The Sweet Caress by Roberta Latow Read Free Book Online Page A

as the woman without a memory and a fortune of money the sheriff was withholding pending the results of her investigations. Speculation was rife about who she really was and what sort of life she had lived before her arrival in town.
    Jessica won over those she met by her unpretentious and cordial manner. She had several part-time jobs: working alongside Cissie in her mother’s dress shop, waitressing at Wiggin’s Tavern when they needed extra hands, and for four hours a week she stacked shelves for the town’s oldest grocery shop. She worked hard and well, and accepted without complaint whatever menial task she was given. She gained a reputation for being reliable and willing to turn her hand to anything to earn her living expenses and keep herself busy. As Candia she would never have contemplated doing such work but as Jessica, while she did not actually enjoy the work, she found it perfectly acceptable. She was experiencing a side of life she had never even thought about. Her life of odd jobs demanded nothing except willingness. It took no brain power, little thought and no need for charm, which was therapeutic and just what she needed to gain the kind of strength she felt she needed.
    Every day her Newbampton experience distanced her from the life she had known. Jessica knew she was only just limping along but at least she was here and, helped by her career as an odd job lady, she was beginning to integrate herself into the community. People watched her. They were filled with compassion for her, as they would have been for the town idiot or any other crippled soul who arrived on their doorstep, and they were enthralled by her beauty and charm and the mystery surrounding her.
    It was several weeks after she had her brain scan before she saw Dr Luke Greenfield again. He appeared one evening at the door of Rose Cottage. Jessica, who was dressed in a pair of jeans and a much too large cream-coloured heavy knit sweater, was delighted to see him, itshowed in her face. Though she had been attracted to him, she had not realised until now just how carnal her feelings for him had been. His sexuality seemed to wrap itself round her. She wanted him, she ached to experience with Luke Greenfield that most intimate moment between a man and a woman, orgasm, the sweet caress. Jessica felt no embarrassment about that. All things carnal had, since her first sensuous experience, been a natural delight that allowed her to be at ease with her sexual appetites.
    ‘Is this a doctor’s house call?’ she asked, while the smile on her lips, the seductive twinkle in her eyes told him she knew that it wasn’t.
    ‘Would you prefer it to be?’
    ‘Ah, I see, you are a man who answers a question with a question. I don’t think that’s going to get us very far.’
    ‘Oh, I think it will. It was, after all, a question that stated I am not here on a house call.’
    ‘A heavily veiled statement,’ Jessica told him.
    ‘Which you chose to ignore.’
    ‘You’re playing with me, Dr Greenfield.’
    ‘No, Miss Johnson, we are playing with each other.’
    ‘Yes, I suppose we are, though I think I would have put it differently – we’re dancing round each other.’
    ‘Dancing and teasing as in a fertility dance, the way the birds and the beasts do?’ he asked.
    ‘Aren’t you being a bit presumptuous?’ she asked good-naturedly.
    ‘Am I?’ Luke asked.
    ‘By god, we’re doing it again,’ they both said at the same time and burst into laughter.
    Jessica was aware that she had met her match in Luke Greenfield and that excited her interest in him beyond that of being sexually attracted to him. It made her take a closer look at this handsome man. He was bare-headed and was wearing a camelhair coat that had wide lapels and was belted. She could see peeping out from under his coat ablack silk bow tie and just a hint of a fine white linen dress shirt. She was surprised that he should call on her when he was quite obviously on his way to