Somehow, instinctively, Fliss sensed the change within Vidal, and before she could resist it her own body was responding to it, welcoming it, wanting it, wanting him as the grimness of her earlier determination gave way to something far more elemental and irresistible. She wanted Vidal to feed that feeling, to caress and entice this quivering of a new and intense desire filling her. It was so much stronger than the anger-driven determination she had previously felt, Fliss thought shakily.
She was wholly unable to stop the sounds of her pleasure bubbling in her throat as her flesh responded to the building rhythmic thrust of Vidal’s body within her own with increasing pleasure. That pleasure gripped her and flooded her, holding her captive, demanding her submission, making her forget why it was that their intimacy was happening.
Lost in the bitter sweetness of what might have been, Vidal tensed with disbelief when he felt the barrier within Fliss. His brain couldn’t ignore the message being sent to it. In the space between one breath and the next, one thrust and the next, a confusion of thoughts exploded through his head. He looked down at Felicity, whose reactions were slower. Her flesh, softened and aching with desire, was reluctant to give up its pleasure. Resistance to the thought of being denied seized her as she realised that Vidal had stopped the delicious movement that had been giving her so much delight. In his expression she could see shock and the prospect of withdrawal. A withdrawal her body did not want.
‘No.’
Her charged denial could have meant anything, but Fliss knew that Vidal understood it meant everything. She clung to him, urging him to complete the sensual possession he had begun, her gaze on his willing him to give her what she ached for so badly.
What was happening to her? Where was the anger she should be feeling? How had Vidal managed to steal it away from her and replace it with this aching sweetness and this longing for Vidal that now possessed her? Fliss didn’t know. She wasn’t capable of logical reasoned argument any more. Her feelings were too strong for that. She only knew that everything she had always wanted was here, with Vidal.
Vidal. His name and her own longing ached silently within her, her body, her flesh, clinging to his in a mute plea.
Vidal felt the quiver within Fliss that held him to her. He should end this now. There were questions that needed to be asked. Old history must be rewritten. But they were here in this moment, in this place he had wanted to take her for what felt like a lifetime. And she wanted him.
Reality had no place here. This was a place of broken dreams that could be mended, shattered hopes restored and old pain banished.
His body made its own decision, and its possessive movement within her caused Felicity to make a soft purring sound deep in her throat. The way she was looking at him now was the way she had looked at him at sixteen, in her innocent longing. Only now her gaze was the gaze of a woman—her desire the desire of a woman. He had ached for her for so long. Loved her for so long. No! But it was too late for him to make that denial. His body wasn’t listening. It was gripped by a tide it was impossible to stem.
He moved within her, carefully but surely, silencing the small sound she made as her flesh tightened in what began as pain only to be transformed into pleasure, until her body was free to respond to his possession as it wanted to. As it had been created to do, Fliss thought hectically as the world and reality began to lose focus, and there was only Vidal to cling to between waves of pleasure spiked with a need that grew with each one.
Finally the need that drove her reached its culmination in a burst of pleasure so intense that she could hardly bear it, crying out to Vidal in a tangle of words mingled with tears of release as he held her and let his own body take its pleasure in the final dying spasms of hers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VIDAL looked into the darkness, probing it, trying to find a way through it. The bedroom was warmly lit and everything was clear. Some things were painfully clear, etched in sharp detail inside his heart for ever. The darkness he needed to probe lay within himself, within his gross negligence in not knowing. In not having known. It broke his pride, and worse than that—after all, what right did he have to pride now? Instead he was filled not just with his own pain but far more importantly with Felicity’s.
The shattering of his delusion showed him how unworthy of her the love he had fought so hard against admitting actually was. Somehow he should have known. He would never forgive himself for that failing, and he suspected neither would Felicity.
‘Am I right in thinking that the … intimacy we have just shared was at least on your part aroused by a need to punish me? To prove to me that I was wrong about you?’