It would be okay. It couldn’t not be.
His body was heavy on hers and his tongue insistent as it lashed hers. Her body responded in ways she couldn’t control. Fires were spinning through her and she had no control to stop what was happening; she had no control over anything. She was at his whim and at his mercy, his for the taking for ever and ever. Did he realise that she was his? Utterly and always?
‘I love you,’ she said again, and the words were tumbling out of her. She needed him to understand. ‘I didn’t come here to lie to you. I didn’t even know you’d be here.’
His expression showed impatience. Was he listening? Did he hear her? His fingers pulled at her panties and she stared up at him, then reached for his face, cupping his cheeks, holding him still.
‘Look at me,’ she said, with a vo
ice that trembled and a heart that was hammering wildly. ‘Look at me and tell me you don’t know me,’ she implored, her eyes scanning his face, willing him to remember what they were.
His grunt was impossible to interpret, but the pressing of his arousal at her core was everything she needed. She sobbed with dark desire—when they made love she would feel better. He would feel better. This just made sense.
‘You want me?’ he asked through gritted teeth, his hands trapping her wrists and pinning them out to her sides.
Tilly’s face was covered in tears, her cheeks pink, her hair in disarray. There were scratches on her from his stubble; she was marked. She was his. But he needed her to say it. He needed her to surrender completely to him. Even then, would it be enough? To overlook her betrayal and manipulations?
‘Yes,’ she moaned, writhing, hot beneath him.
His smile held no humour; it was a twist of his lips. If Tilly had seen it she would have described it as cruel. But her eyes were shut. She was waiting for him to give her everything she needed, to remember that he loved her.
He thrust inside her and she cried out as relief exploded like fireworks in her blood.
‘Yes!’ she shouted again.
‘Do you love me?’ he demanded, pulling out.
His desertion was a physical ache low in her abdomen. She lifted her hips, trying to find him, to welcome him back but a muscle jerked in his cheek.
‘You said you love me.’
‘I do,’ she groaned, her eyes clashing with his, begging him, silently communicating the truth of her heart.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you.’
And he thrust into her again.
Her grief and shock were quickly pushed sideways by the desire that was rocking her. But they were there still, in the back of her mind, like little bombs of reality she couldn’t detonate just yet.
She didn’t realise that she was saying it over and over again. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you...’ like an incantation that would wrap him up in the magic they’d created.
He swore in his own language and his mouth dropped to hers. He kissed the words angrily into her being, silencing her finally, leaving only the sound of their heavy breathing and the cracking whip of desire in the room.
Misery was there, on the edge of everything, but it couldn’t stave off the pleasure that was climbing to a fever-pitch inside her, taking control of her body nerve by nerve until finally she catapulted over, sobbing and moaning as the crescendo of physical joy broke over her. He chased her, his body releasing itself in a guttural cry, his hands around her wrists loosening to push his body weight off her as soon as he’d exploded, so that he could look at her, rocked by the final throes of desire.
He stared at her with an intensity that she might have believed to be love if it hadn’t instantly struck her heart cold.
‘I will remember you like this,’ he said bleakly, and before the last vestiges of pleasure had ebbed from her he was gone, pulling himself up to stand, turning his back on her. His shoulders moved with the rise and fall of his breathing.
Tilly stared at him and those little disastrous truths exploded now—terrors that filled her with pain. ‘How can you doubt this?’ she asked quietly, wiping her cheeks and noticing absentmindedly that his fingers had left red marks on the pale flesh of her wrists. They were fading already and she resented that. She didn’t want to lose any physical markers of what they’d shared.
His laugh rang in the room like an accusation. ‘I doubt everything!’
‘You love me and I hurt you,’ she said quietly.
‘Love you? I don’t even know you, Cressi—Damn it! Matilda. You are every bit as bad as Marina. No, you are worse! I actually loved you, and you allowed me to...to bare my soul to you even knowing how dishonest you were being.’
She winced and he spun to face her, his expression fury personified.