‘And to enable you to make a handsome profit into the bargain,’ Christa suggested.
Now she felt that she had really angered him.
‘Is that really what you think of me?’ he asked her quietly, cutting right across the defences she had erected and bringing the question at issue out of the public arena into one that was strictly private with such speed that she felt as though the ground had been cut completely from beneath her feet.
‘This has nothing to do with what I think of you…on a personal basis,’ she started to defend herself.
‘Yes, it has,’ Daniel contradicted her flatly. ‘When something arouses you emotionally your voice changes completely…I could hear the dislike and contempt in your voice quite clearly—and the fear as well,’ he informed her.
When something aroused her emotionally? What about when someone did the same thing? Did she betray herself equally shockingly then, too?
Suddenly she was starkly conscious of Daniel’s profession, of his training, of the fact that he probably knew more about people’s reactions and what they meant than she could possibly know.
‘What is it, Christa?’ he challenged her. ‘What is it about me that you find so painful, that makes you feel so antagonistic? What I am, or what I do?’
‘Neither,’ Christa denied quickly. Too quickly, she recognised as she watched the way his eyes narrowed, felt the full power of his concentration on her.
‘I…I just don’t like the idea of people being deceived…cheated…hurt.’ She stumbled slightly over the words, wishing she had never got involved in such a conversation and longing to escape—but how could she do that without betraying herself even more to Daniel?
‘And you think that I would do that?’
An immediate denial sprang to her lips, but somehow she suppressed it, the effort it took making her throat ache and her eyes feel gritty.
‘I don’t know you well enough to make that sort of judgement,’ she managed to tell him shakily.
To her surprise a slight smile suddenly curled his mouth. ‘You’re a fighter, I’ll say that for you,’ he told her.
Christa stared at him. ‘You want me to disagree with you?’
‘Not exactly, but there is a certain stimulation about discussing something with someone who knows their own mind and isn’t afraid to say what they think. It brings a certain kind of energy…a chemistry to the discussion, not totally unlike the very special chemistry that two people create when they’re very strongly sexually attracted to one another,’ Daniel told her softly.
Like someone in a trance Christa went totally still, only her eyes moving, and totally against her will they focused on Daniel’s face.
‘I’m not saying that I don’t and won’t take issue with you on what you’re saying,’ Daniel continued, as calmly and easily as though he had never made that reference to sexual chemistry, as though he had never left those words hanging in the air so provocatively that Christa felt as though she could still feel their echo vibrating dangerously through her whole body. ‘But that kind of person, the kind of woman who negatively accepts everything she hears simply to make life easier…’ He gave a small dismissive shrug.
‘But men don’t like women who argue with them, who are too independent,’ Christa told him quickly.
‘Don’t they?’ Daniel challenged her softly. ‘That’s a myth I thought was well and truly exploded. Men, intelligent men, real mean feel exactly the same about women who passively accept their every word as law as they do about women who passively accept their intimacy in sex.’
Christa couldn’t help it; she could feel the hot, toecurling sensation his words evoked, submerging her body in a flash-flood of intense awareness.
‘Sex…making love,’ Daniel continued, ‘like a good discussion, should be about mutual intensity, mutual involvement…a mutual desire to share what is happening…Don’t you agree…?’
‘Sex for sex’s sake isn’t something that interests me,’ Christa told him, forcing her voice to sound disparaging and curt.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Nor me—call me unmacho if you like, but I really fail to see what pleasure there can be in a physical intimacy that does not include—not merely include, but also fully embrace—an emotional and intellectual intimacy as well. Which probably explains why I seem to have become unintentionally celibate…’ he added ruefully.
Celibate? This man? Christa’s heart lurched and floundered and then ricocheted against her chest-wall so hard that she thought Daniel must actually be able to see it beating.
‘What’s wrong?’ she heard him asking her.
‘Nothing,’ Christa denied, and then added quickly, ‘It’s just that men…most men wouldn’t say…don’t tell…don’t reveal their… themselves…’ She stopped speaking, shaking her head beneath the onslaught of her muddled thoughts.
‘Perhaps because they’ve learned the hard way that women don’t always want to listen,’ Daniel told her, apparently guessing what she had been trying to say. ‘Some women find male emotions, male vulnerability, very threatening. It isn’t what they’ve been brought up to expect from a man. Watch a small boy with his mother, observe the different way she treats him from his sister…the way society expects her to treat him. Once they get to a certain age boys are actively discouraged from being open about their emotional needs, but they do have them, and so do men.
‘What are your emotional needs, Christa?’ he asked her softly, catching her so totally off guard that she could only stare at him while the colour came and went in her face as she succumbed to the shock of his question.
‘I…I don’t want to talk about them,’ she managed at last, adding fiercely, ‘That isn’t why I’m here…’
‘No, you’re here to test the efficiency of our work, on the surface at least, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there, Christa? There’s a personal hidden agenda in there somewhere, there inside you, something that’s perhaps not quite a fear and certainly not an obsession, but something which has a very strong hold on you and no one else.’
Christa stood up abruptly.
‘Stop it,’ she demanded frantically. ‘I don’t have to listen to this, to you. I…’
‘Christa…’
She almost made it to the door and to freedom, but he caught up with her just as she was reaching out to wrench it open, placing his body between her and it, catching hold of her much as he had done earlier; only this time her body, her senses, registered the subtle, telling differences in that hold, his familiarity with her height and shape, just as she knew, as she reached out her hands supposedly to fend him off, that the feel of his heartbeat beneath her palm, the heat of his skin, the faint roughness of his body-hair beneath his shirt, were something she wanted to experience again with a hunger that was already dangerous.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to upset you. I just wanted…’
r /> Instinctively, as she heard his softly whispered words, Christa looked up at him.
It was a fatal mistake, because her mouth went dry as she focused on his, her heart pounding frantically. The longing that engulfed her to reach up and wrap her arms around him, to press her body close to his, to pull his head down so that she could reach his mouth with her own, made her tremble with shock.
She made a soft sound of denial at the back of her throat, closing her eyes to blot out the vision in front of her. But it was no use. With her eyes closed, her other senses sharpened. She could hear the sound of his breathing, feel the rapid thud of his heartbeat.
When she opened her eyes he was looking right back at her.
‘Christa.’
As he breathed her name against her mouth she gave up, acknowledging defeat, unable to fight her need any longer.
His thick, ‘Open your mouth and let me kiss you properly,’ sent such a violent frission of reaction through her that she had to cling to him for support, cling to him and do exactly what he had just begged her to do, not because he had commanded it but because her own need to experience the intimacy of his tongue exploring the inside of her mouth, stroking against her own, was much, much too strong for her to resist.
Resist…If he hadn’t spoken, she would probably have been the one biting frantic little kisses at his mouth, silently pleading with the quick, tortured little strokes of her tongue for him to do exactly what he was doing now.
Almost delirious with arousal, Christa heard the soft, satisfied sound he made as he invited her to reciprocate his intimacy. The sensation of him sucking gently on her tongue as he drew it into his own mouth, the way his lips openly caressed hers into more intimacy than she had ever known in her life before, made her ache to feel his hands on her body, stroking it, caressing it, easing it free of the unwanted restriction of her clothes.
‘God, I want you…I want you so much.’
The raw passion in Daniel’s voice shocked her back to reality, panic flooding her as she felt her control slipping, her desire to respond to what he was saying, what he was asking, almost too strong for her to resist.