Innocent Sins Page 12

  Laura took a deep breath. God, she thought unsteadily, he was right behind her. She could feel the heat of his body reaching out to her, enveloping her, wrapping her in the same intimacy she had felt that afternoon.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ she said in a muffled voice, but of course he did. He wouldn’t have left his bed and come after her if he hadn’t wanted to know exactly why she’d felt compelled to do something so out of character, so dangerous. And suddenly she knew she was in danger. But not from him; from herself.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, his lips brushing her ear, and her stomach turned over at the unexpected tingle that caused. ‘Come on, baby.’ His hand left the door to curl across her throat and grip her shoulder. It took a very little pressure to bring her back against his chest. ‘Talk to me.’

  Laura’s heart was pounding. Being close to him like this was more thrilling than she could ever have imagined, and the awareness that only the man’s tee shirt she used to sleep in and her thin dressing gown were all that was between them caused a fluttering sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Laura...’ His voice had thickened, and his free hand came around her waist. Whether by accident or design—she was too bemused to decide which—his fingers slid beneath the opening of her robe, gripping her hip and pulling her even closer. ‘Dammit, Laura, talk to me. Tell me you didn’t come here because of what I said this afternoon. I was a fool. I shouldn’t have—teased you like that. It wasn’t fair.’

  Laura swallowed the lump that rose in her throat at his words. Her excitement dissolved into quivering humiliation, but when she would have dragged herself away from him he muttered an oath and held on to her.

  ‘Don’t,’ he groaned, his hand sliding possessively across her abdomen, and as he held her there against him she felt the unmistakable hardening of his sex against her bottom.

  Then, when she was half afraid her shaking legs were going to give out on her, he turned her round and brought her fully against him. Laura’s eyes were wide with wonder when she looked up into his face, and as if some lingering twinge of conscience still troubled him Oliver lifted one hand to cup her cheek. ‘You know this is crazy, don’t you?’ he said unsteadily, and she realised that what he’d said before hadn’t been the truth. He hadn’t been teasing her that afternoon. He’d been as aroused by what had happened as she had and he’d only said what he had to try and influence a situation that was rapidly moving out of control. He uttered a harsh sound. ‘Tell me to stop.’

  ‘Why should I?’ she asked, her hands sliding up his chest to grip the dark hair that tangled at his nape. The power she sensed she had over him was tantalising. ‘That’s not what you really want to hear.’

  ‘You don’t know what I really want,’ he replied thickly, his fingers tightening on her chin, causing her mouth to open and emit laboured panting breaths.

  ‘Don’t I?’ Somehow, she pulled her face free of his hand. ‘I’m not a child, Oliver.’

  ‘I wonder.’ He gritted his teeth, but his hand moved almost compulsively to the back of her neck, tilting her face up to his. ‘I wonder,’ he muttered again, and this time he couldn’t stop himself. With the tumult of his emotions darkening his eyes, he bent his head and covered her mouth with his.

  Laura’s knees buckled and she clutched his shoulders to prevent herself from slipping to the floor. There was such a wealth of emotion in his kiss and although she was by no means experienced when it came to making out with boys she instantly recognised the difference between Oliver’s love-making and the amateurish fumblings she’d known before. For one thing, Oliver knew exactly what he was doing and, for another, for the first time in her life she wasn’t repulsed by it.

  ‘God, Laura,’ he said hoarsely, when he released her mouth to seek the sweetly scented skin of her shoulder. His fingers peeled back the layers of cloth to expose her creamy flesh, brushing aside the tendrils of red-gold hair that had escaped from the braid she’d worn to sleep in and kneading her quivering skin. ‘I want you. You know that. But not like this. It isn’t right.’

  Laura’s confidence wavered for only a moment. ‘It is for me,’ she told him fiercely, winding her arms around his neck and lifting one leg to caress his calf with her heel. She’d seen that done in a play she’d watched on television and she was amazed to find it stimulated her just as much as it apparently stimulated him. ‘I want you. How can that be wrong?’

