Read Unexpected Pleasures Online
Authors: Penny Jordan
Unexpected Pleasures (12 page)
His need to touch her, taste her, love her...and to show her what that love could be ached through him.
Rosie... He said her name, helplessly aware of his self-control slipping, unable to resist his need to know her in this most intimate of all physical pleasures, feeling her tense as he opened his mouth over her, telling himself that he would stop the moment she wanted to do, and then becoming so lost in the pleasure of knowing her, tasting her, feeling her body’s first quivering response to his intimate caress, that no power on earth could have made him release her.
He felt her body move against him, lifting, twisting...heard her sharp, frantic cries, felt the tug of her fingers in his hair as she tried to push him away, but wouldn’t,
couldn’t
let her go, not until he had felt the small, sharp quivers of sensation twisting through her body become a series of intense, pulsing contractions that he could physically feel as he caressed her.
Even after it was over, he still caressed her, gently kissing the inside of her thigh, stroking her skin, moving slowly up over her body, touching her, loving her, until he reached her mouth and saw the imprint of her own teeth on her bottom lip and the tears still seeping slowly from her closed eyes.
She was trembling, he recognised, shivering almost like someone in shock. He wrapped his arms round her, holding her, rocking her.
‘It’s all right, Rosie...it’s all right...’
Rosie didn’t speak. She couldn’t. She was still in shock, still appalled by the intensity of her sexual response to him. Now that she knew...now that he had shown her... How on earth was she ever going to be able to forget?
Panic burned inside her. It would have been bad enough just to know that she loved him emotionally, but now there was this as well. This unwanted knowledge of all the nights ahead of her when she would lie awake, remembering...wanting...aching...knowing that the intensity of the physical peak she had just reached was something that could never be found through mere physical intimacy, that it was something that could only be experienced through love.
Never again would she know the pleasure Jake had just shown her.
She bit down hard on her bottom lip and then cried out as her teeth touched her already bruised skin.
Immediately Jake’s hold on her tightened.
‘It’s all right, Rosie... Go to sleep now... It’s all right...’
Go to sleep. How on earth could she sleep? She didn’t want to sleep...she wanted... She yawned hugely and then yawned again. Wryly Jake watched her, pillowing her head against his shoulder as her eyes closed, and then reaching out to switch off the light before retrieving the duvet and pulling it over them both.
* * *
R
OSIE
WOKE
UP
abruptly, conscious of something missing, but not sure what it was until her brain cleared and she realised she was on her own.
‘Jake...’ She said his name sharply, not really expecting any response, tensing when he suddenly appeared in the open doorway.
She stared at him in the semi-darkness, her heart beating fast.
‘I...I thought you’d gone.’
Thought or hoped? Jake wondered grimly as he walked towards her and sat down on the edge of the bed.
He had broken all the rules, done all the things he had promised himself he would not do, and now he was going to lose her—he could see it in her eyes. She could hardly bear to even look at him.
‘Rosie—’ he began, but she wouldn’t let him speak, interrupting him, saying fiercely, ‘You don’t have to say anything, Jake. It should never have happened. We both know that. It was all my fault...I should never—’
‘
Your
fault...? If any blame lies with anyone, it lies with me, not you, Rosie.’
She turned to look at him. He could see the way her eyes shone in the dark, feel her tension and vulnerability. She didn’t seem to realise that as she sat up the duvet had slid away from her body, or was it that she simply didn’t realise what effect the sight of her naked breasts was having on him?
‘
I
was the one who started it,’ he reminded her gently.
‘But I didn’t stop you...I wanted...’ Rosie bit her lip, shaking her head, knowing how close she had just come to blurting out how she felt about him.
‘I’m not a total fool,’ she told him stiffly. ‘I do know that sex is different for men than it is for women...that a man doesn’t necessarily have to feel any emotional involvement with a woman...to...to want to have sex with her...’
It was like trying to pick his way across a minefield, Jake recognised as he tried to unravel what she was
really saying to him.
‘Not to have sex,’ he agreed, watching her, wondering if that really had been pain he had seen in her eyes before she turned her head away from him or whether he was deluding himself.
What more did he have to lose? he asked himself grimly. Only his pride, and what the hell did that matter?
