A Little Seduction Omnibus Read online

  ‘No, he’s not; he’s squinting because the sun’s in his eyes,’ Dee corrected her, but for some reason her own heart had given a funny little throb as Hugo had turned his head and appeared to look over in their direction. She knew perfectly well what her companion had meant when she’d tried to find the words to describe Hugo’s sexual appeal.

  ‘Lord, but I think I’d die if he ever actually spoke to me. I mean, Hugo Montpelier. The man...the hunk...the dreamboat. He could have any girl he wanted, but he doesn’t sleep around and he doesn’t have a steady. One of the third years actually tried to ask him out, but he said that he didn’t have time and that he was too busy. He’s quite definitely hetero, though, no doubt about that. One of the girls taking Modern Languages told me that she’d managed to get a snog with him at one of last term’s parties and that it was just to die for. She said she practically felt she might have an orgasm there and then, on the spot...’

  Dee looked away. Her own sex drive was healthy enough, but her upbringing had been slightly old-fashioned. She had had dates, kissed boys, that kind of thing, and she knew that when she fell in love there would be no holding back from her, but she knew too that her passionate nature meant that she would only feel safe and secure giving herself completely in a relationship if she knew that her feelings were returned. Casual sexual experimentation, playful dabbling in the shallow waters of sexual curiosity were not for her. She was made for the deep, dangerous ocean, the primitive, primal life force of a sexuality that commanded and demanded total commitment from both sides—total commitment and total love.

  But that did not mean that she was totally immune to the powerful aura of Hugo Montpelier’s strongly male sexuality. He wore it like a banner, proudly and fiercely, and yet at the same time he wore it like a shield, protectively and defensively. Dee had heard all the gossip and speculation about him, the excited girl-chat that went on in the hyped-up, female-hormone-drenched atmosphere of their first-year halls. She had listened to the fevered and feverish uninhibited fantasies of her peers, which ranged from the foolishly idiotic to the frankly obscene.

  Less than two months into her first term at university, she might still physically be a virgin but mentally her sexual knowledge had been expanded in a way that quite frankly had left her feeling slightly shocked.

  One of the fantasies she had heard expressed regarding Hugo was whether he could last long enough to fully satisfy an excited pair of girls who had graphically described just what they would like to do with him if they had him in bed with them, and just what they would like him to do with them.

  ‘Didn’t you know? It’s every man’s special fantasy,’ one girl had purred when she had seen Dee’s shocked expression. ‘And I should know,’ she had added tellingly, grinning at Dee. ‘Ask my twin sister. There isn’t a man alive who doesn’t think that he’s got what it takes to satisfy two women at the same time.’

  ‘Nor a woman alive who doesn’t know that he hasn’t,’ another girl had muttered sardonically to Dee as she’d overheard the other girl’s remark.

  Three-in-a-bed romps might be what were in the minds of some of the girls who drooled over Hugo, but so far it seemed that none of them had managed to persuade him to join them. He had been seen escorting one girl, but she had simply turned out to be a friend of a friend and already virtually engaged, and he had been seen at a drinks party escorting the daughter of one of the university’s Chairs, but she had since gone to America to finish her education.

  ‘So it’s open season on him,’ one girl had declared gleefully. ‘And don’t forget, whoever gets him, we all want a full report...’

  Dee had left at that point. She wasn’t a prude but... But what? But the images the others’ comments had conjured up in her brain were far too private to be acknowledged, never mind shared. Not that Hugo was likely to ask her out. She suspected that she simply wouldn’t be his type. He was so popular, so sought after, that no doubt when he did date a girl he would choose one who...who what? Who would make no bones about the fact that she was quite happy to jump into bed with him and have sex with him simply for sex’s sake? Whilst she, Dee... No, they would have nothing in common.

  Three days later, as though fate had overheard her and decided to teach her a lesson, she found out just how wrong her judgement had been.

