No Longer Forbidden? (12 page)

Rowan ached to ask, but prying was out of place. He wouldn’t appreciate it, given what a proud, aloof man he was. She let her hair fall forward to hide her frown of empathetic pain.

“I was tired of fighting with you. Fighting that feeling,” she confessed, hoping he wouldn’t make her tell him exactly how long that feeling had been twisting like a flame inside her. Tossing her hair back, she made a false attempt at flippancy. “And you’re the one who thinks I need to grow up, so it’s rather fitting for you to be the one to make me a woman, don’t you think?”

A disturbing sense of privilege poured into Nic. Plainly this act held a lot less importance to her than it did for him, so he did his best to laugh it off the way she had. “Is that what this was? A coming-of-age ceremony?”

For a second he thought Rowan flinched. A familiar bleak valley threatened to swallow up his brief sense of pride. He tensed, but then Rowan produced a wide smile that was like light breaking over the dark edges that surrounded him, bathing him in reprieve. She cupped the side of his face, leaning close enough to touch a light kiss to his mouth.

“Yes, Nic. You might not be given to sentimentality about these things, but I shall forever look back on you fondly as My First. That’s almost as good as whatever you get for being Newsman of the Year, isn’t it?”

Always so glib, but her words had a profound effect on him. That
forever look back
ought to be reassuring. He had barely let himself acknowledge the fear that her taking him as her first lover and dropping words like
long-term
meant she expected a relationship. He most certainly was not the man to give her anything like that.

But that
fondly
squeezed feeling out of his incompetent heart. Two days ago he wouldn’t have given any thought to parting with animosity between them, but quite suddenly he hoped for something better than that.

She started to pull away and he brought his hand to the back of her head, silky curls crushed under his gentle insistence she stay close.

“I won’t forget this either,” he admitted.

Which scared him as much as the vulnerable way Rowan caught her lip between her teeth. He closed his eyes against a look that searched for reassurance and drew her forward so he could kiss her, making her release her bottom lip to his own gentle bite and lingering attention to soothe any tenderness he inflicted.

The kiss quickly got out of hand and he groaned, never having come up against anything like this: the desire to make love again so soon after the most intense orgasm of his life, or with a woman so new to it she couldn’t.

When she breathed his name against his lips and set a hand on his collarbone he had to let her put space between them.

“Are you saying you won’t forget in a good way or a bad way?”

Was she kidding? He glanced down at the raging muscle straining from between his thighs like a compass needle seeking North.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Her flush was pure mortification. “I thought it was good for both of us, but—”

“Maybe if you’re willing to practice we can do something about it?” he chided facetiously.

Rowan paled and he realized with horror that she’d taken it the wrong way. She tried to bolt from the bed and again
he had to grab her, holding tight to her wiry strength while she struggled and slapped at him.

“That was a joke,” he insisted, trying to speak over her angry demands to quit manhandling her. He wouldn’t let her go, though—not when his heart was bottoming out at how badly he’d misread her sensitivity. “Rowan, listen.
Ouch
.” He swore as he took a scratch down his rib cage before he immobilized her.

“That wasn’t funny, Nic!” She was breathing hard, muscles a taut bundle of resistance against his hold, eyes spitting venom. “I know more about practice than anyone, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back to trying and not getting it right. For you. I’m living for me now—understand? I don’t care if it was good for you. It was good for me, so you can go to hell with your
practice
.”

His chest knotted up so tight he could barely breathe.

“It
was
good for me,” he insisted, pressing the words into her temple as she turned a stubborn cheek against him. He could see her brow pleated in hurt.

He didn’t know how to apologize with the kind of sincerity needed here, and inadequacy threatened to push him out of the room rather than try, but he had learned enough about her in the last two days to realize how deeply it would injure her to think her performance had failed to please him.

“I only meant I want to make love again and I realize you won’t want to.” He hurried to say it, shifting because he was aroused by their tussle and unable to hide it. He didn’t expect anything but a cold shower, though. “You have this insane effect on me, Ro. You always have. I can’t help it.”

