A Perfect Night (15 page)

Seb's body was, she recognised dizzily, a feast for each and every one of her previously starved senses.

Sight, sound, scent, touch...taste... She wanted to satisfy them all, to positively gorge herself on what she was being offered.

Vaguely Katie was aware that she ought to be shocked by what she was feeling, by how she was acting. Her whole behaviour was so totally unlike her, her needs were so unfamiliar to her, but there was no space, no time, no will within her to listen to any unwanted warning voices. This was the real her. She felt as though she was a chrysalis shedding its restrictive coat to emerge for the first time with the freedom to be as she really was.

As Seb placed her on the bed she reached up and kissed his shoulder, closing her eyes in open apprecia-tion as she breathed in the heated aroused scent of his body, tasted it on her tongue.

'You feel so good,' she whispered huskily to him, the words tumbling from her lips in the brief spaces of time she could allow in her eager oral exploration of his body.

'You smell so good... You taste so good...'

Her words seemed to snap the final cords binding Seb's self-control. Katie heard him groan, a low exciting growl of sound that sent actual physical shock waves of sensation racing over her own skin and then he was holding her, lifting her, positioning her so that every part of her body was open to the intimate caress of his hands and mouth. The sensation of him touching her, caressing her, leaving her with the moist heat of his tongue, send-ing wave after wave of arousal crashing down over her until she was drowning in her own longing and need for his full possession.

There was no time for her to feel apprehension or even hesitation, only a growing vortex of need that drew her into the maelstrom of its tumultuous heart, the only sound she could hear the thud of Seb's heartbeat and the sobbing cry of her own piercing longing.

There was no sense of shock or pain, only the intensity of her own longing, her own urgency. That, and her awed comprehension of how perfectly they fit together, of how dizzyingly strong her own sensual reaction to him was. He moved and she moved with him, their bodies in perfect harmony, creating between them a rhythm that echoed the life force of the universe itself, so completely at one with one another, so perfectly complementing one another that Katie felt as though she was being buoyed up, swept along, carried by a force as pure and spiritual as it was sensual and earthly.

What was happening for her was so sublimely perfect that she felt as though not just her body, but her mind, her heart, her whole being had entered another dimension. Awash with the waves of sensation that had crashed through her, carrying her over that final barrier and safely into the calm place that was the other side of the chasm she had crossed, she reached out to Seb, touching his throat with questing fingers, the smile she gave him beneath her suddenly too heavy eyelids, soft and womanly, full of knowledge and fulfilment.

Seb though wasn't returning her smile. His eyes were dark and unreadable, his face set and something close to anger breaking through the quietly controlled pitch of his voice as he demanded,

'Why didn't you tell
me...warn
me?'

Self-consciously, Katie looked away from him, her euphoria disappearing at the cold disapproval of his voice.

'It was your first time, wasn't it?' Seb was demanding sharply as she looked away from him unable to hold or endure the searching look he was focusing on her.

There wasn't any point in denying the truth, not when he had so obviously realised.

'Yes. It was,' Katie agreed calmly.

She heard Seb curse under his breath and winced at the anger she could hear.

'You should have
told
me, and...'

'...and what?' Katie found the courage to question, her own lips only trembling very slightly as she twisted them into a wry smile. 'You'd have stopped?'

She saw from the dark surge of colour burning up under his skin that Seb knew what she meant.
He
had been as incapable of stopping as
she
had been of drawing his attention to her virginity.

'Why
should I have told you?' she asked him and then looking at him she said simply, 'It...it couldn't have been any...any better and I...'

Seb cursed again.

'You were a
virgin,'
he reminded her furiously, 'and I...'

'You made love to me as though I were a woman and not a girl,' Katie suggested. Pride darkened her eyes, her head lifting as she spoke to him.

'Perhaps I
didn't
tell you because I
wanted
to be treated as a woman...an equal...'

'No...you're lying,' Seb denied sharply. 'No woman of your intelligence and your age waits so long without having a purpose, a reason for doing so, and certainly a woman like you would
never
allow such an important rite of passage to be... No... you must have been waiting for something or someone...'

