A Lesson In Seduction Read online

  His teeth grazed her lips, his hardness lodged tightly in the hollow of her groin, and his fingertips slid under her lacy straps on their next casual journey, curling around the narrow ribbons and peeling the stretchy fabric down, leaving her breasts peaking against the soft abrasion of her top.

  Rosalind’s hands slid up into his hair, gripping him hard and deepening the kiss as she waited in exquisite agony for the explorative touch to steal back up to the flesh he had daringly exposed, but his hands stayed inexplicably at her waist, fingers kneading the soft indentation with an almost painful thoroughness. She twisted restlessly. She couldn’t bear him to turn tentative and shy on her, not now... She clutched at his wrists, dragging his hands up under her top and moulding them around her naked breasts.

  Fireworks went off in her head. A convulsion of indescribable pleasure rolled over her, enveloping every millimetre of her skin from the top of her tingling scalp to the tips of her reflexively curled-up toes. The heated darkness came rushing up at her like a physical force, sweeping away any semblance of thought or will, sucking her into a black hole of pure, concentrated sensation. Time warped and stretched, turning fluid and meaningless. The universe shrank at an accelerating rate until it was composed of nothing but a warm body and a violently beating heart...one man at the centre of eternity.

  It was Luke who broke the blindingly erotic spell, Luke who dragged his mouth away from hers, his hands still moving compulsively on her breasts, violent tremors shaking his body as he fought the gravitational pull of their mutual desire.

  ‘God, what am I doing?’ he muttered harshly, dragging his hands from her bare flesh but unable to prevent his fingers trailing a final, reluctant farewell across her stiffened nipples as he did so, his eyes burning at the sight of her instinctive little shudder of response.

  Rosalind stared up at him in dazed confusion until the tortured self-contempt in his expression brought reality crashing back down on her. She too was trembling, only the palm tree behind her hips preventing her from sinking bonelessly to her knees in front of the man who had kidnapped her senses and held them so ravishingly to ransom.

  She hadn’t wanted to be rescued, she realised helplessly. She hadn’t cared what they were doing, or where, or why. One minute she had been a playful temptress confident of her control, the next she had been a maelstrom of chaotic emotions, utterly at the mercy of her feelings for this one man. Luke James.

  His thin mouth twisted at her wide-eyed stare, mistaking it for challenge. ‘Well, teacher, I guess you made your point,’ he said, stepping back.

  ‘Did I?’ It was Rosalind who had learned a lesson, and she was still grappling with the terrifying implications.

  ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you.’

  ‘What?’ She had pulled her bra back over her breasts and now her hands flattened defensively over their aching tenderness, protecting her lingering arousal from his mockery.

  To her shock he touched her throbbing mouth with his thumb, his face grave. ‘I didn’t realise I was being so rough...you have a little cut...’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she said hastily, turning aside, so that his touch slid to the outer point of her jaw, a brief streak of fire across her soft cheek.

  He straightened, putting his bands behind his back, and Rosalind didn’t doubt that his fists were clenched as he said tightly, ‘I suppose I should thank all your previous lovers for providing my teacher with her expertise.’

  Previous lovers? That implied that she had a current one. A jealous lover who had the right to delve into all the secrets of her soul, who would seduce her from her emotional independence with the promise of something infinitely more rewarding, something she yearned for beyond the expression of words. Panic rose in Rosalind’s throat and she resorted to her protective cloak of flippancy.

  ‘Oh, not all of them,’ she drawled. ‘Out of the legion of men I’ve had in my bed there were one or two who were totally uninspiring.’

  ‘Has there really been a legion?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing at the defiant glitter in hers.

  ‘At least!’

  ‘Do you know how much a legion is, according to the dictionary definition?’

  She shrugged airily. ‘A lot.’

  ‘Three to six thousand.’

  Rosalind’s jaw dropped and so did Luke’s eyelids.

  ‘That’s an awful lot of lovers for any one woman,’ he

  said smoothly.

