Forbidden or For Bedding?

Satisfaction ran through Guy as he surveyed the woman in front of him. Alexa Harcourt in evening attire was all that he wanted her to be.

Superbe.

As she stood before him in the rich, lustrous beauty she was finally revealing to him, anticipation speared within him for what he knew would be the delights of the evening ahead.

Not that she gave any sign yet of realising that was to happen. She was, he knew, quite unconscious of what with absolute inevitability lay ahead. It would, of course, make her seduction even more piquant—even more enticing!

And now the evening was about to begin.

‘Shall we?’ he invited.

She walked with superb grace, his appreciative eye noted, although there was the very slightest tension in her shoulders. As if she were not entirely at her ease.

Yes, she was indeed well worth his time and attention. Pleased with his choice, Guy relaxed fully into the leather seats and continued his appreciative surveillance. The evening stretched pleasurably ahead of him.

And the night—ah, the night would be exceptional…

JULIA JAMES lives in England with her family. Mills & Boon^>® were the first ‘grown-up’ books she read as a teenager, alongside Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier, and she’s been reading them ever since. Julia adores the English and Celtic countryside, in all its seasons, and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. She also has a special love for the Mediterranean—‘The most perfect landscape after England!’—and considers both ideal settings for romance stories. In between writing she enjoys walking, gardening, needlework, baking extremely gooey cakes and trying to stay fit!

MILD autumnal sunshine was filtering through the kitchen window of Alexa’s flat on the borders of Notting Hill, illuminating the pinewood table set for breakfast for two. The simple but elegant pottery creamware and silver-plated cutlery had been acquired painstakingly and piecemeal from antiques shops. Bright flowers adorned the table in a glass vase, and the aroma of freshly made ground coffee hung in the air.

So did a tension that Alexa would have had to be a block of stone not to feel.

She had had no inkling of it until this moment. Until this moment her mood had been languid—sensual, even—for making love upon waking was something that never failed to leave her with a sense of rich well-being that lasted all the day long—even on days like this when, unlike the previous night, she would go to bed alone.

But she was used to that by now. Used to going from a night of sensual overload that left her dazed, swept to shores she had once known nothing of but to which now she was a familiar, oh, so familiar traveler, to abstinance. But as she stood by the table, coffee pot in hand, her slender body concealed by nothing but a pale green silk peignoir, her long, still slightly tousled hair rippling down her back, she felt her throat give a little catch, as though her body—more than her body—remembered with absolute clarity that sense of wonder, almost disbelief, that would sweep her away on a tsunami of emotion.

Not that she ever revealed that emotion. Only the passion with which it was expressed. The emotion itself could never be acknowledged.

For a moment—an endless, empty moment—bleakness showed in her eyes. Then it was gone. She had accepted, had had to accept, that all she could have was what she had now. These brief, precious times when she would burn with an intensity that transformed her life, which carried her through the intervening days and nights of celibacy until her phone would ring and everything else became secondary, inconsequential, irrelevant. Her friends, her work, her whole life—all put aside.

And then for one night, perhaps two, perhaps—so rarely—more, when the call summoned her to a private airfield and whisked her away within an hour of the summons to some continental city or—even more rarely, even more blissfully—to some Italian villa, some Alpine ski lodge, some Monagasque penthouse, she would give herself entirely to the moment. However brief, however fleeting.

Was she rash, foolish, intemperate to be so? Of course she was! She knew it—knew it with every last ounce of sense within her. Good sense. Sense that tempered, as it must—should—that volatility of emotion which was the other half of her, that intensity of emotion that fuelled not just her life but her art. Sense that kept her outward persona cool, composed—controlled.

That was what others saw. The persona she deliberately projected. Few of her friends, especially those in the heady and passionate world of art, realised that her outward appearance of dispassionate calm in fact concealed an inner intensity of emotion—emotion that she channelled only into the art that she painted for herself, not for her profession. Others saw a tranquil beauty—a pale, silken-haired English rose—but few recognised the flame that burnt deep, deep within her.

Raised by parents who had led ordered, intellectual lives, Alexa knew that they had been taken aback to discover their only child was as artistically talented as soon became evident during her schooldays. They had not opposed her choice of subject—far from it—but Alexa had always recognised that they found it faintly astonishing that their daughter should have taken so to art which, to their sedate minds, was associated with stormy passions, extreme emotions and, worst of all, a tendency to lead disordered and messy lives.