A Reluctant Mistress Read online

  Desperately Natalia tried to make a fist, tried to remember the moves taught in the self-defence course she’d taken years ago, but her bones had no stuffing and she couldn’t move.

  Although his mouth was gentle on her skin, what brought a harsh little sound breaking past her closed throat was the tip of his tongue tracing the palm with erotic finesse. His lashes had drooped; a dusky colour stained his skin.

  Yes, she thought exultantly, oh, yes…

  Still with her hand against his mouth, he said, ‘So we’ve established that it’s not temper—or not entirely.’

  He looked at her, and she flinched at the triumph blazing in his narrowed eyes. ‘You should see yourself,’ he said silkily. ‘Heavy eyelids and a lush mouth, skin as fine and translucent as the most precious ivory, your lithe, graceful body curving towards me—you promise all the delights that poor old Kubla Khan wanted in his Xanadu.’

  Branded, marked on her soul by the moment his mouth had touched her and drained her of stamina, of resolve, of autonomy, Natalia jerked her arm back convulsively. He let her go with a casual dismissiveness, watching as she rubbed her wrist against her thigh.

  ‘Life would be infinitely more simple if you could get rid of desire so easily,’ he said cynically. ‘Stop that, you’ll rub your skin raw.’

  ‘Damn you, I’m not delicate or weak,’ she said, her voice uneven and blurred, her arms stiff at her sides. ‘I’m strong.’

  ‘And I find the prospect of your strength infinitely seductive,’ he said coolly. Before she could answer, he added, ‘If you have a prejudice against making love on your back, I’d be delighted to introduce you to other, more adventurous positions.’

  For a single extravagant, treacherous second she saw him lying beneath her, sprawled like an indolent cat, his golden skin gleaming in the light of lamps. The image lingered suffocatingly in her mind as she said on an impeded note, ‘Forget it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I wish I could.’ Although heat still lingered in his golden eyes, his voice became cool, controlled. ‘To go back to your original misapprehension, I want to host a party to repay my social obligations at a restaurant in Bowden. I need a hostess. If you do that we’ll be even—and you can forget about the fence.’

  She almost said yes. The word trembled on her tongue, but when she saw the flash of calculation in his smile she knew what he’d been trying to do. It hurt that he should think she was so easily conned. ‘I’m not a charity case—you don’t have to think up false jobs so you can drop a few cents in my hand.’ Scorn vibrated in her voice. ‘If you really need a hostess, get someone older. If I do it, people will put the worst construction on it.’

  ‘The worst? That I’m blackmailing you—forcing you to act as hostess at a dinner party?’ His irony flicked her pride.

  ‘That we are lovers,’ she said with cold bluntness. A fierce, perverse satisfaction gripped her when anger gleamed behind his thick lashes.

  Leashing it, he said uncompromisingly, ‘They’ll only be a bit in advance of reality.’

  The fire crackled suddenly, sending warm light flaming across his autocratic face to highlight the hawkish good looks, the powerful framework that would make him striking until the day he died. Swift, unwanted sensation melted Natalia’s spine and fogged her brain, robbing her of the ability to think.

  Apparently taking her silence for acquiescence, he glanced at the rain, still hosing down. ‘You’ve already established your independence, so don’t insist on walking home in this. I’ll take you.’

  Although he spoke perfectly pleasantly, a faint threat underlined his words. If she pushed too far he looked willing to pick her up and dump her into his car.

  He could try.

  Rigidly she said, ‘I don’t cut off my nose to spite my face. Thank you.’

  Stifling an angry, forbidden excitement, Natalia strode beside him to the back of the house, where he unfurled a vast, brilliantly coloured golf umbrella. ‘Come on,’ he said tersely.

  Rain hurled down in solid sheets. If she’d insisted on walking home she’d have been soaked immediately. At first Natalia tried to keep as far from Clay as she could, but after two steps he said caustically, ‘It won’t poison you if you put your hand on my arm and walk in step with me.’

