roll in mud and still come up looking like Helen of Troy and Eve mingled in one glorious woman. Tearstains merely add another dimension to that maddening smile. It’s a wonder the advertising agency who dreamed up the Adventurous Woman project didn’t think of them— they certainly thought of everything else.’
She said calmly, ‘If they’d believed tears would sell more cosmetics they’d have done it. However, I was supposed to be an adventurous woman, not a wimp.’
‘Why did you give modelling up? There isn’t a flaw in that perfect face—I imagine you could have gone on for another five years yet. Ten, with filters.’
Perdita had spent years hearing her face and body discussed in the most clinical of terms, and would have said that she had no false vanity, no emotion but gratitude for the quirk of heredity that had given her looks and a body that matched the ideal for this decade. But something about the way Luke spoke sent a tiny whisper of foreboding through her.
He sounded every bit as blase as her agent, as the photographers who’d called forth hundreds of incarnations of her. His gaze as it measured her high cheekbones and satiny, full mouth was cool and dispassionate. Yet she detected an oblique anger, all the more intense for being so tightly leashed.
Many men had looked at her with desire. She was accustomed to it, knew how to deal with it. There was nothing in Luke’s demeanour to indicate anything but a rigidly disciplined self-possession, but the air sparkled and quivered between them, and deep in her body a flicker of white-hot response flamed treacherously into life.
It had to be because she’d never had a chance to get over her crush on him. Most adolescents fell in and out of love until slowly they built up a pattern of understanding, so that when real love arrived they recognised the differences. Pitchforked into an early maturity before she’d been ready to say goodbye to childhood, it was no wonder she was still in thrall to a purely physical response.
Caution steadied her voice, made her voice offhand as she shrugged. ‘I’m not greedy. I’ve earned enough to make me secure for the rest of my life, and apart from interesting things like the Adventurous Woman promotion, modelling was just sheer hard work after a couple of years. I didn’t enjoy being treated like a commodity.’
Now why had she told him that? Her lashes covered a momentarily uncertain gaze. Normally she wouldn’t have said that to anyone but a trusted friend. She didn’t trust Luke Dennison. She couldn’t afford to. In many ways he was the enemy, and, like all the most dangerous ones, he had the ability to infiltrate her defences. Which meant she was going to have to stop unbuttoning her lip whenever he asked a simple question.
‘Even though you conspired with a whole industry to do exactly that? So we aren’t going to see that lovely face in any more magazines?’
‘For a year or so,’ she said, ‘and then no.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She shrugged again. ‘I’ll find something. I might go to university.’
His hard mouth suddenly twisted into an enigmatic smile. ‘You’d cause a riot,’ he said softly.
Perdita’s breath caught in her throat. No, she thought. No! She had to remember that this was just a hangover from adolescence.
‘As you see,’ she said with unhurried self-possession, ‘I don’t look the way I do in the magazines.’
His brows lifted, but he said merely, ‘Modest as well as famous.’
A sudden weariness fogged her brain. She managed to contrive a yawn and an enquiring look. He understood and his smile became even more sardonic. ‘I’d better go. Goodbye, Perdita.’
‘Goodbye,’ she said, trying to sound businesslike and dismissive, but courteous nevertheless. An unnerving glint in his eyes told her she hadn’t succeeded.
She watched him go, her eyes unconsciously straying to the breadth of his shoulders, the lean hips and taut buttocks, the long, powerfully muscled legs. Closing the door behind him with a sudden vicious jerk, she turned and leaned back, her hands spread against the smooth, cool wood, her breath locked in her chest. She had lied when she said she didn’t remember his lovemaking.
He had been tender, his hands slow and skilful as he caressed her into wakefulness. Bemused, her whole being singing with delight, she hadn’t even thought of Natalie; she was lost to everything but the wonderful sensations that were rippling through her at the behest of those clever, experienced hands.
Darkness had hidden him, yet she hadn’t been afraid. She’d known who he was. His scent, she thought now, trying to be objective. He had a particular male scent that still had the power to liquefy her bones. That night it had been spiked with the flavour of wine.
Her slow awakening had been something spun out of the fantasies she’d indulged in during the warm, welcoming nights of that summer. Still dreaming, her heart thudding like a piston in her chest, her mind drugged by the lazy tide of desire his touch summoned, she’d been gathered into his arms while his mouth searched for and finally, after a series of kisses, found the frantic pulse in her throat.
He hadn’t spoken. If he had, she thought now, she’d probably have woken up to her danger, realised what was happening to her. She’d always loved him with the uncritical adoration of a child, but those holidays her serene, unashamed affection had altered into something deeper, forbidden. During the slow, heated days she had watched him, knowing that he never saw her, yet longing for him with a growing woman’s intense passion, her ripening body aching with hidden, unfulfilled needs.
And each night just before she had dropped off to sleep she had called up images in her mind, telling herself guiltily that she was hurting nobody because nobody knew; nobody, especially Natalie, would ever know. Young and inexperienced though she was, she’d understood that such feverish emotions couldn’t last, but when she’d woken in his arms she had had no defences from needs she had only just recognised.
His mouth seduced her into acquiesecence, his hands stroked a feverish response from her body; the fumes of her hunger hazed her brain to banish any moral restrictions she might have felt. Enslaved by the passion that shimmered through her like molten silver, the first love that until then had been so rigorously disciplined, she surrendered mindlessly.
His mouth on her breast set her shuddering, not with fear but with an awed delight at the exquisite pangs her body was capable of. She writhed voluptuously, seeking more, seeking something to ease the throbbing ache between her legs, pressing herself against the lean, heated body so close to hers. The unfamiliar pressure of his erection didn’t shock her; instinct produced a swift, provoking answer from her hips, setting off chills through every nerve cell.
‘Darling,’ he’d said, ‘such enthusiasm…’
Thinking about it made her heart weep. There had been such love, such lazy, amused tenderness in his tone.
Looking back with the awareness of experience she understood now that he had been immensely gentle, using his practised expertise to ready her until finally he had moved over her, and taken her in one slow, compulsive thrust, measuring the length of himself in her.
It hadn’t hurt at all. Instead, everything within her had tightened in anticipation, sensations intensifying into a white-hot explosion, and she had gasped and opened herself to him, hips rotating, enclosing him with the force of her strong young body.
He had hesitated,
