Bond of Hatred(55)
Dark golden eyes held hers in the throbbing silence and then a vibrantly amused smile curved his expressive mouth. He strolled back to the bed, closed his hands over her shoulders and took her mouth with a searing hunger that sent the blood drumming through her veins. He pressed her back and came down on her in one smooth movement.
'Prove it,' he muttered thickly, settling his hips between her parted thighs, one hand summarily dealing with the tangled silk of her nightdress, wrenching it out of his path.
She trembled, learning the heat of his arousal, filled by an intense excitement she could not deny. He kissed her again then, forcefully, almost roughly, and she tangled her hands breathlessly in his hair, kissing him back with a kind of crazy desperation, gripped by an urgency that burned.
He took her in a storm of passion, wringing every last drop of response from her quivering body. No smooth seduction this time, nothing but the raw driving ferocity of male possession. Afterwards, she was shattered by the extent of her own enjoyment. The suspicion that Alex had been out of control as well had wildly excited her. She lay in a damp tangle of limbs, her arms tightly wrapped around him.
'I'm sorry.' Alex pulled away, threw himself back against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling, a dull flush of colour darkening his hard cheekbones. 'I need a shower.'
She turned over, wondering what was wrong, afraid to ask in case he told her. Ten minutes later, he left the room and she lay sleepless in the darkness. He came back to her with the taste of brandy on his lips at some timeless stage of the night and made love to her all over again, slowly, gently, and with immense restraint. She toldherself that it didn't matter that he was careful not to encroach on her side of the bed afterwards. She told herself that if she couldn't have love she would settle for sex and that she wasn't going to let herself be oversensitive in her expectations. But long after Alex was safely asleep she cried for what she couldn't have.
The following days blurred one into another. The staff were very busy preparing for the big party Alex was determined to throw. When Sarah wasn't putting on a brave show for Alex's benefit, she was with Nicky, to whom she clung more than ever, taking comfort and strength from his unquestioning love and need for her. She went shopping because Alex told her to. She bought fabulous clothes without any real pleasure.
He took her out to dinner several times, but when they were photographed he froze and looked guilty as hell. She wore the diamonds he had given her and which she had never thanked him for and, when she attempted awkwardly to make good the oversight, he brushed her words away as if they embarrassed him and she fell silent. It was that night that she began to pick up on the edge of guilt that betrayed him.
'I need you,' he would admit with a flat lack of emotion that chilled her in the dark of their bed but, even though he gave her extraordinary pleasure, he still seemed to feel the urge to apologise for that same need. He never laid a finger on her otherwise. During the hours of daylight, it was as though she were ringed by a defensive force-field, but at night it was as though he couldn't keep his hands off her and all restraint vanished. He exhausted her to such a degree that she took to sleeping in late in the mornings.
The beginning of the second week he started coming home with giant bunches of flowers and then the meaningful conversations started. He behaved as though everything about her was a source of endless fascination. He wanted to know about her childhood, herparents, every lousy job she had ever had, and her tension began to build to explosive proportions because she knew he couldn't possibly be one-tenth as interested as he was trying to pretend.
'Do you really have to try so hard to live with me?' The desperate demand just flew from her lips at the end of the second week over dinner.
He tensed, his jawline squaring. 'What do you mean?'
'You don't have to try so hard to make me feel wanted,' she murmured tautly, her shadowed eyes resting on him. 'I'd rather you were just yourself.'
Brown fingers beat a silent tattoo of tension on the polished table. His magnificent bone-structure tautened, a tinge of pallor showing beneath his sun-bronzed skin. 'I can't do anything right with you, can I?' he breathed with a ragged edge to his deep voice, his accent thicker than she had ever heard it.
'It's not that.' But how could she say to him that she found the spectacle of his obvious efforts to make their marriage work increasingly humiliating. It would go too close to the bone for both of them. An enormous lump formed in her throat. She wished she had kept her mouth shut. That much effort to give her what he believed would make her happy ought not to be condemned. She bent her head, decided she was an ungrateful bitch and fought the tears threatening.