She turned her head to look at him and he began to wobble on a tightrope a thousand stories in the air. He backed onto solid ground.

“I don’t know what it is with our chemistry. I had hoped
once would be enough.” The lie bunched his muscles into aching knots. He had
never
believed once would be enough. “If you let me, I’d be on you night and day to work this out of my system.”

Her lashes came down to hide her eyes and he scowled, uncomfortable with how much he’d revealed. He was generally self-sufficient, but now he looked into a bleak future where his frustrating hunger for her might actually be worse, not easier to bear.

“If we were coming together as equals,” she said carefully, before she lifted wary lashes, “I’d let you. But not if I don’t have the sort of experience to keep you interested.”

“You—” she couldn’t see the fine tremble in the hand he used to smooth her hair “—are a natural. I’m at the disadvantage. I know how special this is.”

“Tell all the girls that, do you?”

“I’ve never said it to anyone,” he contradicted tightly.

“Really?” She rolled into him with a forgiving slither of silken skin and inviting softness, bending his mind away from the alarm bells against making comparisons or revealing how truly exceptional their experience was.

Her pleased smile provoked another zing of warning against feeding her ego and that sense of entitlement to adoration of hers. He didn’t want to be a slave to her good graces. But her light hands skimmed over him in deliciously arousing paths, rewarding rather than rejecting, and he quit caring that he was turning into one more ardent fan.

“Me, too. Best ever.” She strained to touch her lips under his chin.

With a shaken chuckle and deep reluctance he stopped her. This mood of hers was surprisingly endearing. Gathering her slender fingers in his own, he kissed the scrape on her palm before saying, “You need time to recover. Don’t you?”

“No. I like the way you make me feel, Nic. I want to do it again.”

The tiny throb of longing in her voice was a golden rope that looped around the root of him and tugged.

He shuddered and gave in, tucking her under him with possessive intent.

One thing about Rosedale, Nic acknowledged later that evening, if you wanted to avoid someone you could.

He’d left her as the sky was starting to darken. Rowan had been on her stomach, nothing but a midnight waterfall of hair and an ivory shoulder. His body had sprung to attention despite the way he’d worked it into exhaustion over hours of lovemaking. He’d forced himself to leave her, partly because he was sure she was tender and partly because he hated how addicted he was becoming.

Becoming
? a voice taunted deep in his head. He’d always been obsessed. Now he’d had her it was worse. And he’d
admitted
it to her. That left him deeply uneasy, so he had showered, dressed, come into his office and shut the door.

The memory of Rowan’s uninhibited response wasn’t as easy to leave behind. At one point she’d kissed her way down his body and murmured, “May I? I’ve always wondered …” He’d disbelieved she was
that
inexperienced, but the amateur way she’d learned to please him had told him this too was her first time and had nearly undone him.

He glanced at his knuckles, going white where he gripped the arm of his chair. He ought to be working, not reliving Rowan’s teasing him beyond bearing before lifting to ride his hips until she was sobbing with rapture.

His laptop hummed with yet another string of emails hitting his inbox, but he wasn’t having much luck being productive and he needed to be. The conglomerate of multimedia interests that Olief had amassed during his lifetime
was a demanding operation. If Nic hadn’t had this to consume him for the last year, the fruitless search for Olief’s plane and its survivors might have driven him to madness.

Lately he’d taken more of his own direction, but he couldn’t do it properly until Olief was declared dead and the will was read. Uncertainty hovered around him like the buzz of a mosquito as he considered what it might reveal. He
liked
running things. He wanted to continue to do so. And if it turned out Olief had not named him as his heir …

Nic turned away from the thought, telling himself to be prepared for anything—even that. But it would sting. In the meantime he drew a salary as the interim president by keeping the place running and solvent. He ought to be doing that, not frittering away his time between brooding over things he couldn’t change and schoolboy fantasies about Rowan’s breasts filling his hands.