  Reluctantly she did that, telling herself that she could not feel the throb of his life force through her fingertips, however sensitised they were. Walking beside him in a small column of dryness with the smell of rain in her nostrils was a powerfully intimate experience; she felt both protected and challenged, and was relieved when at last they got to the big implement shed.

  As Clay shook water off the umbrella just inside the wide door, a man looked up from a long bench where he’d been working on a piece of machinery.

  ‘Nat!’ he exclaimed, his face lighting up. His glance swung to the man beside her, and after a pause he added in a flat voice, ‘Clay.’

  Warily conscious of Clay beside her, Natalia responded, ‘Hi, Phil. How are things?’ She moved away from Clay, very conscious of his alert interest.

  Phil’s eyes devoured her. ‘Great. Things are great.’

  ‘Good.’ She smiled at him, silently thanking Clay when he asked about the machinery that Phil was working on. The two men spoke for a few moments until Clay said, ‘We’d better get going. I’ll see you in ten minutes or so, Phil.’

  Phil slid another look at Natalia. ‘OK. See you later, Nat,’ he said, and turned back to the bench.

  Clay’s huge car smelt of money, Natalia thought dispassionately as she did up her seat belt—money and freedom.

  Halfway down the drive Clay asked calmly, as though he had a right to know, ‘When did you two stop being lovers?’

  Rage and shame fired a lethal cocktail into her bloodstream. She toyed with the idea of telling him it was no business of his, but he had only to ask someone in the district to find out. ‘Phil and I went out together until about two months ago. We broke up amicably.’

  On her part, anyway.

  ‘About the time I bought Pukekahu,’ Clay said.

  Natalia shrugged. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘You might have dumped him amicably,’ Clay drawled, ‘but he’s still eating you with his eyes, poor devil.’

  She masked the sudden leap of her nerves with an enquiring stare. Nothing in Clay’s tone should have made her wary, yet it took will-power to say, ‘Now you’re suffering from a misapprehension.’

  Clay shifted the gear lever down, his mouth curving. ‘Barely adult, yet already a femme fatale.’ His voice was coolly reflective, his eyes narrowed to reveal only a sliver of gold.

  ‘What a quaint, old-fashioned term,’ she said with relish. ‘I suppose your parents were New Zealanders, so you can’t even blame it on a foreign heritage. Do you read historical novels? Nowadays such women are called nymphomaniacs or cold bitches. I’m certainly not the first, and I don’t think I’m a cold bitch, either.’

  ‘Then why the lack of concern in your voice? And the dismissive body language? You were superficially friendly, but you couldn’t have made your rejection more obvious.’

  She said steadily, ‘Encouragement would have been more cruel.’

  After a short silence Clay said with soft menace, ‘He’ll be working on the fence, so keep away. If you’re not going to give the poor devil what he craves, don’t torment him.’

  Natalia leashed her temper. ‘I’m not into torment,’ she said woodenly. Clay had just made it impossible for her to help with the boundary fence.

  Was that the reason he’d told her Phil would be putting up the fence—so that she’d stay clear? A quick, angry glance at his angular profile defused that idea. Hardly; if he considered her to be a femme fatale he probably thought she’d be down there at every available moment tantalising poor Phil.

  Ahead gaped the shed at Xanadu, an empty space where the truck usually stood. Clay nosed the big car inside.

  When Natalia went to get out he said, ‘Here,’ and handed her a blank
signed cheque. ‘Fill in the cost of any damage the heifer did,’ he said, his unhurried self-possession reinforcing her resistance.

  Temptation wooed her.

  Before she could speak, he said with an amused cynicism, ‘Don’t be prissy, Natalia.’

  She dropped the cheque. ‘I’ll get a quote and let you know what the amount is,’ she retorted.

  Not looking at him, she unclipped the seat belt. From the corner of her eye she saw him move, and her head whipped around. ‘What are you doing?’

  On a note of savage irony he snapped, ‘I left my umbrella in the shed; I’m coming in with you.’

  He didn’t seem to be the sort of man who’d forget things. Did she scramble his brain as much as he did hers? It was a disturbing, exciting thought, one she pondered as she climbed out and turned to face him with an arrogantly tilted chin.

