FANTA C Read online

  * * *

  FANTA C

  Sandra Brown

  * * *

  Contents:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  ^»

  The first time was enchanted.

  We made love in the stable amid the smell of hay and horses and dust. Our coupling was hot and lusty. Our bodies were shiny with sweat when it was over. Replete, we lay with limbs entwined. Straw was tangled in my hair. He playfully plucked out pieces of it, while I delighted in the way the sun shone in through the cracks in the walls, casting stripes of light and shadow on his wide hairy chest.

  It had been destined to happen, though the selection of the time had been exclusively his. Mounted on one of my father's prized thoroughbreds, I had returned to the stable after the daily ride. My heart had begun to beat vigorously at the sight of the stable foreman leaning against the corner of the building. No one else was in the yard.

  I looked at him with the haughty condescension passed down to me through generations of aristocratic breeding. He, in no great hurry, sauntered forward. Smiling arrogantly, he raised his hands and placed them around my waist to assist me off the sidesaddle. Wanting to shake his unshakable self-confidence and conceit, I deliberately let my body slide enticingly down the front of his before my booted feet touched the ground. I watched his eyes grow dark, but my triumph was short-lived.

  Defying convention and propriety, he continued to hold me close against him. I gazed up at him with unmitigated desire. It was made even stronger because he was employed by my father and far beneath my social status. Any kind of intimate relationship between the stable foreman and me was forbidden. Deliciously, temptingly so.

  Then, too, he was Irish. I, English. He was wild and undisciplined and possessed of a temperament as stormy as the Irish Sea. I had been reared in an atmosphere of gentility and refinement. I knew French and Latin. He had only a rudimentary knowledge of English and was frequently overheard using vulgarities the meanings of which I could not begin to guess. If the gossip was true, in his possession a bottle of whisky rarely outlived the night. I was sometimes allowed to sip one glass of sherry before dinner, and then only on special occasions. My hands were immaculate. His were not. But that didn't matter when he slid them around my waist and pulled me closer still.

  He bent his head and kissed me as though it were his right instead of tantamount to the capital offense it would be should we be discovered. A lock of his long, unruly hair brushed across my smooth brow as he dipped his head lower and pressed his open mouth upon mine.

  Though he was responding to the desire he had no doubt seen in my eyes, his audacity enraged me. I pushed against the front of his leather jerkin. But I was fighting a losing battle, not only against his superior strength, but with myself and the passionate stirring of my blood. Admittedly, I didn't try too hard to escape his embrace or his marauding tongue when it thrust between my lips and deflowered my mouth.

  At that point, I felt quite faint.

  Breathless and weak, I stumbled along behind him as he drew me into the deep, musty shadows of Father's stable. This is what I had wanted, wasn't it? Isn't this what all those smoldering looks that we had been exchanging for weeks should culminate in? Hadn't I, with accidental touches and provocative postures, issued an invitation for him to do just this? Secrets were about to be revealed to me. Didn't I crave to know what the servant girls whispered about behind their hands?

  Even had I changed my mind, he wouldn't have allowed it. He pressed me against the slats of one of the stalls. The hay was knee-deep, sweet-smelling, and fresh. It was warm inside the building. And dim. Dust motes waltzed in the air as crazily as my senses were spinning. With his lips still glued to mine, he angled his body forward so that I might feel the evidence of his desire behind his tight britches. The strong, agile body I had safely admired from behind the curtains in my bedroom window now pressed against me with alarming familiarity. My thighs trembled, but parted obediently as he wedged his knees between them and rammed his hips up and forward.

  His hands went straight for the stock tied in a demure bow around my throat. He undid the knot with a gentle jerk and began unwinding the white silk, dropping it into the hay when it came off. The pearl buttons of my blouse were no deterrent to his questing hands. They slipped from their hand-embroidered holes without protest.

  I gasped when I felt his work-rough hands on my breasts. My batiste camisole made him impatient. He shoved it down and my breasts fell free into his callused palms.

  Overwhelmed with the strange sensations coursing through me, my eyelids fluttered closed. My head fell back against the slats, and I surrendered totally when his mouth descended to cover my quivering flesh with ardent kisses. I had never imagined that a man's lips and teeth and tongue were capable of giving such incredible pleasure. It was sinful, wasn't it? Didn't The Book of Common Prayer describe these feelings riveting through me as carnal delights? They were so terribly wicked. Yet so splendid. My nipples became hard and pointed beneath the damp, rapid stroking of his tongue. Arching my back, I pushed them deeper into his mouth. Involuntarily, I cried out his name.

  "Shh, shh, my love," he whispered in the lilting, melodic accent I loved. "It's careful we must be."

  His hands exercised no decorum. They obeyed no rules. They slipped beneath the skirt of my ruby velvet riding habit, tangled in the layers of lacy petticoats, and waded their way through my clothing until they touched my naked skin. Roughly whispered endearments, enriched with his decidedly Irish flamboyance, filled my ears as he fondled me intimately with a tenderness at odds with his growing impatience.

