‘Luke!’
‘Who did you think it was?’ he drawled unkindly. ‘Bob? or Trevor Lawson?’
She had no defence against him in this mood. He stood silhouetted by the window, his body powerfully lithe in the hip hugging cream pants, his shirt unfastened, as he started to remove it.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me if I enjoyed my evening?’
His goading touched a painful nerve. She sat up in bed, unaware of the purity of her features in the moonlight, her hair spread round her like a soft cloak.
‘I didn’t realise wifely concern was supposed to be part of our bargain. What do you want me to do? Ask how much you enjoyed making love to another woman? Marriage to me was an expensive price to pay for satisfying your lust, Luke, especially now that you no longer want me.’
‘
What makes you think that?’ His tone was softly jeering. ‘And as for being satisfied…’
Her heart seemed to have lodged in the back of her throat. She made a small sound of protest, muffled beneath the hands which lifted her from the bed, removing her thin cotton covering to reveal every slender contour of her quivering flesh.
‘Some appetites are fed by starvation,’ Luke said slowly, his eyes beginning a slow inspection of the moonlit flesh beneath his hands. ‘And others thrive on feeding.’
Meaning, no doubt, that his desire for her was in no way diminished by having spent the last few hours in someone else’s arms, Genista thought, trying to quell her growing feeling of nausea. She wouldn’t let him make love to her merely to satisfy a need!
She started to tell him so, fear silencing her as she saw savage hunger in his eyes. Perhaps his evening had not been as successful as she had imagined. Perhaps his girl-friend had deliberately led him on, teasing and enticing but withholding herself, and she was merely being used as a vehicle to slake his thirst for someone else. She thought she had experienced every pain it was possible for a human being to experience, but now she knew that this was not so. The thought that Luke was contemplating making love for her purely for physical release brought an agony that made her feel physically ill.
‘I’m tired, Luke…’ She couldn’t bring herself to look at him as she uttered the lie, but she hoped it would have the desired effect and that he would release her. His thumbs were stroking the inner flesh of her wrists seductively, and she wanted nothing so much as to melt passionately against him, feeling him stir with the same primitive force which was already weakening her resistance.
‘Tired? Can’t you think of a better excuse than that?’
‘All right then, I don’t want you,’ Genista lied desperately. ‘I hate you touching me, Luke. I wish you’d go away and leave me alone…’
‘Oh, I shall,’ he said softly through gritted teeth, ‘but not until I’ve made you beg and plead for me to stay with you, Genista. Before tonight’s over that cool, frosty little voice of yours will be sobbing my name, ragged with passion—A passion I already know you can experience.’
His own voice had taken on a deeper timbre which found an answering chord deep inside her. She longed to refute his words, but her tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of her mouth, preventing speech whilst an intense longing pulsated within her. In the moon-shadowed room she could see Luke’s dark outline; the tanned flesh of his chest, rising lightly with his breathing, the lean tautness of his hips, the powerful muscles of his thighs, roughened with their light covering of dark hair beneath his cream pants. He came towards her and she retreated instinctively, until she was pressing herself back against the bed, her body tensing as she waited for him to touch her. His hands either side of her head on the pillow imprisoned her, his lean body only inches away, as he lowered his head and touched her lips almost experimentally.
She tried to avoid the caress, twisting her head frantically away, but each time she did so her cheek brushed the hard warmth of his hands, while her own were held rigidly at her sides for fear they might inadvertently come into contact with Luke’s body.
His lips moved from her mouth to her cheek. She turned away desperately, realising her mistake when her lips immediately came into contact with Luke’s. He made no attempt to hurry the kiss, taking his time, forcing her lips to part for him, and still he made no other attempt to touch her. She tensed in anticipation of the sensual demand implicit in the intimacy of his kiss, but it never came, instead just when all her own yearning desire rose up inside her to overcome the barriers of her self-control, her lips were released, their hunger unappeased, the briefly tantalising kisses pressed lightly on her face no compensation for the abrupt cessation of the drugging pressure of his mouth on hers.
Genista endured the torment as long as she could, willing herself not to humiliate herself any further by allowing him to see how much he had already aroused her. If she just forced herself to endure his deliberate arousal a little while longer he was sure to grow bored with the game and release her. But she was soon forced to confess that his control was the greater, as minute succeeded long, agonising minute and every part of her body was urging her to bury her fingers in the thick dark hair growing low on the nape of his neck, and unashamedly hold his mouth against hers to complete that kiss he had broken off so cruelly.
Her body ached for his touch. She had to close her eyes against the sudden intruding recollection of his tanned fingers cupping the creamy softness of her breast, stroking it into urgent fullness, before moving downwards, coaxing from her unawakened body the responses which had eventually driven her into his arms in a frenzy of need.
It wouldn’t be that way this time, she told herself. She mustn’t allow it to be that way, but as his breath warmed her throat and her body traitorously remembered all she had willed it to forget, a soft, husky sound broke past her closed lips.
She stilled the soft whimper immediately, but not before Luke had heard it.
‘It’s not quite as easy as you thought, is it, Genista?’ he taunted softly. ‘It’s hard to be high and mighty when your body is crying out for satisfaction, isn’t it? Well, now you know how I felt. Did you think I enjoyed it?’ he demanded savagely, ‘Do you think any man enjoys wanting a woman the way I wanted you?’
‘Wanting without loving is…degrading!’ Genista flung at him, close to tears.
‘Do you think I don’t know that? But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, so come down off your cloud and acknowledge that you’re a human being, just like any other.’
She told herself that he just wanted to humiliate her; just wanted some sort of warped revenge because he resented having wanted her, but when he pinned her wildly thrashing hands behind her back and let his lips wander at will over the pale silkiness of her body, she was soon far beyond caring. His lightest touch seemed to ignite fires she had never dreamed could burn; reveal a sensuality she had never known she possessed, and while her mind writhed in humiliated agony at the punishment he was deliberately inflicting her body responded with an intensity which seemed to feed his deep hunger.
His name rose sobbingly to her lips, cried wrenchingly through mingled pleasure and pain, and although she glimpsed satisfaction in his eyes as he raised his head to acknowledge his victory, the hard pressure of his hands was not withdrawn, the torment continuing until she could bear her self-imposed restraints no longer and her fingers trembled in anguish against his skin, their mutual passion blazing up into an inferno which carried them both over the edge of the earth to a place where nothing mattered but the dousing of its flames.
‘Please, Luke!’ Genista murmured weakly at one point when the withholding of his ultimate possession was an agony she could no longer endure.
Salty tears poured down her cheeks, her pride was in tatters, but she no longer cared. All she wanted was the pleasure of Luke’s complete possession. His skin tasted of salt and sweat, and she touched it with a hunger which she could no longer hide, shaking with the depth of her need, pleading mutely for the final act which would turn them from two separate human beings into one complete entity. His arms slid round her, holding her against him, his breathing harshly ragged. She could feel the hard pressure of his desire, and melted on a soundless moan beneath the fierce pressure of a kiss which drove back the final barriers, as at last he answered the unspoken plea of her body.