Above her downbent head she could hear Vidal talking to her, his voice strained and muffled. ‘I can’t let you go on. Not now—not whilst my body craves the intimacy of yours so badly.’
‘Yessss!’ Fliss answered him fiercely. ‘Yes, Vidal.’
When he released her and moved back from her, getting off the bed and reaching for the trousers he had discarded, Fliss started to reach out to him frantically, to protest—and then she stopped, her eyes widening when he removed his wallet and opened it.
It was just as well that he had taken measures to prepare himself should he have ended up in bed with Mariella, Vidal acknowledged grimly as he removed the protective sheath from its wrapper.
The interruption to their intimacy had given Fliss time to recognise what was happening—what she was doing. Away from the heat of the desire Vidal’s caresses had aroused in her something about the brisk expediency of his preparations had broken the spell she had been under. The reality of what was happening was now in stark contrast to the fantasy she had been creating. This surely was the time to stop, to be practical and truthful and tell Vidal the truth. But how?
She took a deep breath, and her voice was unsteady as she told him huskily, ‘There’s no need for you to … to do that, because …’
Because I’m a virgin, she had intended to continue. But before she could do so Vidal interrupted.
‘I might not be able to control the desire you arouse in me, Felicity,’ he told her harshly. ‘But I am not such a fool as to take the kind of risks with my sexual health that intimacy with you would involve without this protection. You may be the sort of woman who boasts that her pleasure is increased by the danger of unprotected intercourse, but I am not a man who wants to put either my own or my future sexual partners’ health at risk by going down that road. Of course if you’d prefer not to go any further …’
A horrible feeling of sickening shame was filling her, and for a minute Fliss was tempted to tell him to leave. But then the anger she had felt earlier surged up inside her again, and with it her need for justice.
Her chin lifted, and her lashes were shielding her eyes from Vidal’s scrutiny as she shrugged and said in what she hoped was a suitably deceptive breathy voice. ‘Not go any further now, when you’ve … when I want you so much, Vidal?’
Had he been hoping that she would end it? That she would have the strength of will that he knew he did not? Vidal asked himself grimly, as his body reacted immediately and openly to her deliberate sensuality.
He could see the swollen pink softness of her mouth, her lips half parted, and her eyes were almost closed, as though she was already swooning with the pressure of her desire.
Anger and shame, Vidal felt them both—against himself and against Felicity as well. But they weren’t strong enough to hold back the need that was driving him, taking him beyond logic and reason to a place where all that existed was his longing for this one woman.
He thrust into her slowly, needing to absorb every second of something so long denied, already knowing in that place deep within himself he had fought so hard to ignore that their bodies would match perfectly, and that hers would take and hold his in exactly the same unique way in which she already held his emotions in thrall.
He shouldn’t be feeling like this. He knew what she was, after all, but it was as though something within him didn’t want to recognise that reality—as though some weakness in himself refused to believe that reality and instead wanted what was happening between them to belong to them alone. His body registered and responded to what he was feeling. What he wanted. What he needed.
His earlier driven anger gave way to a longing to shed the past and take them both to a place where they could start anew, with this burning ache of mutual need and desire untouched by what had gone before. He was losing sight of what was real, Vidal warned himself. The certainty of the contempt and anger that had informed his beliefs for so long, was fracturing under the pressure of what physical intimacy with Felicity was doing to him. Deep within himself Vidal could feel the growing ache of a yearning that he couldn’t banish for things to be different, for them to be different, so that what was happening between them could be born of.
Had he forgotten the past? Did the past really matter? Wasn’t it more important that she was here now in his arms, with him in the way that he had so longed for her to be? Where was his pride? Was he really admitting to himself that he loved her?
Vidal didn’t know. He only knew that holding her like this now was sweeping away the barriers he had put up against her. His pride might say that he must not love her, but what about his heart? Denial, anger, longing, loss. Vidal felt them all—a torment of if onlys that overwhelmed him with a passionately regretful longing.