Lingering Shadows. PENNY JORDAN

sign of Giles. The house was so quiet that she even wondered if he had perhaps gone and left her, but when she went to the window and looked out she could just about make out the outline of the car in the darkness.

      She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She had been through this often enough before to know what it was all about, she reminded herself as she walked downstairs.

      So why was she feeling so nervous … so on edge?

      She had almost reached the bottom step when the kitchen door opened and Giles appeared. He had changed too, and his hair was damp as though he had showered. He must, she realised on a small spurt of shock, have used one of the other rooms.

      ‘Supper’s ready,’ he told her.

      Supper was ready. Lucy stared at him. What had he done? Certainly he could not have sent out for a takeaway, not here.

      ‘I thought we’d eat in the sitting-room,’ he added a little uncertainly.

      Lucy nodded, for once lost for words.

      An hour later, greedily eating the last of her chocolate mousse, she admitted to herself that she was impressed.

      The food, which, Giles had told her shyly, he had brought with him in a hamper from London, had been wildly delicious and, she suspected, wildly expensive. There had been champagne, pink champagne, which she knew others looked down on, but which she loved.

      They had started the meal with tiny wild strawberries, and then there had been delicious cold salmon served with delicately flavoured salads, a sorbet laced with something alcoholic, and then proper, darkly bitter chocolate mousse, and she had greedily eaten both hers and Giles’s.

      It had been food chosen not for a man but for a woman, and again she was confused by Giles’s sensitivity in so accurately gauging her tastes.

      Now, curled up on the settee while Giles removed the remains of their meal, she felt relaxed and replete. She felt, she recognised on a sudden startled stab of awareness, happy.

      The scented candles Giles had lit while they ate still burned, filled the room with their fragrance, warm and musky. She breathed it in sensuously.

      She was wearing a simple shift dress, simple in design, that was. It had been perilously expensive, so soft and fragile that all she was able to wear underneath it was a tiny pair of briefs.

      Now as she moved into a more comfortable position on the settee she was aware of the sudden sharp peaking of her nipples, and the slow unfolding ache of desire inside her.

      When Giles came back she smiled languorously at him, her eyes narrowed and mysterious. He came across to her, leaning over her. His hand cupped her face. It felt good against her skin, cool and firm. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, tentatively, hesitantly almost. She let her lips part, rubbing the tip of his thumb with her tongue, her eyes closing sensuously, but there was nothing calculated or deliberate about the gesture, she was genuinely aroused, and as she arched up towards Giles she heard him mutter thickly. ‘Oh, God, Lucy …’

      He had never kissed her so fiercely before, so hungrily. She heard him telling her unsteadily that she tasted of chocolate, but then she teased him with her tongue and he stopped saying anything.

      She had never, she realised breathlessly later, wanted to make love so much with any man. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to be rid of her clothes and for Giles to be rid of his. She could feel how aroused he was and that knowledge excited her.

      She tugged impatiently at the buttons on his shirt, spreading her hands flat against his chest, licking and nuzzling his bare throat and then his chest, laughing softly as she heard him groan and felt the sweat springing up on his skin.

      He fumbled with the zip on her dress the first time he tried to unfasten it, but instead of irritating her his hesitancy only seemed to sharpen the excitement coiling inside her. When he finally unfastened it and the dress slid to a silky heap at her feet, leaving her body virtually naked, gilded by the light of the candles, its sheen enhanced by the soft cream backdrop of the settee, the dark arousal of her nipples as perfect as the deepest of the velvet-petalled roses, Giles didn’t touch her. He simply looked at her.

      Men had looked at Lucy before, but none of them had ever looked at her like this, as though they were beholding a miracle, a vision; none of them had ever looked at her with heaven in his eyes.

      And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.

      His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.

      But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.

      The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.

      Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.

      When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’

      She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.

      ‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’

      Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.

      She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.

      To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.

      When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.

      He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.

      She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.

      ‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.

      The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’

      It shocked her that he should know her so