‘Not to have sex, Rosie,’ he repeated, reaching out and gently cupping her face, sliding his hand along her jaw and firmly turning her face towards his own. ‘But to make love...that’s different...and I did make love with you, Rosie, even if
you
only had sex with me.’
She had gone very still and silent, her face showing no trace of emotion or reaction at all.
‘And I do love you, Rosie...have loved you for a very long time...’ his mouth twisted wryly ‘...a very long time. Have you any idea what it does to a man to have to admit that he’s fallen in love with someone who’s still virtually a child, even if physically she might look like a woman? Have you any idea what it did to me to find you in bed with Ritchie?’
Now she did show some reaction, her body tensing, pain flickering in her eyes.
‘You don’t have to say this to me, you know,’ she told him fiercely. ‘I’m not going to fall apart just because I’ve suddenly discovered that I love you, Jake. You don’t have to feel sorry for me...to pretend...’
For a moment he was too stunned to speak, to take in her muffled, fiercely spoken words.
‘I know why you made love to me, you know,’ she continued without looking at him, her words low and rushed. ‘I know you did it because of...of Ritchie. I know you just wanted...don’t want your pity, Jake,’ she told him harshly. ‘I don’t want—’
‘What?’ he demanded savagely, his control suddenly deserting him as he grabbed hold of her shoulders and almost shook her. ‘You don’t want what, Rosie? Me...my body, my need, my desire, my love...? Well, you’ve got them whether you want them or not, and I’ll tell you something else, shall I? All those things you don’t want from me, I
do
want from you...all of them and more. I want you, Rosie. I want your emotions, your needs, your desires...your love...your life...I want all of it. All of it...all of you, and if you say one word more to me about pity or compassion—’ He stopped abruptly, shaking his head. ‘Rosie, I’m sorry...I shouldn’t—’
He felt her hand tremble as she reached out and touched his mouth.
‘No... No more words,’ she told him thickly. ‘Don’t tell me, Jake... Show me...show me...’
He could feel the way her body shook as she kissed him and wound herself around him, the small frantic kisses that betrayed her emotions and aroused his own.
This time, when he made love to her, it was the powerful pulse of his body within her own that brought her to the peak of her own pleasure.
Later, snuggled up against him, she heard him murmur in her ear, ‘That marquee Chrissie was talking about... How about using it to celebrate our wedding?’
‘So soon?’ Rosie protested. ‘My parents—’
‘They’ll be there. Chrissie will see to that, and besides...’ In the darkness he kissed her gently and then touched her stomach. Immediately Rosie knew what he meant.
‘I wouldn’t want our child to think it wasn’t conceived in love any more than I would want you to think it,’ he told her softly.
* * *
C
HRISSIE
WAS
OVERJOYED
when they told her the news.
‘Leave everything to me,’ she told them firmly.
* * *
‘W
HAT
’
S
THIS
?’ Rosie asked Jake uncertainly as he handed her a small, gift-wrapped box.
They had been married just over three months, and she had never been happier. The shadows thrown by the past had completely disappeared and no longer held any fear or threat for her. They had just come back from a fortnight’s holiday in Greece, Jake having decided to retain his interest in the marina project but to take a smaller active part in its management.
‘I don’t want to be away from you,’ he had told Rosie when they had discussed it. ‘Your own business means that you won’t always be free to come with me...’
And so, rather than ask her to put their relationship before her work, he had been the one to make that decision and that choice.
‘You’re more important to me than anything else in my life, Rosie,’ he had told her. ‘I’ve loved you for too long, wanted you for too long, to let anything come between us now that we are together.’
She hadn’t told him yet that she suspected she was soon going to have to look for a partner to take over her role in her business because she had conceived their child.
Now, as she unwrapped the gift he had given her and saw the small gold teddy bear dangling from its delicate chain, she wondered if somehow he had guessed after all, but then he said quietly, ‘I’m not sure if I’ve got the dates right... I thought it must have been about this time...’ and she realised that this gift wasn’t for the child
they
had conceived together, but for the one she had secretly lost.
Tears burned her eyes as she went into his arms.
‘I don’t ever want you to think you can’t grieve for him...talk about him,’ he told her huskily as he held her. ‘Or that I’ve forgotten what you went through...what you suffered...or how I wasn’t there for you when you most needed me.’
Rosie shook her head. ‘Oh, Jake...’
