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Walking past her now, he lay down on the floor and commanded, ‘Come here.’ Estelle’s whole body convulsed, quivering with sexual urgency. ‘Sit on it,’ he demanded, drawing her towards his erect penis.
Willingly she complied, straddling him and lowering herself eagerly onto him. As she did so, he started to thrust upwards so forcefully that the sensation of him inside her was almost more pain than pleasure and at the same time he reached down between her legs and used his fingers on her clitoris.
It was too much for her self-control. Within seconds she had started to climax.
They spent what was left of the night in her bathroom and after he had finally spent himself and had his orgasm, Estelle knew that she was going to be sore, but she didn’t care. She had loved every moment with Blade, every moment.
The memory of that high still had the power to make her smile and to make her wet, very, very wet indeed. She was smiling now, her hand automatically reaching between her legs, her body turned into the protection of Blade’s doorway as she heard him answer her phone call.
‘Blade, it’s me, Estelle,’ she told him softly. ‘Are you in?’ That question was their private code and meant ‘I want sex.’
She could almost feel the dark, triumphant smile slicing his face as he told her softly, ‘No, I’m afraid I’m not. It’s all right, darling,’ she heard him saying as he half covered the receiver. ‘It’s only my sister.’ Then his voice dropped to a whiplash sting of mocking sound as he told her, ‘If you’re really desperate for it, Estelle, I could always talk you through it. You’ve always enjoyed that, haven’t you? Or, of course, you could come round and watch … even join in.’
Furious, Estelle cut the co
Angrily, she turned on her heel and started to walk towards her own apartment building. There was a man standing on the pavement several feet away from her, waiting to cross the road.
Hungrily, Estelle studied him, her eyes gleaming with predatory sexual urgency. He wasn’t her type, though, thin and pallid-looking, his body stance limp and docile, and no doubt his sex was the same.
Glaring at him in disgust, Estelle mentally cursed Blade, knowing how much he would be enjoying having the woman who was with him right now, all the more so because he knew Estelle was going hungry … wanting him, needing him.
3
Uneasily, Garth glanced at his watch as he replaced the receiver following yet another unanswered call to Claudia.
It was now gone one o’clock in the morning. Claudia might have been going out but … At this time of the night, with the roads almost empty, it would take him less than two hours to drive to Upper Charfont. He was sorely tempted to do so, but he knew perfectly well how Claudia would react to his unheralded arrival at that time of night. And someone who knew them both was almost bound to see his car there—Upper Charfont was that kind of town. Not that he minded, but he knew that Claudia would.
He would ring her first thing in the morning, he promised himself—if indeed she was there to be rung and not … not what?
Not with Luke Palliser.
Irritably, Garth stretched his now-tense body, wincing as he heard the tell-tale crack of his neck. Without being vain, he knew he was in damn good shape for his age. He looked after himself, ate well and sensibly, exercised moderately, regularly counted his blessings amongst which Tara had to be close to the top of the list of the most valued and precious of all the good things that life had given him. The price of having her in his life had come so high, though, that there had been times when to his own shame he had almost wished she had never come into being and times, too, when he had been acutely and ridiculously jealous of the intensity and immensity of Claudia’s love for her, but then he suspected he had always been far more passionately in love with Claudia than she had been with him.
He could still remember the sense of dismay he had experienced when his then commanding officer, Claudia’s father, had a
What he had known was that he would much rather his partner had been the long-legged ‘model’ he had been introduced to at a London party and whom he had been discreetly pursuing for the previous six weeks. Not so much, he had to admit, because of her good looks and ‘model’ status—Garth had always preferred his women curvaceous rather than bone thin and the ‘model’ had had a hectic, frenzied air about her, which, coupled with the slight gauntness of her body, had even in those relatively i
For Garth, a single young man with a healthy sex drive, the opportunity to escort to the ball a young woman he was pretty sure he had a strong chance of ending up in bed with afterwards was far more appealing than the prospect of an evening spent dutifully making polite conversation with the brigadier’s no doubt plain and dull daughter.
Only Claudia hadn’t been plain and she had certainly been far from dull, and when he went to pick her up he had realised at once that she was as pleased at the prospect of an evening spent with him as he had been with her.
Petite and blonde, with the kind of curvy feminine figure that made Garth instinctively want to wrap his hands around her waist just to test his belief that it was small enough for them to encompass it, physically she was enough and more to make him drool with longing. But there was a lot more to Claudia than her delicate physical beauty as he had quickly discovered, and by the end of the evening he had known that she was the girl he wanted to be his wife.
Claudia herself had taken rather more persuading. Not because she didn’t share his feeling as she had told him seriously the first time he proposed to her—she did—but because she had seen too many army marriages founder on the rocks of misunderstanding and conflicting pressures to want to entrust the future of her children, their children, to a marriage that might not last.
Even then, her priority had been the security of the family she so much wanted to have, the children she so much wanted to bear.
‘How can you say you love me?’ she had raged at him when she found out what had happened. ‘How can you claim that you love me when you’ve slept with someone else?’
He had tried to explain, make her understand, tell her that it had been a mistake … an accident almost, but she had refused to believe him, refused virtually to listen.
He had always known that beneath her outer softness and apparent vulnerability, she had unsuspected strength, but he had never imagined that that strength could be turned against him. He had tried to get her to change her mind, but she had refused to listen, and in the end he had had to accept the fact that their marriage was over, that her pride would not allow her to understand or forgive what he had done.
In the first couple of years after the divorce, he had done what all men in his position did, trying to disperse the pain and sense of loss in the arms and beds of other women.
It hadn’t worked, but then he hadn’t really expected it to, and at least being single and determined to stay free of any new emotional entanglements had meant that he was able during the lean years of the economic crisis to concentrate all his time and attention on his business. It had come through the recession relatively unscathed and they were, in fact, now rather unexpectedly very much to the forefront of their field.