Yuletide Reunion. Sharon Kendrick
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red-brown hair, so that it spilt in mahogany streams all the way down over her silk-covered breasts. Dizzy with wine and longing, she tried to think of something interesting and original to say, and failed dismally. ‘Will you be sorry to leave?’ She leaned back to perch her bottom on the wide window-ledge and smiled at him.
The movement distracted him as much as the invitation in her eyes, and Aleck found his eyes drawn once again to the pale gleam as her breasts thrust heavily towards him. He felt the slow, insistent throbbing of desire start to build up, felt it begin to pulse powerfully through his veins. ‘Sure, I’ll be sorry,’ he said, in a husky voice that didn’t sound like his own at all. ‘There’s a lot I’m going to miss.’
Drunk with the heady delight of his proximity, with the obvious appreciation in his eyes, Clemmie found herself purring like a parody of a sex-symbol. ‘And what are you going to miss most?’
Aleck felt his muscles tense as she lounged back negligently on the window-ledge. She might as well have been naked for all that dress was covering her up, the two inverted vees of the bodice taut and stretched as they struggled to restrain the lush young breasts. The silk lay smoothly against her flesh, except for where he could quite clearly see the outline of some outrageously flimsy G-string. Aleck swallowed. ‘Well, I’ll miss seeing you,’ he told her, in a throaty whisper.
Clemmie opened her dark eyes even wider, her surprise completely genuine. ‘Will you?’
‘Sure, I will.’
‘I didn’t think you’d even noticed me,’ she told him honestly.
He gave a hollow guilty laugh, as Alison’s memory slipped from his mind like sand through his fingers. ‘Not notice you?’ he demanded unsteadily. ‘Oh, come on. You’d need to be blind or pretty stupid not to notice you, Clemmie...’
His face gave him away.
Clemmie could see the fight that was taking place within him, yet she was too trapped by desire to heed it. Too flattered by the look on his face which must have mirrored her own. A look she had dreamed of, night after night, but never thought she would see in the flesh. Compelled by a need she did not recognise, she put her hands up behind her head to cushion her head on her palms, and the action did even more to accentuate her breasts. ‘You do say the nicest things,’ she smiled.
Appalled at his behaviour, and yet unwilling or unable to stop himself, Aleck took a step towards her. Why not just give her what she so obviously wanted? What he so obviously wanted, too. ‘Do I?’ he murmured. ‘I don’t just say the nicest things, Clemmie, I do them as well...’
He moved his lips towards hers, and Clemmie wondered if she had imagined the dark note of warning which had coloured the throaty whisper of his response. But then his mouth was covering hers and the effect was like lighting touchpaper.
He showed none of the finesse of the Aleck of her dreams, just pulled her into his arms and began a kiss which was so shockingly intimate and so unbelievably sensual that Clemmie felt she should have been outraged by it. Yet she found herself kissing him back as though she had been born for just this moment.
He pulled her closer, so close that her lush silken-covered breasts were crushed against his chest. God, he could feel those nipples digging into him like tight little rocks. He couldn’t help himself, and just briefly brushed his fingertips over each straining mound, expecting her to slap his face. But she didn’t.
She couldn’t. The moment he touched her, she was lost. His. Submerged and drowning in silky-dark erotic waters. She knew that she shouldn’t be letting him do this, that she should be pushing him away, insulted—but instead Clemmie nearly died with pleasure when he touched her breasts. The wine and her loneliness and the overwhelming emotion she had felt for Aleck Cutler since the moment she’d first laid eyes on him, all combined to become the most potent, sensual cocktail of her young life.
His mouth was still on hers as his thigh pushed its way insistently between hers, his fingers now straying beneath the silk of the bodice itself until they alighted on each exquisitely aroused nipple and he circled the bare skin of each painful peak with erotic triumph.
‘Clemmie,’ he moaned into her mouth.
‘W-what?’
‘God, you’re so beautiful,’ he managed to get out, from between gritted teeth.
Her head tipped back as he kissed her neck. ‘No, I’m n-not...’
’Beautiful,’ he contradicted, still in that dazed kind of voice. ‘And I want you. Do you know that? So badly.’
‘I want you, too,’ she gasped in wonderment, and laced her fingers into his thick dark hair.
His hand moved to the pert curve of her bottom, cupping each silk-covered buttock with a groan, and he was just about to slide the slithery material up, so that he could touch her legs and beyond, when the brief and rapid sound of footsteps heralded a third person’s arrival and the room was thrown into bright light.
Bedazzled, they sprang apart—just in time to see the Head of Science standing by the light switch, with a whole gaggle of giggling fifth-formers just behind him.
‘Good evening, Cutler,’ he said stonily. ‘Perhaps you and Miss Powers would like to come to my office. I think that a little talk is probably long overdue. Don’t you?’
Clemmie looked up into Aleck’s face. For a split second their eyes connected, and in his she could read the unmistakable message of self-disgust and outraged recrimination.
And she knew then why mothers always warned their daughters about being too easy. Because Clemmie would have done anything to be able to remove that look of seething contempt from Aleck Cutler’s beautiful eyes.
’MOM, Mom—Mom! Is this really, really our new home?’
Clemmie laughed and looked up from the packing case she was hunting through. Where was the wretched kettle? She smiled into the excited face of her ten-year-old daughter. ‘Yes, Justine,’ she smiled. ‘It really, really is!’
‘And did I come here when I was very little?’ Justine sat back on her heels and looked up at her mother.
‘Yes, you did. You wouldn’t remember. It was where Grandma used to live—’
‘With Grandad Dan?’
‘That’s right.’ Clemmie lifted the bright blue kettle out of the packing case with a look of triumph. ‘There—found it! Why don’t you go and get your sister and bring her down, and then we’ll all have a break?’
‘Is there any cake?’
‘Ginger cake, if you’re very good!’
‘Whoopee!’ shrieked Justine, and scooted off to find Louella.
Clemmie looked around her at the empty room, still trying to take everything in, wondering why her life never seemed to chug along comfortably like everyone else’s. Not that she was complaining. Not now. Not with this lovely house to call her own. A home at last, after a long time searching.
Clemmie sighed, remembering the man who had brought her and her mother so much happiness. Dear Dan. Because he’d been her stepfather she had not expected him to love her. But he had loved her, loved her as much as if he had been her own father. And yet...
When he died, she had somehow expected him to leave the house to one of his blood relatives, not to her. There had been a nephew somewhere, an elderly aunt somewhere else. And it wasn’t as though she’d seen a lot of him. Her visits from the States had tended to be when she could afford them, which hadn’t been very often. And after her mother had died she hadn’t had the heart to come back to Ashfield at all.
Clemmie’s