  He opened his trousers and I saw him. The extent of his arousal frightened me. He saw my fear and soothed it with words of comfort and reassurance. His manhood was warm and smooth and hard as he entered me, stretching me, filling me. Our moans filtered through the shadows of the stable. The exquisite pleasure of our joined bodies lifted me out of myself. I plowed furrows through his hair with my fingers. He kissed my breasts fervently. With each thrust he delved deeper into me. And deeper still. Until—

  * * *

  "Elizabeth!"

  Elizabeth Burke was rudely yanked out of her fantasy by her sister's exasperated voice. Eyes which had been cornily described as china-blue blinked into focus the woman standing on the threshold of her gift shop. Her sister's face was drawn into a frown as affectionate and tolerant as it was disapproving. Lilah, younger by two years than Elizabeth, shook her head and clicked her tongue. "You're at it again, I see."

  "At what?"

  "Don't play dumb with me, Elizabeth." She shook her index finger at her sister. "You were daydreaming. At least a million miles away."

  "I was not. I was, uh, thinking about the order I'm filling out." Elizabeth rearranged a stack of papers on the glass showcase to give her lie credibility. Her cheeks were as warm with embarrassment over having been caught fantasizing as they were flushed from the heat of the fantasy itself. As she feared, her perceptive sister wasn't fooled.

  "You're blushing. If it was that good, share it with me." Lilah dropped down onto one of the high, velvet-cushioned stools Elizabeth had provided for her customers to use while looking at the merchandise in the shop. The stool had a lacy white wrought-iron back. Lilah stacked her hands on the crest of it and gazed up at her sister. "Give. I'm all ears."

  "You're all baloney. I wasn't fantasizing about anything except the ringing of the cash register. What do you think of these perfume bottles? They're made in Germany." She pushed the catalogue across the countertop.

  Lilah gave the glossy pictures a cursory glance. "Very nice."

  "Nice and expensive. Do you think a high-ticket item like that will sell?"

  "It depends on how unfaithf
ul the buyer has been."

  Lilah had a jaundiced attitude toward matrimony, even for this day and age. Elizabeth didn't agree. "Not every man who shops here is buying a present for his wife to ease a guilty conscience."

  "Of course not. Some of them are shopping for their mistresses," Lilah said drolly. "Just look at them."

  She waved toward the paned-glass bay window through which the elegant lobby of the Hotel Cavanaugh could be seen. It was crawling with people, mostly men, who were either waiting to check out or check in. With few exceptions they were traveling businessmen who were uniformly dressed in varying shades of dark wool worsted. Most carried leather attaché cases and trenchcoats. They all seemed to be under a deadline and wore similar anxiety-ridden expressions.

  "Hurrying home to the little woman after a week of high living on the road," Lilah said disdainfully. She was a feminist. In her older sister's opinion Lilah carried her battle for equality of the sexes a bit too far. "I'm convinced that at least half of them have dallied while they were away from home and hearth. Aren't you lucky that their guilt is good for your business?"

  "What a wretched thing to say. Just because you've elected not to marry doesn't mean that there aren't happy marriages."

  "Maybe one in a million."

  "I believe that my customers come in here to buy gifts for the wives they have missed and will be very glad to return home to."

  "You also believe in the tooth fairy. Get your head out of the clouds." Teasingly Lilah reached up and tugged on a strand of Elizabeth's pale blond hair. "Join the real world."

  "You don't make the real world sound like a very pleasant place to be." Elizabeth swatted aside Lilah's hand and rubbed at a smudge on the glass showcase.

  "That's because I'm not viewing it through rose-colored glasses."

  "What's wrong with a little romance?"

  "Nothing! I'm down on love, marriage, and all that stuff. I never said anything derogatory about sex."

  Elizabeth recoiled. "Neither did I. And keep your voice down. Somebody might hear you."

  "So what if they do? You're the only one not talking about sex these days. Aren't you getting lonesome?" She ignored Elizabeth's sour look. "Sex, sex, sex. There, see? I didn't get struck by lightning. I wasn't swallowed by a whale. I didn't turn into a pillar of salt. I'm still here."

  "Well, I wish you'd go away," Elizabeth grumbled. She knew what was coming. No matter how their conversations started, they always ended with a discussion about her love life ... or lack of one.

  The differences in their personalities and philosophies were reflected in their appearances. They bore a striking resemblance to each other. Both were blond, but Elizabeth's hair was finer and straighter than her sister's. Her features were delicately drawn. Lilah's were more voluptuous. Both had blue eyes, but Elizabeth's were as serene as a country pond while Lilah's were as restless as the north Atlantic.

  Elizabeth would have felt comfortable dressing out of a Victorian lady's armoire. Lilah went for the most avant-garde fashions. Elizabeth was cautious and studious. She carefully weighed the potential consequences before taking the first step onto unfamiliar ground. Lilah had always been the impetuous, aggressive one. That was why she felt free to be so outspoken about her sister's personal life.

