‘Thanks,’ he said softly. ‘That was a very generous thing you did.’
‘Nicky?’
If he heard her anxiety and guessed the reason for it, he gave no sign.
‘He’s asleep.’ His fingers touched her cheek, and when he turned them over they were damp with her tears.
‘Oh, Briony,’ he protested softly, gathering her up against him, ‘is marriage to me so abhorrent to you that it makes you cry?’
‘I’m not,’ she retorted, but the words were lost against his chest. She hadn’t cried in years and she hated herself for the weakness that made her do so now, but now she had started it didn’t seem possible to stop. She wanted to tell Kieron to let her go, but her body seemed to mould itself treacherously to his as though drawing strength from his masculine frame while Kieron’s soft reassurances were murmured into her hair. As though her tears were the melting ice which had frozen her heart, she could feel her body coming to life beneath his stroking hands, sensations she had completely forgotten surging up inside her. Kieron’s hands found their way inside her robe, caressing her quivering flesh, emotions dammed up for years clamouring urgently for satisfaction as she yielded mindlessly to his touch, her will-power overridden by a primeval need that nothing could stem.
She reached blindly towards him, tracing the heard bones of his shoulders, barely aware of him shrugging impatiently out of his shirt and lifting her to carry her to the narrow bed.
Her mouth parted on a soft groan, her whole body shuddering deeply in response to his kiss, her body moving passionately against him, until he cupped her hands and held her away from him, his voice husky and unsteady.
‘No one’s touched you in years, have they?’ he demanded incredulously. ‘It’s all been waiting there, dammed up behind the ice, just needing a touch to set it free. Well, it’s free now,’ he groaned against her skin, pulling her against his hard body, ‘Feel what you’re doing to me, Briony. I want to make love to you, but this time without deceit. I’m not going to be accused of that twice.’
His words shattered through the partition she had erected between her mind and body, forcing her mind to accept the actions of her flesh, and she cringed back from him immediately, her face white and sick.
‘What the hell?’ Kieron stared down at her. ‘Don’t tease me, Briony,’ he commanded. ‘I don’t like it, and you may find out you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. For a moment there you were a woman. You can’t wall her up for ever. Some time or other she’s going to break through and play havoc with your emotionless little world.’
Horror engulfed her. What had happened to her? She had reacted to Kieron’s touch like brushwood to tinder. She pushed him away, sick with self-revulsion. Oh, God, what must he be thinking? She couldn’t possibly marry him now. White with self-loathing, she stared up at him, her eyes blazing defiantly.
‘Well, go on, then,’ she hurled at him. ‘Gloat! That’s what you’re doing inside, isn’t it? Thinking how easy it was to turn me on? Oh, God, how I hate you!’
Kieron’s face was nearly as white as her own.
‘Is that what you think?’ he demanded furiously. ‘That I’d deliberately and coldbloodedly do something like that?’
How long they stared at one another in mutual bitterness, Briony did not know. She only knew that when she eventually managed to drag her eyes away from him she was shaking uncontrollably.
‘You did it once before,’ she reminded him bitterly.
‘And since then you haven’t allowed a man into your life, is that it?’
She laughed then, sobering only when he shook her hard. ‘What’s so funny?’ he demanded harshly.
‘I’ve let one man into my life,’ she reminded him. ‘Your son. The reason we have to go through this farce of a marriage.’
‘It’s too late to back out now,’ he warned her. ‘Nicky.…’
‘Yes, I know. It’s for Nicky’s sake that I’m doing this. I want that understood plainly, Kieron. I won’t be degraded by lovemaking without love again.’
He studied her for a few minutes, his expression unreadable, and then the colour drained from her face as he said slowly.
‘And if it was with love?’
Her mind rejected the words instantly, only the terrible aching of her body confirming that she wasn’t entirely free of the past. She clamped down on the feeling.
‘I don’t love you!’
The ring of the telephone broke the tension-filled silence like a guns
hot. Kieron got off the bed and went into the living room, leaving Briony to fasten her robe and pad resentfully after him.
‘It was for me,’ he told her calmly, replacing the receiver. ‘I gave the paper your number.’
Who had it been? Gail? Why should she care?