‘Guy,’ corrected the man himself, letting the true pronunciation of his name slide sensually off his tongue.
He lifted a long, tanned, beautifully constructed hand to her in invitation for her to take it. She did so nervously, trembling a little, a bit bewildered by what was happening to her churning insides, and shaken even more off balance when instead of the polite handshake she had been expecting he lifted her hand to his lips, his eyes refusing to break contact with the dense blueness of hers.
It had taken him just that long to make her fall head over heels in love with him—not that she’d understood what it was then. Because she was unawakened to her own sexuality and quite content to stay that way, that sudden overpowering burst of emotion had frightened her then—it still did now. But then she had been in no way equipped to deal with it, and the fact that he was making no effort to hide how powerfully she attracted him had the adverse effect of sending her scuttling off in the other direction. She snatched her hand away and took a jerky but very necessary step back from him, and he smiled at her in a way that mocked her small rejection.
He invited her to take tea in his home. She refused, reminding him coolly that it was her brother she had come here to see. When Guy then blandly informed her that Jamie would not be free from his duties until the evening and repeated the invitation while she waited for her brother to finish his work, she glanced ruefully at her brother, who was looking bemused at Guy’s announcement, and still refused to allow him to act host in her brother’s absence, inventing a fictitious date waiting for her in London which brought Jamie’s gaze swinging around to her in open-mouthed amazement, since he was well aware of her lack of interest in the kind of date she was implying. ‘I can only stay five minutes at most,’ she added hurriedly, wishing she had not given in to the sudden urge to come and see her brother.
Guy stared at her, bringing a guilty flush to her cheeks because the mockery in his gaze said he
knew she was lying, and with a bow and a smile that did nothing to ease her anxious desire to get away from him he excused himself and strode off towards the front of the house while Jamie stared after him in frowning confusion.
‘I don’t understand any of that,’ he gasped. ‘Guy isn’t usually so…’
‘Five minutes, Western!’ The curt warning had come from the disappearing figure of Guy Frabosa as he rounded the corner of the house.
‘I don’t understand that, either!’ Jamie exclaimed. ‘Why were you so cool with him, Marnie?’ he demanded, deciding that the blame for it all had to belong to her. ‘I thought it was very nice of him to welcome you like that—and you turn all icy on him—you’ve offended him now!’
‘I came to see you, Jamie,’ she reminded her brother coolly. ‘Not to take tea with a man who is a complete stranger to me.’
He shrugged, still baffled by the whole odd encounter, and walked her back around the house to her car, chatting lightly, but she could tell he was jumpy, eager to get back to work before Guy decided to come down on him a second time. And she was more than ready to get away before his boss disturbed her level senses a second time. Jamie saw her seated behind the wheel of her Mini, quizzing her on how it was running, and smiling when she assured him the little car gave her no trouble at all, her eyes skipping nervously along the rows of windows in the house, somehow knowing that Guy Frabosa was observing her departure from the shadows somewhere inside.
She turned the key in the ignition, now quite desperate to get away.
Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing.
After several tries, her brother muttered something derogatory about stupid women flooding the engine, and ordered her out so he could get in instead. He messed, he fiddled, then climbed out and lifted the bonnet, disappearing beneath it with all the concentration of a born mechanic while Marnie stood, knowing, without knowing how she knew, that her car had not let her down without help from somewhere.
She watched Guy stroll out of the front door with a fatalistic acceptance that must have shown on her face, because he sent her a lazy mocking look as he went to join her brother.
A small smile touched her lips as she lay now in her bed with only the moon as witness. It was months later before Guy had actually admitted to doctoring her car.
‘I was not prepared to let you go,’ he had told her with all the lazy arrogance of his nature.
‘Did Jamie know it was your doing?’ she’d demanded.
‘Since it took him five hours to find the fault, I would have to presume that, on finding it, he must have guessed,’ Guy had answered blandly. ‘He is too good a mechanic not to have realised quite early on that the car had been tampered with. His problem was discovering just what it was I had done to it.’
‘Sometimes, Guy, I hate your arrogance.’
‘And sometimes, cara, you literally drown in it,’ he’d growled, pulling her into his arms to prove his point. She had had no control whatsoever of the passion he could arouse in her. And even in the very early days of their relationship, when he was very aware of her inexperience, he had been able to turn her blood to fire with an ease that had both shocked and frightened her.
A fear that had kept her fighting him right through the turbulent weeks which had followed as Guy, true to the stubborn, selfish character he was, set himself out to take what he wanted.
And take he eventually had. Ruthlessly, passionately, unassailingly and with scant regard to whether or not it was what she wanted. Or maybe he did regard it but chose to dismiss it, she allowed. Because even Guy, thick-skinned as he was, had to know that although he had forced her to surrender physically to him he had never really managed to beat down her mental reserves towards him.
Sighing wearily, Marnie gave up trying to stop the memories from coming, and climbed out of bed to go and stand by the moonlit window.
Marriage to Guy had been no less fraught than their turbulent courtship. He’d decided on marriage, he’d informed her then, because he just could not bring himself to take her innocence without the legal right to do so. And she had been so damned weakened by his sensual assaults on her that she’d foolishly agreed.
So married they were, and he took her off to his native Italy where, in a secluded villa overlooking his own private piece of the Med, he taught her all there was to learn about the physical side of love. And he possessed her to such a devastating degree that he only had to look at her to make her want him. True to his nature, he had no inhibitions about the forms their lovemaking could take, and taught her to cast off any she might have wanted to hold on to. Her body became an instrument tuned like one of his precious cars to his own personal specification, and for six dizzy, passionate months they drifted through life in a haze of mutual engrossment where the only cloud cluttering their sensual haven was a distinct absence of any sincere words of love.
Guy seemed only to require the delight of her young and responsive body, while she—well, she just accepted what crumbs of himself he threw at her and kept a vital part of herself hidden away from him in readiness for the time when the novelty would die and he would begin looking about him for pastures new.
And why did she think it would come to that? Because she had seen the way he was around other women. Guy was a born egotist, forever needing to feed that ego through the constant adoration of any woman prepared to offer it to him.
She suspected that he didn’t really see her as a living, breathing person with thoughts and feelings of her own but more like a new possession he liked to show off to his friends—like a mascot, kept for his own amusement. It never occurred to him that she wouldn’t like his friends, that the constant vying for the centre of attention by both sexes and the suggestive remarks that were thrown about so freely actually shocked and embarrassed her.
Shy by nature, she was always rather quiet and withdrawn in company, and they felt no qualms about teasing her about her quietness, making her feel more uncomfortable in their company, showing her in their cruel, deriding way that she was not and never would be one of them.