‘Don’t think I don’t realise what it must have cost you to have Ritchie here when we got married. To treat him normally...to—’
‘Ritchie doesn’t bother me,’ Rosie told him truthfully. ‘If you want the truth...what happened with him...it doesn’t worry me any more, Jake. Losing my baby—that was different, although I accept now that it wasn’t necessarily because I’d willed it to happen. You’ve driven out all my bad memories and replaced them with good ones.’
She kissed him and then smiled mischievously at him. ‘It’s a pity you bought this, though...’ she told him.
‘A pity?’ Instantly he frowned. ‘Rosie—’
‘Because now you’re going to have to buy another one,’ she told him, watching his face as he realised what she was actually saying.
‘Are you pleased?’ she asked him after he had finished kissing her.
‘Pleased?’ He held her tightly, his voice raw with emotion as he told her, ‘You’re having my child. Pleased doesn’t come anywhere near describing how I feel.
‘I loved you for so long without thinking you could ever love me, Rosie. Sometimes I still can’t quite believe that any of this is real, and then I look at you, hold you...touch you...love you, and I see in your eyes that it is real, that you do love me.
‘Of course I’m pleased,’ he whispered against her mouth. ‘Come here and let me show you how much...’
‘Mmm... That sounds like a good idea to me... A very good idea,’ she whispered dreamily against his mouth as he began to kiss her.
* * * * *
Master of Pleasure
CHAPTER ONE
S
ASHA
TURNED
HER
head to look at her nine-year-old twin sons. They were playing on the beach like a pair of seal pups, wriggling and wrestling together, and jumping in and out of the waves that were washing gently onto the secluded Sardinian shoreline.
‘Be careful, you two,’ she warned, adding to the older twin, ‘Sam, not so rough.’
‘We’re playing bandits.’ He defended his boisterous tackling of his twin. Bandits had become their favourite game this summer, since Guiseppe, the brother of Maria who worked in the kitchen of the small boutique hotel that was part of the hotel chain owned by Sasha’s late husband, had told them stories about the history of the island and its legendary bandits.
The boys had their father’s night-dark hair, thick and silky, and olive-tinted skin. Only their eye colour was hers, she reflected ruefully, giving away their dual nationality—sea-coloured eyes that could change from blue to green depending on the light.
‘Told you I’d get free.’ Nico laughed as he wriggled dexterously out of Sam’s grip.
‘Careful. Mind those rocks and that pool,’ Sasha protested, as Sam brought Nico down onto the sand in a flying tackle that had them both laughing and rolling over together.
‘Sam, look—a starfish,’ Nico called out, and within a heartbeat they were both crouching side by side, staring into a small rock pool.
‘Mum, come and look,’ Nico called out. Obligingly she picked her way across to them, crouching down in between them, one arm around Sam, the other round Nico.
‘Come on. And I’m the Bandit King, remember.’ Sam urged Nico to get up, already bored with the rock pool and its inhabitant.
Boys, Sasha thought ruefully. But her heart was filled with love and pride as she watched them dart away to play on a safer area of smooth sand. She turned to look back towards the hotel on its rocky outcrop, while still keeping her maternal antennae firmly on alert. This hotel was, in her opinion, the most beautiful of all the hotels her late husband had owned. As a wedding gift to her he had allowed her a free hand with its renovation and refurbishment. The money she had expended had been repaid over and over again by the praise of their returning guests for her innovative ideas and her determination to keep the hotel small and exclusive.
But with Carlo’s death had come the shock of discovering that the other hotels in the group had not matched the financial success of this one. Unknown to her, Carlo had borrowed heavily to keep the business going, and he had used his hotels as collateral to secure his loans. Bad business decisions had been made, perhaps because of Carlo’s failing health. He had been a kind man, a generous and caring man, but not the kind of man who had taken her into his confidence when it came to his business and financial affairs. To him she had always been someone to be protected and cherished, rather than an equal.
They had met in the Caribbean, with its laid-back lifestyle and sunny blue skies, where Carlo had been investigating the possibility of buying a new hotel to add to those he already owned. Now, in addition to having to cope with the pain of losing him, she had had to come to terms with the fact that she had gone overnight from being the pampered wife of a rich man to a virtually destitute widow. Less than a week after Carlo’s death his accountant had had to tell her that Carlo owed frighteningly large sums of money, running into millions, to an unnamed private investor he had turned to for help. As security for this debt he had put up the deeds to the hotels. And, although she had begged her business advisers to find a way for her to be able to keep this one hotel, they had told her that the private investor had informed them that under no circumstances was he prepared to agree to her request.