He was so close to the truth that Katie held her breath praying inwardly that Seb wouldn't inadvertently stumble on it and realise...

Realise what? That she had dreamed up for herself a totally false image of her own sexuality? That she had spent years fantasising about a sexual experience and a man so far removed from the reality of what her body had told her tonight it really wanted, that the enormity of the gulf between what
she
had believed she
had
wanted and what in fact she really
had
wanted was so huge that even now she could barely grasp how wrong she had been?

The person she had believed she was before tonight could never have felt, wanted, needed,
enjoyed
what she had just experienced with Seb. By rights she knew she ought to feel, at best self-conscious and at worst down-right ashamed of what she had done and why she had done it, and certainly it was something she couldn't envisage ever discussing even with someone so close to her as her twin.

How on earth would Louise react if she were to tell her that she had been so overwhelmed by her own sexual longings that she had practically begged Seb, a man she knew she didn't love, but who in that mad moment of intensity she had wanted with an urgency and despera-tion far stronger than anything she had ever previously experienced, to take her, possess her, fill and complete her?

She had, she recognised on a shocking surge of self-realisation, wanted exactly what had happened and worse, she had wanted it to be with Seb who she knew didn't love her and who she knew was just about as different from Gareth as it was possible for a man to be.

'Why?' Seb was asking her tersely. 'Why now? Why me?'

He reached out, taking hold of her by her shoulders, dragging her upright to face him before she could stop him.

'"What's going on, Katie? I arrive home to discover that you and I are supposedly having a relationship, that we are effectively
already
a couple, although you and I both know that that just isn't so...or rather it wasn't,'

he corrected himself grimly.

'That
was an accident,' Katie told him immediately.

'I never...' She stopped, biting her lip and then wincing as the touch of her teeth against its tenderness reminded her of the intimacy of the kisses they had shared. Her face flushed a soft rosy pink as she tried to wriggle free of him and another part of her body reminded her even more insistently of just how intimate that intimacy had been.

'An accident?'

'Yes,' she insisted. 'Louise jumped to the wrong conclusions about... about us...I...'

She stopped. How could she explain just why she hadn't totally and immediately corrected her twin. 'I tried to tell her, but it...it wasn't easy...' She hung her head. 'She feels uncomfortable with me sometimes, guilty almost because she's...because she has Gareth and their life together and it's hard to make her understand that I'm happy as I am.'

'She wants you to be like her, part of a couple—

settled...' Seb interrupted her, adding intuitively, 'And so it was easier to allow her to think that her assumptions were correct.'

'Yes. Yes, it was,' Katie agreed. 'I never dreamed that she would tell anyone else or that...'

She stopped and shook her head. 'I couldn't believe it when my mother started talking to me about you...about us, as though... I should have admitted the truth then, I wanted to... I knew how angry you'd be once you got to hear about i t '

'I
was
angry,' Seb admitted brusquely. 'But that's no excuse for what I did... Why didn't you stop me...tell me?'

'Perhaps I didn't want to,' Katie told him honestly, her eyes clouding a little with the pain of her private thoughts.

She wasn't being totally honest with him. Katie knew that. She hadn't told him the truth about why she had allowed Louise to believe they were involved with one another. But how could she tell him without exposing herself to even more humiliation and, anyway, how could she tell anyone else about her feelings for Gareth when she hadn't told her twin? And now, if she told him about Gareth, could she then go on to admit that, despite the longevity of her love, despite what she had believed to be the strength and permanence of it, the moment Seb had touched her she had been overwhelmed by such a compulsive urgency, such a white-hot burn of desire that it simply hadn't been possible for her to think of anything or anyone else?

She gave him a direct look and said quietly and ruefully, her mouth curving in a semi-self-mocking smile,

'Perhaps I was beginning to feel that my virginity was getting dangerously close to the end of its shelf-life. But I wanted you Seb... I can't explain why or how and I wasn't even thinking about my virginity, I wasn't capable of that kind of logic, of any kind of reasonable thinking... I can't explain why or what... I just...'

