Come Lie With Me - Linda Howard [83]
One night he came to bed after midnight and groaned wearily as his body relaxed. Dione turned over and touched his cheek, trailing her fingers over his skin and feeling the prickle of his beard. “Do you need a massage to relax?” she asked quietly.
“Would you mind?” he sighed. “My neck and shoulders have a permanent kink in them from leaning over a desk. My God, no wonder Richard and Serena are having problems; he’s had two years of this, and that’s enough to drive any man crazy.”
He rolled over on his stomach, and Dione pulled her nightgown up to her thighs, straddling his back and leaning forward to work her magic on his tight muscles. As her kneading fingers dug into his flesh he made a muffled sound of pain, then sighed blissfully as the tension left him.
“Have you seen Serena lately?” he asked.
Her fingers paused for a moment, then resumed their movement. “No,” she replied. “She hasn’t even called. Have you talked to her?”
“Not since the night she had dinner here and told us she and Richard had separated. I think I’ll call her tomorrow. Ahhh, that feels good. Right there. I feel as if I’ve been beaten.”
She rolled her knuckles up and down his spine, paying particular attention to the spot that he had indicated needed extra work. He made little grunting noises every time she touched a tender area, and she began to laugh. “You sound like a pig,” she teased.
“Who cares? I’m enjoying this. I’ve missed the massages; several times I’ve started to call you and ask you to come to the plant to give me a rubdown, but it didn’t seem like such a smart thing to do in a busy day.”
“Why not?” she asked tartly, a little irritated that he considered her to be a traveling massage parlor, and a lot irritated that he hadn’t followed through on his idea.
He laughed and rolled over, deftly keeping his body between her thighs. “Because,” he murmured, “this is what usually happens to me during one of your massages. Let me tell you, I had a hell of a time keeping you from realizing what was going on when you thought I was impotent and were so sweetly trying to turn me on to prove that I wasn’t.”
She moved off him like a rocket, her entire body blushing. “What?” she yelled furiously. “You knew what I was doing, and you let me go ahead and make a fool of myself?”
He laughed uproariously, reaching out to pull her into his embrace. “It didn’t take me long to figure it out,” he admitted, still chuckling. “As if you needed sexy clothes to turn me on…but I couldn’t let you know what you were doing to me without frightening you away. Honey, you weren’t seducing me; I was seducing you, but I had to let you think it was the other way around.”
She burned with embarrassment, thinking of the things she had done, the revealing clothes she had worn. Then she felt his hand on her breast, and the heat intensified, but no longer from shame. He hadn’t made love to her for several days; he had been coming to bed late and falling asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, and she had missed his touch.
“You don’t really mind, do you?” he asked softly, pulling the nightgown over her head. “What are you doing with this thing on?”
“I get cold when you aren’t in the bed,” she explained, stretching her body in his arms, reveling in the rasp of his hair-roughed skin against hers.
With a growl he rolled her to her back and buried his face between her breasts. “I’m here now, so you don’t need it,” he said, his voice muffled by her flesh. He took her quickly, impatient after the days of abstinence. She held him even after he was asleep, her doubts momentarily eased by the passion of his lovemaking.
Serena called the next morning.