Shelly searched his face with sad, quiet eyes. “Do I?”
He touched her face with something like wonder. “In the very beginning, I loved Ben’s mother. I felt such tenderness for her, such aching need. But she wanted what I could give her in a material sense. For her it was a business deal, and Ben was my price.” He winced. “She never loved me. She died in the arms of another man, and I hated her and loved her and mourned her for years afterward. Since then, women have been nothing more than an amusement. I’ve used them,” he confessed, lifting his eyes to hers. He searched her face slowly. “But, I couldn’t use you. And that being the case, I think it’s better for both of us if we forget everything that’s happened.”
CHAPTER FIVE
S
HELLY LOWERED HER EYES
to his chest and tried not to appear as devastated as she felt. She was already looking ahead to a time when she wouldn’t see him again. He wanted her, but wanting was not going to be enough. She knew that and so did he. His mind was clouded by the desire he felt. Once he satisfied it, the clouds would vanish and he’d hate them both. Even if she were tempted, and she was, it wouldn’t be wise to let things go any further.
“You mean we shouldn’t see each other again,” she said miserably.
“That’s about it.” He moved away from her, pushing the wet hair from his damp face. “We won’t be here much longer,” he added. “We’ll muddle through.” He searched her face quietly. “Somehow.”
She forced a smile. “What about Ben?” she asked.
“He’s crazy about you. Don’t deny him your company.”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
He touched her soft cheek gently. “Shelly,” he said huskily
, “you know it wouldn’t work. Even if I took a chance on your age, our social backgrounds are too far apart.”
“And that would never do,” she agreed, averting her eyes.
“I’m a banker. I have a position that requires discretion.” He shrugged. “I’ve never cared much for convention, but when the jobs of other people depend on it, I can give the image I need to give. Besides,” he added bitterly, “it isn’t as if marriage would ever enter into any relationship I had. Do you understand?”
She lifted her eyes to his hard face, seeing the resignation and stubborn determination there. “You don’t trust women. Is that why you let Marie get such a hold on you? She was safe?”
“I know all about Marie,” he said, without taking offense. “She’s devious and snappy, and selfish to a fault. She has grown up around wealth. She enjoys throwing her weight around.”
“So I noticed,” Shelly said.
“Ben thinks you’re very special,” he said, his voice deep and soft. “So do I, Shelly. I’m sorry. I wish…I really wish things had been different. We seem to have a lot in common. We might discover even more.”
“So we might. But taking risks isn’t your specialty, is it?”
He shook his head. “I only bet on a sure thing. This isn’t.” He touched her mouth and slowly drew back. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I. But,” she added, drawing in a steady breath as she struggled for something light, “whatever happens, we’ll always have Paris.”
It took a minute for that to sink in. By the time he started to laugh, she was already halfway to the beach.
* * *
F
AULKNER, TRUE TO HIS WORD
, didn’t come near her again. Ben did. He haunted her.
“Can’t you find something else to do?” she wailed.
He grinned and shook his head, because he knew she
liked him. Her face was an open book. “You can’t banish your only child.”
“But you’re not!” she cried.
“How do you know?” He looked very serious. “I mean, you could have had me and forgotten about it. You might have advanced amnesia.”
“I couldn’t have become a mother when I was twelve,” she muttered. “And besides that, I’d remember having had a child. It isn’t something anybody forgets.”
Ben didn’t say a word, but he could add. His father thought Shelly was in her teens, but she’d just subtracted his age from hers and come up with twelve. That made her twenty-four. He pursed his lips.
“How old are you?” he persisted.
“How old do you think I am?” she asked foxily.
“Twenty-four.”
She glared at him. “How in the world…”
He told her how in the world, and she let out a long, slow breath.
“I won’t tell Dad. But why don’t you want him to know?” he asked.
She couldn’t explain that without giving herself away. “I have my reasons,” she said. “So it’s our secret. Okay?”
“Okay. After all, a boy can’t afford to argue with his own little mother.”
She opened her mouth to protest, groaned and closed it again. Arguing did no good.
