Penny Jordan (15 page)

Not true. What she had needed, if she had needed anything, was to love and be loved in return, but that had been a long time ago. Now she was content to accept with mature wisdom that love took many forms, that one could have as much joy in the emotional and non-sexual love one shared with a child or a friend as one was likely to find with a lover.

No, she wasn't going to even attempt to persuade herself that the tension she could almost feel pulsating between her and David was 'love'.

No. She would much rather respect and enjoy the purity of the sexual intimacy and need that was bonding them together than to denigrate it and attempt to dress it in the shabby clothes of pseudo love.

'Mmm...that was nice,' she murmured softly when he lifted his mouth from hers.

'Only nice?' he whispered back equally softly.

Smiling, Honor offered judiciously, 'Better than nice...'

'Much better,' David agreed as he reached out to brush her hair away from her neck. 'Much, much better.'

Blissfully, Honor closed her eyes as he kissed the sensitive column of her throat. He was wearing the robe she had loaned him and she slipped her hand inside and delicately traced the line of his collar-bone.

'You're so tanned,' she told him dreamily.

Lifting his mouth from her skin, David laughed. 'It's dark...how can you tell?'

'I can feel it,' Honor insisted. 'Your skin feels warm and golden.'

As he nuzzled the tender spot just behind her ear, David smiled to himself, remembering how he and the others had crewed naked in the early stages of their voyage to bring the yacht back to Europe.

'Your
skin feels like satin,' he countered. 'All creamy soft.' As he spoke, he was edging the duvet away from her body.

Honor let him, her ego and her female pride feeding off the look she could see in his eyes as he studied her naked body.

Honor believed in moderation in all things. She had never dieted or excessively exercised, but she liked good healthy food and clean fresh air. She liked, too, the sensation of using her body, of stretching and enjoying it. In London, when the girls were young, she had attended a regular yoga class and she still followed the principles she had absorbed then. Mainly, though, she suspected the elegant shape of her body and the creamy, youthful tone of her skin were due to good genes.

As he slid the duvet away from Honor's body, David felt his throat tighten in awe.

Unlike Tiggy's, Honor's body was full-breasted, warm-fleshed, curving in at her waist and out again over seductively rounded hips, her legs tapering to delicate, fine-boned ankles, so fine-boned, in fact, that he suspected he could probably circle them with the fingers of one hand.

Tiggy, oddly in a woman who had such a childishly thin body, had quite thick ankles, or so she had always complained to him. But then, Tiggy had been obsessed about every aspect of her body, constantly finding fault with it and relaying her findings to him.

In some intangible way, Tiggy's dissatisfaction and constant fault-finding with her body had made him feel that she was similarly dissatisfied with him and their marriage. Every time she pinpointed or highlighted another physical feature she found unacceptable, it seemed to him as though he was the one she was actually finding fault with. Her failure to achieve the perfect body was somehow reflected in
his
failure to be aroused by her.

There was no problem in his being aroused by Honor. Even before he had seen her naked, his body had been embarrassingly direct in its reaction to her.

Once, he would have been proudly vain of such a fact, but time and the priest, as well as his awareness of his own failings, had taught him better. He
was
pleased, of course, and in a way proud. To be able to so openly and vigorously display male desire must always be a source of pride to the baser part of a man's make-up, but his real pleasure, his real pride, came from knowing that Honor felt able to openly express
her
sexuality with him.

A little ashamed of the emotion he was feeling, he bent his head to conceal his expression from her, gently brushing the lightest of light kisses against the soft curve of her belly.

'Ohhh...' Honor breathed in voluptuous pleasure.

'Nice?' David teased her.

'I'm not sure,' Honor responded provocatively.

'Do it again.'

Laughing, David obliged, but neither of them were laughing a few seconds later as the bedroom echoed to the increasingly charged sound of their breathing.

'Take this off,' Honor whispered unevenly to him as she tugged at the lapel of his robe.

'Help me, then,' he whispered back, equally unsteadily, closing his eyes and shuddering as he felt her fingers on his naked body.

