The Collector's Edition Volume 1 (47 page)

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Authors: Emma Darcy

BOOK: The Collector's Edition Volume 1
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“I’m glad you’re not disappointed,” he said dryly.
She was, deep down. Disappointed he hadn’t recognised her, though she couldn’t really have expected it on a superficial level. Even at thirteen, her hair had only slightly yellowed from the snowy white it had been through most of her childhood. It was almost brown now. She’d done a lot of growing up since Jamie had last seen her. A late bloomer, her mother had often said.
Having seen recent photographs of him, it was easier for her to identify the boy in the man, despite the changes. Still, when he had looked into her eyes... Surely they were the same, almond-shaped and deeply lidded, their amber irises quite an unusual and distinctive colour.
Golden girl. The name he’d given her brought a wry smile. He’d once said she was the only gold in his life. Why hadn’t the bond between them lasted?
She shook her head. Obviously it had meant more to her than to him. As Aunty Em said, he’d had the means to come to her if he’d wanted to. He’d picked her up tonight by chance, a stranger, to relieve his boredom. Or was it more than that? Did he feel the underlying tug of another time and place, an attraction he was pursuing beyond any rational thought?
She moved her fingers over the knuckles of his, wishing she was a clairvoyant who could see the future through the power of touch. His skin was warm, despite the coolness of the September evening. How did he transmit the electric vibrancy that was racing through her?
They turned a corner. Another narrow, tree-lined street, terrace houses crowding the sidewalk, their porches trimmed with ornate iron-lace fences. An old area of Sydney, Woollhara. It was close to the city centre and the harbour, newly fashionable again, the houses expensively renovated to suit the taste of wealthy people. She’d walked around here this afternoon, casing the area, dithering over whether to attempt gate-crashing the private showing in the gallery or leave well enough alone.
Who’d have thought she’d be walking hand in hand with Jamie—Jim—a few hours later? A burst of light-headed laughter bubbled forth.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
She grinned at him, dizzy with her daring. “I can’t believe I’m with you like this.”
The flash of his eyes seared her with a sobering reminder this was no child’s play between them. They were into a very adult game here. A quiver ran down her thighs. Should she stop now?
He stopped. He took a key ring from his jacket and released her hand to unlock the passenger door of the car at the kerb beside them. The distinctive lines of the Porsche gave her heart and mind a jolt. This was real. A black Porsche, low, dark, threatening. The old warning shrieked through her mind—never get in a car with a stranger.
Jim Neilson swung the door open for her.
If she stepped into that space... Why was she suddenly seeing it as a black hole, infinitely dangerous? The tension of decision held her momentarily paralysed.
“Not turning coward on me, are you?” he softly mocked.
She looked wildly at him, hearing Jamie daring her to be as brave as he was, her heart pounding madly, fear fighting with the need to earn Jamie’s respect and admiration. Except this was Jim Neilson, and she was a stranger to him, so how could her compliance with his game earn respect or admiration?
“Believe this!” he said harshly, and in the next instant, before she could even draw breath, she was pinned to his chest, held imprisoned there by the unrelenting strength of an arm that denied her any attempt at resistance as he curled his other hand around her cheek and chin and forcibly tilted her face to the angle he wanted. His teeth flashed, white and wolfish. “An appetiser,” he promised.
Beth barely had time to gasp. His mouth covered hers, invading it with shocking swiftness, no pause for persuasive or seductive preliminaries. His tongue embroiled hers in an erotic tangle, darting provocatively, sweeping her palate with sensational effect, inciting a fiercely primitive response. It was as though he’d pressed some dormant trigger in her, exploding a deeply buried mine of sexuality that demanded satisfaction.
A torrent of feelings pumped through her—anger to have waited so long to experience this, frustration that he’d never come for her, never invited her to share in his new life, a fierce jealousy of the women he had given himself to, a seething desire to take all he offered, experience it to the hilt, make him remember her for the rest of his life, whether he wanted to or not.
She clawed her fingers up his leather jacket, thrust them through the thick mat of his hair, curled them around his skull, urging on the passionate plunder that could not be called a kiss. Not from him. Not from her. A kiss was an exchange of good feelings, warm feelings, a wish to give and take pleasure. This was the boiling blood of a battlefield, each of them striving to win concessions from the other.