  ‘God knows,’ he groaned, his hands sliding down her back to cup her bottom and lift her against him. ‘Perhaps it isn’t,’ he added, as if trying to convince himself, and then, because she wrapped her legs around him, he gave up the unequal struggle and carried her to the bed.

  For a moment after he’d pushed off her dressing gown and peeled her tee shirt over her head, Laura knew a moment’s panic. His sheets were cool at her back and they caused a brief spasm of sanity to chill her blood. But it didn’t last long. When Oliver knelt beside her and bent to take one erect nipple into his mouth, she thought she was in heaven. She was half afraid she would die from the pleasure his darting tongue evoked.

  Time was suspended as he ran his hands over her body. She had always thought she was too tall and too lean, but evidently he didn’t agree with her. There was genuine satisfaction in the eyes that met and mated with hers, and she found herself moving instinctively with him, arching her body and spreading her legs in a way that at any other time would have mortified her soul.

  But there was no shame with Oliver, no inhibitions when he straddled her and invited her to touch him. His shaft was hot and hard and incredibly smooth, like steel beneath soft velvet. But, in spite of his eagerness to share his excitement with her, when her slim fingers closed around him, he moaned aloud.

  ‘I can’t—I can’t wait,’ he said in a strangled voice, and with a groan of anguish he came into her, slowly at first and then with an unrestrained eagerness he couldn’t deny. Her muscles froze at first and then expanded to accommodate him. She felt as if it was never going to end, and she stifled a cry.

  She’d been prepared for it to hurt, but what she’d not been prepared for was that after that initial agony she would begin to enjoy it. The girls at school, who had been so keen to share their experiences with her, had evidently never had a lover like Oliver. His skill and consideration soon had her moving with him. Moving willingly, instinctively, reaching for the seemingly unattainable release of the emotions he was building inside her. His lean body quickened, stroking in and out of hers with an ease and slickness that had her clinging to him helplessly. Her nails dug into his shoulders, and she wrapped her legs around him, little breathless cries issuing from her throat.

  And then what had seemed to be impossible happened. Almost simultaneously, he came into her with such force that she thought she might, not be able to take him after all. But she could; she did; his groan of satisfaction proved it, mingling with the cry she uttered as a devastating wave of pleasure spread throughout her body.

  She wanted to weep. What had happened had been so— so beautiful, and Oliver’s still shuddering body lying on top of hers gave her a feeling of real contentment. She was a woman now; in every way. She loved Oliver, and he loved her. Nothing anyone said or did could change their feelings for one another.

  She’d been so wrong. Laura acknowledged that now with a shiver of distaste. What had happened afterwards had been so awful, so ugly. She couldn’t even think of it without feeling a surge of nausea in her throat.

  Predictably, it was Stella who had ruined everything for them. No, not for them, she amended bitterly. For her. The way Oliver had behaved after that night had seemed to confirm everything his mother had claimed. But when her stepmother had burst into the room and found them Laura had been too bemused to think coherently, blinking into the harsh electric light like a mole that had just been dug out of its hole.

  And that was how she felt: shocked and ashamed that Stella should have been the one to find them. Her contorted face had destroyed the sweet intimacy
she and Oliver had shared, and how she’d kept from screaming her outrage Laura never knew.

  Of course, Stella had had some justification for her anger. This was her home and they had abused the trust she’d put in them. Laura acknowledged that, acknowledged that her stepmother must hate the fact that it was she who had been responsible for Oliver abusing that trust. But what she couldn’t forgive was the fact that Oliver had conspired with his mother to keep what had happened between themselves.

  The threatening storm had apparently kept Stella awake, too. The heat and humidity had made her restless, and she’d been on her way downstairs to get herself a drink when she’d heard Laura’s faint cries.