  Rain drove on to the rusty corrugated iron roof, deafening her, but she said loudly, ‘I’m capable of getting to the house without your help.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, his eyes gleaming, ‘but sometimes I like to live dangerously. Let’s go.’

  Scooping her in front of him, so that his broad shoulders and height sheltered her from the driving rain, he growled, ‘Run,’ and propelled her forward.

  He smelt of rain, Natalia thought, responding with a visceral immediacy to his male scent, its very faintness at odds with its potent effect on her. Heat enveloped her as he matched his long strides to her shorter ones, both of them moving with an ease and physical understanding that bypassed awkwardness and catapulted her into a forbidden intimacy.

  Clay Beauchamp was a stranger—one she disliked and didn’t trust—yet with each step a fierce, unwanted urgency stripped layers of common sense and logic and prudence from her.

  The back door promised deliverance. ‘Here we are,’ she said tightly when they were at last under the narrow porch. Turning, she added reluctantly, ‘Thank you.’

  She found herself looking up into his face, stark, formidable, into tawny eyes smouldering with the same violent hunger that racked her.

  ‘Natalia,’ he said, as though it was a curse, and then he kissed her, and the fire she’d been banking down—the white-hot intensity she’d renounced—burst into a conflagration and consumed her.

  His mouth was hard, demanding far more from her than she was prepared to give. But, oh, she was bewitched! Hunger clawed through her, offering all the forbidden glory of passion, all the sweets of heaven—if she would only surrender.

  Her arms locked around his shoulders, outstretched fingers clinging to the powerful muscles beneath the thin, damp material of his shirt. Drugged, reft away into a dark enchantment of the senses, Natalia fought a battle with the famished, mindless need that had sprung into such terrifying, wild life.

  Stop, she whimpered silently, stop! Now. Stop.

  Clay’s chest expanded, dragging her shirt exquisitely over her sensitive nipples. Against her lips he asked harshly, ‘Did I hurt you?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice sounded husky, absent. She forced her seeking hands away from his shoulders, bracing herself to step back from the heat and strength of his big body.

  He kissed the corner of her mouth before moving with delicious precision to the lobe of her ear. His teeth bit into the soft skin, and sensation shot through her like lightning—jagged, all-consuming, destructive, and ferociously beautiful.

  This is Clay Beauchamp, her mind managed to insist, in spite of the sensuous fog that threatened to engulf it. You first met him two days ago.

  Two days.

  She said on a half-sob, ‘No, Clay.’

  Lips skimming the responsive hollow below her ear, he muttered, ‘I didn’t understand what incendiary meant until I kissed you. How the hell do you do it?’

  Natalia pulled back from the perilous sanctuary of his arms; for a moment they tightened around her, and then he let her go, shocking her into bereavement. Longing for contact, her body drooped. She flung back her head, stiffened her legs, made her hands stay peaceably at her sides, her fingers stop yearning for his heat and power.

  All she could call on was the formality inherited from her mother. ‘Thank you for bringing me home,’ she croaked, inwardly wincing at the ridiculous words.

  Clay smiled, a slow, dangerous smile that didn’t hide a purely masculine aggression. His predatory eyes promised no surrender. ‘Thank you for expanding my experience,’ he drawled. ‘I’ve never been so affected by a kiss before—I’m glad it had the same impact on you.’

  Only dogged stubbornness got the key in the lock. Desperately, Natalia pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  Sudden incredulity replaced the heat in the leonine depths of Clay’s eyes before they turned curiously opaque. Clumsily Natalia went to shut the door against him, but he followed her, walking past her into the kitchen and the room that stretched out from it—a room bare of all furniture except an ancient armchair and a battered kitchen table, with one chair that had cost her a few dollars in the local secondhand shop.

  The fire and passion of the past few minutes retreated, overtaken by stiff pride. With angry, lowered lashes she watched as he stood in the bleak room and stared around, his studied survey eventually lighting on the gallery of meticulously detailed pencil sketches pinned to one wall—mostly flowers and leaves from the bush, but some still lifes.

