A Forbidden Passion: No Longer Forbidden? / The Man She Loves To Hate / A Wicked Persuasion

CHAPTER SEVEN

NIC felt as though he was looking at a stranger—one so beautiful she made his heart lurch. Her eyelids were swollen under a smoky smudge of makeup, her green irises like rain-soaked moss, her lips ripened by his kisses. He pulled back a little for a lengthy study of every flushed curve and trembling muscle.

How in the hell was he the only man who’d ever seen her like this?

Rowan wriggled in muted protest. He was still aroused enough for rational thought to recede and instinct to want to take over. She was so smooth and soft, her warmed scent a soporific drug to his senses. The desire to sink down on her and rediscover every decadent inch of her increased.

His heartbeat elevated, but she stiffened in wariness.

“What are you doing?”

She sounded breathless. Her flat stomach contracted under the weight of his hand while her wrists turned in the light grip of his other hand. Her flexing was a seductive trigger he fought out of self-preservation. This situation didn’t make sense and he needed it to.

“I’m admiring this gift you’ve given me.” Her springy curls begged for petting, but he resisted, taking heed of her belligerently angled chin instead.

“You don’t have to be so sarcastic about it,” she said.

“I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I’m stunned.” Winded. Very much in danger of being moved. He had to stick to cool analysis or he’d begin attaching meaning to this unique circumstance. He had worried being in his bedroom would make the act too personal, but she had shot things into a realm of intimate sharing that didn’t happen often between any two people—most especially between him and anyone.

“How, Ro? There was a boy at school. I heard the stories.”

Her lips firmed and her cheeks darkened. “That … didn’t work out. I thought I was ready, but I wasn’t. I called it off. He was getting dressed when the headmistress found us. Would you let go of me, please?”

He released her and she sat up. Her narrow back seemed very vulnerable. He felt an unaccountable urge to pull her back into his embrace and keep her sheltered against him. A curious lump formed in his chest. She’d been so tight. Exquisite and succulent. Her rippling orgasm had been unmistakable, but her sheath new and small. If he’d hurt her he’d never forgive himself.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. You?” Rowan flipped the edge of the coverlet up and across her front, dying with self-consciousness. “Shall we have a post-mortem on your past, too? Did you get it right the first time, or do you have an inept experience you’d like to share?”

Nic was impervious to the glare she sent over her shoulder. He sprawled as comfortably as any male animal whose appetite had been recently sated. The condom was gone, she noted—with a glance that he caught.

His brows went up while his eyelids stayed heavy.

She prickled with embarrassment, willing to give anything to take back that peek. He was still hard. Had he not been satisfied? The coverlet bunched thickly in her hands as she curled her fingers into apprehensive fists.

“I’m not trying to pry,” he said. “I just can’t understand how you’d still be a virgin when I’ve seen you with men I thought were your lovers.”

“Who? Dance partners? We’re all very familiar. It doesn’t mean anything.” Kind of like how this act seemed to have no profundity for him beyond a mystery to be solved.

She couldn’t believe she had felt apprehensive at the thought of him walking out. This was far worse—sitting naked next to him, insanely aware of what they’d just done, how he’d touched her like he not only owned her but knew her body’s responses better than she did, trying to have a conversation.

Her entire world had been flooded with color. A huge bubble of elation had threatened to split her chest. But he didn’t need time to savor and process. He wasn’t suffering any craving for reassurance. He’d done this a thousand times.

A thousand and one.

“You might have offered a clue,” he chided dryly.

“Like what? Can you imagine Cassandra O’Brien’s daughter running around wearing one of those ‘Proud To Be A Virgin’ bracelets? I was happy people thought I’d been with that boy. My school friends quit teasing me. I dated when I could, but my schedule didn’t allow for anything long-term so sex never happened.”

“I meant you might have said something today.” His voice changed, becoming darker and crisper.

She sensed that word long-term had done it and swallowed. He didn’t move, but she watched a new level of coolness come over him. It made the tiny inch of space between them seem cavernous and the warm room grow cold.

“Why would you throw it away on me?” he asked.

Throw it away. Her stomach clenched. Not exactly a treasured moment. More like taking out the garbage. She hated herself then for not being able to control who she was attracted to. For letting that attraction rule her to the point of waiting half her life for him and then giving herself despite knowing it meant nothing to him.

Yet when she tried to conjure regret all she felt was a stunned ache of poignant joy. It had been the most singularly beautiful experience of her life. She was glad it had been with Nic.

“Do you really think virginity is something precious to be bottled up and hoarded for a special occasion?” she asked with a catch in her voice, trying to hide how deeply stirred she was as she reached back to brace herself on her arm and face him. Her other hand held the coverlet firmly across her breasts and thighs, but she did her best to mirror his nonchalance, affecting only vague interest.

His gaze cut a swift glance at her nude shoulders and exposed knee before meeting hers again. “I guess I wouldn’t be a very progressive man if I did, but I imagine you’ve had other opportunities, so choosing to give it up now—with me—seems odd.”

“Why not you?” she challenged, her heart dancing close to a tricky ledge.

His intense look of concentration blanked for a second into a hollow gaze before he shuttered his expression. “Indeed, why not me when any man would do? Why now is the real question, isn’t it?”

An urge to correct him caught in her throat, but she didn’t want to reveal how much she had wanted it to be him. At the same time a stunning insight struck her. Nic had no idea he was special to her or anyone else. She had been told all her life that she was special—so special she had to live up to unrealistic expectations—but he hadn’t had that problem. His father had ignored him. What about his mother?

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.”