  At the time, Laura remembered, she’d been only too glad that it hadn’t been her father who’d found them. As she scrambled out of Oliver’s bed, dragging the folds of her dressing gown over her nakedness, behaving like the frightened mouse she must have appeared, Stella had had an easy target. It wasn’t until later that she’d discovered that her stepmother’s reasons for not betraying her to her father had had less to do with saving her from certain punishment than with stopping her son from making what she’d seen as the biggest mistake of his life.

  God knew what she’d said to Oliver after Laura had left the room. Laura had thought she was making things easier by getting out of there. It was only afterwards that she’d realised that by giving in to Stella’s demands then she had created a precedent that had never been reversed.

  It had been comparatively easy for her stepmother to see that Laura had no further opportunity to be alone with Oliver before he left for Europe. As Laura hadn’t even known he was thinking of going, she’d been prepared to wait and bide her time, sure that sooner or later Oliver himself would arrange for them to be together.

  But it hadn’t happened. She’d awakened one morning to be told that Oliver had left for Dover the night before. There’d been no farewell, not even a message to say how sorry he was that things had turned out as they had, and because her father had known nothing about what had happened there’d been no way she could share her feelings with him.

  Laura turned and punched her pillow now, wishing it was Oliver’s head. How could she have allowed him to kiss her just a few days ago? she wondered painfully. How could she have let him get close enough to her to even think that she’d welcome his treacherous caress? He hadn’t changed. He was just as two-faced now as he’d been then, only now it was some other girl who was being deceived.

  Poor fool!

  Laura sniffed and settled down again, but her mind wouldn’t let her rest. Not yet. Oliver’s leaving for Europe hadn’t been the end of the story, as she knew only too well. A few weeks later, when her period was late, she had had another reason to regret her recklessness.

  For over a month, she’d been in a state of panic, not knowing what to do, where to turn. The idea of confiding her secret to a stranger didn’t bear thinking about, and Dr Evans was a friend of her father’s. How could she tell him?

  And then it was all over. One day, as she was cleaning out her room, trying to imagine what she’d do if her father disowned her, she’d felt a cramping pain in her stomach. It had been worse than any of the monthly cramps she’d had before, and she’d barely made it to the bathroom before she’d felt a gushing wetness between her legs.

  The ugliest part of it all was that Stella had found out about that, too. Her stepmother had come looking for her and found Laura trying to erase any trace of what had happened from the bathroom floor. She’d been so pitiful, Laura remembered bitterly. She’d actually been crying over losing the baby, when what she should have been doing was jumping for joy.

  But at least Stella’s finding out had enabled her to handle the situation without involving Dr Evans. Her stepmother, now she came to think of it, had been amazingly knowledgeable about the miscarriage, reassuring her she had nothing to worry about, helping her to cope with her loss. In fact, Laura belatedly wondered whether Stella herself hadn’t lost a baby. It did seem unusual, that having had Oliver when she was just a teenager, she should have gone—what? Thirty years?—without getting pregnant again.

  But Laura didn’t want to think of the connotations of that suspicion. And at the time she’d been so eager to put it all behind her, she hadn’t looked beyond her own mistake. Even Stella’s warning that if she told anyone else about it she would tell her father had seemed justifiable recompense for her stepmother’s silence. She hadn’t thought that her father might have blamed someone else.

  Of course, in the weeks that followed, she’d realised why Stella had been so helpful, why she’d been so willing to hush it up. She hadn’t wanted her precious son to hear about it. As always, she’d been protecting Oliver, making sure he didn’t get bogged down in unwanted guilt.

  Unfortunately, it had always been there between her and her stepmother, and she supposed it always would. That was why their relationship had never changed. She knew her father had hoped that as she grew older they’d have more in common. But Laura had never been able to put the past behind her and Stella had never let her forget.

  That was why she’d refused to come back to Penmadoc after her university days were over, why she’d jumped at the chance to marry Conor Neill, even though she’d known that she didn’t love him as she should. She’d wanted to get away, as far away as possible, and with the width of the Atlantic between her and Oliver she had hoped to find a better life.

