by Penny Jordan
Lissa laughed, catching his mood, banishing him from the kitchen while she finished what she was doing.
They had the champagne before dinner—and after it, and although Lissa demurred Joel insisted on her drinking some wine with her meal.
By the time she got up from the table she felt distinctly light-headed, but in such a relaxed carefree way that she couldn’t refuse when Joel refilled her champagne glass. ‘We’ve got to finish it,’ he told her, ‘otherwise it will go flat.’
The golden bubbles tickled her throat, sliding smoothly down it inducing a sensation of relaxed light-heartedness inside her. Even her blood seemed to be fizzing slightly. They talked, or at least Joel did, while she listened in a hazy cotton wool, other-worldly cloud of relaxation. Occasionally she had the impression that he was watching her … waiting for something … but she dismissed it as imagination. At ten o’clock she started yawning and when Joel suggested she go to bed she didn’t demur.
‘I’ll clear these away,’ he told her, indicating the empty glasses. ‘Sure you can manage?’ He grinned as she stood up and promptly wobbled slightly.
‘If you’re suggesting that I’m tipsy, then you’re quite right,’ she told him, ‘and what’s more it’s all your fault.’
‘Want me to carry you upstairs, or can you manage on your own two feet?’ He said it teasingly, and yet when he looked at her Lissa felt the most unexpected surge of desire kick upwards along her nervous system. She giggled nervously to conceal it and shook her head.
Once upstairs, she showered languidly, studying the smooth slickness of her wet skin as she stepped out and reached for a towel. Her body was something she rarely looked at as a rule, but tonight she found herself studying it, aware of a certain sensuality to it that she had never noticed before. Fleetingly she wondered if Joel still found her desirable, trying to dismiss the thought as she towelled herself dry and then slipped on her cotton nightie, but unable to do so. She was like a child, excited by the thought of playing with fire, even while she knew that parental rule protected her from doing so she thought, angry with herself, trying to shake off the languorous indolence of her movements.
She had just climbed into bed when Joel came in.
‘I’ve brought you a nightcap,’ he told her, handing her another glass. ‘The last of the champagne. Drink it, it will help you sleep.’
The glass was three quarters full and Lissa sipped at it, watching him move about the bedroom. He took off his shirt and as though she were an observer to her own reactions she found herself monitoring her own physical response to him. His skin was faintly olive, tanned and sleek, his muscles hard without being over-developed. He disappeared into the bathroom, and Lissa heard the shower running.
She had just about finished her champagne when he came back and she watched him walk towards her.
‘Finished?’ As he got into bed beside her, he turned towards her and took her glass. She was still sitting up and as he turned away to put the glass on the tray his hand rested lightly on her shoulder preventing her from lying down. The bedside lamps were still on and as Lissa reached out to snap hers off, Joel reached across her, his arm a dark bar against the whiteness of her nightdress. For some reason Lissa seemed unable to take her eyes off it. Her light went out, Joel’s arm moving against her body. Wonderingly she touched the olive skin of his forearm, completely absorbed in the sensation of his skin beneath her fingertips, warm and vital. She looked up at him, his face half in the shadow thrown by the other lamp. He leaned forward and his lips brushed hers. Curiously she was neither surprised nor apprehensive. It seemed as though some part of her mind had known that he was going to kiss her and directed her to turn into his kiss rather than away from it. His hand left the lamp and curled round her, turning her, but all her concentration was fixed on and fascinated by the slow movement of his mouth against her own and her own response to it. Easily, fluidly, she felt the natural reaction of her body to his proximity. Her mouth parted at the gentle insistence of his tongue, her senses half bewildered and totally confused by the delicately explorative way he ran it over her lips. She wanted more … more than this lightly arousing intimacy she realised inwardly, but that knowledge did not shock or frighten her. On the contrary, it seemed completely natural and right. So much so, that her hands lifted to Joel’s neck, her lips parting yearningly for his kiss.