She stopped, her eyes momentarily shining with emotional tears as she admitted with painful honesty,

'Yes, perhaps I
should
have warned you...told you...or stopped you...but...'

'But...' Seb prompted her when she fell silent and bowed her head so that all he could see was the top of it

'...but I didn't want to,' Katie repeated huskily as she lifted her head to meet his gaze. 'I had no idea that sex could be so...so...'

'...so dangerous,' Seb offered sardonically.

'So
total,'
Katie amended as she added bravely, 'I'm not going to allow myself to feel guilty or ashamed about what happened or about the way I felt, Seb. I,..it was...it was wonderful,' she told him recklessly, the words little more than a shy whisper of sound as her face grew pink and she looked away from him.

'Wonderful!"
Seb repeated explosively. 'Have you
any
idea! None of this should have happened. None of it.

You and I...'

'...don't even like one another. I know...' Katie agreed sadly. 'Maybe that's the way passion is, I don't know. Perhaps you would be able to say better than me.'

'You think so?' Seb shook his head. 'What just happened between us was as much of a "first time" for me as it was for you. I don't make a habit of allowing myself to lose control like that and I certainly don't enjoy knowing that...'

He stopped, shaking his head while Katie suggested practically, 'Well, at least no one other than ourselves need ever know about it. Tomorrow I'll explain to my mother that Louise got it wrong and...'

She tensed as Seb suddenly moved abruptly away from her pulling the disarranged bedclothes over his lower body.

His rejection of her and his patent lack of interest in what she was saying hurt her more than she liked having to recognise and the warmth and happiness that had followed their lovemaking was quickly being replaced by a sense of loss and loneliness.

'If you want...' she began stiffly and then she saw the way he was looking at her body and she knew immediately and exactly just what it was he did want and her face burned bright scarlet with a heart-stopping mixture of shock and excitement.

Excitement because Seb still wanted her, because the reason he had reached for those concealing covers was because his body was reacting to the proximity of hers, because...

Before she could stop herself or even think critically or sensibly about what she was doing she heard herself whispering softly, 'Seb, please stay with me tonight...
all
night...'

'Stay with you...'

His voice was slurred and gruff as though his throat was hurting him somehow. Fascinated Katie watched as he closed his eyes and swallowed, her whole body shivering in mute reactive awareness of the strong tide of need which was already building to threaten their de-fences.

'Yes. I want you to,' she told him. 'I want you...' She gave him a brief look full of female knowledge as she reminded him, 'After all, I'm not a virgin anymore now.'

She could see the heat leaping in his eyes as immediately and dangerously as though she had thrown a lighted match onto petrol. When he reached for her his *

skin felt like hot satin and when she touched him he cried out, suffering the eager exploration of her hands and then her mouth until his whole body was racked by seismic shudders of uncontrollable reaction.

'Stay with me' she had begged him and he did, through the tumult of her own hungry desire and beyond it, holding her through the night as she slept.

What the hell was happening to him? Seb asked himself defeatedly. He had come to see her tonight intent only on demanding an explanation from her, furiously angry with her and now... He looked down at where she slept in his arms. Now he knew that ridiculously, illogically, he never ever wanted to let her go.

'Stay with me' she had asked and in doing so he had somehow rewritten all the rules he had laid down for the way he intended to live his life.

'COFFEE...'

Sleepily Katie opened her eyes and then sat bolt upright in her bed as she saw Seb standing in the doorway to her bedroom, fully dressed and holding a mug of fragrantly scented coffee.

Wide-eyed, she watched him as he walked towards her without waiting for her response. Less than a handful of hours ago, as the dawn had started to lighten the sky, she had woken him from his sleep whispering to him that she wanted him. She blushed now to recall just how wantonly insistent she had been and just how femininely persuasive as she had eagerly caressed his body. Not that he had needed very much persuasion. She winced as she moved and felt her own body's sharp response to the intensity of the long hours of lovemaking they had shared.