this, with two...’

‘I can’t argue with that,’ he had agreed throatily, but he had still been laughing a little at her.

He had stopped laughing, though, when she had held him still and bent her head to place a ring of shyly adoring kisses around the taut head of his erection.

Oh, yes, he had stopped laughing then.

Now, with the lights turned down low over the large, luxurious bed, Hugo undressed her slowly. They had been to bed together before, but this time, somehow, it was different...special...and the moment he stepped away from her he gave her a look so full of import that it made Dee shiver a little to read the message in his eyes. This was their night of commitment to one another, the final bridge to cross on their way to
complete
commitment, the final act which they had not yet shared.

They already knew one another’s dreams and one another’s hopes, they already knew what they were destined to be and to do—that together they would work for the benefit of mankind, that they would leave university to work together in the field, would marry before they left. Hugo was so idealistic—even more so, in some ways, than she was herself. He believed passionately in what he wanted to do and he was totally and utterly committed to it. To deny him the opportunity would be like cutting off one of his limbs, only worse.

‘There’s so much we can give them, so much we can put back into a culture, a country, that in the past we’ve only taken from and destroyed, and there’s so much we can learn from them. They have so little in materialistic terms, but they have their pride and their dignity—their heritage.

‘My father doesn’t approve of what I’m planning to do, you know, and neither does my grandfather, but it’s something I
have
to do...I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t,’ he had told her passionately, and Dee had known exactly what he meant. His idealism only made her love him more, even whilst she knew that it would also mean that there would always be a small part of his heart and his emotions that did not belong totally to her.

He was very like
her
father, in that his pride in his own beliefs ran very strongly in him.
Very
like her father.

‘It’s your turn,’ Hugo whispered to her now, as his tender glance caressed and reassured her. Very carefully Dee started to undress
him
, her fingers trembling not with nervousness but with the intensity of her suppressed and aching longing for him.

‘No, that’s cheating,’ she protested huskily when, without waiting for her to finish, he leaned forward and started to nibble the side of her neck, his hand cupping and stroking her naked breast. Dee closed her eyes as she felt her body’s reaction, going still as she tried to stem the fierce hot tide of it, rising not so much up through her body as washing fiercely down through it, to that place where the sheer pressure of it forced into life a fierce, tumultuously beating pulse.

Hugo’s lips caressed her shoulder, her collarbone, and then moved lower, nuzzling at the soft curve of her breast and then the taut crest of her nipple before closing over that nipple itself. Dee made a fiercely guttural noise of throaty excitement, her fingernails digging into Hugo’s skin, but if he felt any pain he certainly didn’t show it. However, his slow, careful suckling on her nipple did, suddenly becoming an urgent, body-trembling erotic tug that made Dee groan as she buried her hands in his hair and held him passionately to her.

Somehow she was on the bed. Somehow Hugo was undressed. Somehow he had positioned her so that he could kneel between her splayed legs as he kissed her quivering belly. Now, with no need to control her longing for him, Dee could respond to him as she had so much longed to do, arching her spine and lifting herself to the tormenting lap of his tongue as he licked at the moist slickness of her body. There was no need for the champagne—her own desire had covered her skin in its own sweetly scented mist of arousal—but, wonderful though the touch of his mouth against her body was, it wasn’t what Dee really wanted. Not now. Not this time.

‘Are you sure you’re ready for me? Do you want...?’ Hugo asked her hoarsely as she reached for him, wildly begging him, eagerly demanding to feel him deep inside her.

‘Oh, yes, yes...’ Dee groaned longingly.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him, watching him as urgently, as hungrily as he watched her.

‘I’m afraid of hurting you,’ he confessed as he hesitated, but his body wasn’t afraid, Dee recognised, her eyes widening as she watched him lowering himself towards her. He looked so good, so...so ready...so—

She gave a little whimper of sound as she felt him rubbing himself slowly against her.

‘That hurt?’ Hugo asked her in concern.

Dee managed to laugh.

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘It hurts because it’s not...because I want you
inside
me...’ She gave a smothered gasp as she felt the first of the deep penetrative strokes she had so longed for, her eyes widening as she realised how well their bodies fitted together.

No way did the sensation she had of being filled, stretched completely, in
any
way approximate to any kind of pain, but the intensity of her pleasure was so acute that it could almost be described as a kind of special agony, a racking urgency, a pulsing, heart-jerking, driven compulsion that had her calling out Hugo’s name as she clung frantically to him.

It didn’t last long; both of them were too aroused, too wrought up emotionally and physically, for it to do so. Dee knew she had been virtually on the point of orgasm even before Hugo had entered her, and he had been almost as close to the edge of his own self-control.

