Savage Awakening Read online

  That was when she identified the growing pressure beside her hip. It was so long since she’d been with a man that she hadn’t realised until now what was happening. But then, the abortive little affair she’d had with Terry Matheson was not something to remember. And he had felt nothing like this: so big and powerful, his erection pulsing against her leg.

  Her skirt was up around her waist now and she thought Matt’s hand shook a little as he cupped her through her panties. ‘You’re wet,’ he said thickly, and she realised he could feel her arousal clear through the thin cotton.

  ‘I know,’ she said, half apologetically, and she heard the groan that rumbled through his chest at her words.

  ‘Hell, Fliss,’ he muttered, pulling her panties down to her knees and spreading the cluster of red-gold curls with his thumb, ‘that is so not something to be ashamed of.’ And before she knew what he intended, he slid down her body until his mouth was level with the tight curls at the tops of her legs.

  She couldn’t believe what he was doing, but although her hands moved futilely to clutch his hair, his thrusting tongue defeated her. Sensations such as she’d never experienced before gathered into a burning coil she couldn’t control and, in spite of wanting to wait until he was a part of her before she came, her orgasm was irresistible. And overwhelming. An incredible wave of pleasure swept her up and over the brink, the shuddering aftermath drenching him with the sweetness of her essence. Then, as she struggled back to sanity, he slid over her again and let her taste herself on his lips.

  It was all totally unreal, totally erotic, and Fliss felt as if her whole body was engulfed in fire. But that breathtaking orgasm had left her only partially satisfied. She wanted more; she wanted him; and she was horrified when Matt abruptly rolled away from her.

  She gasped in disbelief. There was no way she was going to let him pleasure her without pleasuring himself, she thought passionately, and she had no hesitation about tearing off her skirt and kicking her panties the rest of the way down her legs. Then she was as naked as he was, and positioning herself so that she was looking down at him, she bent and covered his mouth with her own.

  ‘Fliss…’

  He spoke her name against her lips, his eyes wide now and filled with a haunting regret she refused to accept. He wanted her; she knew he did. And, despite his apparent denial, she found that when she circled his mouth with her tongue his lips parted almost automatically.

  He liked it, she assured herself, not understanding his resistance but eager to build on her success. With instinctive daring, she dipped her tongue into his mouth, letting it slide the length of his in a tentative exploration.

  A feeling not unlike exultation gripped her when she felt his response. His quickening breathing filled her nose and mouth, filled her lungs, and she felt as if she was drowning in the scent and feel of him. Dipping her head even lower, she bit one of his button-hard nipples, and the sound he made then was definitely not a protest.

  However, when she began to drop a chain of moist kisses down his chest to his flat stomach, and her fingers moved unmistakably towards his groin, his reaction was much different. His hand shot out and trapped her fingers in an iron-hard grasp and in a muffled undertone he grated, ‘No!’

  Fliss’s immediate thought was to obey him. After all, hers was a fragile confidence at best, and she wasn’t used to going against authority. But then, the expression in his eyes made her hesitate, and, although she didn’t fight to continue, she didn’t draw back either. Something was going on here, something she didn’t yet understand. But she intended to, she told herself grimly. Oh, yes, she intended to.

  ‘You want me,’ she said, her voice almost as low as his had been, and she saw him close his eyes as if he couldn’t bear to let her see the truth in them. ‘You do,’ she insisted huskily. And then, because it was the only thing she could think of to explain his behaviour, she added, ‘I’m not asking you to make any commitment. I realise that Diane—’

  ‘It’s not Diane,’ he snarled, and once again she was assailed with the fear that perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps he didn’t want her, after all. But then, in a hoarse voice, he continued, ‘Of course I want you, dammit. I’d give anything if I could—’ He broke off, staring at her with tortured eyes. ‘But I can’t. Do you understand? I can’t. I’m impotent, Fliss. That’s what those bastards did to me. I only have to think about sex—’ He groaned. ‘That’s why I can’t make love to you as I want to. I’m no good to you. I’m no good to any woman.’