There was a waterfall not far from the house in Jamaica where the water fell so fast and from such a height that it was impossible to dam it and that was exactly the way he reacted to the sensations, the emotions, crashing down over him, through him, right now.

Honor tensed a little as she felt the raw hunger of his kiss and the seeking, probing thrust of his tongue as it parted her lips, but the arms he had wrapped around her were holding her safely and tenderly and her own body was as eager to return his passion as he was to give it. Delicious shudders of pleasure rushed dizzyingly through her body where he touched it—her back, her belly, her breasts. Heavens, how they ached, becoming swollen, provocative mounds of tempting female fruit, heavy and ripe with promise, luscious and succulent.

No wonder that David, having soothed the darkly burgeoning crest of her nipple with the tender stroke of his thumb, should bend his head and bite delicately into the provocation they offered. And no wonder, too, that she should enjoy the sensation of his mouth against her body so much so that she cried out in hot delight. Eagerly, she reached down her hand and urged him to touch and taste her more intimately.

A piercingly sweet thrill of emotion touched David at the deepest level to know that she wanted to give him such an exquisite pleasure.

The female heart of her, like her breasts, was lush and ripe, sweet tasting and sensually pleasurable to his tongue and lips.

As David caressed her, gently opening and ex-ploring her with his fingers, Honor began to feel the first sharp contractions of her orgasm. There was no time to warn him or to urge him to penetrate her.

'Self-gratification' might be endorsed and even encouraged as a rite of passage of female maturity, but... But whilst physically satisfying, it lacked that very definite and irreplaceable special something, that sharp thrill of excitement and fulfilment that came with a partner.

Helplessly, she let herself be caught up in the increasingly urgent sensations of her own body, unashamedly enjoying them whilst she gasped her appreciation to the man who had incited them.

'I'm sorry,' she told David a little breathlessly as her pleasure subsided to a gentle ache, 'but it's been a long time and you were—'

'I
was,'
David agreed wryly, taking her words and using them to convey his own meaning to her,

'but unfortunately, I no longer am.' As he read the recognition of his meaning in her eyes, even before her gaze dropped to his body, he admitted,

'It's been a long time for me, too, and I'd forgotten, if indeed I ever knew, just how erotic and arousing it is to touch and taste a woman so intimately. Your pleasure was too much for my self-control.'

To his surprise, Honor started to blush. So much so that he could actually see the warm colour staining her skin despite the darkness surrounding them.

'I'm sorry,' he began to apologise. 'I didn't mean to embarrass you.'

'You haven't,' Honor assured him quickly. 'It was just... My late husband used to complain that I had much the same effect on him in bed as toast crumbs. I irritated him to the point where he just wanted to do what had to be done and get out of the bed as fast as he could. To be told now, when I'm the mother of two adult daughters and, in vul-gar parlance, well past my sell-by date, that a man...a very attractive and sexy man, finds me so desirable that he can't stop himself from...'

Honor gave a small, satisfied sigh. 'You have just made me a very happy woman.'

'I have?' David asked, unable to stop himself from expressing his own pleased pride at her praise. 'Well, I don't know how you're going to feel about this,' he began, 'but I rather suspect that before too much longer—'

'What I feel about it...what I feel about you,'

Honor emphasised blissfully, 'is... No, come here and let me show you what I think and feel,' she murmured huskily to him.

David needed no second bidding.

'So, WHAT ARE YOU TWO planning to do this weekend?' Jon asked Jack and Joss as they enjoyed a leisurely late brunch prepared with a good deal of teasing and laughter by Jack, who had insisted on showing off his newly learned domestic skills.

'You wait until you're off to uni,' he advised Joss defensively when his younger cousin had grinned to hear Jack earnestly discussing the rec-ipe for a vegetarian casserole he was eager to learn to make with Jenny. 'When I get to college, it isn't going to be easy managing on a student grant and some of the stuff you hear guys eat...yuck!' He pulled a grim face. 'At least if I can learn to cook for myself, I'll know what I'm eating.'

