‘Here?’
Softly brushing over his palm with my thumb, I raised his hand high until it hovered over a far more interesting area.
‘Here?’
He made a low noise in the back of his throat. I smiled. The first cracks were appearing in the stone.
‘Oh, no! I have a better idea. Here…’
Raising his rather unwilling hand up even farther, I brought it to my lips and with his wet fingertips, brushed off the specks of mud on my lips. The first touch was incredible. His fingers brushing across my mouth were like the tips of angels’ wings. They sent a blast of heavenly fire through me, making me crave more. Languidly, I parted my lips and slid one of his fingers inside, my tongue flicking against its pad.
His breath hitched - and I pounced! He was so dazed, he didn’t have a hope of evading me. My arms locked around his neck before he’d had time to blink, and then my lips were on his, taking him, devouring him, in the most wanton kiss we had ever shared. He fought. Not to get to me this time, but to get away. Trying to protect his precious mint-condition shirt, I guessed. Or he just couldn’t deal with a woman going for what she wanted.
Ha! He would just have to! I was not going to let his rock-hard stubbornness get in the way of this. This was too good to end.
‘Mr Linton…Lilly…no, I…’
‘You what?’ Freeing his lips, my mouth raced down his throat, scattering kisses all the way. My arms came down from around his neck, and the first button of his shirt popped open in a moment. ‘You want more? Coming right up!’
‘No!’ he growled. ‘We can’t do this!’
‘Can’t we?’ I softly bit him on the neck and felt him quiver against me. Oh boy, this was fun! ‘Why? It’s not as if we haven’t done a bit of this before.’
‘That was different,’ he groaned.
‘Why?’
‘You weren’t covered in mud!’
I smirked against his granite skin. ‘What? You can’t engage in amorous congress while you’re dirty?’
‘Not if you’re English, no!’
‘I must say,’ I whispered, my lips moving slowly further down to the hollow at the base of his throat, ‘I disagree.’
I started forward, and was just about to mash my dirt-covered body against him, when he - damn him! - slipped from my grasp like an eel, ducking down into the water and coming up with a splash a few yards away.
‘Hey! Don’t you move!’
Ignoring my order, he flung himself head-first into the water. I lunged after him, but he was already darting away, swimming the crawl faster than I had ever seen anybody do in my life.
‘Come back! I promise to wash before we do it! Hey! Come back!’
He didn’t respond. Instead, he continued on until a few fast strokes had brought him to the opposite bank. Ducking down, he slid into a thicket of reeds and lianas, and was gone. All that remained was a whiff of his smell in the air and the sound of wet footsteps, fast receding into the distance.
I punched the water.
‘Damn!’
*~*~**~*~*
Needless to say, I wasn’t in a particularly good mood when I got back to the camp. After my little trip into the river, the lower half of my body had lost most of its mosquito protection and was now itching for an entirely different reason than I had originally hoped for. Quickly I returned to my little patch of mud and restored my protective package, taking care to punch the mud a few times, imagining that it was Mr Ambrose’s face.
And the worst thing was: I couldn’t even be officially miffed at him. Because, no matter how much he protested that it was all about his mint-condition suit, I knew what it was really about: he had been protecting my virtue.
The nerve of him! If my virtue needs protecting, I’ll do it myself, thank you very much!
Yes, but…right then and there, did I have the strength to do it myself? Did I even want it? All I knew was that I wanted him. Desperately. I wanted to get dirty with him and paint myself all over his body, mark him forever as mine.
Biting my lip, I punched the mud again. Damn him! Damn him for being so reasonable and controlled. Damn him for thinking of what I needed, instead of what I wanted!
I finished my insect protection measures, and, getting to my feet, started back towards the camp. I hadn’t got half the way when a dark figure stepped out from the trees, blocking my path. My hands instinctively rose in defence - when dark, deep, sea-coloured eyes met mine and I immediately recognised the figure on the shadowy pathway.