  The silence that followed his outburst was significant only for its brevity. But then Fliss exclaimed incredulously, ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘Believe it.’ Matt spoke heavily. ‘Do you think I’d make something like that up?’

  ‘But—you were aroused—’

  ‘Only slightly.’

  ‘No.’ Fliss wouldn’t have that. ‘I felt it, beside my hip. You were hard. I felt you throbbing against my leg.’

  ‘You imagined it.’

  Matt responded harshly, but Fliss knew what she’d felt; what she’d seen, for God’s sake, before he’d decided that only one of them was going to be satisfied.

  ‘I know what I felt, Matt,’ she cried, but he closed his eyes again as if this was all too much for him to bear.

  ‘Just—just leave me, huh?’ he said tiredly, and now when she glanced towards his groin she saw he had some reason for his despair. He was soft and flaccid again, the power of his erection destroyed by his own disbelief.

  She sat back on her heels then, not sure what she ought to do. If he was right and she stayed here, she was only exacerbating his misery. But if she was right—and she was almost sure she was—this might be her only chance to prove it to him.

  Deciding she had nothing to lose, she leant forward and laid her hand against his cheek. And, as she’d anticipated, Matt reacted violently. Thrusting her hand aside, he attempted to roll away from her, but she was too quick for him. Moving more positively than she would have ever thought possible, she straddled him, sitting across his hips and pinning him to the bed.

  ‘What the hell—?’ he began, but she refused to let him ruin this by losing his temper.

  Putting a finger across his lips, she leant towards him until her breasts brushed his chest. Then, cupping them in her hands, she presented them to him with a smile that was unashamedly seductive.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he exclaimed, but she saw him looking at her, saw the way his eyes darkened with unwilling awareness as she shifted against his hip; when he realised her moistness was brushing his groin.

  ‘What you did to me,’ she said huskily. ‘Will you do it again?’ She looked down at herself deliberately. ‘I sort of—ache, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘God, Fliss—’

  ‘Or I could do it for you,’ she murmured daringly, and knew an incredible sense of triumph when she felt him hardening beneath her.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he choked harshly, but she knew exactly what she was doing. She might have little experience when it came to men, but she’d read enough books to know that actions definitely spoke louder than words.

  ‘We’ll see, shall we?’ she said, not knowing where all this confidence was coming from. She leant closer so that her breasts were crushed against his chest now and traced his lips with her tongue. ‘Hmm, you taste good.’

  ‘Fliss…’

  There was a note of desperation in his voice, but it didn’t seem to be having any effect on his body’s reactions, thank goodness. When Fliss shuffled backward, his erection rose almost proudly from its coarse nest of hair, and she encircled it with her hand before bending to take him into her mouth.

  He jerked convulsively then, but she didn’t give up. Her tongue loved the silken length of him, and she got a particular pleasure from feeling his heartbeat pulsing against the roof of her mouth. His skin was like velvet, and she tried to imagine how good it would feel to have that soft-coated hardness inside her.

 
‘Please…’ he groaned, and she knew that, however convinced she was that Matt wasn’t impotent as he believed, there was only one way to prove it. Not without some trepidation, she rose onto her knees and positioned herself above him. Then, before he could stop her, before she lost the courage to do it, she lowered herself onto him.

  Her first thought was that she’d been too ambitious. She couldn’t do this. He was too big, and she was too tight, and it seemed as if she simply wouldn’t be capable of accommodating him. But, despite Matt’s hoarse cry of protest, she persisted, and found to her relief that her body expanded to meet his needs. Seconds later, he was nestled slickly inside her, stretching her and filling her in a way she could never have imagined before this moment.

  She looked at Matt, half hoping to see approval in his eyes, but he had half reared up on his pillows, and there was pain, but no approbation, in his expression.

  ‘Fliss,’ he muttered, his hands reaching for her hips, and she guessed he was going to lift her off him.