She sensed his drive for submission from her. She wouldn’t give it. With sheer wanton provocation, she rubbed her lower body against his, feeding the frenzy of released feeling, exulting in the hard bulge of his erection, hating him for being so aroused by a woman he’d merely picked up. A nobody to him. Yet he could do this to her, with her, an intimacy that had no grounds for intimacy on his side. Just sheer animal lust, taking, uncaring of the object being taken.
It was obscene.
She wanted to kick him. She wanted to kill him. She wanted him to want her because she was Beth. Damn him! Damn him to hell for closing his door on her! Forgetting her!
“Feeling hungry?” he growled, his hands scooping her bottom and squeezing her into more aggressive contact, a blatant and unashamed pressure against her stomach.
“Yes,” she hissed, uncaring what he thought.
He swung her around and lowered her onto the passenger seat of the Porsche, lifting her legs in with a smooth economy of movement. “Then let’s get to the feast,” he said, his eyes challenging her appetite for it as he stood back and closed the door.
One night, she thought fiercely. One night to make up for what she had missed. One night to take all she might have had if circumstances had been different. She felt cheated, bereft, pumped up with wild and perilous purpose.
He sank onto the seat beside her, closed his door, started the engine with a roar. “Fasten your seat belt,” he rasped.
“You’re right,” she snapped, whipping the belt across her body and clicking it into place. Her eyes clashed with his in fiery challenge. “It could be a bumpy ride.”
He revved the motor, his foot playing with the accelerator as he assessed the glitter in her no-holds-barred gaze. “You pack one hell of a punch, golden girl,” he said, then turned his attention to getting the Porsche on the road.
They took off into the night.
The tension in the car jangled every nerve in Beth’s body.
She didn’t care.
She didn’t care where they went or what they did.
She was going to see this night through with Jim Neilson.
Then, maybe, she could bury Jamie once and for all.
“T
AKE off your jacket.”
The casual command kicked another burst of adrenaline through Beth. She bit down on a blistering retort and gave him a veiled look that hid lethal thoughts.
He leaned indolently against the side wall of the private elevator he’d just activated, assessing her with hot, lustful eyes. They were zooming to the top level of some tall building at Circular Quay. Beth didn’t have to be told he wasn’t taking her to a restaurant. He wanted control. Absolute control.
She shifted her stance, relaxing against the wall facing him, her eyes simmering with the need to strip him naked. In every sense. “Take yours off,” she commanded.
A quirky little smile gave his mouth a more sensual curve as he pushed forward enough to shrug his shoulders out of the jacket and drag it off his arms. “Leather doesn’t turn you on?”
“I prefer the touch of human skin.”
“Then I’d better get rid of my shirt, too.”
The jacket was dropped on the floor. She watched his hands start on his shirt buttons, his fingers nimbly making short work of opening up the black silk, revealing a tantalising arrow of black hair zeroing down to his jeans.
“You’re lagging behind,” he taunted, his gaze fastened pointedly on her breasts.
Beth slid off the shoulder strap of her handbag and let it fall. She smiled as she thought of the sexy lingerie she was wearing, a gift from her younger sister Kate, along with the advice it was well past time for Beth to get herself a red-hot lover. Kate had not been enamoured with Gerald. No doubt she would think Jim Neilson fitted the bill.
His shoulders needed no padding. There was nothing weedy about his arms, either. His skin gleamed like polished bronze over tightly packed muscle. He had a torso that would draw admiring stares from both men and women. The thought of touching him, running her hands over his magnificently delineated chest, was so attractive, Beth told herself clawing would be more in order. She drew off her jacket, and defiantly matching his carelessness, tossed it on top of his clothes.
“Very saucy,” he commented, his gaze sizzling over the provocative swirl of black lace, cunningly designed to focus the eye on the flesh-coloured fabric stretching over her aureoles.
Beth felt her nipples tighten.
“Delectable.” The throaty murmur reflected his arousal as he suddenly crowded the space between them, taking her hands, lifting them above her head, pinning them to the wall with such swift action Beth was caught by surprise.
The elevator stopped.
The doors opened.
His eyes mocked her distraction. Nothing deterred him from bending his head to her upraised breasts, tugging her nipples to more distended prominence with his teeth, sucking on them with stomach-curling power, leaving the thin fabric of her bra hot and wet and totally transparent. It was so incredibly erotic, Beth held her breath and let it happen, fascinated by the movement of his mouth, enthralled by the sensations arcing from it.
