He sighed tremulously as she responded to the new delight of flesh against flesh, and brought his mouth back to hers, warm and seductive, his hands moving on further down until they were gently kneading her soft flesh as his hips thrust insistently against her own.
Moisture began to spring out all over his skin, musky-scented and so familiar to her that she groaned in pleasure as it assailed her nostrils. Her fingertips dug in as they ran from muscle-packed shoulders down the full length of his long back until they reached his waist, where they slid sideways, making him shudder, his muscles jerking in spasm as she searched out his acutely sensitive groin, cupping the rigid bones in his hips with her palms while her fingers moved incitingly.
And, as if her joining in the sensual foreplay he had begun was like giving leave for him to do his worst to her, Guy gasped something and slid his hand inside her pyjama bottoms so he could push them
out of his way.
Marnie felt something buried deep inside her crack, and like a dam with its seams burst open wide all her long-suppressed passions came flooding through, sending her arching towards that knowing hand, and on a husky groan she bit sensually down into his lower lip, making him start, jerk away from her to gaze hotly down into her flushed face. The mayhem going on inside her must have shown in the passionate glitter in her eyes, because Guy muttered something beneath his breath, and tried shakily to calm her.
‘I hate what you do to me!’ she choked out wretchedly.
‘No, you don’t,’ he denied, stroking a shaking hand across her flaming hair in an odd gesture of sympathy. ‘You only wish you did, my darling,’ he murmured, and brought his mouth back on to her before she could say another bitter word, burning her with a kiss that banished every other feeling from her but the hungry need to touch and feel.
His caresses grew urgent, more intimate, giving her no opportunity to return to the sanity she had let go of, his mouth sliding down her body to nip, lick and kiss her into a frenzy of desire. Her breathing was out of control, rasping hectically from her lips as he took one of her thrusting breasts into his mouth and sucked hard, until the pain of it became a terrible pleasure.
‘You want me,’ he said hoarsely, knowing her body better than she even did herself.
‘Yes,’ she answered, not even sorry to admit it any more.
‘How much?’ He ran his tongue across the recently abused tip of her breast, its newly heightened sensitivity making her cry out in pleasure.
She didn’t answer. Her teeth clenched tightly against her searing breath to stop the words he wanted to hear escaping through.
His hot breath burned her where it brushed, his body, slick with sweat, moving with a slow eroticism against her, arousing her with the sensual experience of a man who knew his own power.
Barely able to breathe as that slow, desperate build-up of feeling began to grow within the centre of her, she could feel herself beginning to float, her limbs tightening, her mind losing itself in the dizzy mists of sexual ecstasy.
‘How much?’ he demanded again.
Heart, body and soul. He wanted to hear her repeat the husky little love chant he had forced from her every time they made love before. But—
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she refused again, sane enough to know she could not give him more than she was already giving him. Desperate enough to sob at her own strength to refuse him this one simple but oh, so telling little phrase. ‘Never again,’ she whispered wretchedly. ‘Never again, Guy, never again.’
‘The heated throb of your body says you want me,’ he muttered. ‘It pulses with a need to feel me filling you inside! Your soul cries out for reunion with mine—I can hear it, even now while you lie here beneath me trying to deny its right to belong! I can hear it, Marnie, calling out to mine! And your heart.’ He covered her left breast where her heart pumped heavily against his resting hand. ‘What does this wildly pulsating heartbeat tell me?’
‘It tells you nothing—nothing!’ she cried, finding enough strength to push him away from her and rolling dizzily off the bed to stand. ‘I wonder sometimes if you’re some kind of throwback from the Dark Ages,’ she muttered, hugging her trembling body because she had a terrible feeling it was going to shatter if she didn’t. ‘How dare you expect more from me than you’re capable of giving yourself?’
He was lying where she had left him, on his back in all his arrogant nakedness, his expression grimly closed. ‘I gave you everything of myself the day we married,’ he stated coolly.
Marnie let out a deriding sound, dragging the flaps of her top around her aching breasts and trying to pretend that she didn’t give a damn that he had managed to bring her tumbling back to her senses before the whole thing had spun way out of control. ‘And Anthea?’ she threw at him bitterly. ‘What was she supposed to be—a moment’s loss of sanity?’
He nodded. ‘You could call her that,’ he agreed. ‘But, as I said to you only the other day, Anthea is a part of the past and is no longer up for discussion. It is over—’
‘Gone, forgotten, I know,’ she finished for him. ‘Well,’ she snapped, ‘so are the promises from the past. If you want my full commitment to you a second time, then you will have to earn it a second time.’ Jerkily she moved across the room to the adjoining bathroom door. ‘Now get off my bed, and out of my room,’ she told him as she tugged open the door. ‘The right to enter either is not yours quite yet!’
Slamming the bathroom door shut behind her and locking it, Marnie then leaned back against the solid safety of the wood and closed her eyes.
She hated him! Hated! she told herself fiercely.
But a lump formed in her aching throat, put there by the guilty knowledge that, even while she did hate, she wanted him with a hunger that was growing stronger with each hour she spent in his company. And if he hadn’t pushed his luck too far just now, then she would be still lying beneath him, glorying in the pleasure only Guy could give her.
*
Emerging half an hour later, Marnie made directly for the sitting-room with the intention of using the telephone extension in there. But she was brought up short for a moment when she found Guy lounging on one of the soft-cushioned sofas reading his daily newspaper.
He didn’t look up, and, lifting her chin in outright defiance at the sudden hungry jolt her senses gave her, she marched over to the phone and picked it up.
‘What are you doing?’ Guy enquired lazily.