She looked back at her sons. They would miss Sardinia, and the wonderful summers they had all enjoyed here, but they would miss Carlo even more. Although he had been an elderly father, unable to join in the games of two energetic young boys, he had adored them and they him. Now Carlo was gone, his last words to her a demand that she promise him she would always recognise the importance of the twins’ Sardinian heritage.
‘Remember,’ he had told her wearily, ‘whatever I have done I have done with love—for you and for them.’
She owed Carlo so much; he had given her so much. He had taken the damaged needy girl she had been and through his love and support had healed that damage. The gifts he had given her were beyond price: self-respect, emotional self-sufficiency; the ability to give and receive love in a way that was healthy and free of the taint of destructive neediness. He had been so much more to her than merely her husband.
Determination burned steadfastly in her eyes, turning them as dark as the heart of an emerald. She had been poor before—and survived. But then she had not had two dependent sons to worry about. Only this morning she had received a discreet e-mail from the boys’ school, reminding her that fees for the new term were now due. The last thing she wanted to do was cause more upheaval in their young lives by taking them away from the school they loved.
She looked down at her diamond rings. Expensive jewellery had never been something she’d craved. It had been Carlo who had insisted on buying it for her. She had already made up her mind that her jewellery must be sold. At least they had a roof over their heads for the space of the boys’ summer holidays. It had hurt her pride to ask Carlo’s lawyers to plead for them to be allowed to stay on here until their new school term began in September, and she had been grateful when they had told her that she’d been granted that wish. Her own childhood had been so lacking in love and security that from the very heartbeat of time when she had known she was pregnant she had made a mental vow that her child would never have to suffer as she had suffered. Which was why...
She turned her head to watch her sons. Yes, Carlo had healed so much within her, yet there had been one thing he couldn’t heal. One stubborn, emotional wound for which she still had not found closure.
The worry of the last few months had stolen what little spare flesh she had had from her body, leaving her, in her own eyes, too thin. Her watch was loose on her wrist as she pushed the heavy weight of her sun-streaked tawny hair back off her face and kept it there with one slender hand.
She had been eighteen when she’d married Carlo, and nineteen when the boys had been born, an uneducated but street-smart girl who had been only too glad to accept Carlo’s proposal of marriage despite the fact that he was so much older than her. Marriage to him had provided her with so much that she had never had, and not just in terms of financial security. Carlo had brought stability into her life, and she had flourished in the safe environment he had provided for her.
She had been determined to do everything she could to repay Carlo’s kindness to her, and the look on his face the first time he had seen the twins, lying beside her in their cots in the exclusive private hospital in which she had given birth, had told her that she had given him a gift that was beyond price.
‘Watch, Mum.’ Obediently she obeyed Sam’s demand that she watch as he and Nico turned cartwheels. One day soon they would be telling her not to watch them so closely. As yet they hadn’t realised just how carefully she did watch over them. Sometimes, with two such energetic and intelligent boys, it was hard not to be over-protective—the kind of mother who saw danger where they saw only adventure. Her own thoughts silenced the ever ready ‘be careful’, hovering on her lips. ‘Very good,’ she praised them instead.
‘Look, we can do handstands too,’ Sam boasted.
They were agile, as well as tall for their age, and strongly built.
‘You have made good strong sons for me, Sasha,’ Carlo had often praised her. She smiled, remembering those words. Their marriage had bought her time and space in which to grow from the girl she had once been into the woman she was now. The sun glinted on the thin gold band of her wedding ring as she turned again to look at the hotel on the rocks above them.
She had travelled all over the world with her late husband, visiting his chain of small exclusive hotels, but this one here in Sardinia had always drawn her back. Originally a private home, owned by Carlo’s cousin, Carlo had inherited the property on the cousin’s death, and had vowed never to part with it.
* * *
G
ABRIEL
STOOD
IN
the shadow cast by the rocks and looked down onto the beach. His mouth twisted with angry contempt and something else.
How did she feel now? he wondered, knowing that fate had reneged on the bargain she had struck with it, and that the security she had bought with her body was not, after all, going to be for life. How had she felt when she had learned that her widowhood was not going to be one of wealth and comfort?