She was so proud of him, Jenny reflected as the two boys argued amicably together. Yes, there had been that unhappy patch a little while back when poor Jack had been so confused and angry about David, but now, thankfully, he seemed to be over it. Jenny knew how much his decision to study law and follow Jon into the family practice had pleased her husband.

Their own son, Joss, was the kind of person whom everyone just naturally loved. Ruth had once declared that he was one of that rare breed of human beings who somehow bridged the gap between God and man. Although she had protested at the time that Ruth was exaggerating her favourite relative's attributes, Jenny had nonetheless secretly and proudly agreed with her. Joss

was
special, very special, but that didn't make the love she had for her other children, or for Jack, any less strong.

'To each according to his needs' went the saying and that was how Jenny felt about her love for her children. Sometimes one of them needed more love than the others, and Jack, like Olivia in many ways, had a special little bit of her heart that her own children didn't have because they didn't need it.

Olivia had been born after the stillbirth of Jenny's first child. Tania, Olivia's mother, had been overwhelmed and sometimes repelled by motherhood. Tania fretted about getting her figure back and refused to breast-feed the cross, hungry baby she was more than glad to hand over to Jenny who, despite her longing to have another child, had at that point still not conceived.

Jenny's tender heart had ached for Olivia when the child had been confronted by her parents' indifference and her grandfather's dismissal of her because she was a girl.

Jenny had been delighted when Olivia had married Caspar and gone on to have a family of her own, but since the birth of Olivia's second child, the bond between her and Jenny had not been so close. Jenny had put it down to the demands on Olivia's time, coupled with the presence of a loving partner in her life, which did away with Olivia's need to confide in her.

It was only natural and right that Olivia's closest confidant, the person she turned to most, should be her husband.

It was probably her age that made Jenny feel she had somehow almost overnight undergone a change of status. She was no longer a busy mother at the hub of her household and her extended family. It must be the empty-nest syndrome with a vengeance, she ruminated. Whilst the bond she had built with Maddy was one she cherished and valued, she still missed the earlier closeness she had had with Olivia whom, in many ways, she considered to be her eldest 'daughter'.

Some women of a certain age,
her
age, might think themselves ill-used when their mothering role came to an end.

She was determined that when Joss followed Jack to university, there was no way
she
was going to mope. No, instead, she intended to persuade Jon to think about semi-retirement. There were so many things she wanted them to have time to do together whilst they were still young enough to enjoy them.

'Is there any chance we can borrow your car tonight, Mum?' Joss asked Jenny.

'Maybe,' she agreed cautiously.

Although both boys had passed their driving tests and were competent drivers, Jenny and Jon had mutually decided not to provide either of them with their own cars.

'It doesn't matter how responsible they are, at bottom they are both still testosterone-driven young males. I've had to deal with the legal aspects of too many appalling tragedies involving hot-blooded young men and their cars not to be aware of what a potentially dangerous combination they can make,' Jon had told her.

Jenny had agreed wholeheartedly with him, and although both boys protested and wheedled, Jon and Jenny had refused to give in. Jenny's small car was there for them to borrow—with her per-mission—but that was all.

'They'll drive just that bit more carefully in your car and that's a fact,' Jon had said to Jenny.

'And
they'll value their own cars all the more if they've had to work and save for them.'

Jenny smiled. Jon knew what he was talking about after all. Ben, his father, had given David a sports car for his coming-of-age, telling Jon dismissively that he didn't need his own car because, unlike David, he was still living at home.

Both Jenny and Jon had objected when Ben had also insisted on buying a fast car for their own son, Max, but Ben being Ben had delighted in overruling them and, of course, Max as he had been then had openly abused his grandfather's generosity.

'It isn't Max he's indulging, it's himself,' Jon had once exploded when his father's high-handed attitude to their parental authority had pushed him beyond the limits of his patience.

Jenny had said nothing, unable to refute the truth of what her husband was really saying—that Ben was buying Max's loyalty, and much more shamefully and hurtfully their son was allowing him to do so.