The night before they were to leave for home, Ben maneuvered Nan and Shelly into a leisurely supper with him and his father. It was a less than sparkling evening, with Shelly and Faulkner trying to ignore each other and act normally. They failed miserably. Finally Nan and Ben went in search of souvenirs at the shop next door to the motel office, leaving them alone.
“This wasn’t my idea,” he said gruffly.
“I know.” She stared into her coffee cup with eyes that barely saw it. She was leaving and so was he. They’d never see each other again.
“Damn it, you know it’s for the best,” he said through his teeth. “Will you look at me?”
She lifted her eyes and winced at the temper in his. “Yes, I know it’s for the best!” she muttered.
His lips parted on a rough breath. His silver eyes searched hers until she flushed. “I want you,” he said unsteadily.
She glared at him. “That’s it, reduce it to the most common terms you can!”
“What else is there besides lust?” he demanded. “That’s all we really have in common. And we wouldn’t have that if you hadn’t spent your entire holiday here coming on to me!”
“That’s right, blame it on me,” she raged. “Tell the world I tried to seduce you!”
“Tell me you didn’t,” he shot right back. His hand curled around his wineglass and tightened until the stem threatened to snap. “Every time I turned around you were making eyes at me.”
“I told you why…”
“You lied,” he said flatly, his smile world-weary and full of cynicism. “Don’t you think I know when a woman finds me attractive? I’m rich. I’ve spent my adult life fending off willing women.”
“Including Marie?” she asked sweetly, with blazing pale eyes.
“I don’t need to fend off Marie,” he returned. “She has status of her own.”
“You mean, her parents do,” she shot back.
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t,” she replied seriously. “Life is about making choices on your own, taking your own chances, making your own way. A life-style should be earned, not inherited.”
“Ahhh,” he murmured sarcastically. “A budding socialist.”
“Hardly.” She glared at him. “Haven’t you been listening? I think people should earn what they get.”
“Marie earns it,” he said, his tone faintly suggestive.
She remembered how it felt to be in his arms, and she flushed, averting her eyes.
“I keep forgetting how young you are when you bait me,” he said angrily. He drained his wineglass.
“I’m not so young that I don’t know what you were insinuating about your relationship with Marie,” she said shortly. “If she’s what you really want, why were you kissing me on the beach?”
He searched her eyes. The memories were darkening his. “Maybe I wanted to see how far you’d go.”
She felt her cheeks becoming even ruddier. “As you said, I’m young,” she muttered. “A pushover for any experienced man,” she added pointedly.
He wanted to believe that, but he couldn’t. He toyed with the empty wineglass, watching the light from the chandelier reflected in the faceted crystal. “No,” he replied. “It was much more than that, for both of us.” He lifted his eyes back to hers and felt the heat shoot through him like fire as he saw his own hunger reflected in her soft, sad eyes.
His breathing roughened; quickened. “I want to make love to you, one last time.”
Her lips parted. “Faulkner…”
He signaled the waiter and paid the bill. Scant minutes later, he’d asked Nan to take a delighted Ben back to the girls’ motel room, and he and Shelly were walking down the dark, deserted beach.
Shelly was much too aware of the brevity of the strappy little green sundress she was wearing with high-heeled sandals. She felt vulnerable as she thought about his strong, callused hands on her bare skin. But she had no pride left and she couldn’t pretend that she didn’t want this. It would be their last time together.
He turned to her when they were along a sheltered bit of beach, elegant in his white dinner jacket and dark slacks. He seemed bigger somehow, towering over her, unsmiling.
“You came with me,” he reminded her. “I didn’t drag you here by the hand.”
“I know.” Her voice was almost drowned out by the crashing of the surf. She searched his dark eyes in the faint light. “I’m not taking anything,” she said abruptly.
He drew in a long breath. “Shelly, we can’t make love to each other here. And I can’t take you to my room because Ben might decide to come back on his own, without Nan.” He caught her shoulders in his lean, warm hands and drew her to him. “You’re a virgin,” he whispered softly, drowning her in his strength and the drugging, delicious scent of masculine cologne as he moved closer. “I’m not quite that much of a rogue…”
His mouth opened as it touched hers, teasing her lips apart. He felt them tremble softly as he began to increase the pressure of his mouth. She moaned, pressing against him, and he felt his body react sharply to her proximity.