  ‘Well, maybe that’s a little on the high side,’ she said weakly.

  ‘Only a little?’ His eyebrow etched the daring question. It wasn’t often that he had Rosalind so thoroughly off balance and he intended to press his advantage.

  ‘Shall we just say I’m considerably less experienced than most people seem to think?’ she said, wryly conceding him his victory.

  He showed an unfortunate tendency to rub it in. ‘How much less?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business, do you?’ she retorted, ruffled by his persistence. She wondered what Luke would say if she told him that the reason why she was such an expert in light-hearted flirtation was that she had been celibate for years. Turning aside propositions without wounding egos or losing valued friendships took a practised sleight of tongue.

  ‘After what nearly happened just now I think it is,’ he said with a quiet, unnerving certainty that prompted an instant, knee-jerk objection.

  ‘Nothing happened—’

  ‘I said nearly,’ he corrected her, his eyes dropping to where her nipples still thrust against her thin top. ‘But I don’t happen to think that what we did was “nothing”. It certainly felt like something to me. I’m afraid I don’t have your sophistication—I don’t quite know how to handle this...attraction between us...I don’t know what to do.’

  For a shattering moment she took him literally. ‘You don’t mean that you’ve never—? That you’re a...a...?’ She stepped away from the mind-blowing thought and trod on a cylindrical piece of coral on the uneven track. Her ankle twisted as her foot skated away, sending her down on one knee amongst the crushed shells.

  ‘Steady!’ He picked her up and set her on her slender legs again, bending to brush at the shell-dust that mingled with the blood that seeped from the minor scrape. ‘You don’t have to propose to get me into your bed,’ he said, straight-faced. ‘I didn’t mean I was that innocent. Is your ankle all right?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said dismissively, ignoring the slight stinging of her grazed flesh as she watched him straighten and reveal his lightly flushed face. ‘Then what did you mean? How many lovers have there been in your murky past?’

  He hesitated before answering briefly. ‘One.’

  Rosalind felt instantly light-headed. ‘One what? One important one? One legion?’

  He didn’t smile. ‘One lover. My wife.’

  ‘You’re married?’ she whispered, her honey-coloured complexion paling, making her incredulous green eyes look enormous. She was profoundly shocked, even more so than when she had gone to a party she had thought she would have to miss and surprised Justin in the act of infidelity with one of his nameless pick-ups. At least with Justin she had been prepared by her growing suspicions. And somehow Luke seemed to be the type to wear a wedding ring...strait-laced, strictly honourable...

  ‘I was. She died.’

  Rosalind was appalled by her sense of relief and rushed to atone for her inappropriate emotions. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’ He put a hand under her elbow, turning her in the direction of the hotel. ‘Come on, we’ll walk the rest of the way back. I’ve got some antibiotic cream I can use to clean up that cut.’

  ‘If it was a long time ago you must have married very young...’ Curiosity crawled through Rosalind’s veins as she limped gracefully along beside him. What had his wife been like? she wondered.

  Was she pretty? she asked him silently. Did she make you laugh? Did she make you happy? If she was alive would you still love her?

  ‘I
was nineteen and Christie was eighteen.’

  She turned that over in her mind. He would still have been at university. Hadn’t he said he had lived with his parents?

  ‘Did you have to get married?’

  As soon as the question left her lips Rosalind’s curiosity faltered. What if Christie had had a baby? Children? Luke could be a father, for all she knew. A family man. Someone who loved children and believed that procreation was the essential purpose of marriage.

  ‘Quite the reverse,’ he said firmly. ‘Christie and I were sweethearts all through our teens but she came from a very religious family, even stricter than mine. There was no question of sex before marriage.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He intercepted her sideways glance and judged it correctly. ‘And yes, that is one of the reasons we got married so young,’ he admitted drily. ‘We were both mature for our age and very sure of our feelings, and our parents realised that we were having more and more difficulty in refraining from the full expression of our love. They were happy to approve a marriage that would avert a sin.’