Dee had barely felt the first quivering explosion of her own completion when Hugo cried out her name, the hot, fierce pulse of his ejaculation drenching her body with a fiercely sweet burst of pleasure.

She was, Dee discovered seconds later as she relaxed into his arms, crooning happily in delighted pleasure, making soft cooing sounds of love to Hugo as he held her.

‘It will be better next time,’ she heard him promising her as he smoothed back her hair and kissed her tenderly. ‘I’ll make it last longer and—’

‘
Better
...than
that
...
impossible
!’ Dee assured him blissfully.

‘Oh, Dee, Dee, is it any wonder that I love you so much?’ Hugo praised her adoringly. ‘I should not have met you, you know. You shouldn’t really have existed. I didn’t
plan
for this to happen. I wasn’t
going
to fall in love, and I certainly didn’t want to make the kind of lifetime commitment I want to make to you to any woman until I was at least thirty.

‘It’s just as well that you and I share the same ideals and the same ambitions. I don’t think I could have borne it if you’d been the kind of woman who expected me to stay at home and get myself the sort of job my father wants me to get. Something in the City that will make me a lot of money. I’m not going to be much of a catch as a husband, you do realise that, don’t you? Our children will complain and all your friends will think that you’re crazy to love me. Your father will quite definitely disapprove...’

‘No, he won’t,’ Dee denied. ‘He’ll admire you for what you’re doing—and it is admirable, Hugo, to want to help others. I couldn’t love you so much as I do if you were any way different from the way you are, and I certainly wouldn’t want to change you or the plans you’ve made.’

‘Mmm...it’s providential, isn’t it, that you’ll have completed your degree course just about the same time as I finish my Ph.D.? There’s no way I can make time to go back to working in the field until I finish it, but once I have, once we’ve both completed our studies... There’s so much I want to do, Dee. So very, very much...’

‘Mmm...I know,’ she agreed, and then added with sweet provocativeness, ‘You haven’t even touched the champagne, and then there’s the Jacuzzi... How long have you booked the suite for?’

‘Just tonight,’ Hugo told her ruefully.

‘
Just
tonight? You mean we’ve still got it for a whole twelve hours?’ Dee teased him, mock wide-eyed.

‘A whole twelve hours,’ he agreed, but he was mumbling the words a little because Dee was kissing him.

‘Then we don’t have a
moment
to waste, do we?’ she told him as she trailed her fingers slowly over his body.

‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ he agreed.

CHAPTER SIX

D
EE
woke up with a start. Her heart was pounding and her mouth felt dry. She had slept heavily but not refreshingly, almost as though she had been drugged, and as she lay in bed she was conscious of an unfamiliar reluctance to get up, almost a
dread
of doing so, as though by remaining where she was she could hold her apprehensions and low spirits at bay.

Unfamiliar? Not exactly. Not totally. There had been a period after her father’s death, a time once the urgency of the immediate calls upon her time and attention had slackened a little, when she had experienced a similar longing to crawl away and hide somewhere safe and womb-like. She had had to fight to overcome it, to tell herself that the decisions she had made had been right and necessary, to urge herself to go on. Resolutely she threw back the bedclothes and slid her feet to the bedroom floor.

Her bedroom was her own secret, special place, somewhere that no one else was allowed to enter. Not so much because it was a private sanctuary, Dee recognised, but because of what she knew it betrayed about a deeply personal side of her nature.

The walls were painted a soft washed colour, somewhere between blue and green, and the windows were draped in gossamer folds of creamy white muslin. The same fabric fell from the ceiling and was gathered back softly at either side of her double bed, which, like the chaise longue at its foot and the comfortable bedroom chair by the window, was covered in a cream-coloured cotton brocade. The carpet too was cream. The whole ambience of the room was one of soft delicacy. A stranger looking into Dee’s bedroom and making a character assessment of her from it would have judged her to be soft and ethereal, a creature of fluid, feminine moods and feelings, a dreamy water sprite of a woman, whose sensibilities were as delicate and tender as the petals of the fresh cream flowers that filled the bowl on the pretty antique table she used as a dressing table.

As Dee showered and then dressed she acknowledged that the cause of her sense of wanting to curl up protectively and let the world get on without her for a while were the two completely contradictory forces lining up against one another for battle inside her head.

On the one side was her need to persuade Peter, without either alienating him or even more importantly hurting him, that it was time for him to step down from the foundation committee, and her knowledge that the best way to achieve that goal would be to win Hugo’s support, to actively
court
his help and approval of her plans, whilst on the other was her totally opposing need to have nothing whatsoever to do with him, to blot him completely out of her thoughts, her mind, her life, her heart.

Abruptly Dee stopped brushing her hair, her body convulsing in a small involuntary shiver.