She tensed and started to draw back, but his hand swept down to the base of her spine, gently preventing the withdrawal.
“You’re safe,” he whispered into her mouth. “This feels good. Don’t ask me to stop.”
It felt good to her, too, but it was embarrassing. She tried to tell him, but his mouth became slowly invasive, and she clung to him as the intimacy of the kiss grew suddenly and exploded into something approximating possession.
He felt her nails through the thick fabric of his jacket. He wanted to feel them on his skin.
With a rough sound, his hand moved between them, his knuckles brushing over the tops of her breasts as he worked at fastenings. Seconds later, he coaxed her hands into the thick mat of hair that covered him and let her caress him.
“Oh, God, it isn’t enough,” he whispered shakily, his mouth harder now, hungrier. “Shelly!”
His mouth covered hers again. He moved the thin straps of her dress away from her shoulders and abruptly stripped her to the waist with deft, economic movements of his hands. Before she could utter a protest, he had her against him, inside the folds of his shirt and jacket, her breasts rubbing with exciting abrasion against his bare skin.
His thumbs caressed her breasts while he kissed her, his teeth nibbling, his tongue probing deeply. She was trembling and so was he, and the surf was hardly louder than their erratic heartbeats.
“Please!” she sobbed against his mouth.
He barely heard her. His body throbbed where hers touched it. His hands were possessing her, exploring her exquisite softness in a silence that was total and overwhelming. None of the differences between them mattered when they were this close. He’d never felt this way. Not even with his late wife when he was in the throes of first love.
He lifted his head a few inches and looked into her rapt, vulnerable face.
“If you were on the pill,” he said roughly. “Would you let me?”
“I don’t know.” She rested her forehead on his chest, shivering with reaction. “It’s a big step. I’ve always believed that it belongs in marriage, between two people who are committed to each other for life.” She lifted her eyes to his. “Is that unrealistic, in a world where love is nothing more than a euphemism for sex?”
“What a profound question.” He smiled, but a little bleakly. “I’m not the one to ask. Anyway,” he added with a forced note of humor, “where would we make love? This is hardly a deserted place, and Nan and my son are in your room. If we went to mine…” He sighed heavily. “I couldn’t. I want to, and if you were even
faintly experienced, I would. But this isn’t for you, Shelly. As I’ve already told you, I have nothing else to offer.”
She pressed her cheek against the warm, heavily throbbing flesh of his chest. The thick hairs tickled her nose as they stood together in the semidarkness, unspeaking.
“If I were older,” she began. “Richer…”
“You’d still be a virgin,” he replied simply. “And I’ve had all I want of marriage.” He tilted her chin up to his eyes. “I’ll regret this night until I die.”
“That you kissed me?”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. That I couldn’t strip you down to your silky skin and ease you under me, here in the sand,” he whispered, tracing her soft, swollen lips. “As intensely as we want each other, I don’t think I’d ever hurt you.”
She nibbled on his thin upper lip, her fingers stabbing into the hair that covered him. “It would take a long time, wouldn’t it?” she whispered. “For me, I mean.”
“Yes.” He kissed her back, lazily, tenderly. His hands found her soft breasts and caressed them in a warm silence.
“They feel good.”
“What?”
“Your hands on my skin,” she said at his lips. “Do it…harder.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
He teased around her mouth with the tip of his tongue. “You know why. Your breasts are very delicate, and I’m no sadist. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She smiled. “It wouldn’t hurt. I meant like this.”
She guided his thumb and forefinger to the hard, dusky tip and showed him what she wanted. She gasped as it sent a wave of heat through her body.
“Shelly,” he whispered roughly, “does it make you hot all over when I do that?” he asked at her lips. He asked something
else, something very intimate and explicit. “Does it?” he persisted huskily.
“Yes,” she confessed shyly.
It wasn’t wise. He knew it, even as he bent his head and took the nipple between his teeth. But the sensations she was describing very closely resembled those of fulfillment. It excited him to think he could give her complete ecstasy with such a small demonstration of love play. He had to know…