She was intoxicating, like alcohol or narcotics, and he knew he was using her to stimulate his body when his brain wanted to think, losing himself in her, clinging to her like a ship adrift in the turbulent ocean. Part of him hated himself for it, for not being strong enough to wait until he was whole and recovered again to need her, but another part of him was so glad she was there, keeping him safe from the rocks like a lighthouse in the dark.
“Grace…” Desire rose within him, sweeping over him. He plundered her mouth with his tongue, sliding his hand up her thigh to her hot, wet centre.
She opened her legs wider for him, sighing as he began to stroke her. She was already swollen and ready for him, and he grew rock hard as he explored her with his fingers, sliding them inside her, then bringing them up, slick and coated, to arouse her.
In the darkness, his other senses took over and he felt overwhelmed by how soft and silky she was, from her long hair that felt like ribbons in his fingers, to her satin-covered body, to her hot, slippery sex. The musky scent of her arousal made him throb with desire, and her approving sighs and murmurs in his ear about things she’d like to do to him were so erotic, he thought he could probably have come just by letting her talk dirty to him.
But she seemed to know when she’d pushed him far enough, because she sat up and made him lie on his back. She moved astride him, shifting until the tip of him entered her, and he sighed as she pushed down, enclosing him in hot, wet velvet.
She sat upright, and he felt her arch her back and drop back her head, taking him deeper inside. He ran his hands up her thighs and her satin-covered body to her breasts, cupping them and squeezing her nipples, making her gasp.
“My pace,” she said, catching his hands and pinning them above his head. “Now, play along and pretend I’ve captured you.”
“Yes, Miss Fox.”
“Good boy. You’re my prisoner, see?” Moving her hips, forcing him to slide slowly in and out, she leaned forward and nipped his earlobe with her teeth, her breasts brushing his chest.
“Absolutely.” He sighed as she kissed down his neck, her lips rasping on his stubble, her tongue touching his skin where the blood thundered through his veins.
“You’re totally under my control,” she said, lifting her hips and teasing the tip of his erection with gentle, shallow thrusts before pushing down firmly and letting him slide deep inside her.
“Oh God, yeah, whatever you want, honey.” It was good to relinquish responsibility, just this once. He spent so much of his time giving to others. The idea of a woman taking charge, taking her pleasure from him, playing with him until he couldn’t bear it any longer, made him dizzy.
She sat up and took off her nightie in one smooth movement, then clasped his hands again, leaning over him. Her nipple brushed his lips and he opened them willingly, sucking it into his mouth, and she gasped and ground her hips down.
She moved back and kissed around to his ear again. “Easy,” she whispered. “I want to make love to you slowly, Ash, until you can’t think of anything else but me, until your whole world is here, inside this room, inside me.”
He groaned. “Oh God…do you know what you do to me?”
“Yes.” Her voice was breathless, husky with desire. “But I want to do it more.”
“More?” A shiver of delight rippled through him.
She chuckled. “We’re only just starting, sweetheart. I’m only just learning what you like, what turns you on.” She ran her tongue lightly up his ear. “For instance, I’ve only just learned that you like it when I say this…” She put her lips close to his ear. “Fuck.”
He sighed, pushing up with his hips. “I thought you didn’t swear.”
She laughed and nibbled his earlobe. “I don’t mind saying it in the dark. Let me put it into context. I like it when you fuck me, Ash. And I’m going to fuck you now, as slowly and as thoroughly as I can. There, am I using it right?”
“It would seem so,” he said hoarsely, incredibly turned on by her wicked mouth. She was moving slowly, sliding up and down him. Kissing him, she let her tongue play with his. She aroused him leisurely, filling his mind with the sensation of her hot, sensitive skin stroking him, of the tantalising graze of her nipples against his chest hair, of her soft lips brushing his.
Much as he was enjoying himself, he worried that it was all one way until, after a while, her pace began to increase, and her soft moans started to fill the darkness. Deciding enough was enough, he wrestled his hands free, holding her tightly, and rolled her underneath him. “A man can only take so much,” he told her, capturing her lips with his own.
“I wanted to make it last,” she complained when he finally lifted his head, although the way she wrapped her legs around his waist as he began to thrust more forcefully implied she wasn’t as devastated as she sounded.
“You want me to stop?” he grunted, pushing up her knees so he could plunge deeper inside her.
“Ah…well…if you put it…like that… Oh God…”
She was heaven, simply heaven, soft and wet and hot, and he was losing himself. His thoughts and emotions tangled with her erotic cries, the thick blanket of night muffling everything except the feel and touch and taste of her. They were covered in sweat, their bodies sliding over one another, and as her sighs turned to moans and her moans to deep groans, Ash let go and erupted into her. He gasped as she tightened around him, crying out with the intensity of her orgasm. He caught her cries with his mouth, holding her tightly, wishing he could stay like that forever. When she was wrapped around him, she kept his mind free of thoughts like a firewall, a barrier against the real world, insisting that this was where he belonged, here with her, hot and sweaty in the dark.
“Tea please,” said Mia. “With milk.”
Grace kicked her under the table, knowing Mia was only asking for milk in her Earl Grey because she knew it wound Isabella Fox up.
“Milk?” Isabella looked at Mia as if she’d asked for curry sauce. “I don’t think so, dear. Lemon’s much more suitable for Earl Grey.” She passed Mia a slice of lemon, freshly picked from the tree outside the kitchen.
Grace sipped her tea, wondering why after five minutes with her mother she always felt as if she were fifteen years old. Before she’d even taken her coat off in this house, she was transported back to her teenage days, and the familiar feelings of inadequacy and frustration began to creep up on her.