He stood there, silent as an empty grave. His eyes, though, weren’t empty. They were swirling with dark storm clouds, speaking their own secret language.
The silence was lengthening. I supposed I had better say something before it reached the length of Loch Ness.
‘Mr Ambrose, Sir.’
That was it. I didn’t really know what else to say. The look in his eyes was slightly disturbing.
‘Mr Linton.’
That was it. That was all he said. His voice was perfectly cool and controlled again. He stepped out of the shadow, and I saw that he had somehow managed to clean and dry his oh-so-precious mint-condition shirt and tailcoat.
Slowly, he took a step forward. My whole body tensed, prickling with the feeling of his proximity. What was he doing here? Not half an hour ago, he had run away from me. And now he was coming towards me, with a look in his eyes that made me shiver inside? What was his game?
Whatever it was - he intended to win.
He was only a few feet away from me now. His hand came up, and, mesmerised, I stood there as his fingers approached. They touched my cheek - my dirty, mud-stained, unladylike cheek - and stayed there for an immeasurably long second. When his fingers came away again, they were stained with dirt. He raised them to his own face and I watched, spell-bound as he drew a long, devilishly dirty, line of mud across his cheek. He began just under his eye, and drew downwards, until his path ended right next to his mouth.
Or so I thought.
His fingers moved on, until they rested against his lips, and he bestowed a gentle kiss on the finger that had grazed my cheek, leaving his lips mud stained and dirty. His eyes met mine, searing into me. Then, without saying a word, he turned and marched away back up the path.
With trembling fingers, I reached up to touch my cheek, where I could still feel his fingers burning into my skin with cold fire.
What the hell was that?
Caught in Cobwebs
If I had thought the little episode on the path meant that Mr Ambrose was now fine with my new apparel (or lack thereof), I had been vastly mistaken. I had hardly time to wake up the next morning before he pounced on me. He more or less arm-wrestled me into wearing my chemise over my mud-package. It was a bit wet and sticky, but on the whole I had to admit it felt nice having something to cover my girly bits. I guess I wasn’t completely cut out for life as an Amazon Indian.
That didn’t mean, however, that I wasn’t more than ready to forego cover in the presence of Mr Rikkard Ambrose. Not at all. The longer we travelled together, the stronger became my desire to push him to the ground and rip his clothes off. Unfortunately, Mr Ambrose didn’t seem to share my desire, or at least had much better control of it than sweet little me. How could I possibly get this craving under control? How?
I tried logic. It had served me well in the past:
Men and women deserve equality. Men won’t give women equality. Ergo, men are bastards.
See how well it works?
So I tried it on this situation.
I want to dance the fandango de pokum with Mr Rikkard Ambrose. I want it really, really bad. But if I do, I will probably get pregnant and have to do the unspeakable m-thing. You know the one that involves churches and priests and vows of obedience. Ergo: I can’t get my hands on him.
But…I still wanted to! Blast!
Logic didn’t seem to work here. Instead, I secretly started plotting ways of getting him to take his clothes off. For days and days, I brooded ov
er dozens of plans, one less likely to succeed than the last. But it turned out that I needn’t have bothered. All I had to do was wait, for fate was on my side.
*~*~**~*~*
‘Take care where to step.’
Those were the first words I had heard Chandresh say for several days. He was almost as tight-lipped as Mr Ambrose. So, I had to admit, I was curious why he was speaking up now.
‘Why?’
He didn’t look at me. Instead, his eyes kept doing what they had been doing before: scanning the ground.
‘There are dangerous animals here.’
‘What kind of animals? Jaguars? Leopards?’
He pointed upwards. I followed his finger with my gaze, but all I could see were a couple of cobwebs stretched between tree branches.
‘I don’t see anything. What-’
Then it clicked.
‘Oh.’
‘Yes. As I said - take care where you step.’
I was tempted to ask whether the little fellows we should be on the lookout for were poisonous or not - but then I decided that, on the whole, I’d rather not know. Once or twice I saw something dark scuttle past underfoot, but the day passed without a major incident. It was towards evening that events took a more interesting direction.