She had fought that battle once, fought it and, she had believed, won it, inch by painful inch, hour by agonising hour. She put down her hairbrush and stared unseeingly into her mirror. She was afraid, she acknowledged grimly. Afraid of having to re-enter the long, painful time of darkness she had already been through once, afraid of what might happen to her if she allowed Hugo to come back into even the smallest corner of her life, and that was why she had been so reluctant to face the day.

Yes, she was stronger now than the girl she had once been, but then she had had the advantage of being motivated, driven by what she had considered to be almost a crusade; then she had had zeal and youth on her side. Now...

Now she still believed as firmly as she had done then that she had made the right, the only decision, but now the brightness of her fervour, her belief was shadowed, obscured sometimes by her own inner images of what might have been, the child or children she might have had, the life, the love she might have shared.

As a young man Hugo had been, if anything, even more fervent in his beliefs than she had been herself, and, unlike her, he had been sharply critical of what he had termed the selfishness of a materialistic society and those who supported it. As an idealist, his views had sometimes been diametrically opposed to those of her father—or so it had seemed at times.

‘What do you expect my father to do?’ she had demanded angrily of him once in the middle of one of their passionate arguments. ‘Give
all
his money away...?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Hugo had snorted angrily, in defence of his own beliefs.

He had been equally passionate about how important it was for those involved in aid programmes to be completely free of even the faintest breath of scandal, of anything that could reflect badly on the cause they were representing. Oddly enough, that had been a belief he had actually
shared
with her father.

Perhaps because she was a woman, Dee was inclined to take a more reasonable and compassionate view. Human beings were, after all, human, vulnerable,
fallible
.

There was no point in giving in to her present feelings. She would, she decided firmly, take the bull by the horns and drive over to Lexminster so that she could both see how Peter was and either talk with Hugo or arrange a meeting with him so that she could raise the subject of the committee with him.

Her mind made up, Dee told herself that she had made the right decision. What had happened...existed...between her and Hugo all those years ago had no relevance to her life now, and it certainly had none to his. Her best plan was simply to behave as though they had been no more than mere acquaintances, and to adopt a casually friendly but firmly distancing attitude towards him.

A very sensible decision, but one which surely did not necessitate four changes of clothes and a bedroom strewn with discarded, rejected outfits before Dee was finally ready to set out for Lexminster—over an hour later than she had originally planned.

Even so, it had been worth taking time and trouble with her appearance, she told herself stoutly as she climbed into her car. Her father had been of the old school, and had firmly believed in the importance of creating the right impression, and in taking time over her clothes she was just acting on those beliefs, Dee assured herself.

The cream dress she was wearing was simple, and the long slits which ran down both sides made it easy to move in without being in any way provocative—at least that was what Dee thought. A man, though, could have told her that there was something quite definitely very deliciously alluring about the discreetly subtle flash of long leg that her skirt revealed when she walked.

Its boat-shaped neckline was sensible—even if, regrettably, it did have an annoying tendency to slide down off one shoulder occasionally—and the little suedette pumps she was wearing with it were similarly ‘sensible.’ The pretty gold earrings had been a present from her father, and were therefore of sentimental importance, and if she had dashed back into the house just to add a spray of her favourite perfume and check her lipstick—so what?

As Dee drove through the town centre she noticed a small group of teenage boys standing aimlessly in the square, and she started to frown. She knew from the headmaster of the local school, who was on the board of one of her charities, that they were experiencing a growing problem with truancy amongst some of the teenage children.

Ted Richards felt, like her, that the town’s teenagers needed a healthy outlet for their energies and, perhaps even more importantly, that they needed to have their growing maturity recognised and to feel that they were a valued part of their own community.

In contrast to the disquieting boredom Dee had recognised in the slouched shoulders and aimless scuffling of the youngsters, when she drove past her own offices the area outside it was busy, with the town’s senior citizens making use of the comfortable facilities of the coffee shop and meeting rooms on the ground floor of the building. Only the other morning, as she had walked through the coffee shop, she had noticed that the list pinned up on the noticeboard inviting people to join one of the several trips that were being planned was very fully subscribed.

Teenagers did not always take too enthusiastically to being over-organised, especially by adults. Dee knew that, but she was still very conscious of the fact that their welfare and their happiness was an area which needed an awful lot of input.

Anna’s husband, Ward, had certainly opened her eyes and inspired her in that regard. Perhaps it might be worthwhile asking Ward if he would show Peter round his own workshops, Dee mused as she left the town behind her—always providing, of course, that Peter was well enough for such an outing.

Peter had a very special place in Dee’s heart. She never found it boring listening to his stories of his young manhood, especially when those stories involved her own father.

