Conveniently His Omnibus(29)
His smile was both innocent and tantalising. ‘Oh, the sort that said you were looking at me as a man instead of simply your lame dog boss.’
Sophy shook her head. ‘But why pretend to be something you weren’t, Jon? Why pretend to be so sexless and...dull?’
He hesitated for a moment and then said slowly, ‘I know this will make me sound unattractively vain but when I first went up to Cambridge, like many another before me I wanted to have a good time. My father was comfortably off...those were the days when teenagers didn’t have to worry too much about getting a job...when, in fact, our generation thought it was the hub of the whole world. It was my first real time away from home, I had a generous allowance and a small sports car my father had bought me when I passed my ‘A’ levels. I wasn’t short of congenial feminine company. In short I lived a life of hedonistic pleasure rather than scholarly concentration. That all came to an abrupt end just after my third term. My tutors started complaining about the standard of my work...that sobered me up quite a bit, until then I’d never really had to work, you could say that it had all come too easily to me. Then a friend of mine was sent down—drug trafficking; a girl I’d gone out with died—all alone in a filthy squat with her arm all bloated out with septic poisoning from using a dirty needle—she was mainlining on heroin. I had to identify her. It all brought me down to reality.
‘When term resumed after the Christmas recess I decided I was going to turn over a new leaf. I’d talked to my brother—Hugh was eight years older than me, already married then, but still enough in touch with his own youth to listen sympathetically to me— but it seemed that my friends or at least some of them didn’t want me to change. Then I had to start wearing glasses. I discovered quite quickly that people who didn’t know me reacted differently to me...and so gradually I evolved a form of disguise and somehow it stuck with me. There was nothing to make me want to abandon it, until I met you and even then it seemed I wasn’t going to be able to reveal myself to you in my true colours, so to speak.’
Sophy looked questioningly at him and he said drolly,
‘Ah, well, you see I had observed how you reacted to me...and how you reacted to any male who was even just slightly aggressively masculine and I didn’t want to frighten you off. You felt safe with me, that much was obvious and because of that I could get closer to you. Some disguises are used for protection,’ he told her, ‘some for hunting...’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Ah, yes, my poor little love, I’m afraid you...’
She didn’t let him finish, flushing suddenly as she remembered his bland and extremely irritating indifference to her timid sexual overtures in the early days of their marriage...an indifference which she had naïvely thought sprang from unawareness.
‘You knew...’ she accused.
‘Knew what?’ He was smiling dulcetly at her.
She swallowed, and said huskily, ‘That I wanted you.’
‘After the way you looked at me when I came back from Nassau I hoped you might,’ he agreed tenderly, ‘but I had to be sure it wasn’t merely that I was a challenge to you, Sophy. I had gambled too heavily for that. You see,’ he told her quietly, ‘as I soon discovered well before I married you, what I once thought was merely lust turned out to be love and that love hasn’t diminished for knowing you...quite the contrary. That is what I have been trying to talk to you about, Sophy.’ He touched her face lightly with his fingers and she trembled wildly, hardly daring to look at him. ‘We have been lovers, and you have given yourself to me physically with a generosity that no one else has ever matched or ever could, but have you given yourself to me emotionally, Sophy? Can you give yourself to me emotionally or is it still Benson, despite all that he has done to you?’
‘Chris?’ Sophy stared at him. ‘I never loved Chris. Not really, not like...’
‘Not like?’ His voice was placid, belying the expression in his eyes. It made her heart race and suspended her breath until she realised he was still waiting impatiently for her response.
‘Not like I love you,’ she told him.
He expelled his breath on a harsh sigh and said roughly, ‘God, Sophy, you don’t know how you’ve tormented me.’
She smiled at him, going willingly into his arms as he dragged her against him. ‘Oh, I think I’ve a fair idea,’ she told him demurely, ‘after all you’ve done your own fair share of tormenting.’
From the shelter of his arms, she looked up at him, watching the way his eyebrows rose in query.
‘All that parading around practically nude,’ she elucidated for him, ‘making me want you, making me love you...’ She looked up at him again and smiled, ‘and probably damn well making me pregnant into the bargain.’
‘Have I done?’ He looked smugly and irritatingly malely pleased at the prospect.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, ‘but, Jon...’ she protested as he turned round with her still in his arms and rolled her onto the bed, following her there, and pinning her down with the superior weight of his body.
‘Jon, what are you doing?’ she demanded.
He was grinning at her and her heart turned over inside her as she read the purpose in his eyes and he told her softly, ‘It would certainly be one sure fire way of keeping you tied to me. Besides...’ He paused to kiss her, smothering her mumbled protest until she was forced to give up and respond to him.
‘Besides...what?’ she asked breathlessly when at last he had released her.
‘I love loving you so much,’ he told her simply. ‘No woman has ever meant to me what you do, Sophy, or ever will. I could have wept when you told me that you weren’t fully a woman. I could have killed Benson for what he had done to you. You were too inexperienced to even realise what he had done. How he had pushed his own inadequacies off on to you.’
‘You made me a woman, Jon,’ she told him huskily, feeling his body tense against her and thrilling to the vibrant masculinity of it. Only one thing still troubled her, creasing her forehead as she said hesitantly, ‘Jon, just now when I said I might be pregnant you seemed pleased but you threatened to put the children into care. You...’
‘I gambled that their supposed plight would push you into marrying me far faster than any amount of reasoned argument,’ he admitted wryly, ‘but believe me I would never have done it. They’re my brother’s children, Sophy, and I love them very much, just as I shall love our own very much...but never quite as much as I love you.’
Beneath him her body quivered and she reached up to wrap her arms round him, her voice breaking slightly as she murmured, ‘Make love to me please, Jon. Show me that this isn’t all some impossible dream.’
‘No dream, but reality,’ he whispered against her mouth. ‘The reality of our love.’
* * * * *
The Demetrios Virgin
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
‘FOUR FORTY-FIVE.’ Saskia grimaced as she hurried across the foyer of the office block where she worked, heading for the exit. She was already running late and didn’t have time to pause when the receptionist called out. ‘Sneaking off early... Lucky you!’
Andreas frowned as he heard the receptionist’s comment. He was standing waiting for the executive lift and the woman who was leaving hadn’t seen him, but he had seen her: a stunningly leggy brunette with just that gleam of red-gold in her dark locks that hinted at fieriness. He immediately checked the direction of his thoughts. The complication of a man to woman entanglement was the last thing he needed right now, and besides...
His frown deepened. Since he had managed to persuade his grandfather to semi-retire from the hotel chain which Andreas now ran, the older man had begun a relentless campaign to persuade and even coerce Andreas into marrying a second cousin. Such a marriage, in his grandfather’s eyes, would unite not just the two branches of the family but the wealth of the family shipping line—inherited by his cousin—with that of the hotel chain.
Fortunately Andreas knew that at heart his grandfather was far more swayed by emotion than he liked to admit. After all, he had allowed his daughter, Andreas’s mother, to marry an Englishman.
The somewhat clumsy attempts to promote a match between Andreas and his cousin Athena would merely afford Andreas some moments of wry amusement if it were not for one all-important fact—which was that Athena herself was even keener on the match than his grandfather. She had made her intentions, her desires, quite plain. Athena was a widow seven years his senior, with two children from her first marriage to another wealthy Greek, and Andreas suspected that it might have been Athena herself who had put the ridiculous idea of a marriage between them in his grandfather’s head in the first place.