The Princess Bride (5 page)

He moaned something, shuddered. He rolled abruptly onto his side and drew her hand back to him, moving it softly on his body, teaching her the sensual rhythm he needed.

“Dear God,” he whispered, kissing her hungrily. “No, baby, don't stop,” he groaned when her movements slowed. “Touch me. Yes. Yes. Oh, God, yes!”

It was fascinating to see how he reacted to her. Encouraged, she moved closer and her mouth pressed softly, sensually, against the thick hair that covered his chest. He was shaking now. His body was strangely vulnerable, and the knowledge inhibited her.

He rolled onto his back, the very action betraying his need to feel her touch on him. He lay there, still shivering, his eyes closed, his body yielding to her soft, curious hands.

She laid her cheek against his hot skin, awash in new sensations, touches that had been taboo all her life. She was learning his body as a lover would.

“Tell me what to do,” she whispered as she drew her cheek against his breastbone. “I'll do anything for you. Anything!”

His hand held hers to him for one long, aching minute. Then he drew it up to his chest and held it there while he struggled to breathe.

Her breasts felt cool as they pressed nakedly into his rib cage where his shirt was pulled away. Her eyes closed and she lay there, close to him, closer to him than she'd ever been.

“Heavens, that was exciting,” she choked. “I never dreamed I could touch you like that, and in broad daylight, too!”

That raw innocence caught him off guard. Laughter bubbled up into his chest, into his throat. He began to laugh softly.

“Do hush!” she chided. “What if Mary should hear you and walk in?”

He lifted himself on an elbow and looked down at her bare breasts. “She'd get an eyeful, wouldn't she?” He traced a taut nipple, arrogantly pleased that she didn't object at all.

“I'm small,” she whispered.

He smiled. “No, you're not.”

She looked down to where his fingers rested against her pale skin. “Your skin is so dark compared to mine…”

“Especially here, where you're so pale,” he breathed. His lips bent to the soft skin he was touching, and he took her inside his mouth, gently suckling her.

She arched up, moaning harshly, her fists clenched beside her head as she tried to deal with the mounting delight of sensation.

He heard that harsh sound and reacted to it immediately. His mouth grew insistent, hot and hungry as it suckled hard at her breast. Her body clenched and suddenly went into a shocking spasm that she couldn't control at all. It never seemed to end, the hot, shameful pleasure he gave her with that intimate caress.

She clutched him, breathless, burying her hot face in his neck while she fought to still her shaking limbs, the faint little gasps that he must certainly be able to hear.

His mouth was tender now, calming rather than stirring. He pressed tender, brief kisses all over her skin, ending only reluctantly at her trembling lips.

Her shamed eyes lifted to his, full of tears that reflected her overwhelmed emotions.

He shook his head, dabbing at them with a handkerchief he drew from his slacks pocket. “Don't cry,” he whispered gently. “Your breasts are very, very sensitive. I love the way you react to my mouth on them.” He smiled. “It's nothing to worry about.”

“It's…natural?” she asked.

His hand smoothed her dark hair. “For a few women, I suppose,” he said. He searched her curious eyes. “I've never experienced it like this. I'm glad. There should be at least one or two firsts for me, as well as for you.”

“I wish I knew more,” she said worriedly.

“You'll learn.” His fingers traced her nose, her softly swollen lips. “I missed you.”

Her heart felt as if it could fly. She smiled. “Did you, really?”

He nodded. “Not that I wanted to,” he added with such disgust that she giggled.

He propped himself on an elbow and stared down at her for a long time, his brows drawn together in deep thought.

She could feel the indecision in him, along with a tension that was new to her. Her soft eyes swept over his dark, lean face and back up to meet his curious gaze.

“You're binding me with velvet ropes,” he murmured quietly. “I've never felt like this. I don't know how to handle it.”

“Neither do I,” she said honestly. She drew a slow
breath, aware suddenly of her shameless nudity and the coolness of the air on her skin.

He saw that discomfort and deftly helped her back into her clothes with an economy of movement that was somehow disturbing.

“You make me feel painfully young,” she confessed.

“You are,” he said without hesitation. His pale eyes narrowed. “This is getting dangerous. I can't keep my hands off you lately. And the last thing on earth I'll ever do is seduce my business partner's only daughter.”

“I know that, King,” she said with an odd sort of dignity. He got to his feet and she laid down again, watching him rearrange his own shirt and vest and jacket and tie. It was strangely intimate.

He knew that. His eyes smiled, even if his lips didn't.

“What are we going to do?” she added.

He stared down at her with an unnerving intensity. “I wish to God I knew.”