We had made camp near a clump of tall, dark trees, just right for hanging our hammocks from. Our supplies were beginning to run low, so Chandresh posted a few guards some distance away around the camp, and then took the rest of the men hunting into the jungle. Karim went with them, but Mr Ambrose, for some reason, decided to stay behind. Maybe he wanted to lean back, relax and calculate how many millions of pounds he was going to make from this trip. Maybe he had found a stain on his tailcoat that he needed to eradicate. Most likely, though, it was fate.
I was lying in my hammock, contemplating the unfairness of life and the perfection of Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s profile when I heard a noise from the direction of his hammock. I turned and saw that he wasn’t lying down like me, but standing upright. In fact, you could hardly have stood more uprightly uprighter. His posture was as stiff as a board, his eyes fixed on some point in the distance. His hands, his arms, his face - they were all perfectly still. Even his left little finger didn’t twitch.
‘Mr Ambrose?’
He didn’t reply. What was the matter with him? Had he finally truly turned into stone?
‘Mr Ambrose, Sir? What is the matter?’
He parted his lips, infinitesimally, and whispered so low it was hardly more than a tickle against my eardrum, ‘Drr ss smsm crlnp mm lg.’
‘Pardon?’
His cool eyes bored into me. Every other part of his body still stayed perfectly still. ‘I said there is something crawling up my leg.’
Swinging out of the hammock, I examined his lower half with a frown. ‘I don’t see anything on your trousers.’
‘It’s inside the trousers.’
‘Oh.’
‘Indeed.’
For some reason, a smile twitched at the corners of my mouth. ‘You do realise that if you hadn’t been so stubborn about keeping your clothing on, this wouldn’t be a problem? You could just reach down there and sweep away the-’
‘This is not the time to discuss my sartorial choices, Mr Linton. Take my trousers off!’
It was very hard to keep my lips from breaking into a full-fledged grin. Very hard indeed. ‘Sir! Are you trying to persuade me to get you naked? I’ll have you know that I am a decent girl, and not in the habit of pulling down the trousers of any gentleman who asks.’
‘Mr Linton!’
‘Though I might consider it, if he looks nice enough.’
‘Mr Linton! It’s at the knee already. Get a move on.’
I sighed. ‘All right, all right. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’ll be taking them off now anyway, so it’s not worth the bother.’
A seraphic smile on my face, I started forward. I didn’t hurry, particularly. I had been waiting a long time for this and was going to enjoy every moment.
‘Mr Linton!’
‘Coming, coming…’
Stopping a few feet away, I eyed the belt buckle of Mr Rikkard Ambrose. Oh dear. This looked as if it was going to take some work. Checking for spiders on the ground, I knelt down in front of him. From under my lashes, I looked up at him.
‘Oh dear.’ I smiled an innocent little smile. ‘What a compromising position.’
‘If you don’t get on with it,’ Mr Ambrose ground out from between clenched teeth, ‘I’m going to find a really compromising position to put you in!’
My smile widened. ‘Don’t tempt me.’
‘It’s on my thigh now!’
‘Lucky spider.’
‘Mr Linton…!’
‘All right, all right.’ Batting my lashes up at him one last time, I reached for his buckle. The thing was just as stubborn as its owner, and felt as if it was rusted shut, although it gleamed like freshly polished silver. Still, I was nothing if not determined. With a clink, the buckle opened, and a moment later, Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s legwear slid to the ground with a soft rustle.
Aah…
Closing my eyes, I took a second to appreciate this unique moment. He was there, right in front of me. And he couldn’t move.
Then I opened them again to see what he had to offer.
My mouth went dry.
‘Mr Linton?’
‘Wrgsfgl?’
‘Mr Linton! The spider!’
‘S-spider? What spider?’
‘The spider!’
‘Oh, that spider.’ I blinked, trying to shake of the daze. It was hard. Very hard. After all, I was only human. ‘Well…let’s see, where is it…?’
