The Friendship Barrier Page 9

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  It was gone six o’clock before she finally finished all the dictation Jake had given her, her mind and body both bruised and aching with pain.

  It was only as she went upstairs that she remembered the formal dinner. Jake had made no mention to her of his other guests, and she could only presume that they were local people who had perhaps known his parents. She knew that in the past Jake had toyed with the idea of opening a branch of the partnership locally, but, as far as she knew, this was still only a ‘maybe’. Perhaps tonight’s dinner had some bearing on that.

  Tired to the point where all she really wanted was sleep, Stephanie showered and washed her hair, twisting it up into a complicated pleat. Not wanting to crease her new outfit, she sat in front of the mirror in her camiknickers to do her makeup. The slight tan she had gained during the summer gave her legs enough colour for her not to need tights or stockings, and, as she applied deft touches of eyeshadow to enhance the colour and size of her eyes, she tried not to look at the provocative way the spotted net cups of her underwear outlined her breasts. The silk satin clung lovingly to every curve of her body, the back dipping down to the base of her spine. Never would she have chosen such an article of clothing herself, and several times she was tempted to take it off. Only the knowledge that if she did she would not be able to wear a bra stopped her, and when she had finally finished applying her makeup she was forced to acknowledge that the natural flush of colour staining her cheeks owed its presence almost entirely to her own unease with what she was wearing.

  Once she had dressed in her evening suit, she felt a little happier. The high neckline at the front was reassuringly formal, although she hadn’t realised how restricting the straight skirt would be when she walked. A final glance in the mirror assured her that her appearance was as elegantly formal as it should be, and then she was on her way downstairs.

  Jake, as she had expected, was already in the drawing room, standing in front of the fire. Evening clothes suited him, and, although she had seen him in them on countless occasions before, this was the first time she had been so intensely aware of him. Her pulses fluttered warningly as she crossed the room, accepting the glass of sherry he poured for her.

  ‘What time are the others expected?’ she asked, her eyes drawn against her will to the deft movements of his fingers as he replaced the crystal stopper in the decanter.

  ‘There are no others.’

  ‘No others… but you said we were dining formally…’

  ‘That’s right. So we are,’ Jake agreed, flicking back his cuff to glance at his watch. ‘Mrs Kettering warned me that the cheese soufflé she’s prepared doesn’t like to be kept waiting, so if you’re ready…’

  Half a dozen questions clamoured for answers, but, before she could ask even a single one of them, Stephanie was reduced to suffocating silence by the warm pressure of Jake’s hand against the small of her back. Her skin seemed to tingle where he touched it, an intense heat spreading out from his fingers to every centimetre of her skin.

  The dining room of Mile End was decorated in a mixture of reds and gold. Silverware and crystal gleamed softly on the polished table and Stephanie had the bemused feeling that she had suddenly been transported to another world. Why on earth had Jake gone to all this trouble to eat with her? She couldn’t count the number of meals she had shared with him, and yet this was the first time they had dined together formally. Why?

  The warm pressure of his hand increased as he pulled out her chair for her and, when it was removed, Stephanie felt oddly bereft. Dazedly, she was aware of Jake pouring her a glass of wine and of Mrs Kettering wheeling in a heated food trolley.

  ‘Souffl?’ Stephanie was suddenly aware that Mrs Kettering had gone, and nodded her head slowly.

  ‘Jake… what is this?’ she asked when he had served them both. ‘You told me… that is, I thought… Jake, what’s happening to us?’ she asked urgently, pushing away her food untouched. ‘We were friends, but now…’

  ‘You’re trying to hold on to something that no longer exists, Stephanie,’ he told her brutally. Yes, we were friends, but, as friendships go, ours involved certain restraints. For instance, we were never friends in the way that two men could have been friends.’

  When she opened her mouth to protest, he added sardonically, ‘You don’t agree? If we had been you wouldn’t have objected to my discussing my sex life with you, would you, but, as I recall, that subject was taboo. You didn’t even want to acknowledge that I had a sex life, did you?’

