Satin Doll (24 page)

Sam swayed as his fingers drew the blue silk of the panties down slowly to her knees, to her feet. She stepped out of them, and he sat back on his heels, his burning look surveying her pale, tousled hair, her kiss-swollen mouth, her high, firm little breasts with their glistening pink buds rising and falling rapidly. His black eyes dropped to the long sweep of her white belly, the flare of her hips with the V of blonde curls. She whimpered, drugged and throbbing with desire as his big hands slid up from her knees to her thighs, his fingers joining to part the silky curls and touch the cleft of her flesh.
 

At his touch her body was suddenly clamoring for him, her mind lost in flame-shot darkness, her fingernails digging into his big shoulders as his pulsing caress claimed her. Her hips followed his mouth, writhing, surrendering, and she gasped, going suddenly rigid. Then the very air around them exploded.
 

Chip’s arms went around her to keep her from falling. Samantha sagged against him, limp as a rag doll, winding her hands around his neck. He carried her quickly into the bedroom, put her down on the bed and began tearing off his shirt, his boots, then his jeans.
 

“You should see yourself against that black velvet,” he muttered. He came into the bed and leaned over her, naked, his big, splendid body glistening slightly with perspiration, his black eyes glowing. “Samantha, you’re the most impossibly tempting, beautiful—no wonder you drive me mad,” he growled. One hand pulled her knee up against his thigh, cradling her to him. He looked down into her face, into her half-closed eyes with their silvery lights cloaked with black lashes, her pink mouth wet and swollen for him. He lowered his head. “No, stop that,” he growled. “Look at me.”
 

Sam’s eyes flew open, startled.
 

“No imagining yourself in someone else’s arms. I won’t have it.” His warm, hard mouth closed on her ruthlessly, his teeth nipping her lower lip.
 

She murmured something incoherent, trying to push him away, but he silenced her by deepening the kiss. Then he drove himself into her, big and hard, his powerful body trembling with almost angry need. His body contracted quickly, again and again, as though he couldn’t stop. “Ah, Samantha,” he choked, “love me back. The feel of you—so tight and hot! Take me deeper, love!”
 

She writhed under him, bursting with his bigness and heaviness, his uncontrolled thrusts driving her wild. He wanted her. She couldn’t believe how much Chip wanted her. The sound of his breath was harsh and ragged, his satiny shoulders under her fingertips slick with sweat, his powerful body raking her, lifting her from the bed with his violent possession. She wrapped her legs around him, crying out wordlessly, her hands clutching his black curly head.
 

“Say you want me,” he rasped.
 

She let herself surrender. “Yes, yes—I want you!” Somewhere in the dim blackness of her mind she knew she trusted this splendid, powerful body to take them both into burning oblivion. They reached the last peak at the same time. As colors and sparks burst inside her, Sam barely heard Chip’s hoarse growl as he poured himself into her. When at last he jolted to a stop, he held himself above her with his arms braced, eyes tightly closed. It was several minutes before he opened them. “Samantha?” He could hardly speak.
 

With an effort she opened her eyes and looked up at him. She saw Chip’s drenched face above her, his eyes slitted, wet black hair tumbled across his forehead, mouth drawn in a harsh, tight line. “Are you all right?”
 

She looked up in an unfocused, silvery daze, drifting somewhere in clouds, in warm mists that washed through her. She could feel his body still trembling.
 

He murmured, his breath touching her lips, “This seems to be getting to be a habit.” He cleared his throat roughly. “Samantha, I’m sorry, it got the best of me. Did you—are you—”
 

She sighed, watching him under half-closed lids. She wasn’t sure what she felt. Her senses were stunned, her body relaxed and incomparably satisfied, just the way it had been the last time. She knew she should jump out of the bed and demand that he leave. She was furious and disgusted with herself that she had allowed this to happen again. But she couldn’t move. There was no explaining it, she thought, drinking in Chip’s heavy body that pressed down on her, his hands gripping her bottom, holding her tightly. He looked so concerned, his brows over his long, straight nose in a frown, that she almost felt sorry for him. Good lord, he had wanted her, she thought, strangely touched. And she’d just plain lost her mind.
 

Softly, with the tip of her tongue, Sam traced a line on the wet, satiny skin of his shoulder, tasting salty sweat, inhaling his rich, sensual scent. It was probably the strangest part of all that she felt happy there in his arms. But then I don’t know much about sex, she told herself dreamily. She reached up and touched the curls dripping small drops of perspiration into his black eyes. Why did it have to be Chip? If it was just sex, why did it feel like so much more than that? He turned his face quickly to kiss her fingertips. “It’s just sex, isn’t it?” she whispered.
 

“No, dammit, it’s not just sex,” he growled. He hesitated, frowning, and decided to leave it at that.
 

He gathered her to him, rolling slowly to one side in the bed. Then he rubbed the side of her cheek with his thumb before he gently kissed her on the lips. He threw one long leg over her and cradled her against him.
 

“You feel so good,” he muttered against her hair. She smelled tantalizingly of some expensive perfume, of lovemaking, of herself.
 

“You still want me,” she murmured. “I can feel you.”
 

“I can wait.”
 

“I can’t go on doing this with you,” she said. She tried to raise some feelings of protest that wouldn’t come. “It’s crazy. It doesn’t mean anything to either one of us.” When he only grunted contentedly, his lips warm against her cheek, she tried again, unconvinced but louder. “This has to be absolutely the last time.”
 

She suddenly lifted herself on one elbow to peer down into his face. The ragged halo of her wheat-colored hair framed her face, her silvery eyes, the mouth that was still damp with his kisses.
 