She didn’t want him to stop, but he did, straightening and sliding her arms down the wall to her sides as he stared at the effect he’d had on her, smiling in satisfaction at the dark, hardened nubs. His eyes flicked to hers, black, brilliant, piercing in their intensity.
“Was the entree to your liking?”
Beth swallowed, collected her scattered wits and answered, “I hope the main course lives up to it.”
He laughed and bent to scoop up their clothes. “I wouldn’t rob you of the right setting.” He nodded to the opened passage out of the elevator. “Go ahead. Enter my private world. I’ll show you everything I have.”
Beth willed strength into her quivery legs and preceded him out of the elevator, straight-shouldered, maintaining an air of dignity despite her state of exposure, heart thundering in anticipation of his next move, mind set on holding her own throughout this encounter with Jim Neilson.
He switched on ceiling spotlights as she stepped from a tiled foyer to a carpeted living room. Her high heels sank into the thick, dove-grey pile. She paused to take off her shoes and drink in Jim Neilson’s habitat. It had the obvious luxury of spaciousness and the stark impact of almost characterless modernism.
The furnishings looked clinical—chrome, glass, black leather, a grey vertical blind blocking out the end wall, which was undoubtedly glass for what had to be a spectacular view from this high up. The chairs and sofas and tables were certainly functional, probably state-of-the-art in their styling, but they seemed more like showpieces than home pieces.
A disturbing Brett Whitely painting seemed to leap off the wall facing her, strident in its lines and colour. She was staring at it, feeling it was like some nightmare she wouldn’t like to live with, when she felt hands at her waist, the release of the button at the back of her skirt, the zipper drawn down. A gentle pull over her hips and the garment circled her feet.
For a moment, all she could think of was how much more exposed she was, the sexy lace panties reduced to little more than a G-string slicing between her buttocks, the garter belt holding up her stockings offering no better protection. Then warm palms slid down to cup the soft, naked roundness of her bottom, fingers splaying over it.
Her heart leapt into her mouth. She had to do something and do it fast. No way was she going to be Jim Neilson’s sexual victim. She wouldn’t let him think it, either. He was
her
chosen lover for the night.
She sucked in a deep breath and swung around, her fingers digging into the waistband of his jeans, her mouth homing in on his nipples as she ripped the stud apart and tore his zipper down. The art of surprise wasn’t all his, she thought savagely, feeling his stomach contract, his chest expand.
She tugged and licked at the relatively small protusions of flesh, exulting in his hardening reaction to the stimulation. She pushed his jeans and underpants down his loins, extracted the taut, hefty piston of his manhood, weighing it deliberately in her hand as she drew back to look at it, a mad boldness seizing her mind.
“The equipment is first class,” she mocked, rubbing her thumb over its moist tip, stroking her fingers along its full length before dismissing it, turning away to sashay to the blind at the end of the room. “I also like to take in every view,” she added silkily, finding the cords that operated the slats and yanking them to sweep the blind to the other side of the window.
A stunning panorama of the harbour gleamed at her, the huge coat hanger bridge looming beyond the busy ferry terminal at Circular Quay, the magnificent sails that roofed the Opera House curving brightly into the night sky, the massed foreshore lights of the northern suburbs winking like thousands of fireflies. The realisation hit her that she was standing in what had to be a million-dollar penthouse apartment. And the owner of such prime real estate was used to having whatever he wanted.
She heard the thud of shoes landing on the carpet, the swoosh of clothes being discarded, the soft pad of footsteps, the crackle of paper being torn. Paper? No, a packet of some sort. He probably carried condoms in his wallet. He’d be mad not to practise safe sex in a situation like this. She’d be mad, too.
She was probably certifiably insane as it was, but normal rules didn’t apply to this night. It was time out of time, and there was a fever in her blood that demanded a sense of completion, come what may.
Her skin prickled with anticipation. The next move was his. She adopted a relaxed stance and ignored his presence behind her, fixing her gaze on the harbour traffic far below. She didn’t care that he could view her naked backside at leisure. In some perverse way she enjoyed flaunting it at him. It excited her, thinking of him looking at her, planning what he would do next, sizzling with the need to reduce her to his plaything again.
Fingertips grazing over the backs of her knees. It was an act of will to remain absolutely still. The tantalising touch sliding up her thighs, muscles tensing. The suspenders of her garter belt unclipped, back and front, fingers trailing up the lacy leg edge of her panties, flesh crawling with sensitivity, belt removed and tossed away, a nail-thin caress up the curve of her spine, raising an uncontrollable, convulsive shiver, bra unfastened, thumbs hooking under the shoulder straps, drawing them down her arms, letting them fall, a soft, silky rolling down of her stockings, ankles and feet tantalisingly caressed as he lifted each one in turn.
