Forbidden Seduction [ Forbidden Obsession]

When her mother had first married Lucas father and they had gone to live in his ancestral home, she had been overwhelmed at first by the darkness of the huge house. It had been Roth who had guessed her fears and apprehensions after he had found her sleepwalking that night. Roth who had been staying at the house

instead of his cottage one weekend, ‘babysitting’ her in the absence of her mother, and who had taken her, not back to bed, but to his own room where he had made her a hot drink and talked to her, showing her the telescope he used to watch the night sky.

The binoculars beside it he had used for another, more mundane purpose. As the estate manager one of his jobs had been to keep a sharp look-out for poachers. The night had no fears for Roth, and through him she too had learned to appreciate its special beauties. It had been Roth who had taken her to watch the badger cubs at play, earning her mother’s anger. Elena quickly stopped that line of thought. Since she couldn’t sleep she might as well try to do some work; that at least would be a far more profitable way of spending her time than thinking about Roth.

Her mouth still felt slightly swollen and sensitive from the way he had kissed her earlier. Her face started to burn as she recalled again the comment he had made to her about her being a vixen-and about Michael being her lover.

What would he say if he knew that she had only had one lover and that lover had been a man who hadn’t really wanted her, a man she had had to coax and beg to take her to bed, a man who had told her that he felt no love for her, that what had happened between them had been a mistake, an error of judgement best forgotten?

No. No. No. Angrily, Elena buried her face in her hands, but it was too late; there was no pushing back the memories now, they were here, surrounding her, flooding out any kind of denial or rational thought.

She had been at university by then; had, in fact, gone there unwillingly. So intense and all-consuming had been the ferocity of her teenage love for Roth, so burningly immediate and sharp-fanged her desire for him, that she had not been

able to bear the thought of putting any kind of distance between them. Every spare minute she had, every excuse she could use, she had used-to be with Roth. As Lucas stepsister it had been easy enough for her to spend her free time at the estate, joining the group of local teenagers who were helping Roth with some of his environmental projects had given her even more opportunity to be with him. Not that Roth himself had seemed to be aware of her feelings, even though she had done everything she could to show him how she felt.

There had been that afternoon she had fallen into the muddy lake they had been cleaning. Roth had pulled her out, grinning at her mud-covered clothes and hair.

‘I need a bath,’ she had complained, grimacing.

‘A bath?’ Roth had laughed. ‘There’s no way lucas housekeeper is going to let you into the house like that. I’d better take you back to the cottage with me and hose you down outside before I let you go back, otherwise we’ll both be in real trouble.’

His cottage… How she had trembled at the thought, imagining not the prosaic cleaning-up operation Roth had so teasingly referred to but something far more intimate, her body soaking in a tub of blissfully hot water whilst Roth lovingly soaped her clean…

‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her, frowning at her. ‘You’ve gone very red. Are you feeling ill?’

Ill… Sick with love, with longing for him, would have been the appropriate answer, but she had been too naive, too shy to make it. Instead she had shaken her head and dutifully climbed into his battered Land Rover for the drive back to

his small estate cottage. The sensual intimacy she had so dangerously imagined had proved to be just that-a fantasy. Roth had made her remove her clothes in his small back porch, sternly admonishing her not to move off the old towel he had put down on the floor and to give him a shout once she was undressed and wrapped in the towel he had left her.

‘I’ll put your stuff in the washer-lucas housekeeper will kill me if she sees it-and then you can have a quick shower upstairs. You’ll have to go home in it-and then you can have a quick shower upstairs. You’ll have to go home in

my stuff but at least it will be clean.’

‘These towels are awfully thin,’ she had remarked critically once she was standing wrapped in the protection of the largest of them, and Roth had returned to scoop up her filthy clothes.

‘Mmm… I use them to dry the dogs,’ Roth had told her unromantically, grinning at her when he saw her expression. ‘They’re the ones who should be pulling a face,’ he said. ‘When they come back covered in mud they get hosed

down outside before they’re even allowed in.’Property belongs to Nôvel(D)r/ama.Org.

‘I’m not a dog, I’m a…’ A woman, she had been about to say, but then she had stopped as Roth had stooped to pick up her white briefs from the stone floor, her face turning an unsophisticated shade of pink when she saw how small they looked held in his strongly masculine hand.

The wet had seeped right through her jeans to her briefs, but Roth’s eyebrows had risen as he’d studied them and then her.

‘It’s all right… I can go home without them; it won’t matter under… my… your jeans,’ Elena had told him helpfully, far too innocent and young then to understand just how sensuously provocative it could be for a woman to go naked beneath her clothes-and even more so when the clothes, the jeans she was wearing, were his and not her own.

‘It’s okay; I think I’ve got something you can wear,’ Roth had told her laconically.