Chip looked up at her, thinking that she looked enchanting, more beautiful than she realized. The red marks where his teeth had scraped marred the ivory skin of her throat. She’d driven him over the edge; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost control with a woman, wanting her so badly he’d buried himself in her like a maddened kid. He stroked the marks of his rough caresses gently with his fingertips.
 

“How long do you usually have to wait?” she whispered.
 

He shut his eyes. “I don’t have to wait, Samantha. I’m just trying to have some consideration for you.”
 

“No fooling.” Her hands stroked his hip, shyly dropped a little lower. She felt his body tense.
 

“Yes, no fooling,” he managed tightly as her fingers closed around him. “Since I—um, seem to lose my head when I’m around you—” He shuddered. “Aaaahh, God, do you know what you’re doing to me?”
 

“It’s what you do to me. You know that, don’t you?” She lowered her face close to his. “You came up here looking for me. That motorcycle ride was all a fake, wasn’t it?”
 

“No, ah—um, aah.” He opened his eyes. “You’re beautiful, Samantha. So damned beautiful and passionate and we—ah, bloody hell, where did you learn to do that?”
 

“Is it always like this?” she murmured softly. “I mean, like it is when we’re together?”
 

“Not that I’ve ever experienced before.” The black opal eyes stared intently into hers. “You want me just as much, don’t you?”
 

“Well, since this is, you know, the last time.” Sam pulled him over her, feeling him pressing her down into the bed. “Yes, I want you,” she admitted breathlessly.
 

She heard him laugh deep in his throat. “It’s just sex, Samantha,” he reminded her.
 

Chip held her in his arms as she slept. When he moved, she followed his body, snuggling like a child, her arms tight around him. They were growing warm and sweaty again on the velvet bedspread, and his flesh against her thighs was already aching with the enticing contact there. But every time he shifted carefully, trying to move an infinitesimal fraction of an inch away, the woman in his arms glued herself against him and gave a little murmur of protest.
 

Well, at least in her sleep she knew what she wanted.
 

He turned so that part of her weight lay over him, one of her long legs sliding between his, her lower body hugging him tightly. He smoothed back the absurd, shaggy hair from her sleeping face with a gentle hand.
 

The windows of the bedroom were open and in the long European twilight a slight breeze came up the hill from the Tuileries gardens, bringing the scent of early summer, of earth and greenery, leaves and flowers blooming and the faint acrid taint of traffic exhaust and city dust. In the fading light Chip looked down into the beautiful face pressed against his breastbone, the brush of smudged mascara against a creamy cheek, the relaxed childish mouth that was so vulnerable and incomparably beguiling.
Careful now,
he told himself on an indrawn breath. There was no reason why this should be happening to him after all these years. But he had known from the moment he laid eyes on her that she was not the only one who was vulnerable.
 

Making love to her, he had rationalized, was a bit of necessary strategy, perhaps. But making her sexually responsive, awakening all the exquisite, undiscovered passion in that lovely body had not been exactly the wisest thing he’d ever done. How was he to know that under all the seeming sophistication, that deceptively assured, professional beauty, that she’d be so innocent? His strategy had run amuck. He was finding he couldn’t keep his hands off her.
 

Hoist by my own petard, he thought, staring up at the ceiling.
 

Even more regrettably, there was nothing he could do with the business about the door. She wasn’t going to leave it alone. Better that he broke the padlock himself and showed her how to leave it looking as though it were still in one piece.
 

But it bothered him.
 

Part Two
 

Comme les anges a l’oeil fauve,
 

Je reviendrai dans ton alcove
 

Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit
 

Avec les ombres de la nuit.
 

Like angels with savage eyes
 

I will come to where you sleep
 

Soundlessly gliding, and see you
 

Among the shadows of the night.
 

Baudelaire,
L’Revenant
 

L’assemblage
 

The Putting Together
 

Chapter Thirteen

Gilles Vasse stood partly hidden in a niche formed by hanging slabs of dark brown glass panels and rows of transparent electric light bulbs, chain smoking Gauloise cigarettes and somberly viewing the customers in the first row of seats.
 

The crowd at Mortessier’s for the afternoon showing was sparse, the front row occupied by a group of affluent Texas ladies apparently taking a late-spring Paris vacation, the expensively dressed wife of an Arab oil sheik and two neat, bespectacled Japanese businessmen. In the slack weeks before the worldwide press descended on Paris for July’s frenetic fall fashion showings, Mortessier mannequins were modeling an interim collection of best-sellers from the spring line and some now mildly passé summer outfits. As usual the glitteringly modern showroom throbbed to ear-splitting music—this afternoon the beat of the British rock group, Dire Straits—on stereophonic tape and the flicker of special lighting effects.
 

Samantha, slumped down beside Brooksie Goodman in the last row of seats, had been studying the young designer behind the trendy glass panels for several minutes. She gave Brooksie a poke in the ribs with her elbow and muttered, “What’s he doing?”
 

The journalist took off her aviator sunglasses and craned to see. “Oh, just hanging around. Jeez, he’s pretty,” she muttered, “if you go for that skinny young tiger type.”
 

He does look like a kid, Samantha thought. It was only the second time she’d seen Paris’s hottest young fashion talent, but that handsome young face with its high cheekbones and grimly sensuous mouth would stick in anybody’s memory. Gilles Vasse wore black again, another form-fitting cashmere turtleneck sweater with tight slacks that hugged his lithe, wiry frame. Sam watched him frown and stub out his cigarette in the silver ashtray he carried in one long-fingered hand. He looked—troubled? Harried? She remembered the beautiful model she’d seen him with that day at Les Halles, the girl’s glossy, flowing brown hair, the classically perfect face with velvety brown eyes, the dreamy, somewhat melancholy air. Romeo and Juliet, the perfect, beautiful young lovers. But what did that make Gilles’s boss, Rudi Mortessier, the famous couturier? she couldn’t help wondering.