  ‘Jake, please…’ Agitated and upset, Stephanie took a deep gulp of her wine. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Why? You can’t spend the rest of your life ignoring subjects you don’t like, Stephanie, and, as for tonight, well, let’s just say that I’m celebrating the end of one era and the beginning of another.’ When he saw her expression, he laughed cynically. ‘You don’t even know what I mean, do you?’

  ‘The food…’ Stephanie protested feebly, dragging her eyes away from his. ‘Mrs Kettering must have gone to so much trouble…’

  ‘And you’re so hungry,’ he mocked, eyeing her untouched soufflé. ‘Very well, then… by all means let’s eat first and then talk later…’

  He served her with chicken breast cooked in a rich cream sauce and accompanied by a selection of beautifully prepared vegetables, but Stephanie felt as though she would choke with every mouthful. Her stomach was tense with nervous dread. What was there to talk about? ‘An end of an era’ Jake had said. Did that mean he was going to fire her? Sick with misery she watched Jake clean his plate, numbly refusing dessert or cheese and biscuits. When Jake reached for the bottle of brandy, she shook her head.

  ‘No, I forgot, you don’t like the taste, do you?’ he said softly, and for some reason he recapped the bottle without pouring any for himself either.

  ‘Why aren’t you having any?’ She half stammered the question, seizing on anything that would put off the dreaded moment when they would have to talk.

  ‘Why?’ Jake got up and walked towards her, his hands resting on her chair, compelling her to stand up and face him, and give in to the insistent pressure of his fingers round her arm.

  ‘Let’s go into the drawing room. We’ll talk about it in there.’

  Feeling her tension increase with every footstep, Stephanie followed him. The drawing room fire had been lit, and its flames and a single lamp were all that illuminated the gracious room. When she would have chosen one of the chairs beside the fire, Jake drew her down alongside him on the deep settee. Coils of nervous dread writhed through her stomach, the effort of trying to appear cool and composed draining her of every shred of energy.

  ‘Now,’ Jake said lightly without releasing her, ‘tonight I intend to disabuse you of any ideas you might still have that we are “friends”, Stephanie.’ He ignored her gasp of pain, and continued evenly. ‘When I think of you, I don’t so much see a “friend” as a very desirable woman. Would you like to feel what you do to me?’ Before she could protest, he had taken her hands and placed them beneath his jacket. Against her palm, she could feel the furious racing of his heart and, when she lifted her head, his eyes glittered back a message of unmistakable desire.

  ‘Jake…’ She said his name hesitantly… wonderingly, almost. ‘And I didn’t have a brandy because you don’t like the taste of it… and, besides, you’re intoxicating enough.’ Stephanie thought she heard him mutter as his hands slid up to cup her face and his mouth descended to fasten compellingly over hers, communicating a depth of hunger that part of her registered as being acutely intense enough for him to feed her own famished senses, hurtling them both dangerously close to complete loss of control.

  ‘Jake…’ Her lips were almost too swollen and tender to form his name when he finally released her. Beneath her palms, his chest rose and fell unevenly, his heartbeat striking against her with hammer blows. If anything, the grey glitter darkening his eyes had intensified, and the mouth, that only that weekend she had recognised as
intensely passionate, bore nearly as much evidence of their kiss as her own. Wondering, she reached out and touched it, tracing the male curves, quivering tensely with a mingling of awe and wonder. Fierce hard need tensed his body, his lips parting to touch her finger, his teeth nibbling gently.

  ‘Stephanie.’ His hand left her face to pull her own closer to his mouth, his tongue stroking roughly across her palm.

  ‘Stephanie, I want you and you want me, too…’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Yes. Do you think I haven’t seen the way you’ve been looking at me recently? Do you think I’m immune to it…?’

  ‘I haven’t been looking at you any differently,’ Stephanie lied.

  ‘Oh yes, you have. Whether you’re willing to admit it to yourself or not, you’ve been visualising me as your lover…’

  ‘No!’ Her sharp protest brought a fiercely heated flare of response to his eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he told her, watching her. She gasped, a long shuddering moan that proved his point more easily than a thousand words as he lifted his head and trailed his tongue down along the curve of her throat. Shivers of pleasure radiated through her body, her skin tormentingly aware of him.