  ‘Who did those?’ he asked harshly.

  ‘I did.’ And, because it didn’t matter any more, she added, ‘At high school.’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘They’re very good.’

  Holding her shoulders so erect she could feel the tension of abused muscles right down her spine, she asked with a frigid half-smile, ‘What do you know about art?’

  He met and matched her stare. ‘Enough to know that a person with a talent like this should be using it, not growing capsicums.’ He paused, his brows meeting above his nose. As if the question had been goaded from him, he demanded, ‘Why capsicums?’

  ‘My major creditors,’ she said with exquisite courtesy, ‘sat down with me when my father died and worked out a budget. The capsicums and the cattle were their idea, and I make an excellent income from them.’

  He cast an aggressive glance around the room. ‘And every cent you can save goes to pay off the loan?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Sometimes she thought she’d never get there, but each month the bank statement showed her she was slowly winning.

  ‘What are you going to do when you’ve finally paid it off?’

  ‘I’m going to revel in my freedom,’ she returned fiercely, gripped by a complex mixture of grief and pain and anger. ‘I’m going to wallow in it, and I’m never going to be tied down to anything again.’

  His eyes narrowed, his features suddenly grim and calculating. ‘Or any person?’

  ‘Or any person,’ she agreed, banking her swift, angry passion. ‘I’ve had enough of responsibility; I’ll do whatever I want, go wherever I please.’

  He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘I don’t blame you for wanting freedom,’ he said. ‘In your place I would too. Let me have that quote to fix your tunnel-house as soon as it comes in.’

  As she watched him go she touched an involuntary finger to her lips, touched Clay’s mouth through it, and shivered with the hunger that ate away at her self-possession, her pride and her strength, the only things she’d managed to retain from the wreckage of her dreams. The transient pleasures of an affair promised meagre satisfaction, yet she didn’t know what she wanted from Clay—certainly not to fall in love with him!

  Because when Clay looked at her, all he saw was a woman to take to bed.

  By the evening of the next day the effects of waking every two hours to check the irrigation system were making themselves plain, so after dinner Natalia went straight to bed. That night she had to force herself out each time her alarm clanged in her ear, and the last time she found herself staring at the dials and gauges with no idea of what she was looking for.

  A sullen, smouldering
sky at daylight promised rain, so once she’d packed and taken the capsicums to the transport depot she decided to dig over a piece in the vegetable garden. The hens went with her, scratching happily amongst the cabbages and broad beans in the sun, their friendly noises a pleasant and comforting accompaniment.

  Half an hour later, when their amiable clucking changed in tone, she looked up to see a tall figure walking around the side of the house.

  Driving the spade into the ground, she straightened up and watched Clay approach, her senses waking into clamorous, imperative life. He gave her a hard-eyed look that took in the hens, scattering now, and the freshly dug patch of ground.

  ‘How much have you got left to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Good morning, Clay,’ she said sedately. ‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’

  His beautiful mouth curved—so classically perfect in shape that she tended not to realise its strength.

  ‘I’m not a great one for preliminaries,’ he said, pulling the spade out of the ground. ‘Where do you want to dig to?’

  For a crazy moment she thought of trying to reclaim the spade. Only for a moment, however, before common sense kicked in, controlling her irritation. He had good muscles; why not let him use them?

  ‘Wise woman,’ he said ironically, divining her thoughts with insulting accuracy. ‘Not that I’d mind wrestling with you, but I can think of better places to do it.’

  ‘Some people,’ she snapped, removing herself to a patch of seedling lettuces that sorely needed weeding, ‘might consider that to be sexual harassment.’

  With smooth, economical movements he began to dig. ‘Really?’ he asked in a bland voice that set her teeth on edge. ‘I don’t intend to force you to do anything you don’t want to, Natalia. I wouldn’t enjoy an unwilling woman beneath me in bed.’

  Colour scorched her skin. Keeping her head down, she crouched beside the lettuces and set to picking out weeds.

  ‘And don’t tell me you’re too busy,’ he said.