From the twins’ room Ruby made her way to the room she was sharing with Sander—not because she wanted to look again at the large bed and let her imagination taunt her with images of what they would share there, but because she needed to unpack, Ruby told herself firmly. Only when she opened the door to th
e bedroom the cases that had been there before had vanished, and from the en suite bathroom through the open door she could smell the sharp citrus scent of male soap and hear the sound of the shower.
Had Sander had her cases removed? Had he told Anna that he didn’t want to share a room with her? Relief warred with a jolt of female protectiveness of her position as his wife. She liked Anna, but she didn’t want the other woman to think that Sander was rejecting her. That would be humiliating. More humiliating than being forced in the silence of the night to cry out in longing to a husband who could arouse in her a hunger she could not control?
Ruby moved restlessly from one foot to the other, and then froze as the door to the en suite bathroom opened fully and Sander walked into the bedroom.
He had wrapped a towel round his hips. His body was still damp from his shower, and the white towel threw into relief the powerful tanned male V shape of his torso and the breadth of his shoulders, tapering down over strong muscles to his chest, to the hard flatness of his belly. The shadowing of dark hair slicked wetly against his skin emphasised a maleness that had Ruby trapped in its sensual spell. She wanted to look away from him. She wanted not to remember, not to feel, not to be so easily and completely overwhelmed by the need that just looking at him brought back to simmering heat. But she didn’t have that kind of self-control. Instead of satiating her desire for him, what they had already shared seemed only to have increased her need for him.
Her own intense sensuality bewildered her. She had lived for six years without ever once wanting to have sex, and yet now she only had to look at Sander to be consumed by this alien desire that seemed to have taken possession of her. Possession. Just thinking the word increased the heat licking at her body, tightening the pulse flickering eagerly deep inside her.
It was Ruby’s fault that he wanted her, Sander told himself. It was she, with her soft mouth and her hungry gaze, with her eagerness, who was responsible for his own inability to control the savage surging of his need to possess her. It was because of her that he felt this ache, this driven, agonising urgency that unleashed within him something he barely recognised as part of himself.
Like a wild storm, a tornado threatening to suck them both up into its perilous grasp, Ruby could feel the pressure of their combined desire. Fear filled her. She didn’t want this. It shamed and weakened her. Dragging her gaze from Sander’s body, she started to run towards the door in blind panic. But Sander moved faster, reaching the door before her, and the impetus of her panic slammed her into his body, the impact shocking through her.
Tears of anger—against herself, against him, and against the aching desire flooding her—filled her eyes and she curled her hands into small fists and beat them impotently against his chest. Sander seized hold of her wrists.
‘I don’t want to feel like this,’ she cried, agonized.
‘But you do. You want this, and you want me,’ he told her, before he took the denial from her lips with the ruthless pressure of his own.
Just the taste of her unleashed within him a hunger he couldn’t control. The softness of her lips, the sound she made when he kissed her, the way her whole body shuddered against his with longing, drove him in what felt like a form of madness, a need, to a place where nothing else existed or mattered, where bringing her desire within the control of his ability to satisfy it felt as though it was what he had been born for.
Each sound she made, each shudder of pleasure her body gave, each urgent movement against his touch that begged silently for more became a goal he had to reach—a test of his maleness he had to master, so that he would always be the only man she desired, his pleasuring of her the only pleasure that could satisfy her. Something about the pale silkiness of her skin as he slid her clothes from it made him want to touch it over and over again. His hands already knew the shape and texture of her breasts, but that knowing only made him want to feel their soft weight even more. His lips and tongue and teeth might have aroused the swollen darkness of her nipples to previous pleasure, but now he wanted to recreate that pleasure. He wanted to slide his hand over the flatness of her belly and feel her suck it in as she fought to deny the effect of his touch and lost that fight. He wanted to part the slender thighs and feel them quiver, hear the small moan from between her lips, watch as she tried and failed to stop her thighs from opening eagerly to allow him the intimacy of her sex. He loved the way her soft, delicately shaped outer lips, so primly folded, opened to the slow stroke of his fingers, her wetness eagerly awaiting him.