  There she was, riding her hired bicycle across the cobbles, struggling to control it, when Hugo came racing round the side of the building, the full weight of his body hitting her sideways on.

  Neither she nor the cycle had stood any chance. He was six feet three and a sportsman, she was five feet nine and slim, the cycle was nearly twenty years old and rheumaticky; the result was inevitable. Regrettably the cycle, venerably ancient though it was, was left to fend for itself whilst Hugo went to Dee’s rescue.

  She was picked up, carefully dusted off, and even more carefully inspected for damage, and all the time Hugo was apologising to her in his deep rough voice that made her feel rather as if a cat was licking her skin with its rough tongue. But his hands as he touched her were anything but rough; he was so careful and tender with her. Her shirt, a neatly buttoned-up affair, had a rip in it and her jeans had dirt stains down one side. The combs had fallen out of her hair and there was a nasty patch of grazing on her index and middle fingers, where they had come into contact with the gravel, but otherwise she was all right—as Dee gravely assured Hugo.

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ he said in relief. ‘For a moment I thought I might really have hurt you.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Dee felt bound to point out. It was very chivalrous of him to shoulder all the blame, especially when both of them knew that she shouldn’t really have been cycling where she had.

  ‘Look, I was on my way to a meeting, but would you let me buy you a coffee? You never know,’ he told her gravely, ‘you could be suffering from shock.’

  There was no ‘could be’ about it, Dee admitted inwardly, though her shock wasn’t caused by her fall but by the fact that he had actually offered to buy her a coffee, which must mean...

  ‘You have hurt yourself,’ she heard Hugo saying tersely as he suddenly caught sight of her fingers.

  ‘Oh, my hand—that’s nothing,’ Dee denied, trying to tuck her grazed fingers out of sight behind her back just in case he decided that their gravel-pitted state meant that she wasn’t fit to be seen in a coffee shop.

  ‘Nothing...let me see.’

  Before she could stop him he had taken hold of her hand and was gravely inspecting it. Dee wasn’t small, and her hands were elegantly long and fine-boned, although when compared with Hugo’s they suddenly looked almost deliciously frail and feminine.

  Her heart tripping excitedly against her ribs, Dee watched as he carefully brushed away the bits of gravel adhering to her skin.

  ‘This should really be cleaned,’ he told her gravely. ‘I’ve got rid of all the gravel, but...’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Dee started to say, and then stopped, unable to speak, unable to draw breath, unable to do anything as Hugo lifted her fingers to his mouth and slowly and carefully started to suck on them.

  Dee felt as though she was going to faint. The sensation was just so unbelievable, the warmth, the wetness, the slow, rhythmic sucking movement of his mouth.

  She tried to protest, and managed to make a sound that came out like a small whimper, the merest breath, more easily recognisable as one of intense appreciation than one of protest.

  Much later Hugo told her that he hadn’t initially meant his action to be sexual. He had simply been genuinely concerned about the state of her hand and had reacted promptly and very much in the fashion of his own practical, prosaic country-bred mother, who had, when he was a small child, often ‘cured’ small childhood cut fingers and bruises with a cleansing maternal lick.

  ‘All mother animals do it,’ he told Dee simply.

  �
��Yes,’ she agreed, doe-eyed, ‘but you weren’t...you aren’t my mother.’

  ‘No,’ he conceded, ‘I’m not your mother.’ And then he gently continued with what he had been doing, which was peeling her pretty lace bra away from the fullness of her breasts so that he could expose the dark pink crests to his ardent gaze and even more ardent mouth...

  Although the area of the campus they were in when the accident happened was normally a busy one, today, for some unaccountable reason, no one else seemed to be around and they were, to all intents and purposes, alone, so that there was no one else to hear the small anguished sound of shocked virginal pleasure that Dee made, nor the totally male, all-male, all-possessive look that Hugo gave her in response. His gesture might not have begun nor been intended as sexually erotic, but by the time he slowly relinquished her fingers neither of them was in any doubt as to what it was or how it was affecting them—nor what it portended. Peter’s meeting—their shared destination—was forgotten.

