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ran with angry blood. The next second he had caught her head
between his hands, his palms cool against her warm skin, and
Susanna looked up at him, startled, and too taken by surprise to
pull away. He stared at her insistently, as though he was
memorising every detail of her face, and she felt that long, fixed
stare as a physical contact, making her pulses leap and flicker with
disturbed fire.
'Does it always have to be a shouting match every time I see
you?' he asked harshly.
She opened her mouth to answer and he muttered abruptly:
'No, don't say anything. Just let me kiss you.' He bent his head and
his mouth touched hers. Susanna stood, frozen in shock, her eyes
still wide open and able to see that Niall's eyes had closed, his
cheekbones and jawline were tense with a feeling she could
experience in the fierce pressure of his lips as they moved against
hers, in the way his fingers ran up into her hair, winding tendrils of
it through each parted finger, and the sound of his rapid, jerky
breathing.
Susanna was suddenly cold. She was not the type who fainted
normally but she had done so once or twice as a child and she
recognised the chill on the back of her neck, the drowning
sensation making her legs weak and her mouth dry. Her own eyes
closed and she sagged against him, grasping his sweater, admitting
with dismay that she needed that hungry contact, mouth to mouth,
the urgent pressure of their bodies, as she had never needed
anything before. Her mind might recoil from the idea, but it could
not argue with the deepest instincts of the body.
Desire was running through her in a tidal rush which swept
away all wish to think, nothing seemed to matter but the
satisfaction of this painful hunger; her hands trembled as they
touched his wide shoulders and moved inwards to the smooth
flesh of his throat. She felt a heavy pulse beating at the base of it
and Niall gave a stifled groan as her fingers explored. His hands
were moving downward, flattening the velvet of the kaftan so that
the shape of the flesh beneath it clung to his palms as he moulded
her like a sculptor, blindly discovering her body without looking at
her, shaping her breasts in the cup of his hands, caressing the
inward curve of her waist, following the flow of her hips and
thighs. She was hidden beneath the velvet yet his hands made her
naked, and she gave a deep moan of intense excitement.
Niall buried his face in the side of her neck, his lips hot,
pressing into her warm flesh and forcing back her head. 'I want
you,' he whispered shakily and for a fraction of time she was in
profound shock, aching with aroused blood.
She almost surrendered, gave herself without any attempt at
resistance. Her lips moved to say: 'Yes.' She felt them silently
open, her tongue had the groaned assent ready, then she forced
herself back from this dazed weakness, breathing rawly, and
pulled away, her eyes forced open. She had to push Niall to make
him let her go and he stared at her with eyes which glittered like
black stars, their pupils so dilated that they seemed to have taken
over the whole iris. His skin was hot and he was as breathless as
Susanna, she heard the rapid intake of his lungs.
'No,' she said. It was almost a groan, harsh and low. It was a
victory which tasted strangely of defeat; it was not what she had
wanted to say but what she had to say. She had said it often
enough before to other men and never with any difficulty; this was
the first time she had ever said: 'No' and meant the opposite.
Niall gave a strange, wry smile. 'I know it's crazy, do you
think I haven't told myself that a hundred times? You're
impossible; whenever I see you we end up quarrelling, half the
time I feel I want to strangle you.' He looked into her eyes and her
heart seemed to crash into her ribs. It was an illusion, of course,
she told herself; hearts don't bang about inside you and you can't
be deafened by the sound of your own heart beating. 'The other
half of the time I want to do something very different,' he said
huskily.
What is the matter with me? Susanna thought. I have all the
classic symptoms of a disease I don't believe in! She had never
believed that anyone fell in love they just convinced themselves
that they had because the fantasy was a useful way of forming a
bond from which children would result. Susanna had often spent
hours studying birds and animals. If you were going to draw them
you had to understand them; not merely in the physical sense of
how the muscle ran under the flesh and how they moved and fed,
but in terms of their behaviour patterns, what each species did and
why. She felt you could learn a lot about human beings from
watching animals; not least as far as mating rituals went.
Remembering the way her mother had given her whole life to
loving and caring first for her delicate husband and then for Alex,
Susanna had felt no impulse to do the same for any man. The
pattern held for all her married friends, as far as she could see;
they gave themselves up to home-making and child-rearing and
even those who went on with a job seemed more obsessed with
their home life than their career. Love demanded too much; it
wasn't satisfied with anything less than totality. There might be a
man somewhere who wouldn't be so devouring, but Susanna's
intelligence warned her that it wouldn't be Niall Ardrey. One look
at that hard bone structure, those insistent grey eyes, told you that
he was a taker; he would want everything he could get of you, he
wouldn't accept half measures.
'Nothing to say?' he asked after a long pause during which he
had watched her intently. 'That's a first for you; you usually have a
great deal to say why are you so quiet now?' His voice was
calmer, more in control, the dark flush had receded from his face
and his body had slackened from the terrifying tension which had
held it a moment ago. Susanna felt herself shivering; as though she
was bitterly cold now that the aching heat had left her body.
'There doesn't seem much to say. It wouldn't work and we both
know it, and I don't want to get into something that can only end
badly.' She gave him a stiff smile. 'You'd better go while we're
both sane.'
He shrugged, his mouth wry. 'I suppose you're right. Sex is an
explosive game even when the players know what they're doing,
and I sure as hell don't know what I'm doing now. I didn't come
here intending that to happen. You just get to me, maybe because
you make me so damn mad. My temperature shoots sky high when
you're looking at me with that go-to-hell stare, I start wanting to. .
. .' he broke off, grimacing. 'Well, you know what I want to do. I'm
male and my instincts aren't always rational.' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]