‘Is Guy here?’ she asked him coolly.
He turned slightly bloodshot eyes on her, and the lazy smile he had been wearing changed into a taunting leer. ‘Well, well, well,’ he drawled. ‘If it isn’t the child bride herself.’
‘Is he here?’ she repeated coldly, refusing to rise to the bait. Guy hated it when his friends referred to her in that way. He was sensitive enough about their age-difference without having ‘cradle-snatcher’ thrown at him.
‘Upstairs, I think,’ he informed her carelessly. ‘Second door on the right, sleeping off the old plonko the last time I saw him…’ Something else caught his attention then, sending his gaze narrowing over to the stairs, which were just visible through the crush of people spilling out into the hallway. When he looked back at Marnie there was a new vindictive light in his narrowed eyes. ‘Why don’t you go and wake the prince with a kiss?’ he suggested silkily. ‘You never know, Marnie, you might even get a nice surprise.’
Not understanding the taunt—and not even trying to—she turned away, struggling back through the crowds towards the hallway and from there up the stairs, sighing with relief at the respite from the noise and the crush of bodies on the floor below.
It was dark inside the room Derek had directed her to. She stepped inside and fumbled blindly for the light switch. ‘Guy?’ she called out softly. ‘Guy, are you awake?’
Light flooded the room, and at the same cataclysmic moment that she heard the muffled murmur of her name Marnie stood frozen by the horror of what she was being forced to recognise as Guy’s beautiful body lying naked in a tumble of white bedding, with the lovely Anthea coiled intimately around him—as naked as he.
CHAPTER SIX
‘CAN’T you sleep?’ a quiet voice enquired behind her. Marnie started violently, spinning around too quickly to mask the pain her memories had laid naked on her face. Guy saw the look, knew its source, and his own expression closed in grim response to it.
He was leaning against the open doorway, dark hair ruffled by restless fingers as if he too had been having a struggle with sleep. And for once he looked his age, harsh lines pulling at his lean features, scoring deep grooves down the sides of his nose and the taut turned-down corners of his mouth.
Older, but still the same potently sexual man who drew the opposite sex to him like bees to honey, she acknowledged bleakly as her eyes made a swift sweep of his tightly muscled body covered only by the short black robe before looking quickly away. He could still stir her senses just by being in the same room, and she hated herself for it—hated herself.
‘My shirt looks better on you than it does on me,’ he murmured huskily. ‘But then, they always did.’
Her body began to tingle in instant response to the lazy way he ran his eyes over the fine silk shirt she had taken from his room before retiring,
sending her arms wrapping around her body as the tingle centred itself in the very tips of her sensitive nipples.
‘What do you want, Guy?’ she demanded stiffly.
‘You,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘But since that is nothing new to either of us,’ he added drily, ‘and since we both seem unable to sleep tonight, I wondered if you would like to share a pot of tea with me?’
‘Tea?’ Sheer surprise diverted her away from the provocation in the earlier remark. ‘Since when have you been drinking tea?’
Guy had always shown a scathing contempt for the English love of the beverage. He liked coffee, strong and black and sugarless.
‘Actually—’ an oddly sheepish smile took the harshness out of his features ‘—I was going to treat myself to a brandy. The suggestion of tea was an afterthought—offered as an incentive for you to join me. Will you?’
Slowly, tentatively almost, his hand came out in front of him. Marnie stared unblinkingly at it for a moment. A long, strong, capable hand, a hand she knew so intimately that it was like an extension of her own self. A hand which seemed to be offering more than just an invitation to join him.
Her glance flicked warily to his face, but found nothing to mistrust written there, just a wry twist of a smile that said he was quite ready for her usual rebuttal.
‘Well…?’ he murmured softly.
‘Yes,’ she heard herself say. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’ Why, she had no idea, except maybe she found suddenly that she didn’t want to be alone, and even Guy’s company was better than the kind of cold company her black thoughts had been to her.
Easing himself away from the door as she drew near, he let her brush by him before falling into step behind her. The door to his own bedroom stood open, the soft glow from his bedside lamp illuminating the stacks of papers littered about his untidy bed telling their own story.
‘You know me, Marnie,’ he murmured. ‘I need little sleep.’
No, four hours a night was just about his limit, she recalled. As to the rest of the hours of darkness—well, Guy had had his own method of amusing himself, a method that was best not dwelt upon right now.
She curled herself up in the corner of the sofa while he prepared the tea. He wasn’t such a chauvinist that he’d ever minded taking on such a menial task. In fact, Marnie could recall several times when he had wandered into her studio in their London apartment with a tea-tray in his hands.
‘Drink it,’ he had used to command; peer over her shoulder at whatever she was working on, give no opinion whatsoever, brush a light kiss across the exposed nape of her neck, then walk out again, whistling quietly to himself.
They’d been married for several months before it had dawned on her that he only used the tea as an excuse to enter what was essentially her domain. If she turned and smiled at him he used to grin and pull her into his arms for a good long kiss before walking out again. If she ignored him, she used to receive that peck on the neck before he wandered out, whistling. But he never tried to break her concentration.
‘Why?’ she asked him once.