  The chalets were in sight and Rosalind shortened her steps to a dawdle, forcing Luke to do the same as she tried to keep him talking. ‘So how long were you married?’

  ‘A year.’ The casualness with which he spoke belied the horror of what he was saying as he added matter-of-factly, ‘Although we only spent five days actually living together as husband and wife. Christie was critically injured in a car accident on the way back from our honeymoon. A man had a heart attack at the wheel and slammed into us from a side-road. Christie never regained consciousness.’

  Rosalind felt some vital yet nameless defence crumble inside her, his words issuing from a well of loneliness that echoed in the empty chambers of her heart. ‘Oh, Luke, no...’

  They had reached his door, but he made no attempt to use the fact as an excuse to bring the conversation to a polite conclusion. He used his key and ushered Rosalind inside, then continued in that mildly detached voice, as if the tragic story related to an acquaintance rather than himself.

  ‘What we had was so brief, yet so special... Christie and I always seemed to be utterly attuned to each other—heart, mind and soul. I knew I wouldn’t find that kind of perfection with anyone else, so I never bothered to try. I just wasn’t interested in platonic female companionship or empty physical release. Neither seemed to matter. If I ever looked at another woman in lust it was only because she reminded me in some way of Christie—’

  ‘And me? Do I remind you of Christie?’ she interrupted as he sat her down on the bamboo couch and handed her a tissue from the hotel-branded box on the coffee-table. How could she be expected to worry about something as mundane as a minor scrape on her knee when he was performing open-heart surgery?

  Her mouth went dry as she waited for him to tell her that, yes, Christie had been a slim, green-eyed redhead.

  ‘There’s no resemblance whatsoever.’

  But as she started to breathe again his brutal scalpel of truth continued to flash. ‘Yet I find myself wanting to have sex with you. I can’t seem to stop myself thinking about it. Whenever I look at you, I imagine you—’ He clenched his teeth and his hands at his sides, forcing the difficult words out. ‘I think of how it would be with you...I think of doing things with you that I—’ A light sheen of sweat that had nothing to do with their run had broken out on his upper lip. ‘And at night I have dreams—’

  He broke off, but he didn’t need to go on. Rosalind’s hand trembled as she dabbed the tissue ineffectually against her knee, trying to look her most blasé when inside she was turning cartwheels like a giddy teenager. She had had a few fairly intense dreams herself...

  ‘I see.’

  He swept the hair impatiently off his forehead. ‘I wish I did.’ He looked angry, bewildered by his inability to explain his own behaviour, aggressive in his vulnerability.

  Rosalind’s defences dropped even further.

  ‘Maybe it’s because I’m so very different,’ she offered gently. ‘Maybe you’ve allowed yourself to feel desire for me because you know I’m not a threat to your memories of Christie.’

  ‘But you are. I told you, Christie is the only woman I’ve ever made love to—’

  ‘But it would be only sex with me, wouldn’t it?’ She proudly pointed out what he himself had made very clear. ‘You can’t make love with someone you don’t love.’

  ‘“Only sex”,’ he mimicked roughly. ‘Is that all it is to you, Roz—“only” another incidental encounter with a person you fleetingly fancy?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no,’ she said steadily, noting his careful use of language. ‘I won’t deny I did go through a brief period in my life when I wasn’t very discriminating about men—’ she hoped he noticed the special stress ‘—but I’d just been terribly hurt by someone whom I believed was the love of my life, and in typically flamboyant style I decided to show everyone how much I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be pitied. I thought that if I acted like Justin had it would somehow make me feel better. It didn’t, so I stopped. I may flirt, but I don’t sleep around.’

  Her tilted chin and the thread of steely pride in her voice told him that he could take or leave it—she wasn’t going to beg for his respect.

  ‘I’ll get that ointment for your knee,’ he said quietly, and went up the stairs to his bathroom without further comment.

