One Night with His Wife(24)

He touched her in every place but the one place craving his touch. She discovered she had erogenous zones all over her. He let his sensual mouth nip at the extended line of her throat and she was convinced she would burst into flame. He licked her fingers and her very bones seemed to liquefy. He smoothed his palms with aching slowness along the outside of her slender thighs and she burned in absolute torment. And when he started shaping her squirming hips, she clawed him down to her in a tempestuous movement.

‘If you don’t…’ she moaned.

And then he did, and nothing from that point on could have wrenched her from the grip of such torturous excitement. Not thunder, not lightning, not even a full orchestra. Sounds escaped her that she didn’t recognise as her own, and she twisted and she writhed until at last he came over her.

And Luc was trembling too then, dampness sheening his golden skin, the hands that spread her beneath him taut and impatient, dark eyes burnished with raw desire. He entered her in a hungry surging thrust. She cried out loud, out of control, loving it, loving him with such fevered intensity that the pleasure seemed more than she could bear. And as he drove her deeper into that pleasure with long, hard strokes, she felt the great gathering ultimate surge taking her in its hold and just let go, gasping, shuddering, sobbing out his name at the height of ecstasy.

‘I think, mon ange…’ Luc groaned indolently into her hair. ‘I think I shall adapt to being really married with remarkable enthusiasm.’

She shifted indolently against him, enfolded by the most marvellous sense of peace and satiation. Lifting his head, Luc gazed down at her abstracted expression and he laughed softly. ‘You’re still out of it.’

Out of everything, she conceded happily as he traced the relaxed fullness of her reddened lips with a fingertip and gave her the sort of megawatt smile that made her heart sing. ‘Just keep on smiling at me…’

‘I believe I can definitely promise you that.’ His dark drawl husky with sensual amusement, Luc rolled over into a cooler patch of the tumbled bed, but he kept her welded to him with one powerfully possessive arm and covered her mouth very softly with his again.

It felt as if the whole world stood still while he kissed her. Glorious contentment enveloped Star. She closed her arms round him in helpless hunger, revelling in the damp, hard feel of his relaxed length and knowing that she already wanted him again.

Lifting his tousled head, Luc scanned her with stunning dark eyes ablaze with the same awareness. ‘It’s hard to believe that in the early hours of this morning. I was angry and drunk and climbing the walls with sexual frustration…and look at us now.’

Yes, look at us now, Star suddenly thought, tensing at the reminder of that upsetting confrontation during the night. It was as if Luc had pressed a panic button inside her head. Luc seemed to be suggesting that now everything was sorted, as it were. He thought, he had actually just assumed, that he had got what he wanted and that she had now agreed to stay married to him. And why shouldn’t he have made that assumption? Hadn’t she just fallen at abandoned speed back into bed with him again?

‘For the sake of our children,’ he had drawled piously, when he had stated the case for finally making their marriage a real and binding commitment. And didn’t she still love him? Wasn’t this probably the very most Luc was ever likely to offer her? What was she holding out for? Red roses and romance? Chance would be a fine thing! But how much could she even trust in what Luc was saying right now?

‘You know…’ she said uneasily, pulling away from him in a move that took an amount of will-power that embarrassed her. ‘Only last night you were talking like you hated me…’

Faint colour surfaced over his hard cheekbones and he frowned. ‘I still believed that the twins had been fathered by some other man! You never put yourself in my place, mon ange.’

No, now that he said it, she had to admit that she hadn’t ever tried. But then she had never managed to work out what went on inside Luc’s head. However, she suspected that when his emotions became involved Luc’s sense of proportion and his pure logic went out of the window, leaving him vulnerable. How else did she explain an overwhelmingly practical guy who, on the basis of a goodbye note, had had the moat and the lake dragged for her body?

‘But ever since you tracked me down all you’ve been talking about is divorcing me. It was like it was a real mission with you…’

‘So that is what is worrying you. But naturally my priorities have changed,’ Luc countered without hesitation. ‘We have the twins to consider now. They need their mother just as much as their father. You and I both enjoyed less than idyllic childhoods. By staying together we support each other as parents and we can ensure that our children enjoy a different experience.’