It was the most erotic undressing Beth had ever experienced. It electrified both her body and her mind to an acute awareness.
She could feel his breath, sense his heat even before he positioned his body against hers, the hard roll of his erection sliding up towards the pit of her back, his arms encircling her waist, palms pushing up over her nipples and subjecting them to a teasing, rotating motion that had every muscle in her body clenching.
“You seem quite transfixed by the view.” The mocking murmur was close to her ear.
Beth fought to remain clear-headed over the turmoil he was wreaking in her body. “Do you enjoy it or is it simply a status symbol to you?” she asked, reaching back to draw her fingernails over the rock-hard muscles of his thighs, wishing she could dig under his skin.
“I like climbing mountains,” he answered. “Getting to the peak.”
The sexual allusion to what he was doing to her was not lost on Beth, yet she sensed he spoke the truth about himself. Jamie must have climbed a hundred mountains on his way to becoming this man. She wondered if he saw this apartment as a place where he was finally unassailable from ever being dragged down again.
He cupped her breasts, possessing them fully for a moment before sliding his hands over her stomach, burrowing under the flimsy lace that still covered her most private part.
“But valleys have their points of interest, too,” he said, and with an expertise that was shockingly exciting, he parted her hidden cleft to a more accessible opening and began a stroking that aroused almost unbearably exquisite sensations.
She felt like hot putty melting under his touch. Her legs started to tremble. Desperate to maintain some self-control, Beth clutched at another question that had flitted through her mind. “Why did you choose the Brett Whitely painting?”
It distracted him momentarily, giving her a breather from the sweet torture. “It’s a scream of the soul,” he answered darkly and resumed his tactile concentration on the valley as he expounded further. “It’s in every one of us, golden girl. You feel it, too... the scream for all that’s unattainable.’
Yes. It was the scream that had brought her here with him. But what did he dream of? What did he crave? What was he missing in his life, this brave, new world he had conquered?
“That’s why you’re here, wanting this,” he went on, his voice a drum in her ears.
No. She wanted more than this, she thought. The unattainable. And sadness for what could never be with the Jamie who was lost to her surged into her heart, drowning it, even as her flesh cried out for its intense excitement to be appeased.
The low beat of his voice continued. “No matter what we do, how we live, what we have, most of the time we hide from our souls, repress the truth, pretend...” His finger teasing the rim of her vagina, slowly working inwards, her muscles convulsing. “But deep inside, deep inside, golden girl...we scream.”
The last word was hissed, loaded with sexual innuendo, and it was true of her physically—she
was
screaming for the fill of his flesh to ease the need he had incited. Yet her mind was floating above it, listening to the man he was revealing and revelling more in that intimacy than the other.
“You were going to show me everything,” she reminded him.
His touch stilled. He withdrew it to remove her last piece of clothing. “Let me take you on a tour,” he said, grasping her hand, drawing her into stepping out of her panties.
She had to force her tremulous legs to work, to follow him. His stimulation had left her feeling liquified, uncoordinated, aching for far more than he had given. Yet to concede any weakness would feed his satisfaction at the cost of hers. Keep him guessing, keep him working at getting the subjugation to his will that he obviously wanted, keep digging for what she wanted.
“Now on the opposite wall to the Brett Whitely is an Arthur Boyd,” he instructed, smiling indulgently.
His nonchalant air was an act of will. A quick glance showed his arousal had in no way abated. It also gave Beth the reassurance he was sheathed with protection. No risk of any unwelcome consequences from this one-night stand. Which was all it could be for both of them.
Again the sadness weighed heavily.
A meeting... a farewell.
“Stand here for the best view,” he directed, positioning her behind one of the black leather sofas directly across the room from the painting.
It was a high-backed lounge. She automatically rested her hands on it, needing the support of some solidity. He moved to her rear, as before, talking over her shoulder.
“The subject matter looks so simple, but the more you study this painting, the more you see in it.”
The colours were mostly dark greens and blues, a night scene, a small house on the top of a hill, below it a miniature white cow, seemingly heading down to a lake. She saw nothing else in the huge, sombre sweep of landscape. A white crescent moon—no stars—formed a tiny white curve in the sky.

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