It Started With... Collection. Miranda Lee

with a mustard-gold camisole. The jacket still had long sleeves but that didn’t matter yet. Sydney’s weather was still overcast and cool.

      She laid it across the bed then rummaged around till she found matching cream shoes and bag. The jewellery box on the dressing table revealed a pearl choker with matching earrings. Not real pearls, of course, but still classy-looking. This time she would put her hair up in a more severe fashion, showing her throat and ears. To compensate, she would wear more make-up, paying particular attention to her eyes and mouth. Rachel knew she had nice eyes. And Justin seemed fascinated with her mouth.

      Oh, and she would wear perfume. One of the expensive French fragrances Isabel had always favoured. Rachel had already noticed several not quite empty bottles in the wall cupboard above the main vanity unit. She would experiment with a new one each day and find out which one Justin seemed to like the most, then go and buy herself a bottle.

      Stripping down to her underwear, she tried on the cream linen suit, pleased to see that it fitted very well, a surprise, considering she was considerably slimmer around the hips and waist than Isabel. Perhaps Isabel had bought it last year when she’d been dieting. The cami was much too tight around the bust, however, so Rachel took it off, discarded her bra and tried it on again.

      With her full breasts settled lower on her chest the top felt less tight, but, as Rachel walked over to check her reflection in the cheval mirror on the back of the wardrobe door, the satin rubbing over her naked nipples had them puckering into pebble-like peaks. She winced at the sight of their provocative outline, which screamed her lack of underwear, plus her constant arousal. Would she dare wear it like this? And would she dare take off her jacket?

      Oh, yes, she accepted as another wave of heat flooded her body.

      She dared.

      She would dare anything after today!

       CHAPTER TWELVE

      JUSTIN glanced up at the office wall clock for the umpteenth time that afternoon. Almost five. His pulse quickened at the thought that soon he could abandon any pretence of working and do what he’d been desperately wanting to do all day: have sex with Rachel.

      Just the thought of it sent his blood racing through his body.

      But then another less happy thought intruded. It was Friday again. For the next two days he would not see Rachel at all; could not thrill to the exquisite anticipation of knowing that at the end of the day she would let him remove all her clothes to draw her naked and trembling into his arms.

      Last weekend had been almost unendurable without her. This weekend would probably be worse. Justin resolved to keep her with him later than usual tonight. She wouldn’t mind. She enjoyed what they were doing just as much as he did, a fact that soothed his conscience somewhat. If he ever thought that what they were doing together was hurting her in any sense he would have to stop.

      But could he stop, even if his conscience demanded it? That was the question. He had difficulty at the moment doing without her for two days. The prospect of never having sex with Rachel again was an idea he didn’t want to address.

      Another glance at the clock showed it was finally five o’clock.

      His heartbeat took off.

      It was time.

      Rachel’s head snapped up from her computer with a gasp when Justin wrenched open his office door right on the dot of five. She’d been pretending to herself that she hadn’t noticed the time, pretending to be working.

      But that was all it was. Pretence. She lived for this moment every day. It was what she dressed for. And undressed for. It was why each afternoon at four-thirty she rose to lock the outside door, then go to the ladies’ room to make preparations for just this moment. For the last half-hour she’d been sitting there with her panties stuffed in her top drawer and no underwear of any kind covering her bare buttocks and upper thighs. Stay-up stockings had long replaced her pantyhose. She also rarely wore a bra these days, having quickly grown addicted to the feel of silk linings against her bare skin, plus the aphrodisiacal effect of knowing she was naked underneath her clothes.

      Their eyes locked across the room and her surroundings slowly began to recede. Suddenly there was only him, and the way he was looking at her.

      ‘Get yourself in here, Rachel,’ he ordered, his impatience echoed in the tightness of his neck muscles.

      Her legs felt like lead as she levered herself up from her desk and walked, like some programmed robot, into his office. Yet inside she was anything but a cold-blooded machine. She was all heat and hyped-up nerve-endings. Her head was spinning like a top and her heart was pounding behind her chest wall.

      The speed with which he yanked up her skirt then hoisted her up onto his desk punched all the breath from Rachel’s body. He was between her legs in a flash, unzipping his trousers and freeing his rather angry-looking erection. Her body was ripe and ready for him, needing no foreplay. His hands grasped her hips, his fingertips digging into her skin as he scooped her bottom to the very edge of the desk and drove into her to the hilt. With a grunt of satisfaction he set up a powerful pumping action, his eyes grimacing shut, his lips drawing back over gritted teeth. Rachel leant back and braced herself by gripping the back edge of the desk, but even so her bottom slid back and forth across the smoothly polished desk-top.

      Something—possibly the fact he hadn’t even kissed her first—got to Rachel, and suddenly she wanted him to stop.

      The trouble was…her body didn’t want him to stop. It had a mind of its own. Frantic for release, it was. And ruthlessly determined in its quest, pushing aside any gathering qualms and ignoring the danger warnings. Her libido remained recklessly separated from her heart as pre-climactic sensations began to build and the need to come became all-consuming.

      Her belly tightened. As did her thighs. Her bottom. Her insides. He groaned in response to her involuntary squeezing and then they were both splintering apart, their cries of erotic ecstasy echoing in the stillness of the room. His back arched back as he shuddered into her whilst she gripped the edge of the desk so hard her fingers went white.

      But the spasms of pleasure passed, as they always did, and this time Rachel came back down to earth with a terrible thud.

      The reality of what they were doing together could no longer be denied. It was beneath her, carrying on like this. So why was she settling for such an arrangement? Why?

      The reason was obvious, she accepted with considerable anguish. The reason had always been obvious, if she’d looked for it. The reason was at this moment still inside her body, his arms wound tightly around her waist, his head resting between her sweat-slicked breasts.

      It was then that she started to cry.

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      ‘I THOUGHT you said you were never going to take me out to dinner,’ she said with curiosity—and something else—in her voice. Was it hope?

      Rachel’s unexpectedly breaking down into tears after the episode on the desk had jolted Justin out of his selfish desires, and made him take a long, hard look at what he’d been doing. He wasn’t a complete fool, or a bastard, even if he’d been acting like one. It didn’t take him long to realise that a woman of Rachel’s standards and sensitivity couldn’t indulge her sexual self indefinitely without her emotions—and her conscience—eventually becoming involved. She claimed she was all right, and that she often cried after she came.

      But she never had before.

      She’d said through her sobs that she didn’t want him to stop, but to continue in the face of her distress was something he simply could not do. He hadn’t sunk that low.

      So he’d comforted her as best he could, then announced