  Dee walked at Hugo’s side in a daze as he guided her, guarded her almost, keeping her body protectively and possessively close to his own, towards the café. Her bike he had disposed of, propped up against a wall. She would, no doubt, have to pay a hefty fine to the firm she had rented it from for the damage caused, inflicted on its ancient frame, but Dee didn’t care. Quite simply she wasn’t capable of caring about anything or anyone right now, and nor was Hugo.

  The café Hugo chose was small and dark, smelling richly of fresh ground beans and thick with cigarette smoke. He guided her downstairs to its dimly lit cellar and to a small table tucked away in a natural alcove, his body shielding her from anyone’s curious or predatory gaze.

  He ordered for them both, a cappuccino for her and a coffee, plain, black and strong, for himself.

  ‘I got used to drinking it like this last summer, when I was doing volunteer work in Africa,’ he told her when their coffee arrived.

  A simple enough statement, and yet it proved to be both the cornerstone and the basic foundation on which they went on to build their relationship, promoting between them a sense of shared purpose, an intimacy which Dee, with her upbringing, might have found very difficult to reach out for had they taken the route of learning about one another simply through their sexual desire for one another.

  Much, much easier for her to let down her guard and express a very natural and enthusiastic interest in his voluntary work than to respond to him or acknowledge her sexual awareness of him. Much easier for her to be herself, to show herself and all the charming complexities of her delicately drawn personality through the questions he then asked her in return than if he had only been able to communicate with her through the guarded protective response she might have made to merely sexual overtures—which was not to say that there was no mental or verbal communication between them; there was, very much so. It surrounded them almost visibly and physically, crating so powerful an aura that the girl bringing them their second and then their third cups of coffee sighed enviously as she went back to the kitchen to tell the girls there about the pair of besotted lovers sitting at one of their tables.

  They talked for so long that they missed Peter’s meeting completely.

  ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ Hugo told Dee as they left the coffee shop and stood together on the busy street outside. ‘There’s so much I want to tell you...so much I want you to tell me. I want to know everything there is to know about you, right from the day you were born.’

  Dee laughed, flushed, and then laughed again, before protesting, ‘Oh, but that would take all night.’ And then she flushed again, but it wasn’t embarrassment that was making her skin glow so warmly. It was the way she was feeling inside, just thinking about what it would be like to spend the night with Hugo.

  She saw that Hugo was smiling, a male glittery smile that made her heart flip over. It made him look so dangerous, so attractive...so...so...sexy...

  ‘So...?’ he whispered.

  ‘I...’ Dee felt herself floundering, flustered and incoherent as she fought for some semblance of adult sophistication, some slick answer that would defuse the exciting tension building up between them.

  But where another and more experienced girl might have teased, tongue-in-cheek—‘so...persuade me’—all Dee could manage was a stammered, ‘I can’t... I don’t...’ She stopped and shook her head, and then told him with honest simplicity, ‘I don’t do things like that.’ She saw his eyes widen before he gave her a swift, comprehensive look that rested on her mouth, her breasts, and then lower, before returning to her eyes.

  ‘What...not ever?’ he asked her gruffly.

  From somewhere Dee found the courage to meet his eyes and hold his steady look.

  ‘Not ever,’ she confirmed.

  ‘The tribe I was working with last summer have a tradition that whilst a girl has to marry a man chosen by her family she has the right to choose for herself the man who will be her first lover. It’s considered the greatest honour a woman can bestow on a man, to choose him and to choose him out of love, to bestow on him her love and herself, and I happen to agree.’

  Dee could feel herself starting to tremble, while her body had become taut with responsive desire.

  ‘Of course, some of the men get a little bit impatient waiting to be chosen, and then they snatch away the girl of their choice in case she chooses someone else. They seduce her with gifts and kisses.’