My eyes swept over his thighs, taking in the sleek, smooth skin, the hard muscles, and, oh, of course also looking for spiders. But…there weren’t any.
‘There is no spider,’ I informed my dear employer.
‘That’s,’ he ground out between clenched teeth, ‘because while you were staring, it decided to move up into my tailcoat. Get my shirt open! Now!’
Dear me! This spider was a clever little fellow.
‘Why don’t you open it yourself? Buttons aren’t complicated like a belt. You should be able open them without shifting too much.’
‘I’m not going to move an inch. Didn’t you hear Chandresh? Some of those beasts are poisonous. I do not intend to end my days in the Amazonian Jungle, brought down by a mere spider bite.’
Rising to my feet, I lifted an eyebrow.
‘And you’re not worried that I’ll be bitten?’
‘I doubt one poisonous spider would suffer much from the bite of another.’
‘Has anyone ever told you that you are a real gentleman, Mr Ambrose?’
‘No.’
‘Well, don’t expect them to.’
My eager fingers started on his tailcoat and vest.
‘You know,’ I muttered, ‘you’re the only man I’ve ever known who wore a black vest under a black tailcoat - apart from undertakers.’
‘We can discuss fashion later, Mr Linton. Get the shirt off!’
‘Why, Sir! I never thought you’d be so forward with an innocent maiden like me.’
‘You’re going to pay for this later, Mr Linton.’
‘No, you are. You are the employer, remember? You pay me, not the other way around.’
He gave me an arctic glare as good as a dozen curses. After that, I decided it would be politic to indeed get a move on. Besides, if you got a chance to fondle Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s naked chest, would you pass it up?
That was a rhetorical question.
I unbuttoned his shirt and cautiously slid it off, taking time to appreciate his marvellous musculature in the process. He was so impressive, it took me a moment to notice the large, hairy black spider sitting on his chest.
‘Eew.’ I pulled a face. ‘Nasty little beast!’
‘Precisely my opinion, Mr Linton,’ he managed to get out without moving his lips. ‘Now w
ill you get it off me?’
‘Yes, Sir! Right away, Sir!’
Picking up a stick from the ground, I slowly slid it under the spider’s hairy belly.
‘Three…two…one…now!’
One flick of my wrist, and the spider flew away, landing a few feet away on the soggy ground. I could have left it at that. But if I had, I wouldn’t have been me. So instead, I whipped out my gun, levelled it at the little beast and fired.
Bam!
When the echoes of the shot had died away, all that was left of the spider were a few hairy remnants. Lifting the gun to my mouth, I blew the smoke away and batted my eyelashes at Mr Ambrose.
‘Will you look at that? The heroine has saved the day. Now, all that remains for the hero to do is to fall into her arms, weep on her chest and offer up his virtue in gratitude.’
Mr Ambrose stepped forward, his eyes glinting coldly. ‘Don’t count on it.’
‘The weeping, or the offered virtue?’
‘Both.’
‘Dear me. You really are a skinflint. Don’t I even get a “thank you”?’
He said something in reply - but I didn’t catch it. Because in that moment, I turned away from the dead spider to face him and got my first real eye full of Mr Rikkard Ambrose in his new, much less restrictive state of apparel.
Now, as mentioned some time ago, I had seen naked men before - well, statues of them, anyway. But never, not once in my life, had I seen a real man in underwear. Especially not this one. The sight hit me like a sledgehammer, squeezing my heart into a painful pancake.
Good God…!
Why didn’t he just sell half-naked pictures of himself to young single ladies? No matter how much money he had made in other ways, it had to be a pittance in comparison to what he could make with such a business model. His figure was cast in half-shadow under the roof of the jungle, but that only accentuated the subtle, hard curving of his muscles. Slowly I dragged my eyes up from his powerful thighs, over his drawers, faded white and much too tight, to his bare abdomen and pectorals.
I nodded at his drawers.
‘Let me guess…ten years old and still in mint condition?’
‘Twelve, actually.’