  ‘Matt,’ she countered, leaning forward to silence him with a kiss, and he slumped back again almost helplessly.

  But despite his resistance, the kiss was like no other they had exchanged. It was hot, and passionate, and soul-deep, and almost destructive in its intensity. It was an open-mouthed affirmation of how good they were together, and, almost without her being aware of what she was doing, Fliss began to move.

  With her hands pressed on the pillows at either side of his head, her first foray was almost tentative. But it was so good, made her feel so good, that she repeated the exercise. And, although she was sure Matt still believed she was wasting her time, he couldn’t prevent his own automatic participation.

  Their kisses grew hotter, wetter, more and more uncontrolled, and pretty soon Fliss was rearing back to ride him like the stallion he really was. And as if Matt at last believed that there might—there just might—be something in what she’d asserted, he rolled her over again and took over the dominant position.

  Fliss didn’t know how many times she climaxed during that wild possession. At least three times that she knew of before Matt himself gained his release. And gain his release he did, trembling and sweating though he was. But superbly replete at last, shouting his triumph to the world in general and to Fliss in particular…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘CAN I come to Matt’s house with you this morning?’ asked Amy excitedly, and Fliss, who had been wondering whether she ought to turn up as usual herself, regarded her daughter with doubtful eyes.

  ‘I don’t know, poppet,’ she said, aware that her father was listening with interest to their conversation. ‘Grandad’s going to be here all morning. Why not ask Kelly over to play?’

  ‘I don’t want to play with Kelly,’ said Amy at once, and Fliss thought that was par for the course. “’Sides, her mother’s prob’ly taking her shopping. That’s what she always does, when we have a lavatory day off school.’

  ‘A what?’

  Fliss was immediately diverted from her own problems, and Amy gave her a mischievous look. ‘Well, Mrs Hill said it was a loo day,’ she pointed out innocently. ‘And that’s what you always say when you’re going to the bathroom.’

  ‘A lieu day!’ exclaimed Fliss, as her father chuckled behind his paper. She spelled it out. ‘And don’t pretend you didn’t know.’

  Amy grinned. ‘Well, it made you smile,’ she said, tilting her head to one side appealingly. ‘Can I come? Please. I’m sure Matt won’t mind.’

  ‘Mr Quinn,’ Fliss corrected her shortly, and then, conscious that her father might pick something up from her expression that she didn’t want him to see, she said, ‘I’m going to make the beds. I’ll think about it, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Amy had to be content with that, but as Fliss left the room she was aware that her father’s eyes followed her and she guessed he was curious about her attitude, too.

  And who could blame him? Since she’d got back from the Old Coaching House the day before, she had been unusually subdued, and she doubted her father had accepted her assertion that she was tired. Sooner or later, he was going to demand an explanation and, quite honestly, she didn’t have one for him.

  The truth was, she didn’t know how she felt. Oh, she had no doubts about her feelings for Matt, but that wasn’t really the problem. Matt was; and, despite what he’d told her the day before, she was having a hard time believing it had been anything more than a spur-of-the-moment thing, brought on by gratitude and nothing else. He didn’t really care about her. Goodness, until yesterday morning he’d believed he was impotent. Not exactly the condition in which to swear undying love for anyone. Even Diane.

  Especially Diane.

  And that was the crux of the matter. Everything Matt had said and done since he arrived at the Old Coaching House had been based on that spurious principle. However kind he had been to her or to Amy, he’d believed there had never been any question of their relationship progressing beyond a certain point. He liked her, he liked Amy; but anything else had just been wishful thinking on her part.

  Even remembering the two occasions before yesterday when he’d kissed her took on a different aspect now. With hindsight, she suspected they had just been abortive attempts to prove his own lack of sexuality, and he’d always drawn back before she could discover what was going on.

  It hurt to think he might have been using her in that way, but she had no real proof of that either. And despite what had happened the day before, she might be beating herself up over nothing.