Part of the problem, she thought, was that the house hadn’t changed at all since her dad died. It wasn’t quite a shrine, exactly—Isabella had been keen to show everyone she was moving on and that her whole world didn’t revolve around the man in her life—but still, she was a creature of habit. Although she’d had the kitchen repainted, it was still the same dull green Grace had always hated, and as always the blinds seemed to shave the warmth off the sun’s rays, leaving the room permanently cool. Ash’s kitchen was so different. If she closed her eyes, she could picture the warm peach walls and the terracotta tiles, and the way the sun turned all the bubbles in the sink to tiny, rainbow-filled globes that floated around her head. And the way the worktop felt under her butt when Ash was—
“Grace? Are you listening to me at all?”
“Yes,” said Grace, wondering why her talent for saying exactly what she was thinking vanished miraculously when in earshot of her mother. “You were telling me about the daughter of someone’s cousin who’s getting married next month. You sounded impressed.”
“Of course I’m impressed,” said Isabella, joining them at the table. “He’s a doctor. There’s no man more impressive than a doctor.”
“Apart from the Prime Minister,” said Mia.
Isabella shot her a look. “Well, yes, obviously, but he’s married.” She sipped her tea, studying her daughter with the cool, appraising look that Grace knew meant would be followed by a criticism. “But you should be able to manage a doctor. You must meet plenty of parents through the school who are doctors.”
“Yes, but they’re usually married, if they’ve got kids,” Grace pointed out.
Isabella waved a hand. “Not necessarily. One in three marriages ends in divorce nowadays.”
“So why are you so keen for me to get married exactly?”
Isabella sighed and reached out to touch Grace’s cheek. “I’m sorry, love. I know I nag you. I just want to see you happy, that’s all.”
“I am happy,” Grace mumbled. Isabella was incredibly skilled at sliding enough compliments and caring thoughts into the conversation to make Grace wonder if she’d imagined the insults and barbs that had preceded them.
Mia sipped her tea. “Anyway, Grace
has
met a doctor.”
Grace closed her eyes in the stunned silence that followed. She’d asked Mia to accompany her on her weekly visit to her mother’s, hoping for moral support when she eventually got around to mentioning her current relationship to Isabella. She hadn’t expected Mia to blurt it out like that. She’d been hoping to build up to it first. But Mia gave her a “you were never going to say anything so I thought I’d do it for you” look and winked at her.
“Oh?” Isabella looked a strange mixture of vaguely impressed and oddly put out. Grace knew that it wouldn’t matter whom the doctor was. Even if she’d hooked up with a rich brain surgeon, Isabella would find fault and say something along the lines of, “Shame he hasn’t found a cure for cancer.”
“He
used
to be a doctor,” Grace corrected.
“Oh…” Isabella drew the word out, leaned forward and looked interested. “Come on, spill the beans.”
Grace wondered briefly whether it was worth inventing some fictional descendant of Einstein who’d invented time travel or something, but before she could conjure up a fake boyfriend, Mia said, “His name’s Ash Rutherford, and he’s a medium.”
“Mia!”
“Oh,” said Isabella, staring.
Grace sipped her tea and waited for the nuclear fallout.
“A medium?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on…” Isabella’s brain was working furiously. Grace was almost sure she could hear the squeaking of the old cogs inside. “Ash Rutherford.
The
Ash Rutherford?”
“You’ve heard of him?” Grace said, startled.
Isabella stood and got the copy of
The Dominion Post
that had just come out that morning. She opened it to the second page, stared at it and turned it around to show them.
Grace and Mia stared. The headline read,
He Didn’t See That Coming!
and there was a photograph—clearly taken with someone’s iPhone—of Ash carrying a woman out of the Michael Fowler Centre auditorium.
“Well, at least you can’t see up my skirt.” Grace didn’t see any reason in trying to defend herself. Even though her face was turned toward his chest, it was obvious from the brown hair curled in a bun that it was her.
Mia coughed into her tea. Grace ignored her.
Isabella turned the page back and stared at it again. “Why’s he carrying you out?”
“I fainted.”
Isabella turned the stare on her.
“No, Mother, I’m not pregnant.”
“How crude! I was thinking no such thing.”
“You totally were, and I can assure you there’s no chance of a grandchild any time soon.” Grace’s irritation was rising. If she
were
pregnant, Isabella would have remarked on her carelessness and demanded to know how she could shame the family in such a manner, à la Regency romance era. But because she
wasn’t
pregnant, Isabella would think it fine to lay on the fact that she was still waiting for her first grandchild at the ripe old age of fifty-five.
“So why
did
you faint then?”
Grace opened her mouth. And shut it again.
“She had a shock,” said Mia.
“What kind of shock?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
Grace stood and walked over to the kitchen sink to look out of the window. The borders full of spring flowers were pretty, but she longed for the wide expanse of lawn at Ash’s house leading down to the lake, where a heron stood patiently, exemplifying the serenity and peacefulness the whole place seemed to emanate. Here she felt jerky and pixelated like a scratched DVD, stuttering and halting, as if she’d never move smoothly again.
“I can’t believe you went to a show like that,” said Isabella. “What a load of nonsense.”
Chapter Seventeen
Grace stiffened, clenching her jaw so hard her teeth hurt. She closed her eyes.
It seemed hypocritical to tell her mother not to be so harsh when she’d been saying exactly the same thing only the day before, but the fact was that even if she
had
felt the same way, she still didn’t want Isabella slagging him off. The trouble was, she hadn’t had enough time to process her thoughts yet. It was like having a whole shelf of unread books and being asked to write a review on each of them. She needed time to sit alone and really think about what had happened.
She shouldn’t have stayed the night around Ash’s house. Now she was apart from him, she cursed herself for being so weak, when the sensible thing would have been to spend some time contemplating the way he’d turned her world upside down. But he’d looked so tired she hadn’t been able to resist him.