Had she cursed the man she married, or herself? And what of her sons? Something dark and dangerous ripped his guts with razor-sharp claws. Just watching them had brought to the surface memories of his own childhood here on Sardinia. How could he ever forget the cruel, harsh upbringing he had endured? When he had been the age of these two boys he had been made to work for every crust he was thrown. Kicks and curses had taught him how to move swiftly and sure-footedly out of their range. But then he had been an unwanted child, a child disposed of by his rich maternal relatives, abandoned by his father, to be brought up by foster carers. As a boy he had, Gabriel acknowledged bitterly, spent more nights sleeping outside with the farm animals than he had inside with the foster family, who had learned their contempt of him from his mother’s relatives.
Gabriel believed that such an upbringing either made or broke the human spirit, and when it made it, as it had his, it hardened it to pure steel. He had never and would never let anyone deflect him from his chosen path, or come between him and his single-minded determination to stand above those who had chosen to look down on him.
His maternal grandfather had been the head of one of the richest and most powerful of Sardinia’s leading families. The Calbrini past was tightly interwoven with that of Sardinia. It was a family riven in blood feuds, treachery and revenge, and steeped in pride.
His mother had been his grandfather’s only child. She had been eighteen when she’d run away from the marriage he had arranged for her, to marry instead a poor but handsome young farmer she had believed herself in love with.
Strong-willed and spoiled, it had taken her less than a year to realise that she had made a mistake, and that she loathed her husband almost as much as she did the poverty that had come with her marriage. But by then she had given birth to Gabriel. She had appealed to her father, begging him to forgive her and let her come home. He had agreed, but on condition that she divorced her husband and left the child with his father.
According to the stories Gabriel had been told as a child, his mother hadn’t thought twice. Her father had paid over a goodly sum of money to Gabriel’s father on the understanding that this was a once and for all payment and that it absolved the Calbrini family from any responsibility towards the child of the now defunct marriage.
With more money than he had ever had in the whole of his life in his pocket, Gabriel’s father had left his three-month-old son and set off for Rome, promising the cousin he had left Gabriel with that he would send money for his son’s upkeep. But once in Rome he’d met the woman who was to become his second wife. She had seen no reason why she should be burdened with a child who was not hers, nor why her husband’s money should be wasted on it.
Gabriel’s foster parents had appealed to his grandfather. They were poor and could not afford to feed a hungry child. Giorgio Calbrini had refused to help. The child was nothing to him. His daughter had also remarried—this time to the man of his choice—and he was hoping that within a very short space of time she would give him a grandson with the lineage his pride demanded.
Only she hadn’t, and when Gabriel was ten years old his mother and her second husband had both been killed when the helicopter they were in crashed. Giorgio Calbrini had then had no alternative but to make the best of the only heir he had—Gabriel.
It had been an austere, loveless life for a young boy, Gabriel remembered, with a grandfather who’d had no love for him and had despised the blood he had inherited from his father. But at least under his grandfather’s roof he had been properly fed. His grandfather had sent him to the best schools—and had made sure that he was taught everything he would need to know when the time came to take over from him and become the head of the house of Calbrini. Not that his grandfather had had high hopes of him being able to do so, as he had made plain to Gabriel more than once. ‘I have to do this because I have no choice, because you are the only grandson I have,’ he had told Gabriel, ceaselessly and bitterly.
Gabriel, though, had been determined to prove him wrong. Not to win his grandfather’s love. Gabriel did not believe in love. No, he had wanted to prove that he was the better man, the stronger man. And that was exactly what he had done. At first his grandfather had refused to believe Gabriel’s tutors when they praised his grasp of financial politics and all the complexities that went with them. But by the time he was twenty Gabriel had quadrupled the small amount of capital his grandfather had given him on his eighteenth birthday.
Then, three weeks after Gabriel had celebrated his twenty-first birthday, his grandfather had died unexpectedly and Gabriel had inherited his vast wealth and position. Those who had predicted that he would never be able to step into his grandfather’s shoes had been forced to eat their words. Gabriel was a true Calbrini, and he possessed an even sharper instinct for making money than his grandfather. But there was more to his life than making money. There was also the need to make himself emotionally invulnerable.
And that was exactly what he was, Gabriel reflected now. No woman would ever be allowed to repeat his mother’s rejection of him and go unpunished.
