Game Of Love. PENNY JORDAN

her head ached and all she really wanted to do was to go somewhere where she could be alone. Excusing herself, she hurried towards the door. Some fresh air might help to clear her head. Not on the terrace this time—that was too public, too visible. No, she could creep out of the back door and wander round her aunt’s closed kitchen garden.

      In the porch off the kitchen, she hesitated long enough to put on an old pair of trainers and the Barbour jacket her aunt used when she was gardening. She felt cold inside. Cold and empty in some way that made her want to hug her arms round her body.

      As she let herself into the kitchen garden through the wooden door, she paused to breathe in the cleansing smell of her aunt’s herbs. She wished it might be as easy to cleanse her mind, her soul of the besmirchment it had suffered tonight. It was no use telling herself that Luke Templecombe didn’t know the first thing about her, that the woman he had insulted and scorned was not really her at all. She still felt sore, humiliated, defiled…

      There was enough light from the moon for her to see the brick paths quite clearly. There was a seat under the wall, framed by an arbour of grapes which her aunt kept out of sentiment, claiming that the fruit they produced was worse than useless. She went and sat down on it, leaning back and closing her eyes, breathing deeply as she tried to unwind. It took her several concentrated minutes of forcing herself to breathe evenly and deeply before she felt she was properly back in control of herself.

      That infuriating man. She prided herself on her calm, unflappable nature, but he had well and truly pierced the barrier of her self-control and revealed a woman of emotions and feelings even she had not known existed. Don’t think about him, she warned herself as she felt her tension returning, but it was a very difficult mental command to obey when his cynical, vaguely piratical features insisted on forming themselves against the darkness of her closed eyes.

      ‘Ah…Titania by moonlight.’

      The too familiar, drawling voice shocked her into opening her eyes and staring in disbelief as she saw the object of her thoughts standing in front of her.

      Too disturbed by his presence to guard her words, she said acidly, ‘Well, you’re certainly no Oberon, but we’re definitely ill met.’

      She stood up abruptly, intent on escaping from him just as quickly as she could. He was standing several feet away from her and it should have been easy, but for some reason her feet seemed to be stubbornly glued to the path, while he moved easily and lithely towards her, blocking her exit.

      ‘What is it you want?’ Natasha heard herself asking breathlessly, helplessly almost, and inwardly she railed against the weakness in her voice, and her folly in asking the question.

      He seemed to think so too, because he laughed, a soft, dangerous sound that raised the flesh on her arms, his teeth a brief flash of white in the dimness of the garden.

      ‘Such sweet innocence. You sound about sixteen years old, but it won’t wash, my dear. You know exactly what I want.’

      He took a step towards her and then another, while she stood there like a transfixed rabbit, unable to move.

      When he took hold of her, his hands sliding beneath the heavy fabric of her borrowed Barbour, she shuddered deeply, and, as though he found the sensitive reaction of her flesh intensely satisfying, he murmured against her ear, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this all evening.’

      Distantly Natasha was aware of his sliding the heavy jacket off her shoulders, and binding her to him with arms hard with muscles she could feel even through the fabric of their clothes. His head angled towards her, blotting out the moon. Panic attacked her as she suddenly recognised her own foolishness in not escaping earlier. Her mouth had gone dry; her lips felt stiff and cold. She badly wanted to touch them with her tongue, a nervous reaction, and one which she was well aware he would read as intensely provocative. She could see the clear white of his eyes and the light reflective gleam of his iris. She could even see the hard angle of his jaw and the firm curve of his mouth. Soon that mouth would be touching hers…Soon…Was she mad? she wondered in a frantic surge of reality. Had he cast some sort of spell over her, to render her so quiescent and submissive?

      His mouth only a breath away from her own, he told her softly, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this all evening, wondering how you would feel and taste.’

      ‘Well, I haven’t,’she countered jerkily, trying to pull back from him and escape, but it was too late.

      As she turned her head to avoid his kiss, he caught hold of it, sliding his palm along her jaw, imprisoning her so that she couldn’t move her head without hurting herself, his voice edged with mockery and cynicism as he told her, ‘You’re a liar.’

      And then he was kissing her—not roughly or cruelly as she had always naïvely imagined men did kiss women for whom all they felt was an emotionless physical ache, but with such great subtlety, such instinctive awareness of her own needs and responses that it was as though the whole world had caved in around her, leaving her floating helplessly in a dimension she had never even imagined existed.

      The pressure of his mouth moving against her own was at once so caressive, so knowing, so persuasive, that she simply didn’t have any defences against it. Despairingly she recognised that, while her mind might not have wanted this intimacy, her body certainly had, and, humiliatingly, he must have been aware of that wanting even though she herself had not.

      Helplessly unable to stop herself giving him the response he demanded, she heard him make a small sound deep in his throat, and felt her own flesh thrill in recognition of what it meant. His hand was no longer cupping her face; instead it was caressing her throat, pushing aside the shoulder of her dress so that his fingers could caress the smooth, pale flesh he had revealed.