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‘Maybe,’ he admitted.
‘Because you’re the world’s most irresistible lover, I suppose?’
This clearly amused him. He raised his dark, beautifully shaped eyebrows. ‘What’s the matter, Lola?’ he teased softly. ‘Don’t you like having your objections kissed away?’
Lola swallowed down the acrid taste in her mouth.
It hurt, that was all; the realisation that he was playing with her hurt like hell. Because these teasing words were all part of the big mating game he doubtless played with lots and lots of different women.
Lola felt as though Geraint was the consummate fisherman, while she was like a big but unworldly fish who was being skilfully outmanoeuvred by him and was in grave danger of plopping plumply into his net!
‘Why?’ she retorted. ‘Do your women usually enjoy having their objections kissed away? If someone objects, then that implies they are resisting you. If you then change their mind—however enjoyable the methods you might use at the time to make them do so—then surely that also implies a certain degree of force, Geraint.’
He had gone very still, as still as the marble statue of Venus which Peter Featherstone had installed at the bottom of the garden, beside a tinkling fountain surrounded by irises which were the deepest, darkest blue whenever they flowered.
‘Never force,’ he disagreed softly. ‘Ever. But some women like to offer a token objection, a show of reluctance, if you like, rather than resistance. It eases their conscience. If, for example, they have been brought up to think that sex is wrong, or dirty, or in some way shameful—’
Lola’s breath caught painfully in her throat. Had he guessed, for heaven’s sake? She stole a glance at him but, to her relief, he did not appear to have noticed her reaction, he was so caught up in the fervour of what he was saying.
‘And that’s the very worst kind of rationale put around by men!’ Lola blazed, in a storm of temper. ‘Isn’t it still used as a pathetic kind of defence against rape?’
Geraint’s mouth thinned into a forbidding line, and a glimpse of hostile steel gleamed coldly in his eyes. ‘There is a distinct difference between a semi-reluctant kiss which may or may not develop into something more,’ he ground out, ‘and the kind of brutal assault you seem to have lumped it together with.’
‘Is there?’ she queried coolly.
‘Well, why waste time discussing it? Why not judge for yourself?’ he retorted silkily, his eyes darkening, signalling his desire to kiss her.
Lola waited, determined this time not to turn her mouth so eagerly towards him. Maybe if she looked at those delectable lips in a detached way for long enough she might have the strength to withstand him.
He was a master of control, she would say that for him. And she supposed he needed to be, in view of what he had just said. Because if he now demonstrated a tempestuous display of passion towards her then it could not possibly be categorised as fair play, not in the circumstances.
Which was why, Lola guessed, it seemed to take an eternity before his lips were within brushing distance of hers. Plenty of time for her to halt him in his tracks.
But she did not halt him; she did not move at all.
His eyes were narrowed, glittering with the bright, intense light of desire, and yet there was no conquering smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Instead, his gaze swept over every centimetre of her face, thoughtfully, almost ruefully, Lola thought.
He put his hands possessively on her shoulders and bent his face very close, and then she could sense the tension in him. ‘I generally find,’ he sighed, in an erotic whisper, ‘the anticipation of making love unbearably exciting, but tonight it seems almost unendurable.’
She knew she should be discouraging him from speaking to her in this rather shockingly frank way, and yet if she did that then he might not kiss her. And she badly needed him to kiss her. ‘D-does it?’
‘Mmm. Don’t you think?’
Lola swallowed nervously, but, thank goodness, he did not seem to be expecting much in the way of an answer.
Instead, he lifted his hand to trace the outline of her lips with one long finger, and when they trembled violently beneath his touch she saw him give a small smile. ‘Which does rather make a case for prolonging the wait for as long as possible. Wouldn’t you say?’
Lola stared at him hopefully. That sounded more like it! He seemed to be implying that he would offer her some traditional and old-fashioned restraint!
‘I suppose so,’ she said a little breathlessly, thinking that if there was any holding back to be done then she rather hoped that he would have the strength of character required to do it. Because right at that moment she wanted nothing more than to be locked intimately in his arms—and the rest of the world could go hang!
‘It’s just a little unfortunate,’ he reflected huskily, ‘that my body is steadfastly refusing to listen to what my mind is saying, which leaves me with nothing to do except what I’ve been wanting to do all afternoon. To kiss you.’ He gave her a lazy smile. ‘Unless you have any objection to that, Lola?’
She recognised that after everything she had said he was giving her the opportunity to stop him, but she didn’t need to utter a word—he must have read the answer in her eyes.
He slowly lowered his head, and his mouth blotted out everything with a heart-stopping kiss, effectively silencing her in the most satisfactory way imaginable.
To Lola it was exactly like being given a draught of sweet, cool water after an impossibly arid spell in the desert and she opened her lips beneath his, as though she was drinking him in.
