She heard him laugh deep in his throat, his breath tickling her ear as he whispered,
'And you most certainly will. That, my darling cousin, was merely our prelude!' She felt him frown against her skin as he added softly, 'For a woman of twenty-five you're deliciously inexperienced.'
She tensed in his arms, and as though he knew what she was thinking he added, 'I'm not fishing, Lucy. Whatever happened in the past is past, but it's a tremendous boost to a man's ego when he knows he's given a woman a pleasure she's never known before.'
She didn't ask him how he had known, but shivered a little, wondering what he would say when he discovered … But, no, she wasn't going to think about that now. It wasn't important, hadn't he just told her so?
If she had been inclined to believe that his comment that they would make love had merely been made in jest, she soon realised that she was wrong.
The exhaustion which had gripped her in the aftermath of pleasure turned to languor beneath his slowly seductive kisses, and languor to a fine-tuned desire that increased in urgency as his hands caressed her skin-surely now more sensitive even than before to the slow drift of his fingers.
She in turn caressed him, thrilled and almost a little frightened by the maleness of him and the desire she could feel pounding through his body.
This time she had no need to cry out how much she needed him. He seemed to sense exactly the right moment, moving tantalisingly over, then within her, almost teasingly at first, until he felt the fine tension gripping her body. Then he moved differently, making her gasp in surprised shock. The same shock was registered in his eyes as well she saw, as her own opened wide, but already that sharp, unexpected pain had faded, giving way to urgency and the clamour of her senses. Instinctively she kept him within her, wrapping herself round his body, feeling the faint shudder of desire that seized his muscles, and his shock, like hers, gave way to need, desire escalating between them until it reached an unbearable pinnacle to shatter like fragile glass against the pressure of an almost unreachable high note.
This time he didn't wrap her in his arms. Instead, leaning up on one elbow to study her face, frowning slightly, his voice terse, he asked, 'Why didn't you tell me?'
After his earlier words this was not the reaction she had expected. Avoiding his eyes she shrugged and said quietly, 'It didn't seem important.'
'Important enough,' he responded drily. 'There can't be many twenty-five-year-old virgins around.'
His words hurt and to cover her hurt she said flippantly, 'And now there's one less.'
'Why did you let me make love to you, Lucy?' he asked coldly, without responding. 'Did you think it would convince me that you weren't lying about Neville? Will you tell him about this?' he added before she could speak.
Her body went cold, chilled both by what he was saying and the distant, unemotional tone of his voice. It seemed impossible that they were having this conversation. Less than three hours ago he had been telling her he loved her and now he was acting almost as though he hated her. It was because of her virginity, she thought bitterly … Because he didn't love her at all but had simply wanted her, and had been shocked to discover that he was her first lover. No doubt he was scared that she would expect some form of commitment from him, so he was trying to freeze her off in this despicable way.
'Why should I want to discuss what happened between us with Neville?' she asked him coldly. 'He's my business partner-nothing more.'
The moment she voiced the lie she wanted to retract it, but Saul was looking down at her with burning, bitter eyes, his mouth curling into biting contempt as he said thickly,
'So you were lying. You were in league with him all the time. And this was just a way of softening me up wasn't it, Lucy? Wasn't it?'
He was shaking her now, his fingers biting painfully into her upper arms.
'You always were easily fooled, Saul,' she told him icily. 'I had to tell you what Neville had planned when you said you'd overheard us, but of course, I'd never any intention of changing sides. How on earth could you raise the money to fund such a project?'
'And money of course means everything to you. I should have known that from the start … all that soft soap about regretting what your father had done. No doubt you were right there with him, planning every step. Well I've got news for you, my dear cousin. I could buy and sell this place a hundred times over.' He saw her expression and laughed savagely. 'Oh yes, that shocks you, doesn't it and you don't want to believe me, but it's true, I assure you. My stepfather is a multi-millionaire; and what I didn't tell you before was that, when he and my mother married, my father agreed that he could adopt me legally as his son. Now that he's retired I run his business empire for him, and I'm a wealthy man in my own right, from what I've learned from him, Lucy. So you see, my dear, you'd have been much better off casting in your lot with me. What a pity you were so impetuous and so greedy.'
'But then you knew that all along, didn't you,' she said wildly. 'Right from the start you … '
'I wondered what you'd be like,' he agreed curtly, 'but you're wrong about one thing. I'm obviously a lot more gullible than I knew because for a while there you had me convinced. I came very close to falling in love with you, Lucy. Too bad I had to overhear that conversation today, otherwise you could have had my millions to play with instead of Neville's thousands. Now get out,' he told her brutally, turning his back on her. 'I'm going to go and have a shower-I want to wash the scent and feel of you off my skin before it pollutes me. When I come back I don't want to find you here. Oh, and you can tell your cousin that he's got absolutely no chance of buying this place … no chance at all. I wouldn't like to be in your shoes when you do, Lucy. He looks like a man who has a cruel streak to me.'
He got off the bed and walked towards the door, pausing to turn round and demand thickly, 'For God's sake, what is it about him that you can't resist? He doesn't even want you-any fool can see that … He hasn't even made love to you … But then having done so myself, I can see why. At least cerebrally it was satisfying-knowing that I was cheating you just as much as you were cheating me.'
He was gone; the door had slammed behind him, but instead of getting dressed she was still sitting up in his bed shivering violently, no longer trying to control the wild tide of tears flooding her eyes.
It was shock, she told herself numbly as she sought to dress herself and control her palsied limbs, shock that made her shake like this and believe that it was all a bitter dream. He could not have said those things to her-not Saul. But he had … smashing her dreams and her life, and it would do no good to tell him that he was wrong, so wrong about her feelings for Neville because he would never believe her now. And even if he did … He had come near to falling in love with her, he had said, but she didn't believe that. He had suspected her right from the start; he had been waiting for her to make a mistake; and he had deliberately allowed her to think … to think that he cared about her, while all the time he had been waiting to trap her.
She was dressed. All she had to do was to walk out. It was the longest walk she ever made, and for ever afterwards she never knew how she managed to get back to the Dower House.
Once there she curled up in a chair downstairs, too shocked and distraught to even think of sleep. On her skin the scent of Saul remained elusive and tantalising, but she didn't even have the energy to go upstairs and wash. She would never see him again. She was determined on that. She had too much pride … and too much fear, she acknowledged weepily. If she stayed, how could she stop herself from begging him to believe the truth? She loved him, but he had never loved her, she reminded herself. He had pretended to, yes, but that was all it had been: a pretence. Perhaps he had even come over here with the deliberate intention of hurting her, of getting back at her for his own pain all those years ago.
At last, exhausted and muddled by increasingly miserable thoughts, she fell asleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
'BUT Lucy, what do you mean, you're going away?'
She and Fanny faced one another across the drawing-room carpet. Fanny had returned from her holiday that morning, looking glowingly tanned and relaxed. In contrast she looked pale, and almost ill, Lucy recognised, but that scarcely mattered. What did was that she had to get away … from this house … from its too-close proximity to Saul, who fortunately she hadn't seen since that disastrous evening ten days ago.