  His voice was dropping as he spoke to her, becoming lower and raw. Dee made a little husky sound of protest, and as her lips parted Hugo warned her thickly, ‘Don’t do that. Otherwise I shall be the one stealing you away. Have dinner with me tonight,’ he begged her abruptly, and then, when she hesitated, he told her, ‘You needn’t worry. I’m not suggesting... It will be somewhere safely public,’ he told her gravely, ‘for both our sakes. The way I feel about you...’ He stopped and shook his head.

  ‘In Africa a man considers himself to be very much a man, and his woman very much his woman, very, very responsive to him, and their love a sacred thing if she conceives his child the first time they make love. Here, in our so-called civilisation, things are different.

  ‘Once you were in my arms I know that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from responding to man’s most basic instinctive urge, to bury myself as deep inside you as I could, to give my seed, give our child the very best chance it could have of being conceived. And I know, too, that that would be the very worst thing that could happen to it and us right now... I’ve seen students struggling with domesticity and a baby. It doesn’t work,’ he told her flatly.

  Dee was too shaken by his earlier comments to say anything. Deep down inside her body she could feel her own very basic response to him, and she knew that what he’d said had touched a deep cord within her.

  Of course she didn’t want to get pregnant. Of course she didn’t. But of course she did—oh, how she did. But she couldn’t...wouldn’t...

  ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say to you?’ Hugo was asking her tenderly. ‘Dinner is all that I can let myself give you tonight, Dee, even though it’s very far from all I want to give you. Very, very far. So will you, please, please have dinner with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dee responded simply.

  After she left him she made a detour on her way back home to call at her doctor’s surgery and ask for an appointment to discuss birth control. She knew she was blushing as she made her request, but the receptionist was completely matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

  Dee knew that most of her fellow students were using one form of birth control or another.

  ‘You can’t leave it up to the men,’ one of her house-sharers had commented bluntly as she had hunted in the bathroom for the small white pill she had lost as it popped out of the packet. ‘After all, they are our bodies, and we’re the ones who have the right to decide.’

  ‘The righ
t and the responsibility,’ another girl had chimed in, a little bitterly. ‘The two go hand in hand.’

  * * *

  Hand in hand... Dee looked down at where her hand was linked with Hugo’s.

  To her relief none of the others had been there when he had come to collect her.

  ‘Nice place,’ he commented as Dee closed the front door behind them. ‘Must be quite pricey to rent, though, even sharing...’

  ‘Not really...and it isn’t rented. I’m actually buying it,’ Dee told him casually. ‘It’s a good investment. Dad is helping me. I haven’t made my mind up yet, but I may keep it on even when I’ve finished my degree course. The rental I could get will cover the mortgage and the running costs, and property prices are rising at the moment, so... In fact, I think it could be an idea to buy a few more, but to do that I’d have to ask Dad to let me break into my trust fund and I’m not sure—’

  ‘Your trust fund?’ Hugo gave her a sharp look. ‘Now you’re scaring me. That sounds like pretty serious money.’

  Dee stopped walking to look uncertainly at him. She didn’t normally speak so unguardedly to people about her personal background, but she felt so relaxed with him, and besides, he had talked about his days at public school and his own background, so she had assumed that his parents were financially well off.

  Now it seemed she had been wrong.

  ‘My family is land-rich but money-poor,’ he told her dryly, correctly interpreting the questioning uncertainty in her eyes. ‘They’re rich in family connections and the ability to trace the family tree back to the Norman Conquest. There is money—yes—but it doesn’t run to providing each of us with our own private trust funds...’

  ‘Oh, but my father did that because without him I’d be on my own,’ Dee protested, anxious to defuse what she feared was going to become a thorny issue between them.

  ‘Yes, I can understand that,’ Hugo responded gently. ‘If you were mine I would want to protect and safeguard you too. I’m just surprised that he allowed you to come to university. From the sound of it I imagine he would have preferred to have you privately educated at home.’