Maybe she was just too fussy but kisses from other men, in the past, had been best forgotten. Either she had felt as if she had some kind of slimy mollusc clamped to her lips or she’d had an intrusive tongue thrust into her mouth in a way which had made her want to gag.
Apart from her ill-fated liaison with the pilot, of course. He had been a good kisser—but with him Lola had felt that much of it was cold-blooded technique—expertly learnt but with little true feeling.
Whereas Geraint. . .
Geraint kissed solely by instinct—as if her mouth was some new, uncharted territory and he was the laziest and most sensual explorer in the world, his lips caressing and inciting her to wind her arms voluptuously around his neck and to deepen the kiss herself with a new-found skill all of her own.
She felt his body shift in response.
‘Lola. . .’ he said indistinctly against her mouth.
Lola barely heard him; she was too caught up in the sensations he was bringing to burgeoning life. The blood in her veins seemed to grow thick and heavy and the urgent prickle at the tips of her breasts became acutely sensitive, so that even the bra and thin work blouse she wore seemed as uncomfortable as sackcloth.
‘Lola,’ Geraint said again, but more urgently this time, and Lola felt him grow hard against her and the blood rushed hotly to her cheeks as she realised that she had moved fractionally in response, to accommodate his surge of desire.
She registered his harsh entreaty and tore her mouth away from his with an effort, staring into eyes which were almost unrecognisable—very dark, and opaque with passion. ‘Wh-what is it?’ she asked unsteadily.
He shook his head as if in disbelief and was silent for a moment as he fought to control his breathing, before saying huskily, ‘We’d better go inside, sweetheart.’
‘Inside?’ she repeated stupidly.
Did his eyes soften, or was that just wishful thinking on her part?
‘It’s a little too. . .public here,’ he said quietly. ‘Why don’t we find somewhere where we can be more comfortable?’
The simple question brought Lola abruptly to her senses. She blinked as she glanced around her, realisation sinking in like a cake on which the oven door had been opened too soon.
They were standing in the middle of the garden, for heaven’s sake!
And today was the gardener’s day!
‘Oh, no!’ she cried, and ran back into the house, and was about to slam shut the front door, but Geraint was too fast for her. He was inside before she knew it and he was the one shutting the front door!
‘Get out!’ she yelled.
‘No!’
‘Geraint, please,’ she begged. ‘I want—’
‘I know what you want!’ he declared passionately. ‘And if you deny it I’ll know you’re lying because it’s there in your eyes, as clear as can be! And it’s what I want too, Lola. More than anything else in the world right now. You. You. Only you. I’ve wanted you since the first time I set eyes on you, when nothing else in that room existed except you. I want you so much I can’t think straight.’
It was an admission not of weakness but of vulnerability—at least where Lola was concerned—and it affected her more profoundly than anything else so far.
She could hardly believe that she—she—with her too generous curves and her hair which never looked tidy—apparently had the power to inspire the kind of passion in Geraint Howell-Williams which had given his face such a look of such unbearable tension that Lola went positively weak at the knees just looking at it.
Nervously, she wound a strand of glossy hair round and round her finger in a way she hadn’t done for years. ‘I just don’t know what to say,’ she told him honestly.
‘Don’t you?’ he queried softly.
‘No. I don’t seem sure about anything any more.’ She stared at him in confusion, thinking, somewhat belatedly, that he could at least have phrased his desire for her more eloquently than that strained, rather clipped ‘I want you so much I can’t think straight’. ‘Geraint,’ she demanded suddenly, ‘what would normally happen now?’
‘Normally?’ His voice was soft, with an undertone of danger. ‘I’m not sure that I understand you.’
‘I mean, if it was someone else you had said that to—about wanting them—what would they do?’ she persisted stubbornly as reaction set in like a cold chill. ‘What’s the form for this type of occasion?’
‘The form?’ he echoed softly.
‘Stop repeating everything I say!’ stormed Lola.
‘Then why don’t you say exactly what you mean?’
‘You know what I mean! I want to know what your other women do! Do they start necking here, in the hall, and allow you to make love to them on the floor? Or do they slip upstairs for their much needed shower, and then you join them, and . . . and . . .?’ Her voice tailed off miserably.
He had begun to laugh at her use of the word ‘necking’, but her bleak little voice seemed to sober him right up. ‘There are no set rules, Lola,’ he told her quietly. ‘I don’t have a textbook which I consult . every time I deal with a woman.
‘As for what would happen next—what would you say if I told you that I had no idea? That the situation is quite new to me? That I have never made a habit of the very public displays of desire you and I seem to have been indulging in—or at least not for more years than I care to remember?’
She turned a bewildered face up to him, and surprised a look of something akin to pain in his stormy grey eyes.