A shocked cry of protest streaked with primitive longing burst from Ruby’s throat as Sander gave in to the demand of his own arousal and moved down her body, to kiss the soft flesh on the inside of her thighs and then stroke the tip of his tongue the length of the female valley his skilled fingers had laid bare to his caress.
Waves of pleasure were racing through her, dragging her back to a level of sensuality where she was as out of her depth as a fledgling swimmer swept out by the tide into deep water. Each stroke of his tongue-tip against the most sensitive part of her took her deeper, until her own pleasure was swamping her, pulling her down into its embrace, until the rhythm it imposed on her was all that she knew, her response to it dictated and controlled by the lap of Sander’s tongue as finally it overwhelmed her and she was drowning in it, giving herself over completely to it.
Later, filling her with his aching flesh, feeling her desire catch fire again as her body moved with his, inciting him towards his own destruction, Sander knew with razor-sharp clarity, in the seconds before he cried out in the exultation of release, that what he was doing might be trapping her in her desire for him but it was also feeding his need for her.
CHAPTER NINE
FROM the shade of the vine-covered pergola, Ruby watched the twins as they splashed in the swimming pool under Sander’s watchful eye. It was just over six weeks now since they had arrived on the island, and the twins were loving their new life. They worshipped Sander. He was a good father, Ruby was forced to admit, giving them his time and attention, and most important of all his love. She glanced towards the house. Anna would be bringing their lunch out to them soon. A prickle of despair trickled down her spine as chilling as cold water.
This morning she was finally forcing herself to confront the possibility that she might be pregnant! The breakfasts she had been unable to eat in the morning, the tiredness that engulfed her every afternoon, the slight swelling of her breasts—all could have other explanations, but her missed period was now adding to the body of evidence.
Could she really be pregnant? Her heart jumped sickeningly inside her chest. There must be no more children, Sander had said. She must take the contraceptive pill. She had done, without missing a single one, but her symptoms were exactly the same as those she had experienced with the twins. Sander would be angry—furious, even—but what could he do? She was his wife, they were married, and she was having his child. A child she already knew he would not want.
Ruby could feel anxiety-induced nausea clogging her throat and causing perspiration to break out on her forehead. Was she right in thinking that Anna already suspected? Anna was an angel, wonderful with the children—almost a grandmother to them. After all, she had mothered Sander and his sister and brother. Somehow she seemed to know when Ruby was feeling tired and not very well, taking charge of the twins for her, giving her a kind pat when she fell back on the fiction that her lack of energy and nausea were the result of their move to a hot climate.
Sander was getting the twins out of the pool. Anna had arrived with their lunch. Determinedly, Ruby pushed her anxiety to one side.
Sander was used to working at home when he needed to, but since he had brought Ruby and his sons to the island he had discovered that he actually preferred to work at home. So that he could be with his sons, or so that he could be with Ruby? That was nonsense. A stupid question which he could not bring himself to answer.
Angrily he tried to concentrate on the screen in front of him. Th
is afternoon he was finding it hard to concentrate on the e-mails he should be answering. Because he was thinking about Ruby? If he was then it was because of the conversation he had had with Anna earlier in the day, when she had commented on what a good mother Ruby was.
‘A good mother and a good wife,’ had been her exact words. ‘You are a lucky man.’
Anna was a shrewd judge of character. She had never liked his mother, and she had protected them all from their grandfather’s temper whenever she could. She had given him the only female love he had ever known. Homely, loyal Anna liked and approved of Ruby, a woman with more in common with his mother than she had with her.
Sander frowned. He might have seen the financially grasping side of Ruby that echoed the behaviour of his mother, but he had also seen her with the twins, and he was forced to admit that she was a loving and protective mother—a mother who gave her love willingly and generously to her sons…just as she gave herself willingly and generously to him…
Now what was he thinking? He was a fool if he started allowing himself to believe that. But did he want to believe it? No, Sander denied himself. Why should he want to believe that she gave him anything? Only a weak man or a fool allowed himself to think like that, and he was neither. But didn’t the fact that he couldn’t stop himself from wanting her reveal the worst kind of male weakness?
Wasn’t the truth that even though he had tried to deny it to himself he had not been able to forget her? From that first meeting the memory of her had lain in his mind like a thorn in his flesh, driven in too deeply to be easily removed, the pain activated whenever an unwary movement caused it to make its presence felt.