He pulled her up beside him. His big hands rested warmly on her shoulders. “Wouldn't you like to go to Europe?” he asked.

Her eyebrows lifted. “What for?”

“You could go to college. Or have a holiday. Lettie could go with you,” he suggested, naming her godmother. “She'd spoil you rotten and you'd come back with a hefty knowledge of history.”

“I don't want to go to Europe, and I'm not all that enthralled with history.”

He sighed. “Tiffany, I'm not going to sleep with you.”

Her full, swollen lips pouted up at him. “I haven't asked you to.” She lowered her eyes. “But I'm not going to sleep with anyone else. I haven't even thought about anyone else since I was fourteen.”

He felt his mind whirling at the confession. He scowled deeply. He was getting in over his head and he didn't know how to stop. She was too young; years too young. She didn't have the maturity, the poise, the sophistication to survive in his world. He could have told her that, but she wouldn't have listened. She was living in dreams. He couldn't afford to.

He didn't answer her. His hands were deep in his pockets and he was watching her worriedly, amazed at his own headlong fall into ruin. No woman in his experience had ever wound him up to such a fever pitch of desire by just parading around in a silk dress. He'd accused her of tempting him, but it wasn't the whole truth. Ever since the night of her birthday party, he hadn't been able to get her soft body out of his mind. He wanted her violently. He just didn't know what to do about it. Marriage was out of the question, even more so was an affair. Whatever else she was, she was still his business partner's daughter.

“You're brooding,” she murmured.

He shrugged. “I can't think of anything better to do,”
he said honestly. “I'm going away for a while,” he added abruptly. “Perhaps this will pass if we ignore it.”

So he was still going to fight. She hadn't expected anything else, but she was vaguely disappointed, just the same.

“I can learn,” she said.

His eyebrow went up.

“I know how to be a hostess,” she continued, as if he'd challenged her. “I already know most of the people in your circle, and in Dad's. I'm not fifteen.”

His eyes narrowed. “Tiffany, you may know how to be a hostess, but you haven't any idea in hell how to be a wife,” he said bluntly.

Her heart jumped wildly in her chest. “I could learn how to be one.”

His face hardened. “Not with me. I don't want to get married. And before you say it,” he added, holding up a hand, “yes, I want you. But desire isn't enough. It isn't even a beginning. I may be the first man you've ever wanted, Tiffany, but you aren't the first woman I've wanted.”

T
he mocking smile on his face made Tiffany livid with jealous rage. She scrambled to her feet, her face red and taut.

“That wasn't necessary!” she flung at him.

“Yes, it was,” he replied calmly. “You want to play house. I don't.”

Totally at a loss, she knotted her hands at her sides and just stared at him. This sort of thing was totally out of her experience. Her body was all that interested him, and it wasn't enough. She had nothing else to bargain with. She'd lost.

It was a new feeling. She'd always had everything she wanted. Her father had spoiled her rotten. King had been another impossible item on her list of luxuries, but
he was telling her that she couldn't have him. Her father couldn't buy him for her. And she couldn't flirt and tease and get him for herself. Defeat was strangely cold. It sat in the pit of her stomach like a black emptiness. She didn't know how to handle it.

And he knew. It was in his pale, glittering eyes, in that faint, arrogant smile on his hard mouth.

She wanted to rant and rave, but it wasn't the sort of behavior that would save the day. She relaxed her hands, and her body, and simply looked at him, full of inadequacies and insecurities that she'd never felt before.

“Perhaps when I'm Carla's age, I'll try again,” she said with torn pride and the vestiges of a smile.

He nodded with admiration. “That's the spirit,” he said gently.

She didn't want gentleness, or pity. She stuck her hands into her jeans pockets. “You don't have to leave town to avoid me,” she said. “Lettie's taking me to New York next week,” she lied, having arranged the trip mentally in the past few minutes. Lettie would do anything her godchild asked, and she had the means to travel wherever she liked. Besides, she loved New York.

King's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Does Lettie know she's going traveling?”

“Of course,” she said, playing her part to the hilt.

“Of course.” He drew in a heavy breath and slowly let it out. His body was still giving him hell, but he wasn't
going to let her know it. Ultimately she was better off out of his life.

“See you,” she said lightly.

He nodded. “See you.”

And he left.

 

Late that autumn, Tiffany was walking down a runway in New York wearing the latest creation of one David Marron, a young designer whose Spanish-inspired fashions were a sensation among buyers. The two had met through a mutual friend of Lettie's and David had seen incredible possibilities in Tiffany's long black hair and elegance. He dressed her in a gown that was reminiscent of lacy Spanish noblewomen of days long past, and she brought the house down at his first showing of his new spring line. She made the cover of a major fashion magazine and jumped from an unknown to a familiar face in less than six months.