  Nevertheless, as she shook pillows and smoothed sheets, she couldn’t help marvelling at the way she had behaved. She, Fliss Taylor, single mother and full-time housewife, whose only claim to success was three years at university and a one-year stint as a trainee physiotherapist, with one failed relationship behind her, had seduced Matt Quinn, TV journalist, erstwhile prisoner of war, and known celebrity.

  It was incredible. Even now, she had difficulty remembering how she had had the nerve to behave as she had. She wasn’t—she had never been—the kind of woman to believe she was attractive to men. Well, not to men like him, anyway. Her usual dates were with people like herself: working men, who considered a meal at the pub or a trip to the cineplex in Westerbury constituted an exciting evening out.

  Matt wasn’t like that. Until he’d been captured and imprisoned in Abuqara, he’d attended society parties and film premières, he’d regarded mixing with socialites and politicians as all in a day’s work. He’d travelled the world. He’d spoken about visiting Australia as if it were just across the English Channel, whereas she’d be hard-pressed to afford a package tour to Majorca. The gulf between them was immense and just because yesterday morning the lines had become blurred didn’t mean they didn’t still exist.

  Yet, at the time, it had seemed the only thing she could do. She’d been so high on sex and adrenalin, she hadn’t thought twice about acting in a way that was totally alien to her normal nature. She’d acted like a—like a femme fatale, for God’s sake, and, amazingly, it had worked.

  Whatever misgivings she had, and she had to admit that these misgivings were probably all on her own part, she had succeeded. Somehow, and even now she hardly understood how she’d done it, she’d proved to Matt that he was not the useless weakling he’d thought he was. The sex they’d shared had been wild and passionate and incredibly moving, and at the end he’d been totally sated, totally grateful.

  But it was his gratitude that she’d found so hard to take. She hadn’t wanted that, hadn’t wanted to feel that all her efforts had aroused in him was an obligation to thank her in whatever way he believed she wanted. She hadn’t expected him to say he loved her, for heaven’s sake. She hadn’t wanted that. Not when she knew that until that moment of revelation in his bedroom all he’d felt for her was a simple affection.

  An affection that was primarily based on the way he’d treated her that morning, she acknowledged ruefully. For reasons best known to himse
lf, he’d decided to give her a taste of what she was missing. Why had he done it? To reassure her after the shock he’d given her earlier? Or because he’d felt sorry for her all along, a single woman alone, with very little going on in her life to get excited about?

  Whatever, the end result had been the same. She had learned again that it really was dangerous to play with fire, and he had recovered not just his virility, but his belief in himself, too.

  She sighed now, lifting the veritable army of soft toys Amy had on her bed onto their usual place on the window-sill. If only she’d left while Matt was in the shower, she thought wearily. Then he wouldn’t have said what he did and she wouldn’t be feeling such a fool now. They might even have been able to forget the whole incident. Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible. After all, she had made it pathetically clear that she’d expected no commitment from him.

  It hadn’t happened that way, however. Like the idiot she was, when Matt had said he was going to take a shower, she’d hurriedly put her clothes on and gone downstairs. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might be easier all round if she just gave herself the rest of the day off, that if he wanted to speak to her, he knew where she lived. If she had, the ball would have been in his court, so to speak, and she wouldn’t be suffering all this soul-searching now.

  Instead, she’d been so bemused by what had happened that she hadn’t looked beyond the end of her nose. By the time Matt came downstairs, barefoot as usual, and smelling deliciously of soap and shampoo, and clean male flesh, she’d made fresh coffee and was standing at the open back door, a mug of the aromatic beverage in her hand.

  She supposed, if she was honest with herself, she’d been too embarrassed to face him, and he’d come up behind her and wrapped his arms about her waist. Then, as she was struggling not to spill her coffee, he’d buried his face in the warm angle of her neck and shoulder. ‘I love you, Fliss Taylor, do you know that?’ he’d murmured huskily, and for a moment her heart had leapt into her throat. But then he’d spoiled everything by continuing, ‘My God, you don’t know what you’ve done for me. I’ll never be able to thank you.’