But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he lay down, pulling her down on top of him, burying his face in her hair, tightening one arm round her waist while the thumb of his free hand, probed and stroked the vulnerable skin of her neck. Tiny frissons of pleasure shivered through her and while she knew Joel must be aware of them, she didn’t feel ashamed or embarrassed, instead she arched closer to him, closing her eyes and abandoning herself to the shivering delight he was arousing.
‘Lissa … Lissa, look at me.’ His lips brushed lightly over her closed eyelids and dutifully she opened them drowning in the deep gold pools of his. He kissed her cheek, lightly, trailing tantalising kisses to the corner of her mouth. Lissa gave a small tormented moan. She wanted him to kiss her properly. Almost as though he knew how she felt his mouth touched hers. But the contact was too light … to fleeting. He kissed her again just as lightly and Lissa could feel the blood drumming frantically in her veins. Her fingers curled protestingly into his shoulder, her lips clinging pleadingly to his when he kissed her again. Her small moan of protest when the pressure she craved for was removed was checked as his mouth returned to hers, this time satisfying the hunger inside her. Lissa gasped, reality melting like snow in the desert sun. Suddenly nothing was more important than that Joel kept on kissing her as he was doing right now. When he slid her nightdress straps off her shoulder she shuddered in reaction to his fingers against her skin but it wasn’t a shudder of rejection. How had she never known until now how right it would be to feel his hand against her breast, slowly stroking its rounded shape. She made a sound beneath his kiss, suddenly hating the intrusion of her cotton nightdress for coming between his touch and her skin, and when he released her mouth she tugged ineffectually at the fabric protesting huskily, ‘It’s in the way Take it off.’
The hot glitter in Joel’s eyes made her tremble, but in anticipation not fear, eager for the moment when he slid her nightdress from her body and cupped her breasts in his hands. Her heart was racing so fast it was making her dizzy, through a champagne induced cloud she gazed at Joel.
‘Are you enjoying this, Lissa?’ he asked huskily, ‘Does it give you pleasure?’
Amazingly it did. She nodded her head slowly, watching the smile curl his mouth. ‘So am I,’ he told her softly. His mouth nuzzled her throat, finding and exploiting a thousand pleasure spots, his teeth nipping gently until she twisted and arched against him in heady abandon.
Beneath the slow caress of his hands her breasts swelled and ached, her nipples tight and hard, wanting something more than the lightly arousing brush of his thumb. When he bent his head and slowly dragged his tongue over the tightness of her nipple Lissa reacted instinctively, her finger-nails finding his spine and grating over the vertebrae until he shuddered. ‘What is it you want, Lissa? This?’ His mouth moved over her skin, sending shock waves of arousal shuddering through her when it reached her nipple. In the light from the lamp she could see their entwined bodies; his dark and lean, hers feminine, curved, pale apart from the rosy aureoles of her breasts. Her nudity which hitherto had always displeased her was now something she took pleasure in. Joel’s hand cupped her other breast, his head bending towards it and desire kicked to life inside her, her body arching into his possession. She felt almost faint from the pressure of needing him so much. She muttered his name watching him slowly releasing the swollen tip of her breast, her fingers curling into his hair as the need to feel his mouth against her breast again overwhelmed her.
‘Lissa …’ There was a raw, primitive message of need in the way Joel said her name, the fierce demand of his mouth on hers, enflaming her senses further. She trembled
against his body, flattening her palms on his chest, confused by the harsh dragging cry that came from his throat when she did so. Beneath her hands she could feel the prickle of the dark hair that grew on his chest and also the tightness of his nipples. Were they as vulnerable to pleasure as her own? Slowly she bent towards them, running her tongue over their sharp outline as Joel had done with her. She felt his chest muscles contract as he dragged air into his lungs, his fingers curling into her hair.
‘Oh God yes, Lissa. Yes … do that again.’
