Free A Perfect Night by Unknown Page A

result was that now she was almost something of an oddity, an adult who was not really properly a woman at all. Only she knew how left out, how uncomfortable, how ashamed she felt on those occasions when her female family peers and most especially, her twin sister, appeared with that bemused, slightly dazed and wholly femalely smug look in their eyes which said that they had recently enjoyed good sex. But even worse than that were those times when her twin Louise tried to coax her to confide in her.
    'Who are you dreaming about?' she had teased Katie the last time they had seen one another. 'Do I know him...?'
    Katie had shaken her head of course, retreating immediately behind a protective wall of cool hauteur which had left Louise looking both bewildered and hurt. But how could she tell her that the man she had been daydreaming over was Louise's own husband?
    Determinedly Katie gritted her teeth. What had happened with Seb Cooke had simply been an expression of her very natural longing to be able to offer someone her own sensuality, she was sure of it. A very dangerous expression of course, but the relief of knowing there was a plausible, acceptable reason for the way she had let herself go in his arms, the way she had not just responded to him but allowed him to see how much he was arousing her, was such that she immediately began to feel more like her normal self.
    It would have been unbearable to have had to face him knowing that she had actually wanted Seb. But he still thought that, she reminded herself.
    Downstairs, Seb was saying his 'goodbyes' to his hostess. Fortunately their stay had only been a brief one as Chrissie was expecting her parents down to visit the following day and she and Guy still had to pick up Anthony from Guy's sister.
    He still had no idea what on earth had come over him for those few minutes he had held Katie Crighton in his arms, or rather he was perfectly well aware what had, but what he did not know was why it had. He had known far more forthright women, women who had made it more than plain that they would love him to take them to bed, and had been able to turn away from them without even the merest twinge of the savage flood of desire that Katie had aroused in him.
    Anger and desire. As a scientist he ought to know that there was no more potentially dangerous sexual combination and as a scientist, too, he ought also to know that as a man his desire and his arousal were simply physical reactions... Maybe. But as a man he also knew that what he had felt when he touched Katie had had the same raw, powerful energy that nature herself possessed and as yet man had found no satisfactory way of controlling.
    Ask any scientist who had tried to find a way of com-batting a hurricane, a tidal flood, a volcano or an earth-quake... Damn the woman, she was the last kind of complication he needed in his life, now or at any time.
    Even so, just for a moment he allowed himself the luxury of closing his eyes and briefly reliving that moment out of time when she had opened hers and looked at him, her eyes full of shocked liquid pleasure. Had she looked into his and seen there just what he was thinking?
    Feeling...wanting...? Just how much he had yearned to have her then lying naked on a bed beneath him while he licked the damp salt taste of her pleasure from her body and felt her quiver in the aftermath of her orgasm while he did so.
    A bad father and a bad husband he might have been, but as Sandra had once openly and frankly told him, as a lover his sensuality had totally overwhelmed her.
    A sensual scientist. It was a contradiction in terms, two imperfect halves that when put together rubbed and jarred against one another causing friction and pain.
    In the front seat of the car Chrissie commented quietly to Guy, 'Katie still doesn't look very well. I don't think she's been as happy as she used to be since Louise got married... I suppose it must be hard for her, them being twins...'
    'Mmm....' Guy agreed. 'She