  ‘Now,’ he mocked tauntingly. His teeth nipped at her ear, one hand resting on her back while the other traced the shape of her jaw line and teased the arching line of her throat. ‘Kiss me, Stephanie. When you walked in here tonight, you looked at me as though you couldn’t wait to feel my skin beneath your fingers. Touch me with that wanting now… Do it, damn you,’ he swore against her ear. ‘Prove to me that you’ve got the courage to be a woman. You want me, Stephanie. Have the guts to admit it.’

  His words had a similar effect on her body to his earlier kiss. She was trembling with reaction and a hunger she didn’t want to name. The mental pictures conjured up by Jake’s words tormented and taunted. Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt; trembled against them, and then withdrew. She closed her eyes as she heard Jake curse and move restlessly. ‘There,’ he muttered hoarsely, pulling her back against him, her hands crushed against the naked heat of his chest. ‘There, does that make it easier for you?’ He had thrown off his jacket and unfastened his shirt down to the waist. Dazedly, Stephanie let her gaze drift over the tanned planes of his body, her fingers nervously smoothing the dark tangle of body hair that arrowed sharply down over his flat stomach, stopping only when Jake moaned a harsh protest, trapping her hand against his skin.

  ‘You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re doing to me, do you?’ he demanded rawly. ‘Stephanie, Stephanie… I’ve been going mad for the feel and taste of you… waiting for just a sign that you were aware of me as a man.’

  ‘Jake…’

  ‘Don’t talk—not now. I can’t even formulate a single, co-ordinated thought right now. I’ve hungered for this, Stephanie… ached for it… it’s been like a sickness dammed up inside me. Right from the first moment you walked into my office, I knew I wanted you… and we would have been lovers, too, if it hadn’t been for those…’ He uttered a word that half-shocked her, and then said tautly, ‘I wanted to kill them for what they did to you… and God knows how many times I’ve wanted to kill you these last two years… I couldn’t even touch you without you flinching away…’

  ‘You’re touching me now,’ Stephanie pointed out in a husky whisper, more stunned than she wanted him to see by his revelations. Why had she never seen that he wanted her? Because he hadn’t allowed her to see. He had cloaked his desire for her in friendship, and not allowed her to see beyond that friendship. Because she hadn’t wanted to see. Because she hadn’t dared to admit that Jake merely wanted her as he had wanted so many other women and that, once his desire for her was sated, there would be no place in his life for her. Alarm stirred to life inside her. She couldn’t let this go any further. But Jake’s hand had slipped inside her dress, reaching round to cup her breast over the thin net. His thumb stroked over her nipple and all thoughts of resisting were forgotten.

  ‘I’m touching you now because I know that you want me to,’ Jake told her huskily. ‘You do want me to, don’t you, Stephanie?’

  ‘No… yes…’ she admitted feebly as his probing thumb brought such exquisite sensations of pleasure coursing through her body she could barely formulate the simple word.

  ‘Let me take this thing off.’

  Knowing she should protest and yet somehow unable to do so, Stephanie let him ease the top of her suit over her head before he eased down the zip of her skirt, quickly dispensing with it.

  ‘I’m surprised you bothered to go to all the trouble of telling me to dress formally when this was what you had in mind,’ she managed to say dryly when he held her satin-clad body in his arms.

  ‘I knew it was the only way I’d get to see you in this.’ His hands smoothed the satin over the curves of her waist and hips. ‘And I wanted to see you in it, Stephanie.’ His hands reached up and pulled the securing pins from her hair so that it tumbled down round her shoulders. For one breathless moment, her eyes met Jake’s, her body taking fire from what she read there. She had never before had occasion to think of herself as anything even approaching reckless, but she knew in that instant that she was and that she was going to give in to the reckless impulse to be tonight whatever Jake wanted her to be, and to take whatever she could from life without pausing to count the cost or think about tomorrow. As though he knew her thoughts, Jake made a muffled sound somewhere between a groan and a curse, and then his tongue was probing her lips, and they were opening to his touch. Exploration gave way to fierce possession as he fed hungrily on the moist yielding of her mouth, pulling her into the hard curves of his body until they were lying side by side on the settee. The fingers of one hand splayed possessively over her waist, while those of the other tangled in her hair, holding her mouth captive beneath his.