His abandonment excited her, the hoarse words of praise and demand that came from his throat inciting her to blindly follow his commands. There was pleasure to be found in touching as well as being touched she was discovering, especially when Joel’s response to her left her in no doubts as to the way she aroused him.
‘I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing the seducing,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Not you.’
He was still wearing his pyjama trousers and as her glance rested on them and then skittered away he released her rolling on to his side while he tugged them off, quickly coming back to her. The heat and power of the maleness of him against her skin was intensely arousing and Lissa clung to him.
Now dimly, as though the information were of little importance to her and somehow divorced from her she realised that had it not been for the champagne she had drunk she would not be here with Joel like this; that she would never have been able to put her fears and torturous self-doubts aside for long enough to allow him to touch and arouse her as he had, but somehow this knowledge was only of minor import.
Slowly Joel caressed her body, his touch magically conveying to her that while he was the one who was in control inciting and arousing the leaping pulses beating under her skin he too was also held in thrall paying homage to her femininity in the age old way of man; both master and slave to it.
In the shadowy half light she watched his fingers described dizzying seductive patterns of delight against her skin; the curve of her hip, her thigh … She closed her eyes shuddering achingly, clinging to him, crying out his name.
His mouth brushed hers, calming, comforting as though he knew of the primaeval fear suddenly rushing through her body at the weight of his against it.
‘Shush … relax …’
He was soothing her as he might have done Louise when she was in the grip of one of her nightmares Lissa realised but somehow it didn’t matter, what did matter was that she clung to the reassuring calmness of his voice letting it strike at the deepest inner core of her. His mouth covered hers again and she clung to him letting the fierce need he was arousing inside her explode and drown out everything else. She was discovering within herself an intensely sensual streak that she now dimly perceived had perhaps always been there. Perhaps it was the very sensuality of her nature which had caused her to react so violently in the past. Her parents had been severely puritanical in their views; so much so that Lissa was beginning to see how her up-bringing must have been at war with much in her own nature.
‘Are you enjoying this?’
Joel’s question caught her off-guard. Before his near silence had added to the whole unreal aura that had enveloped her from the first moment he took her in his arms. Almost she had persuaded herself that she had strayed into some fantasy dream world from which she could simply wake up any time she wished, but now suddenly reality hit her. She was here … in Joel’s arms, enjoying his lovemaking with an intensity that was sweeping away all her previous conceptions of herself.
As she looked into his eyes, seeing them clearly now, without the benefit of any champagne-induced fogging haze; seeing within them a fine mingling of compassion, tenderness, and something else … something so eternally masculine and elemental that her body responded automatically to it, curving into his, her husky ‘Yes’ was half lost against his skin as she pressed her lips to his throat confused by the maelstrom of emotions suddenly seething within her, knowing that it was not purely desire that was making her so femalely pliable in his arms.
His skin tasted salt against her tongue and while part of her acknowledged the pleasure of such tactile contact her mind laboured dully trying to understand by what tortuous tracks and byways she had come to where she was now … to loving him. The admission that she loved him slid so easily into her mind that she knew it must have been there some time. Instinct screamed at her that to love him would only bring her pain, but held within his arms it was impossible to listen to instinct or caution. She kissed him, tasting his skin, losing herself completely in the joy of absorbing all she could of him into her senses feeling the suddenly accelerated thud of his heartbeat as his body responded to the touch of her hands and mouth.
Now when he touched her there was a hint of pagan savagery beneath his tenderness that drew a corresponding response from her; as though physically their bodies were communicating on a deeper more primitive level than their senses. There was nothing she wanted more than his ultimate and complete possession of her, in fact she wanted it so badly that she was the one to initiate it, moving arousingly against him, her hips writhing seductively against his in an age-old dance of seduction, which made it all the more bitterly devastating when suddenly, for no reason she could think of, behind her closed eyelids the old vision of him danced, bitter and contemptuous, freezing her body into rigid agony at the moment of his possession, destroying the golden bubble of pleasure that had enclosed her.
‘Lissa!”
