Paradise (15 page)

"Brandy will be fine."

Meredith went over to the liquor cabinet and took out the brandy decanter. Behind her, he said, "Do the servants lock the refrigerator at night?" She paused, a brandy snifter in her hand. "Something like that," she evaded.

But Matt wasn't fooled—she realized it the moment she brought his glass over to the sofa and saw the amusement gleaming in his eyes. "You can't cook, can you, princess?"

"I'm sure I could," she joked, "if someone showed me where the kitchen is, and then pointed out the stove and refrigerator."

The corners of his mouth deepened into an answering smile, but he leaned forward and purposefully put his glass on the table. She knew exactly what he intended to do even before he caught her wrists and firmly pulled her toward him. "I know you can cook," he said, tipping her chin up.

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because," he whispered, "less than an hour ago you set me on fire."

His mouth was a fraction of an inch from hers when the shrill ring of the telephone made her lurch out of his arms. When she answered it, her father's voice was like an arctic blast. "I'm glad to see that you had sense enough to do as I told you. And Meredith," he added, "I was on the verge of permitting you to go to Northwestern, but you can forget about that now. Your behavior tonight is living proof that you can't be trusted." He hung up on her.

With shaking fingers, Meredith replaced the receiver. Her arms began to tremble and then her knees, until her whole body was quaking with futility and rage, and she braced her palms on the desk to steady herself.

Matt came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. "Meredith?" he said, his voice deep with concern. "Who was that? Is anything wrong?"

Even her voice shook. "That was my father checking to make certain that I came home as ordered."

He was silent for a moment, and then he said quietly, "What have you done to make him distrust you like this?"

Matt's thinly veiled accusation tore at her heart, hacking away at her rapidly disintegrating control. "What have I done?" she repeated, her voice rising with hysteria. "What have I
done?"

"You must have given him some reason to think he has to guard you like this."

Savage resentment boiled up inside of Meredith, erupting into a mass of churning rage. Her eyes bright with tears and some half-formed purpose, she swung around on him and slid her hands up his hard chest "My mother was promiscuous. She couldn't keep her hands off other men. My father guards me because he knows I'm like her."

Matt's eyes narrowed as she wrapped her arms fiercely around his neck. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"You know what I'm doing," she whispered, and before he could answer, she pressed herself against his full length and kissed him long and lingeringly.

He wanted her—Meredith knew it the moment his arms encircled her, pulling her tightly against his hardening body. He wanted her. His mouth seized hers in a hungry, consuming kiss, and she tried to do her best to make certain he didn't change his mind—and that she couldn't change hers. Her fingers clumsy and urgent, she tugged the studs loose from his shirtfront and opened his shirt, sliding her hands up his chest, spreading the white cloth wide apart, baring what looked to be an acre of bronzed muscle with springy dark hairs, then she closed her eyes tightly, reached behind her back and started tugging on the zipper of her dress. She wanted this, she'd
earned
it, she told herself fiercely.

"Meredith?"

His quiet voice made her head jerk up, but she didn't have the courage to lift her gaze above his chest.

"I'm flattered as hell, but I've never actually seen a woman rip off her clothes in the throes of passion, particularly after only one kiss."

Defeated before she'd begun, Meredith leaned her forehead against his chest. His hand slid over her shoulder, long fingers curving around her nape, his thumb stroking, while his other hand slid around her waist and moved her closer. Then his fingers moved down her bare back to the zipper of her dress. The bodice of a very expensive chiffon gown came loose.

Swallowing audibly, she started to lift her arms to shield herself from view, and hesitated. "I'm ... not very good at this," she said, raising her eyes to his.

His lids drifted down, his gaze shifting to the tops of her breasts. "Aren't you?" he whispered huskily as he bent his head.

Meredith wanted to find nirvana; she sought it in that next kiss. And she found it. Her fingers flexing against the corded muscles in his back, she kissed him with blind need, and when his parted lips moved insistently against hers, she welcomed the suggestive invasion of his tongue. She returned it, and made him gasp and clench her tighter. And then, suddenly, she wasn't in control anymore; she wasn't aware of anything except sensations. His mouth seized hers in stormy desire, her clothes came loose and a cold draft hit her. Her hair tumbled down over her shoulders, freed by his hands, and the room tilted as she was brought down onto the sofa beside a hard, demanding, naked male body.

And then it stopped, and Meredith surfaced a little from a dark, sweet world where she felt only his mouth and the stirring stroking of his hands over her flesh. She opened her eyes and saw him leaning up on his forearm, studying her face in the mellow glow of the desk lamp. "What are you doing?" she whispered, but the thin, wispy voice didn't sound like hers.

"Looking at you." As he said it, his gaze moved down along the sides of her breasts past her waist, then down her thighs and legs. Embarrassed, Meredith stopped him from what he was doing by touching her lips to his chest. His muscles flinched reflexively as she brushed her lips over his skin, and his hand sank slowly into the hair at her nape, lifting her forward. This time when she raised her gaze to his, he bent his head. His mouth captured hers almost roughly, his tongue parting her lips and driving into her mouth in a fiercely erotic kiss that sent flames shooting through her entire body. Leaning over her, he kissed her until she heard herself moaning softly, and then his mouth was at her breasts, making them ache while his fingers explored and tormented and made her back arch against his hand. He moved, his body shifting on top of her, his hips insistent, his lips rough and tender against the curve of her neck and cheek. His mouth returned to hers again, parting her lips; his legs wedged between hers, parting her thighs, and all the while his tongue was tangling with hers, withdrawing and plunging deep. And then he stopped.