‘Come here,’ he said softly, holding his hand out to her. And when she took it trustingly, like a child, she saw his eyes darken again—not with the passion of earlier, but with that same odd, indescribable type of pain.
Did he want to confide to her the reason that lay behind that haunted look? Some urgent inner prompting caused Lola to whisper his name, but so softly that he did not hear it—or if he did he chose not to answer—and, still holding her hand, he moved towards one of the double doors which led into the sitting room.
It was a vast room, dominated by soft blues and green, filled with light from the mighty bay window and scented with a glass bowl of narcissi which Lola had placed there yesterday, just before she had left for Rome.
Once inside, he sat her gently down on the sofa, and Lola was half expecting him to join her, but to her surprise—and, she was forced to admit, her disappointment—he did no such thing. He went to stand at the window, to watch the yellow patches of daffodils as they swayed with fragile and tattered grace in the March wind.
He stood there in silence for a moment, and when he spoke his voice sounded harsh. ‘What do you think you’ll do with this house?’ he demanded suddenly.
Without stopping to wonder why he had asked, Lola gave voice to the thoughts which had been bubbling away in her head for weeks now. ‘I think I’m probably going to sell up,’ she said slowly.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Oh?’
‘It’s too big for one person, especially one who leads the kind of life that I do.’
‘And what will you do? Buy something smaller?’
‘Much smaller,’ Lola agreed. ‘And whatever money is left after I’ve given some to my mum can go to charity.’
He turned around. ‘You’re giving the money away?’ he asked carefully.
‘Yes,’ Lola nodded. ‘To Dream-makers. I think that’s what Peter would have liked me to do with it, really.’
He looked at her. ‘Are you really this good and this sweet, Lola Hennessy? Or just too good to be true?’
She smiled at the question which had almost been a compliment. ‘You’ll have to judge that for yourself, won’t you, Geraint?’
‘Yes. I guess I will.’ And he turned to stare pensively out of the window once more.
He was so still, Lola thought suddenly, and so silent, too, his stance proud and magnificently arrogant, the set of his shoulders slightly forbidding. She remembered what he had said about forbidden passion, how his eyes had glittered some secret message at her, and how she had shivered in spite of herself.
How little she knew about him, Lola acknowledged. About his past, or even his present—and she certainly had no idea what was going on in his mind right now.
And yet. . . Lola frowned. Did she really care? She had known the pilot—or thought that she had—and he had turned out to be a two-timing swine. The fundamental question was whether or not she could trust Geraint not to hurt her, and something beyond logic or reason—something buried away deep in her heart—told her that she could.
As she watched, his posture seemed to alter fractionally—she saw his shoulders and the big muscles of his forearms bunch up beneath the thin cream silk of his jumper and she found herself hungrily wondering what it would be like to be contained within those arms. To be naked within those naked arms. . .
He turned abruptly and something in her wistful face must have angered him, or infuriated him, or something—because his own darkened and his eyes blazed with some strange, pale fire which seemed to drive a shaft of longing right through Lola’s heart as she looked at him.
‘I’m going now,’ he told her harshly, and Lola’s mouth flew open in surprise. It was the last thing in the world she’d expected him to say.
‘G-going?’
‘That’s right,’ he affirmed grimly.
Lola gazed at him in bemusement. ‘But why?’
‘Because. . .’ He shook his head with barely concealed impatience. ‘I can’t stay. Not now, Lola—not when. . .’
Lola noted the incredible tension which had etched deep lines of strain on his face and suddenly she thought she understood, or at least partly, though she did not yet know the reason for his astonishing about-face.
She knew that his proposed departure should bring her a degree of comfort, indicating as it did that he must in some small way respect her, and yet just the thought of him going absolutely appalled her.
Clumsily, with limbs which seemed suddenly weighted down with lead, Lola rose to her feet, painfully aware of the lurching disappointment in her chest.
‘Of course,’ she said stiffly, but she knew, with an unarguable certainty, that if he walked out of her life now, then he would never return.
He stood staring at her for one last, long moment and then he turned away, and the pain was as in-tense as if someone had punched her.
Lola’s hand jerked up automatically, as if it had been twitched by an invisible string, but the silent movement did nothing to halt him as he strode pur-posefully towards the door.
Could she really let him go?
She suddenly realised how stimulating she found his company—even when he made her so mad she could hit him; she felt so alive when she was with him—never more alive, in fact. And she realised how much she admired his strength, and his persistence.
She thought about the unique and powerful effect he had on her. She remembered the exquisite sensations he had inspired in her—what she had felt in Geraint’s arms must be the closest thing to heaven on earth—and he had only kissed her, for heaven’s sake! Imagine what it would be like if he really did make love to her! Lola shuddered.
What if she died tomorrow—would she regret having let him walk out of her life?