Lettie, with her delicately tinted red hair and twinkling brown eyes, was elated at her accomplishment. It had hurt her deeply to see Tiffany in such an agony of pain when she'd approached her godmother and all but begged to be taken out of Texas. Lettie doted on the younger woman and whisked her away with a minimum of fuss.

They shared a luxurious Park Avenue apartment and were seen in all the most fashionable places. In those few months, Tiffany had grown more sophisticated, more mature—and incredibly more withdrawn. She was ice-cold with men, despite the enhancement of her beauty
and her elegant figure. Learning to forget King was a full-time job. She was still working on it.

Just when she was aching to go home to her father where her chances of seeing King every week were excellent, a lingerie company offered her a lucrative contract and a two-week holiday filming commercials in Jamaica.

“I couldn't turn it down,” she told Lettie with a groan. “What's Dad going to say? I was going to help him with his Christmas party. I won't get home until Christmas Eve. After we get back from Jamaica, I have to do a photo layout for a magazine ad campaign due to hit the stands next spring.”

“You did the right thing,” Lettie assured her. “My dear, at your age, you should be having fun, meeting people, learning to stand alone.” She sighed gently. “Marriage and children are for later, when you're established in a career.”

Tiffany turned and stared at the older woman. “You never married.”

Lettie smiled sadly. “No. I lost my fiancé in Vietnam. I wasn't able to want anyone else in that way.”

“Lettie, that's so sad!”

“One learns to live with the unbearable, eventually. I had my charities to keep me busy. And, of course, I had you,” she added, giving her goddaughter a quick hug. “I haven't had a bad life.”

“Someday you have to tell me about him.”

“Someday, I will. But for now, you go ahead to Jamaica and have a wonderful time filming your commercial.”

“You'll come with me?” she asked quickly, faintly worried at the thought of being so far away without any familiar faces.

Lettie patted her hand. “Of course I will. I love Jamaica!”

“I have to call Dad and tell him.”

“That might be a good idea. He was complaining earlier in the week that your letters were very far apart.”

“I'll do it right now.”

She picked up the receiver and dialed her father's office number, twisting the cord nervously while she waited to be put through.

“Hi, Dad!” she said.

“Don't tell me,” he muttered. “You've met some dethroned prince and you're getting married in the morning.”

She chuckled. “No. I've just signed a contract to do lingerie commercials and we're flying to Jamaica to start shooting.”

There was a strange hesitation. “When?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Well, when will you be back?” he asked.

“In two weeks. But I've got modeling assignments in New York until Christmas Eve,” she said in a subdued tone.

“What about my Christmas party?” He sounded
resigned and depressed. “I was counting on you to arrange it for me.”

“You can have a New Year's Eve party for your clients,” she improvised with laughter in her voice. “I'll have plenty of time to put that together before I have to start my next assignment. In fact,” she added, “I'm not sure when it will be. The lingerie contract was only for the spring line. They're doing different models for different seasons. I was spring.”

“I can see why,” he murmured dryly. “My daughter, the model.” He sighed again. “I should never have let you get on the plane with Lettie. It's her fault. I know she's at the back of it.”

“Now, Dad…”

“I'm having her stuffed and hung on my wall when she comes back. You tell her that!”

“You know you're fond of Lettie,” she chided, with a wink at her blatantly eavesdropping godmother.

“I'll have her shot!”

She grimaced and Lettie, reading her expression, chuckled, unabashed by Harrison Blair's fury.

“She's laughing,” she told him.

“Tell her to laugh while she can.” He hesitated and spoke to someone nearby. “King said to tell you he misses you.”

Her heart jumped, but she wasn't leaving herself open to any further humiliation at his hands. “Tell him to pull the other one,” she chuckled. “Listen, Dad, I have to go. I'll phone you when we're back from Jamaica.”

“Wait a minute. Where in Jamaica, and is Lettie going along?”

“Of course she is! We'll have a ball. Take care, Dad. Bye!”

He was still trying to find out where she was going when she hung up on him. He glanced at King with a grimace.

The younger man had an odd expression on his face. It was one Harrison couldn't remember ever seeing there before.

“She's signed a contract,” Harrison said, shoving his hands into his pockets as he glared at the telephone, as if the whole thing had been its fault.

“For what?” King asked.

“Lingerie commercials,” his partner said heavily. “Just think, my sheltered daughter will be parading around in sheer nighties for the whole damned world to see!”

“Like hell she will. Where is she?” King demanded.

“On her way to Jamaica first thing in the morning. King,” he added when the other man started to leave. “She's of age,” he said gently. “She's a woman. I don't have the right to tell her how to live her own life. And neither do you.”

