hindsight that it was almost as though he had hated her, and yet why? All she had been guilty of was falling in love with him. She had not chased him; she hadn’t had the experience for that, and if he had not kissed her … touched her … she would surely never have realised how she felt about him. But he had kissed her … and touched her …
After their swim they had sunbathed. Christy, already healthily tanned, had not bothered to cover herself with any cream. She didn’t need it, but Simon had insisted that he did—a ploy which she should have recognised immediately for what it was.
Willingly she had taken the plastic bottle he gave her, pouring a little of the oil into her palm while he lay on his stomach his head lying on his forearms. She had kneeled beside him, spreading the oil carefully across his shoulders, stroking it in with fingertips that soon became blissfully addicted to the sensation of warm male skin beneath them. Her whole body seemed to tingle as she worked her way over his back, and then at his insistence, his legs. The sensation of the fine dark hairs beneath her fingers was an unfamiliar one, and yet strangely exciting, her pulses reacting as violently as a fairground dipper ride. The pressure of Simon’s hand on her thigh as he raised himself up on his side made her insides melt in a curious surge of heat.
‘Now my chest,’ he commanded softly, and although she had begun to tell him that it was pointless oiling his chest since she had just done his back, the words died unspoken, as he cupped her hands together, and poured the oil into them, guiding her palms against his skin.
The boys she had seen on the beach did not have bodies like Simon’s. It was hard and entirely masculine shadowed by dark body hair which she had always mentally thought distasteful when seen on men on television or films, but which now when touched unleashed a deep-seated excitement that made her insides churn. She had reached his waist before Simon stopped her, pulling her down into his arms, covering her mouth with his own, while it was still parted in a rounded ‘oh’ of surprise.
‘No, don’t close it,’ he muttered to her, stroking her lips with his tongue, and biting gently at her lower one until her senses were inflamed completely beyond her ability to control.
Her mind registered the husky timbre of his voice when he said softly, ‘I don’t think you need this do you?’ his hands sliding down the straps of her swimsuit, but until she felt the harsh rasp of his body hair against her breasts she wasn’t aware of their import, and by then it was too late to protest—she no longer wanted to do so. Her breasts, so full and firm; and always secretly slightly resented in her own heart of hearts, because they were so blatantly curvaceous, seemed to have been designed especially to fill Simon’s hands. Under his skilled caress she felt them swell slightly, her nipples so tight and hard that they almost hurt. It was a totally unexpected sensation, something she had read about but never realised could be completely devastating. She made a small sound at the back of her throat, and as though he understood what she was feeling, Simon had gentled her with soft murmurs, stretching his body so that she was pressed along the length of it. ‘I know … I know …’ he whispered huskily, ‘Feel what you’re doing to me, too.’
The fiercely aroused throb of his body against hers was exciting and yet frightening too. Wild emotions clutched at the pit of her stomach making her ache to move closer to him, to explore the pleasures she had read about and not as yet experienced for herself.
But when Simon made a harsh sound in his throat and bent his head to tug fiercely on her nipple with a mouth that seemed to burn into her skin, fear overcame desire and Christy flinched back from him, unable to cope with the emotions threatening to overwhelm her. She wanted him to make love to her, but the suppressed violence she sensed in him frightened her. When she visualised him making love to her, it was in some romantic setting … on their honeymoon, when he would be a tender, considerate lover … not this driven, almost angry man, who was pushing her swimsuit straps back, and glowering at her darkly, his eyes burning as fierce a gold as the dying sun. She reached out to touch him and he jerked away saying harshly, ‘For God’s sake don’t make it worse than it is … Let’s get back before I really do something I’ll regret.’
His words had made her unhappy, but only for a little while. It was natural that he should be angry, she reasoned with herself. Obviously he regretted his lack of self-control. Loving her, he must respect her … and of course, he wouldn’t want to make love to her until they were married.
Opening her eyes, Christy groaned. How naive and smug she had been. In reality Simon had been very far from loving her and had in fact, merely desired her. His anger had sprung from nothing more than simple frustration but she had not had the wit to see it, and so she had gone on building her ridiculous fairy castles in the air, sublimely unaware of the fragility of their foundations.
If her mother had not been so busy she might have realised sooner what was happening, but even if she had, Christy doubted that she would have realised her daughter’s foolish dreams. Christy had never been encouraged by her own mother to believe that marriage, a family and home should automatically be a woman’s goal in life; no, it was her own unrealistically romantic nature that had led her down that particular garden path. For all that she had known of the physical aspects of sex, she had known nothing of its sheer power … of its intensity, or that a man and woman could simply be drawn together by it in a relationship which had nothing to do with love.
Simon had made some attempt to warn her, she supposed, looking at it from his point of view. Before they left the beach he had turned to her and demanded sombrely, ‘You do know what it is that I want from you don’t you, Christy?’
And she, believing he meant that he wanted her love, replied dreamily, ‘Yes, and I want it too …’ Not realising that in his eyes she had committed herself to a sexual relationship with him that he had no intention of making anything more than extremely fleeting. All the evidence had been there; she had simply blinded herself to it, seeing only what she wanted to see, deceiving herself until it was impossible to deceive herself any longer; until Simon had simply been forced to tell her the truth; that he did not love her; never had loved her and had not the slightest intention of marrying her. Far from it!
Sighing, she roused herself and switched off the record player, making her way to bed.
It was ironic to think that sexually she was very little more experienced now than she had been then, although of course now she was much more aware of her body’s reactions and capabilities. There had been times when she had almost wished she could meet a man she simply desired physically. Someone who could release her body from its virginal bondage but thus far that had not happened, and as the years slipped by her virginity itself became something of a problem. She felt it was slightly ridiculous to be sexually unawakened at twenty-four, and often wondered wryly why nature had been unkind enough to burden the female race with a barrier that proclaimed its own truths and untruths. As she went up to bed she reassured herself that she had made the right decision in refusing to work for Simon. She wasn’t eighteen any more, ready to drop everything to run at his bidding. Let him look elsewhere for his assistance; if the gossip columns she read were only half right, it shouldn’t prove too strenuous a task.
She woke up early, watching the sun stretch lazy golden fingers through her window and knew it was going to be another fine day. She lay in bed, closing her eyes, basking in the heat coming through the glass—a deceptive heat; as deceptive as Simon’s feelings for her.
She could recognise now with maturity that the tense moods that had gripped him during that long ago summer had sprung from sexual frustration. Then she had been alternatively frightened and thrilled by them, skittish as a young foal, shying away from his touch while she entreated it. Images of Simon as he had been then danced behind her closed eyelids; Simon in tennis shorts and T-shirt, his skin bronzed and male; Simon in jeans, powerful and lithe as he worked in the garden and then most potent of all, Simon the night after they had had their quarrel.
She