  ‘Touch me, Stephanie,’ he insisted hoarsely, when he finally released her lips, his teeth still biting compulsively into their softness, as though he couldn’t bear to let her go. ‘Feel what you do to me.’

  Closing her eyes, Stephanie placed her hands against his skin, absorbing the damp heat of it, feeling the thunder of his heart. Jake groaned, his thumb stroking urgently over her nipple, his hand in her hair, compelling her face into the curve of his shoulder. Her lips touched his skin, registering the shudders of pleasure her touch evoked. She had never dreamed that Jake could lose control like this. She had always known somehow that he would be a skilled lover, but she realised she had visualised him as a remote one, giving pleasure, and taking it, but always remaining aloof, apart. This Jake who moaned her name while his skin turned fever hot beneath her touch; who kissed her with a hunger she couldn’t gauge, who trembled when he touched her body, was not the Jake she had visualised. Was he like this with Susy? Jealousy seared through her, burning into her bones, kniving agonisingly through her stomach. She couldn’t bear the thought of him touching any other woman. Her fingers curled into his skin, her nails raking lightly against it in mute protest.

  ‘You’re driving me mad, do you know that?’ Jake’s hands slid to her hips, pressing her into the hardness of his thighs, letting her feel the tide of arousal sweeping through him, making her ache with a physical pain she hadn’t known was possible.

  The firelight threw shadows of gold and red over his skin.

  ‘Tonight I’m going to make love to you, Stephanie. You want me to, don’t you?’

  Warning bells penetrated the miasma of jealousy and desire enveloping her. If she admitted that she wanted him to make love to her, wouldn’t Jake guess that she loved him? Despite all he had said about wanting her, he had never mentioned love; and then there was Susy… Susy who had shared his life and his bed… Susy whom he openly admitted he desired…

  ‘I…’

  ‘Your body wants me,’ Jake told her thickly, the sound of his voice muffled as his mouth explored the soft skin just below the neckline of her lace top. Fireworks exploded inside her, making her arch instin
ctively, her breasts lifting and swelling in open desire. The delicate touch of Jake’s fingers as he gradually drew away the neckline of her underwear was almost more than she could stand. When his lips finally began to explore the smooth slope of her breasts she tensed in expectation, desire twisting and coiling through her stomach.

  ‘You want me, admit it.’ His tongue traced a circle round her nipple, making her ache with the intensity of her need. Her fingers slid into his hair, her body arching hungrily against his mouth. ‘Tell me you want me…’

  ‘I want you…’ the admission burst past her lips, followed by a wave of fear so great that she added feverishly, ‘I want you, Jake and I don’t deny it, but it’s only physical desire, I… don’t feel anything else for you.’

  ‘Only physical desire,’ his voice was suddenly ice-cold and, to Stephanie’s shock, he suddenly thrust her away, sitting up and running his fingers through his hair. In the half light it was impossible for her to see the expression in his eyes, and despite the warmth of the fire, she shivered. ‘It seems to me that I’ve made a miscalculation somewhere.’

  ‘What did you want me to say?’ Stephanie demanded tautly, not knowing why she had to torment herself by saying the words, but saying them nevertheless, ‘That I love you?’

  ‘Well, my ego would certainly have appreciated hearing that after waiting two years to get you into my arms.’

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve wanted me for all that time,’ Stephanie threw at him, quivering with rejection and loss. ‘You’re just using me as a substitute for Susy, and because… because… like all men you can’t bear to think that there’s a woman who’s immune to you.’

  In the dense silence that followed, Stephanie felt she could almost hear the foundations of their friendship cracking, and it gave her no consolation to know she had contributed to its destruction.

  Without answering her Jake started to fasten his shirt. ‘Look, let’s forget this whole thing happened.’ His voice was totally without expression.