She could feel his eyes still on her, and the familiar tingling sensation started seeping its way throughout her system, beginning in that ball of tension in her stomach then slowly spreading out until it had encompassed every part of her, from the very roots of her softly falling hair to the tips of her fingers and toes.
Then suddenly he reached for her, his two hands spanning her waist to lift her off the ground before settling her back on her feet directly in front of him.
She glanced up, startled and wary, but Guy’s attention was on her hair, his fingers coming up to thread absently through the long, loose tresses, then down to her shoulders where only the flimsy bootlace straps of her pale pink nightgown stopped the fine silk from slithering to her feet. He ran light fingertips over her skin, and down her arms, raising goosebumps where he touched.
‘Do you think,’ he murmured in a deep quiet voice that revealed an odd touch of bleakness, ‘that as the years go by the gap in our ages will narrow?’ He took up her hands and held them loosely in his own, studying them with his dark lashes lowered over his eyes. ‘You look very young tonight, Marnie,’ he added huskily. ‘As young as the first time we stood together on a night like this. Do I, by contrast, look as old to you?’
Old? she thought, almost smiling at the idea. Guy was not and never would be ‘old’. She had never understood this one small chink in an otherwise impregnable armour of self-confidence.
Her blue eyes drifted across the lean, sleek lines of his face with the detailed intensity of a trained artist. Guy was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. There wasn’t a single thing about his physical appearance she would want to change.
How could someone like him seem to need reassurance from someone like her? She didn’t understand it—never had before.
‘No,’ she answered him at last. That was all. Just that one simple word that to her said it all—and sent some unknown emotions flashing across his face.
He lifted his eyes and let them clash with hers; dark and burning, telling her without words what he was thinking, feeling—wanting. She shuddered, not sure she could answer the look, and had to look down and away.
‘If I never made you feel loved in my arms before, Marnie,’ he muttered thickly, ‘then I promise you that tonight you will feel it right through to your very soul!’
He caught her mouth, not harshly, as his tone had been, but with a kiss so achingly gentle that she found herself responding almost without realising it.
He still held her hands, and he lifted them around his neck. The action arched her body closer to his, and he spanned her slender waist, holding her close while slowly—oh, so slowly—deepening the kiss into something beyond sweetness.
Her lips parted easily, her tongue waiting to tangle sensually with his. He breathed deeply on a sigh. So did she, and it seemed to herald an end to the final threads of inner resistance she had been trying to cling on to. She wanted this. Why should she pretend otherwise when this was what she had been pining for for days now—since that wild scene at his apartment the morning after they’d arrived there?
And perhaps even before that, a small voice suggested. Perhaps you’ve been pining for this for years.
Her hands moved to find the collar of his robe, fingers creeping beneath it, sliding against his warm skin and urging the robe away from his shoulders at the same time. She revelled in the heated silk of his smooth shoulders, in the muscled tension in his upper arms, the robe sliding slowly away until she had exposed the full beauty of his hair-covered chest.
Guy gave a shudder of pleasure as she dragged her mouth from his to capture a male nipple instead, sucking on it, biting at it in a way that made his chest expand on a pleasurable gasp, and her fingers moved to untie the robe, setting his whole body free, giving her access to his lean waist, his tight buttocks and long hair-roughened thighs.
Her nightgown rippled down her body to land in a silken pool of pink ice at her feet. His hands were on her body, stroking with slow feather-light caresses that tempted each nerve-end to come to the surface of her skin so her pleasure was heightened, making her groan and arch and sway with his touch.
‘Marnie…’ he murmured when she ran her fingers along his highly sensitive groin, catching her roving hand tightly in his own. ‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘My control is not that good.’
She found his mouth again, swamping out the need for words with a kiss that was so sensual, it fired his blood. And he arched her slender body so it bent like a supple wand against the pulsing rock of his.
And they began to move across the dimly lit room in a kind of primeval love dance that brought them to the bed. When he had eased her down on the pale peach cover he took great care to smooth her long hair out behind her, his expression intent, as though he was acting out some private fantasy of his own.
Marnie lay very still, watching him through dark unguarded eyes. When he caught her gaze he smiled, a soft kind of smile that was so infinitely gentle that it touched something achingly beautiful inside her, and she smiled back, reaching up to pull him down on her.
He went, covering her naked body with his own as though understanding her need at that moment to feel again his total mastery over her in the full weight of his body pressing down on hers.
Their mouths joined and remained joined, even as their caresses became more heated, more intimate. Need began to build like a coiled spring inside both of them, building and building until on a sob she spread her legs and wound them invitingly around him.
It was all the prompting he needed. He entered her on a single swift, sure thrust, then lay heavily against her, his heart, like her own, thundering out of control, mouths still locked while he battled to maintain some control over himself.
She had closed around him like a silken sheath, taking in and holding the pulsing force of him deep, deep inside her.
Then, ‘Love me,’ she whispered breathlessly.
?
??I’ve always loved you, Marnie,’ he murmured thickly back. ‘How could you ever believe otherwise?’
‘No!’ she whimpered, shaking her head because she didn’t want to hear those words, didn’t want to have to think about them, dissect them, understand the devastating import of what they meant.
‘Oh, yes, angel,’ he sighed out caressingly. ‘Yes.’