  And she had, she assured herself fiercely. All right, her marriage hadn’t worked out, but that had been as much Conor’s fault as hers. They’d wanted different things from the relationship, and she’d been unable to give him the understanding he deserved.

  All the same, seeing Oliver again had been a daunting experience. She had thought she would be able to handle it better than she had. She hated the thought that he might think he’d got to her—even if he had...

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Oliver?’

  Thomas Grayson paused in the action of removing Oliver’s plate, looking down at the half-eaten pasta with some concern. Since his employer had returned from Wales two days ago, he’d barely touched his food and the old man was getting worried abut him.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Oliver lay back in his chair and looked up at Thomas with resigned complacence. ‘I guess I’m still adjusting to the change of circumstances. I’m not used to sitting around all day, doing nothing. Going down into that ravine was pretty exhausting, I can tell you. Nothing like working in a comfortable studio, with every technological advantage at your fingertips.’

  Thomas settled the plates on his arm and then pulled a wry face. ‘It’s been almost three weeks since you got back from Malaysia, Mr Oliver. You can’t still be suffering from jet lag. I don’t buy that.’

  ‘Buy?’ Oliver arched his dark brows humorously. ‘Since when have you been using language like that?’

  ‘Don’t try to dodge the issue, Mr Oliver.’ Thomas pressed his thin lips together. ‘There is something wrong, isn’t there?’ He took a breath. ‘Should I know about it?’

  ‘If you mean, am I suffering from some fatal disease that I’m not telling you about, then forget it. I’m as fit as a flea, as far as I know.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘I’m not hungry, right?’ Oliver was getting impatient now. ‘I—had a burger at lunchtime. End of story.’

  ‘That was at least six hours ago—’

  ‘Thomas, enough. I know you mean well, but I do know when I’m hungry and when I’m not. And right now I’m not.’

  ‘Very well.’

  Barely concealing his disapproval, Thomas left the room and, stifling an oath, Oliver got to his feet and followed him. Entering his study, he went straight to the wet bar and poured himself a generous measure of Scotch, not feeling any release of tension until the single malt had invaded his bloodstream. Then, as its heat eased the grinding stiffness in his bones, he breathed a weary sigh.

  But, dammit, it was a bad
job if he was admitting that he needed alcohol just to function normally. What the hell was the matter with him? Thomas was right. He was different. But how different he had yet to find out.

  Thomas appeared in the doorway as he was finishing the Scotch. ‘Will you be wanting pudding, Mr Oliver?’ he asked stiffly, his tone still showing his disapproval, and Oliver set down his empty glass and shook his head.

  ‘Not right now,’ he said, injecting a note of apology into his voice. ‘I—I think I’ll go out. I promised Guy McKenna I’d show him the rough proofs as soon as they were available. And a lot of them are done.’

  But that was another source of frustration to him. Although he’d been back from Wales for over two days, he’d done very little work. Most of the film he’d shot in the Kasong Gorge hadn’t even been processed, and if he did intend to see Guy McKenna it would be to apologise for the delay.

  Of course, he knew McKenna would understand. It wasn’t every day that there was a death in the family. And if his restlessness owed less to the actual bereavement and more to the knowledge of the will his mother had taken from Griff’s safe, McKenna wasn’t to know about it.

  But he had yet to decide what he was going to do about it. He didn’t even know if the will was legal, though it had been signed and witnessed by two people who, even though their names were unfamiliar to him, were obviously people Griff had trusted.

  His mother had demanded he destroy it. And it would be a simple matter to do so. No one appeared to know about the second will; certainly not Laura, who had left Penmadoc the same afternoon the will was read without even saying goodbye. She clearly didn’t want to live at Penmadoc, not immediately, at least, and it would come to her automatically if his mother married again.

  Or died, he added, with rather less indifference. The idea of Stella shuffling off this mortal coil was not quite so easy to face. She was his mother, dammit. Whatever she’d done, whatever secrets she’d kept from him, she had been Griff’s wife. Didn’t he owe it to her to let her live in the home they’d shared for the past twenty years?