She shuddered under the harshly abrasive way he said her name. ‘It’s all right … Open your eyes.’
Unbelievably she was obeying him, opening her tightly closed eyes to look despairingly into his.
‘See, it’s all right. Look at me, Lissa. Look at me …’ His heart was still thudding erratically, sweat glistening on his skin, but the topaz eyes were nothing like the ones that had haunted her darkness, the curve of his mouth; the way his skin clung tightly to his cheekbones making her realise that the portrait relayed to her by her mind’s eye was actually a caricature of reality … and that the way he was looking at her, with desire, with need … but most of all with understanding bore not the slightest resemblance to the expression she had once thought she had seen.
The muscles of her throat started to relax, her small choked sob of distress, silenced by the gentle pressure of his mouth.
‘I want you, Lissa. I want to make love to you … to feel your body hold mine like a silken sheath …’ He was interspersing his words with hungry, drugging kisses and she could feel herself responding, mentally and physically. ‘I need to be deep inside you.’ He moved as he spoke and her body melted, heat radiating outwards from deep inside her as he thrust against her and then inside her, her resistance flooding away on a shuddering breath of pleasure.
If she had thought she had already tasted the heady wine of pleasure, it had been a mere sip compared to what she was now experiencing. Once the trauma of her self-imposed barriers had been overcome the brief pain of Joel’s initial possession had been nothing; something fleetingly felt and then forgotten beneath the waves of sensation which had overwhelmed her.
It was like touching heaven; being immortal … escaping the bonds of human limitations, and to know that Joel had shared that pinnacle of human pleasure with her made it all the more precious.
As her body relaxed into lethargy she summoned enough energy to say drowsily, ‘You got me drunk deliberately didn’t you?’
“Not drunk,’ Joel corrected her, ‘merely pleasurably relaxed. Do you regret it?’
Lissa shook her head. ‘No.’ How could she regret it? How could any woman regret sharing the most mystic of all human experiences with the man she loved? But then of course Joel did not know that she loved him, and he certainly did not love her. So why, why had he made love to her? Not just on impulse but deliberately. She turned towards him, studying his face in the lamp light. He looked relaxed, younger … supinely male and satisfied. A tiny thrill of pleasure ran through her. It was frightening to realise h
ow vulnerable she was; how easily the smallest thing about him could please her, even to the extent of knowing that it was making love to her that had brought that almost animal langour to his body.
‘I don’t regret it at all Joel,’ she told him honestly. ‘But why? It wasn’t just on impulse.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘No it wasn’t an impulse. Nor was it simply to satisfy my own desire for you. Oh yes,’ he told her watching her, ‘despite what you seem to have thought to the contrary; the fact that you were sexually inexperienced did not lessen my desire for you, Lissa, and I’m not going to pretend that what we just shared together was anything less than extremely pleasurable … nor that I’m not hoping that it’s a pleasure we will share again, but after you’d told me about your phobia it seemed to me that as I was the focal point of your trauma, then I should be the one to help you to overcome it. I thought if you could see me, not as some disapproving intruder, but as a man … a man very much aware of you as a beautiful and desirable woman, and every bit as vulnerable as you are yourself.’ His thumb touched her cheekbone as she turned towards him. ‘Yes, you are beautiful and desirable Lissa,’ he repeated softly. ‘Didn’t my body tell you that?’
The memories conjured up by his words caused her to tremble slightly with a tiny thrill of remembered need.
‘Yes,’ she admitted huskily.
‘It wasn’t all entirely premeditated,’ Joel added. ‘The idea of getting you to relax via a few glasses of champagne only occurred to me today. I’d noticed that you didn’t recoil quite as strongly from me when I touched you, so I knew you were beginning to relax with me.’
‘But … but how did you know … that, that I’d be responsive to you?’ Lissa asked him. Could he have guessed what she had not? Could he have known that she loved him? She hoped desperately that he did not. What he had said to her had made it plain that he did not love her; compassion and desire were not love.