  "As long as you're working in so fertile a playground, why don't you get in on the game?"

  Elizabeth pretended not to understand. "Don't you have a session this afternoon?" Lilah was a physical therapist.

  "Not till four-thirty and stop changing the subject. When one of these men catches your eye," she said, waving toward the twin bay windows on either side of the shop's door, "grab him. What have you got to lose?"

  "My self-respect for one thing," Elizabeth said crisply. "I'm not like you, Lilah. To me sex isn't a game, as you call it. It's love. It involves a commitment." Lilah rolled her eyes as though saying "Here comes the sermon." "You've never been in love so how could you know?"

  Lilah stopped clowning. "Okay, look, I know you loved John. It was storybook all the way. College sweetheart. One soda, two straws. Your love affair with him was so damn sweet it was sickening. But he's dead, Lizzie."

  When she called her sister by the pet name, they were getting to the heart of the matter. She reached across the counter and took Elizabeth's hand, pressing it between her own. "He's been dead for two years. You weren't cut out to be a nun. Why are you living like one?"

  "I'm not. I've got this shop. You know how much time it takes. It's not as though I'm sitting at home, pining away and feeling sorry for myself. I'm out every day earning a living for the children and me. I'm involved in their activities."

  "And what about your activities? When you're not working and the kids are bedded down for the night, then what? What does the Widow Burke do for herself?"

  "The Widow Burke is too tired by that time to do anything other than go to bed."

  "Alone." Elizabeth released a long-suffering sigh that was indicative of how tired she was of this perpetual argument. Lilah paid no attention to it. "How long are you going to settle for fantasies?"

  "I don't fantasize."

  Lilah laughed. "I know better. You're a hopeless romantic. For as long as I can remember, you were tying tea towels on my head and making me a lady-in-waiting to you, the princess, who was waiting for Prince Charming."

  "And then when he arrived, you threw him into a pit with a fire-breathing dragon," Elizabeth said, laughing at the childhood recollection, "and made him fight to prove his worth."

  "Yeah, but when the dragon got to be too much for the prince, I'd run in and rescue him."

  "That's the difference between us. I was always confident that Prince Charming would slay the dragon without any trouble."

  "Are you waiting for another prince, Lizzie? I hate to break the news to you, but they just don't exist."

  "I know they don't," she said wistfully.

  "So settle for something less. Like an ordinary guy who puts on his pants one leg at a time. And takes them off the same way," Lilah added with a mischievous grin.

  Elizabeth slipped back into her fantasy. The stable hand hadn't taken off his pants at all. He'd been too impatient. Impatience like that was exciting. Her heart fluttered, bringing her back into the present. This erotic daydreaming must stop. It was ridiculous. She blamed her absorption with sex on her sister. If Lilah wouldn't talk about it all the time, then maybe she wouldn't be reminded how deprived she was.

  "Well, even the ordinary men are hard to find," she said. "And I'm not going to tackle one as he walks past this door."

  "Okay then, let's focus on someone closer to home." Lilah's brows furrowed. "What about your neighbor?"

  Elizabeth got busy with a squirt bottle of Windex and a cleaning cloth. "What neighbor?"

  "How many single men live in the house behind you, Elizabeth?" Lilah asked with asperity. "The hunky one with gray hair. Broad shoulders."

  Elizabeth scrubbed harder at the smudge on the glass. "Mr. Randolph?"

  Lilah's laugh was downright wicked. "Mr. Randolph?" she mimicked in a high, singsong voice. "Don't play innocent with me. You've noticed him, right?"

  Elizabeth stashed the bottle of glass cleaner and the cloth behind the counter and, with annoyance, pushed back a wayward strand of hair. "He's the only single man in my neighborhood."

  "So why don't you invite him over for dinner some evening?"

  "Why don't you mind your own business?"

  "Or wear something absolutely scandalous the next time you mow the grass. Sunbathe topless."

  "Lilah, really! Besides, summer's over. It's too cold to sunbathe."

  Lilah winked licentiously. "That'll make your nipples hard."

  "I'm not listening to this."

  "If that's too much, then do something traditional. Ask him to repair your toaster."

  "It's not broken."

  "So break it!" Lilah came off the stool and faced her sister with obvious aggravation. "At a time when he's bound to see you
, look a little helpless and distraught."

  "You wouldn't."

  "Hell no, I wouldn't. But, as we've already established, I'm not you. I was never the damsel in distress in those fantasies you dreamed up."

  By an act of will, Elizabeth got a grip on her temper. "It's odd that you poke fun at my fantasies. Wasn't it your idea for me to name my shop Fantasy?"

  "I don't poke fun at your fantasies. They're as much a part of you as your fingerprints. Would I have given you that car tag if I didn't think it fit your character?"

  The car tag Lilah had given her last Christmas read FANTA C. She had been appalled at the gag gift but Lilah had had it registered with the state bureau. Without going through miles of red tape and all the rigmarole of having it changed, she was stuck with it for at least a year.