It was lunchtime when Dee reached Lexminster. In addition to the file she was compiling containing her plans for Rye’s teenagers, she had also placed in the boot of her car one of her home-made pies, which were a special favourite of Peter’s, as well as some other food.

She had a key for Peter’s house, but, out of habit, she automatically knocked on the door first and then, when there was no response, fished the key out of her bag and let herself in, calling out a little anxiously as she stepped into the hallway,

‘Peter, it’s me—Dee.’

She was just about to head for the kitchen with her groceries when, unexpectedly, the kitchen door opened. But it wasn’t Peter who opened it, and as she saw Hugo frowning at her Dee’s heart gave a dangerous flurried series of painful little thuds.

‘Oh...’ Dee’s hand went protectively to her throat. ‘I didn’t... You...’

‘I heard you knock but I was on the phone,’ Hugo told her curtly before adding, ‘Peter’s asleep. The doctor was anxious that he should have some proper rest, so she has given him a shot of something to help him sleep.’ He frowned as he looked at her disapprovingly. ‘I just hope that you haven’t woken him.’

To her chagrin his criticism made Dee feel as awkward and guilty as a little girl, causing her to retaliate defensively, ‘Was it really necessary or wise of the doctor to drug him?’

‘Drug him...what exactly are you implying?’

‘I’m not implying anything,’ Dee denied. ‘But at Peter’s age, the fact—’

‘Jane is a qualified doctor, Dee, and if she thinks that some mild form of gentle sedation is called for...’

Dee’s heart twisted betrayingly over Hugo’s intimate use of the doctor’s Christian name, and the way his voice had softened noticeably as he spoke it.

‘I actually needed to talk to Peter,’ she announced, deliberately changing the subject. ‘But if he’s been sedated...’

‘You
needed
to talk to him? So this isn’t just a social visit to enquire after his health, then.’ Hugo pounced.

‘I
am
concerned about his health, of course...’

‘But obviously not concerned enough to have called in a doctor,’ Hugo pointed out dryly.

Dee could feel her face starting to burn with a mixture of guilt and anger.

‘I
would
have done so, but, as I explained yesterday, I haven’t—’

‘Had time. Yes, I know. What was it you needed to talk to Peter about?’

Dee looked sharply at him. There was no way she could bring herself to enlist Hugo’s aid whilst he was being so antagonistic towards her.

‘I rather think that that is Peter’s and my business, don’t you?’ she asked him coolly.

Immediately Hugo’s eyebrows rose, the look he was giving her every bit as disdainful as the one she had just given him.

‘That rather depends. You see—’ He broke off as the telephone in the kitchen started to ring, excusing himself to Dee as he went to answer it.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she heard him saying to whoever was calling. ‘No, that’s no problem. I shall be staying here anyway, so you can contact me here... No, that’s not a problem; there’s no time limit... My work means that I can base myself virtually anywhere just so long as I have access to the conveniences of modern technology.... No...I haven’t told her yet, but I intend to do so...’

Dee hadn’t deliberately eavesdropped on his conversation, but it was impossible for her not to have overheard it, even though she had walked into the hall. As she heard Hugo replacing the receiver, Dee walked back towards the kitchen.

‘Since I can’t see or speak with Peter, there isn’t much point in my staying. When he does wake up please give him my love. I’ve brought some food and—’

She stopped as Hugo cut her off abruptly, telling her brusquely, ‘You can’t go yet. There’s something I have to tell you.’

Something he
had
to tell her? Whatever it was she could tell from his expression that it wasn’t anything pleasant. Her heart started to thump. Had Peter said something to him about her father...about the past? But, no, Peter didn’t know. She had never... But he could have guessed, had his own suspicions...and...

‘What is it? Tell me...’

Dee could hear the anxiety crackling in her own voice, making it sound harsh.

‘We’ll go into the other room,’ Hugo suggested. ‘We’re right under Peter’s bedroom here, and I don’t want to disturb him.’

Her heart pounding in heavy sledgehammer blows, Dee followed him into the parlour.

The air in the room was stale and stuffy, and automatically she walked towards the window, skirting past Hugo and the large pieces of Victorian furniture which dominated the room.

‘What is it? What do you want to say to me?’ Dee repeated tensely.

Hugo was frowning, looking away from her as though... Surely he...?

‘Peter and I had a long chat after you’d gone last night...’

Dee could feel the violence of the heavy hammer-blows of her heart shaking her chest. Here it was: the blow she had always dreaded. Peter had spoken to Hugo, shared with him his doubts and fears about her father. Doubts and fears which he had never voiced to her, but which, like her, had obviously haunted him.

‘He was telling me that your father...’

Dee closed her eyes, willing herself not to give in to the creeping remorseless tide of fear rising up through her body in an icy-cold wave.