Cradling her face between his palms, he ordered hoarsely, "Look at me." Somehow Meredith managed to surface from her sensual daze; she forced her lids open and looked into his scorching gray eyes. The moment she did, Matt drove into her with a force that tore a low cry from her throat and made her body arch like a bow. In that split second he recognized he'd just taken her virginity, and his reaction was more violent than hers.

He froze, his eyes clenched shut. His shoulders and arms taut, he stayed there inside her, unmoving. "Why?" he demanded in a raw whisper.

She shivered at the accusation she thought she heard and misunderstood his question. "Because I haven't done it before."

That answer made his eyes open and what she saw wasn't disappointment or accusation, it was tenderness and regret. "Why didn't you tell me? I could have made this much easier for you."

Spreading her fingers over his cheek, Meredith said with
a soft, reassuring smile, "You did make it easy. And perfect."

That accomplished what nothing else had. It made him groan. He covered her lips with his and, with infinite gentleness, began to move inside her, withdrawing almost all the way and slowly plunging deep, steadily increasing the tempo of his driving strokes, giving and giving and giving until Meredith was wild beneath him. Her fingernails bit into his back and hips, clutching him to her, while the passion raging inside her built into a holocaust, and still it went on and on, until it finally exploded in long soul-destroying bursts of extravagant pleasure. Gathering her into his arms, Matt shoved
bis
fingers into her hair, kissing her with fiery urgency, and drove into her one more time. The deep raw hunger of his kiss, the sudden surge of liquid from his body into hers, made Meredith clasp him tighter and moan with the exquisite sensation.

Her heart beating frantically, she moved onto her side with him, her face pressed against his chest, his arms tight around her. "Do you have any idea," he whispered in a shaken, hoarse voice, his lips brushing her cheek, "how exciting you are
,
and
how responsive?"

Meredith didn't answer, because the reality of what she'd done was beginning to seep through her, and she didn't want to let it. Not now, not yet. She didn't want anything to spoil this. She closed her eyes and listened to the lovely things he continued to say to her while he laid his hand against her cheek, idly brushing his thumb over her skin.

And then he asked something that did need a response and the magic faded, receding beyond her reach. "Why?" he asked her quietly. "Why did you do this tonight? With me?"

She tensed at the difficult, probing question, sighed with a feeling of loss, and pulled out of his arms, wrapping herself in the afghan lying over the end of the sofa. She'd known about the physical intimacy of sex, but no one had warned her about this strange, uneasy aftermath. She felt stripped bare emotionally; exposed, defenseless, awkward. "I think we'd both better get dressed," she said nervously, "and then I'll tell you whatever you want
to know. I'll be right back."

In her room, Meredith put on a navy and white robe, tied the belt around her waist, and went back downstairs, still barefoot. As she passed the clock in the hall, she glanced at it. Her father would be home in an hour.

Matt was on the phone in the study, fully dressed with the exception of his tie which he'd shoved into his pocket. "What's the address here?" he asked. She told him and he relayed it to the cab company he had called. "I told them to be here in a half hour," he said. Walking over to the coffee table in front of the sofa, he picked up his abandoned brandy glass.

"Can I get you anything else?" Meredith asked, because that question seemed like something a good hostess normally asked a guest when the evening neared its end. Or was that what a waitress asked, she wondered a little hysterically.

"I'd like an answer to my question," he said. "What made you decide to do this tonight?"

She thought she heard a tautness in his voice, but his face was completely expressionless. She sighed and looked away, self-consciously tracing an inlaid square on the desk. "For years my father has treated me like a ... a closet nymphomaniac, and I've never done anything to deserve it. Tonight when you insisted he must have some reason for 'guarding me,' something just snapped inside of me. I think I decided that if I was going to be treated like a tramp, I might as well have the experience of sleeping with a man. And at the same time, I had some insane idea of punishing you—and him. I wanted to show you that you were wrong."

After several moments of ominous silence, Matt said curtly, "You could have convinced me I was wrong by simply telling me that your father is a tyrannical, suspicious bastard. I would have believed you."

In her heart, Meredith knew that was true, and she glanced uneasily at him, wondering if anger had been her only reason for instigating what had just happened, or if she'd simply used anger as an excuse to experience intimately that sexual magnetism she'd felt from him all night.
Used.
That was the operative word. In a strange sort of way she felt guilty for using a man she had liked enormously to retaliate against her father.

In the lengthening silence, he seemed to evaluate what she'd said, and what she hadn't said, and to guess what she was thinking. Whatever conclusions he drew from all that obviously didn't please him very much, because he abruptly put down his glass and glanced at his watch. "I'll walk down to the end of the drive."

"I'll show you out." Polite sentences spoken between two strangers who'd been doing the most intimate possible things together less than one hour ago. That incongruity registered on her as she straightened from the desk. At the same moment his gaze riveted on her bare feet, shot back to her face, and then ricocheted to her hair tumbling loose about her shoulders. Barefoot, hair down, and in a long robe, Meredith did not look quite the way she did in a strapless evening dress with her hair in a sophisticated chignon. She knew before he asked the question, what it was going to be. "How old are you?"

"Not... quite as old as you think."

"How old?" he persisted.

"Eighteen."

She expected some sort of reaction to that. Instead, he looked at her for a long, hard moment, and then he did something that made no sense to her. Turning, he went over to the desk and wrote something on a slip of paper. "This is my phone number in
Edmunton
," he said calmly, handing it to her. "You can reach me there for the next six weeks. After that,
Sommers
will know how to get in touch with me somehow."

When he left, she walked upstairs, frowning at the scrap of paper in her hand. If this was Matt's way of suggesting she give him a call sometime, it was arrogant, rude, and completely obnoxious. And a little humiliating.

For most of the following week, Meredith jumped every time the phone rang, afraid that it was going to be Matt. Just the recollection of the things they'd done made her face burn with embarrassment, and she wanted to forget it and him.