  Rosalind brushed at the stupid blurring in her eyes and got up, thinking that a little flexing would stop her caked knee from hardening over and making it more difficult to treat. She walked over to the small dining table where Luke’s computer lay open, plugged into the electrical outlet in the wall, a screen-saver busily at work. Maybe Luke had left it on because he was expecting a fax or some electronic mail, she thought.

  The computer looked highly sophisticated, but appeared to have no mouse or trackball. Rosalind leaned over and ran her finger over the flat pad where she had expected the trackball to be. The screen-saver suddenly dissolved and she realised that the pad was a miniature touch-sensitive screen. She dragged her finger across it again and sure enough the little cursor arrow moved in a parallel course. She tapped and a file opened full-screen.

  Guiltily, because she hadn’t realised that the cursor was hovering over any particular icon, she dragged the arrow up to the ‘close’ box, and was about to tap when a name leapt out at her from the mass of single-spaced text.

  Her own name...things that she had said...things that she had done.

  Luke, it seemed, had been making detailed notes of their association from the day they had first met.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘SPECTACULAR, isn’t it?’

  Rosalind didn’t turn as the shadowy figure materialised on the ground beside her. Deep in the inky shadows of the casuarina tree, in her midnight-blue dress, she had thought she was invisible, but Luke evidently had eyes like a cat.

  She kept her gaze fixed on the dark horizon. On Tioman the night was star-studded and clear but far out across the sea a distant electrical storm played out its fury. Sheet lightning flickered incessantly, brilliant flashes of varying intensity illuminating the rim of the world, throwing the billowing clouds high above the horizon into pulsating relief. There was no thunder, only the hushed breath of the sea to accompany the theatrical light-show, the violence of nature seeming all the more impressive for its silence.

  When she didn’t respond to his opening question she heard Luke shift on the soft carpet of dried casuarina needles scattered across the sandy soil.

  ‘Where did you rush off to this morning? I looked for you. I thought we had plans...’

  Rosalind could almost smell the ozone in the air, but it wasn’t from the distant lightning. She felt electricity crackling through her veins, but, unlike the storm, her rage couldn’t remain silent for long.

  ‘I went on a parasailing trip. With the hunk from the pool bar,’ she added with savage bite, not taking her eyes off nature’s fireworks display.


  There was a heartbeat’s silence, then he said softly, and without a trace of jealousy, ‘Trying to show me how much you don’t care, in your typically flamboyant fashion, Roz?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself! It had nothing to do with you,’ she lied desperately, appalled at how easily he’d turned her own words against her.

  “Then why won’t you talk to me?’

  ‘Why? So you can make some more notes?’ she spat, her skin crawling at the memory of scrolling through the screens of information about herself—her habits and likes and dislikes, what she’d worn and what she’d said—the conversations with Luke reported almost verbatim.

  Until she’d seen it coldly written down she hadn’t realised how much she’d unwittingly revealed during their harmless ‘flirtation’, not only about herself but about her family and friends, a number of whom were famous in their own right. She had trusted Luke at a time when her life was ripe with paranoia and this was how he’d repaid her!

  Damn it, he was as bad as Justin...worse, because she knew now that what she had felt for Justin had been a romantic yearning that had ignored reality. She had been in love with the idea of being in love, with the notion of finding her perfect match, and Justin had seemed conveniently to fit the bill.

  Luke was far from perfect and he had never tried to be her ideal. He was irritating and engaging, obstinate and agreeable, shy and bold, blunt and evasive...in short, a mass of contradictions that should have sent her screaming in the opposite direction. Instead she had been perversely fascinated, seduced by her growing appreciation of his complexity of character, his breadth of mind and the smouldering power of his subdued sexuality. Somewhere along the line, without even realising what was happening, Rosalind had started falling in love with him!

  ‘Damn you, you’ve been dissecting me like some character in a play!’ She blinked hard, grateful for the darkness and appalled at her pathetic desire to cry on the shoulder of the very man who had caused her pain.