Hunger of every kind gripped him. The kind that made him reach to adjust himself in the confines of his jeans and the kind that growled in his empty stomach.

A thought flitted through his mind of taking Rowan down to the ferry landing for a meal. But they weren’t dating. He didn’t know what they were doing, he acknowledged with a hard scrape of his hand down his face.

Impatient, he flung open the door and was greeted by the surprising scent of … Whatever it was, it smelled delicious. He followed it downstairs.

Rowan hadn’t expected her return to Rosedale to be like this. When she’d made the decision to come she’d imagined having the house to herself, perhaps sharing a few light meals with Anna, but mostly taking stock of her life and figuring out her next steps.

She was doing a little of that—or perhaps it was more accurate to say she was absorbing the fact that she was
going to have to do some really hard thinking on that front since Nic had cut off her income. Her mind didn’t want to pin itself to those sorts of thoughts, though. It was too busy trying to make sense of the passionate affair she’d started with the one man she’d always believed out of reach. She had never imagined this could really happen. Nevertheless, she and Nic had spent hours reading each other like braille text, with his masculine groans of passion filling the air as often as her cries of delight.

Excitement flushed through her as she recalled drawing those sounds from him. At the same time she had to keep reminding herself it was a temporary arrangement. Perhaps he’d given her orgasms at an exponential rate to his own, maybe he’d even admitted that she had
always
had an effect on him, but he’d been the first to leave. She bit her lip, preferring the pain of her teeth over the insecure ache his leaving had caused. Waking with him would have been reassuring. Sweet, even.

“What are you making?”

She squeaked in startlement and almost dropped the whole spice jar into the pot. One glance over her shoulder flashed a million sensual memories through her mind. Her palms began to sweat and she could barely hold the wooden spoon to stir the sauce when she turned back to the stove. Hopefully he’d blame the steam off the pan for the dampness around her hairline.

“Braised beef and roasted vegetables,” she answered.

He came to peer over her shoulder, hands settling on her waist. His nearness made her fingers even more nerveless. “Ambitious. Spaghetti would have been fine.”

“Oh, you know what they say about the way to a man’s heart.”

His hands dropped from her waist and she felt a frigid blast move into the space he’d occupied as he moved away.

She made herself laugh, because the alternative was to let his reaction pierce her to the bone. “Apparently we both need to work on taking a joke.” She stepped away to reach for her ice water with lemon, using it to ease the constriction in her throat. “The truth is I know my way around a kitchen quite well. One of Mum’s nearest and dearests was a French chef. He taught me to put on an evening that allowed Mum to portray the lifestyle to which she aspired.” Rowan licked that delicate wording off her cold lips. “So I have one more useless skill in my bag of tricks. I brought in that Bordeaux, if you want a glass.” She nodded at the bottle.

“Why is it useless?” He found the bottle opener and cut the wax off the cork.

“Because I don’t like cooking to order, and I’m not certified.”

He pondered that as he poured a glass and brought out a second one.

“No, thanks,” she said to forestall him.

“You don’t want any?”

“There’s a difference between wanting and needing. I would like a glass. I’m sure it’s very nice—look at the year—but I’d rather refuse and prove I don’t need it.”

“You really did a number on yourself after leaving school, didn’t you?”

“You haven’t said anything I haven’t said to myself,” she assured him with a wan smile, recollecting the morning she’d woken with gaps in her memory and a reflection that reminded her too much of her father. It had been a bit of a relief to find her virginity intact, actually.

Turning away from his penetrating look, she removed a tray of hors d’oeuvres from the refrigerator. “To tide you over?” she invited.

He offered a whistle of appreciation at the array of tiny
pastries, some topped with caviar and hot relish, all arranged between bites of cheese and colorful olives. Rowan quietly glowed under his approval, pleased she could wow him in this way at least.

“You’ve never had a problem with alcohol, have you?” She realized she’d never seen him drunk and that it was probably one of the things that attracted her most about him. He epitomized the self-possessed social drinker. “Even with all those horrible things you saw as a correspondent?”