Star’s heart was steadily sinking. She had put him on the spot again when he hadn’t been expecting it, but couldn’t he just have lied and pretended that she figured in this reconciliation as something more than the mother of his children? No, she was better off with that honesty, she decided miserably. Even she couldn’t romanticise deeper meanings into words and phrases like ‘priorities’ and ‘supporting each other as parents’.

Luc was determined to hang onto Venus and Mars. First he had softened her up with the threat of a custody battle, then he had tried to talk her back into a marriage he had previously been keen to escape. All for the benefit of the twins. But children and good intentions were not enough to hold a marriage together. Why on earth was Luc the logical being so illogical? Her head whirled. It was as if they had suddenly switched characters. She was supposed to be the one who chased idealistic windmills; he was supposed to be the one grounded in the solid rock of realistic expectations!

Star dropped her head and murmured heavily, ‘I think we should just take stock of our marriage at the end of the summer…and not make any hard and fast decisions before then.’

Luc threw back the sheet and sprang out of bed.

That got her attention all right. She watched him hauling on his boxer shorts and then snatching up the chinos lying on a nearby chair. His long, smooth brown back expressed hostility in violent waves. In the space of ten seconds the atmosphere had churned up and charged like dynamite ready to explode.

‘Luc?’ Star prompted apprehensively.

Luc swung back, dark eyes grim. ‘Explain exactly what you mean by that suggestion. I want to be sure I haven’t misunderstood.’

‘Well, we just see how we get on over the summer—’

‘You keep your options open until then?’ Raw incredulity edged his dark accented drawl.

Star nodded. That way she wouldn’t get her hopes up too much. That way if he discovered he couldn’t hack being married to her, she would be prepared and she wouldn’t be quite so hurt.

Studying a point slightly to one side of her, Luc breathed in very deep, so deep she could see his impressive chest expanding. ‘Rien à faire…nothing doing!’

She stiffened. ‘But—’

With a slashing motion of one powerful hand, Luc silenced her. ‘When you went to bed with me again, you knew that I believed you had agreed to my terms!’

Star quickly dropped her head again, wincing, wishing he wasn’t quite so clever. ‘I just wanted you so much…can’t you accept that?’

‘You’re my wife and you’re behaving like a wanton little slut!’

‘You don’t mean that,’ she told him, looking up hopefully but meeting hard, challenging eyes across the depth of the room and shrinking.

‘I heard you telling Rory you loved him last night,’ Luc ground out.

‘Oh…’ Her mind occupied with something which was to her way of thinking much more pressing, Star said, ‘Are you about to apologise for calling me a slut?’

‘Not on my deathbed!’ Luc roared, which seemed fairly comprehensive.

‘Fine…this dialogue is over until you say sorry.’ Beneath his arrested gaze, Star flopped back on the pillows and shut her eyes.

‘Rory was not on your mind that night in England…and he was a very distant memory not ten minutes ago, when you were having a hell of a good time under me!’

Star whispered frigidly, ‘And when you were having a hell of a good time over me. So that leaves us about equal.’

‘How can you be so crude?’ Luc had the nerve to sound genuinely shocked.

‘I just learnt it from you. But at least I have never in my life eavesdropped on someone else’s private phone call…’ It was a lie: on their wedding night she had listened to him call Gabrielle and say he was coming over. That recollection just choked her. ‘But I love Rory like a friend…OK?’

‘No, it is not OK!’ Luc thundered back at her. ‘You will have no further contact with him. And if you think for one moment that I intend to be put on trial as a stud for the summer, you are out of your crazy mind!’

Star felt frozen from neck to toe. She looked up at the superb ornate ceiling, exhaustion creeping over her. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you. I have no plans to ever sleep with you again, Luc Sarrazin. Are you going to apologise? Because if you’re not, you can leave.’