“I don't want other men ogling her!”

Harrison just nodded. “I know. I don't, either. But it's her decision.”

“I won't let her do it,” King said doggedly.

“How do you propose to stop her? You can't do
it legally. I don't think you can do it any other way, either.”

“Did you tell her what I said?”

Harrison nodded again. “She said to pull the other one.”

Pale blue eyes widened with sheer shock. It had never occured to him that he could lose Tiffany, that she wouldn't always be in Harrison's house waiting for him to be ready to settle down. Now she'd flown the coop and the shoe was on the other foot. She'd discovered the pleasure of personal freedom and she didn't want to settle down.

He glanced at Harrison. “Is she serious about this job? Or is it just another ploy to get my attention?”

The other man chuckled. “I have no idea. But you have to admit, she's a pretty thing. It isn't surprising that she's attracted a modeling agency.”

King stared out the window with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. “Then she's thinking about making a career of it.”

Harrison didn't tell him that her modeling contract might not last very long. He averted his eyes. “She might as well have a career. If nothing else, it will help her mature.”

The other man didn't look at him. “She hasn't grown up yet.”

“I know that. It isn't her fault. I've sheltered her from life—perhaps too much. But now she wants to try her wings. This is the best time, before she has a reason to
fold them away. She's young and she thinks she has the world at her feet. Let her enjoy it while she can.”

King stared down at the carpet. “I suppose that's the wise choice.”

“It's the only choice,” came the reply. “She'll come home when she's ready.”

King didn't say another word about it. He changed the subject to business and pursued it solemnly.

 

Meanwhile, Tiffany went to Jamaica and had a grand time. Modeling, she discovered, was hard work. It wasn't just a matter of standing in front of a camera and smiling. It involved wardrobe changes, pauses for the proper lighting and equipment setup, minor irritations like an unexpected burst of wind and artistic temperament on the part of the cameraman.

Lettie watched from a distance, enjoying Tiffany's enthusiasm for the shoot. The two weeks passed all too quickly, with very little time for sight-seeing.

“Just my luck,” Tiffany groaned when they were back in New York, “I saw the beach and the hotel and the airport. I didn't realize that every free minute was going to be spent working or resting up for the next day's shoot!”

“Welcome to the world of modeling.” Lettie chuckled. “Here, darling, have another celery stick.”

Tiffany grimaced, but she ate the veggie platter she was offered without protest.

At night, she lay awake and thought about King. She
hadn't believed his teasing assertion that he'd missed her. King didn't miss people. He was entirely self-sufficient. But how wonderful if it had been true.

That daydream only lasted until she saw a tabloid at the drugstore where she was buying hair-care products. There was a glorious color photo of King and Carla right on the front page of one, with the legend, “Do wedding bells figure in future for tycoon and secretary?”

She didn't even pick it up, to her credit. She passed over it as if she hadn't seen it. But she went to bed that evening, she cried all night, almost ruining her face for the next day's modeling session.

 

Unrequited love took its toll on her in the weeks that followed. The one good thing about misery was that it attracted other miserable people. She annexed one Mark Allenby, a male model who'd just broken up with his long-time girlfriend and wanted a shoulder to cry on. He was incredibly handsome and sensitive, and just what Tiffany needed for her shattered ego.

The fact that he was a wild man was certainly a bonus.

He was the sort of person who'd phone her on the spur of the moment and suggest an evening at a retro beatnik coffeehouse where the patrons read bad poetry. He loved practical jokes, like putting whoopee cushions under a couple posing for a romantic ad.

“I can see why you're single,” Tiffany suggested breathlessly when she'd helped him outrun the furious
photographer. “And I'll bet you never get to work for
him
again,” she indicated the heavyset madman chasing them.

“Yes, I will.” He chuckled. “When you make it to my income bracket, you don't have to call photographers to get work. They call you.” Mark turned and blew the man a kiss, grabbed Tiffany's hand, and pulled her along to the subway entrance nearby.

 

“You need a makeover,” he remarked on their way back to her apartment.

She stopped and looked up at him. “Why?”

“You look too girlish,” he said simply, and smiled. “You need a more haute couture image if you want to grow into modeling.”

She grimaced. “I'm not sure I really do, though. I like it all right. But I don't need the money.”

“Darling, of course you need the money!”

“Not really. Money isn't worth much when you can't buy what you want with it,” she said pointedly.

He pushed back his curly black hair and gave her his famous inscrutable he-man stare. “What do you want that you can't buy?”

“King.”

“Of which country?”

She grinned. “Not royalty. That's his name. Kingman. Kingman Marshall.”