The Unfaithful Wife(18)

All of a sudden Leah was shorn of defences. Hadn’t she brought all of this on them both? Hadn’t she, in her complete and utter stupidity, agreed to marry a man who had looked like death warmed up on the day he had proposed? And she had asked him if he was ill. Ill? Three weeks had passed before the wedding and she had only seen him twice in company and he had been so cool and so distant, he had been like a stranger. But had she smelt a rat? No way! She had been head over heels in love and had told herself he was preoccupied with business.

A slight sound dredged her from her frantic lashings of self-loathing. She turned her head. Her lowered lashes swept up, revealing startled blue eyes. Nik was undressing. Tension thrumming through every tautened muscle, Leah closed her eyes again. But she listened, just as she listened minutes later to the sound of the shower running. Ordinary, everyday sounds for most married women...only not for her. And she found herself envisaging the state of the bathroom: a heap of discarded wet towels and nothing used returned to its proper place.

She had a stark memory of having once invaded Nik’s wing of the London house after he had departed one morning. She remembered the wet towels, the disorder and the disturbing, frightening realisation that no two people could have been more separate or less intimate than they were in their marriage that was not a marriage.

After that she had felt like a lodger in his beautiful house. She had never stamped her personality anywhere, never moved a single piece of furniture. That day had been the beginning of her detachment from him...just as this day had forever shattered that same protective device.

Her ears pricked up in disbelief at the sound of Nik humming a brief snatch from a famous operatic aria out of tune. He sounded so...buoyant? Her lashes lifted. She clashed unexpectedly with gleaming jet. Nik was standing by the bed gazing down at her. Instantly his gaze veiled, the curve of his expressive mouth straightening out.

‘Go to sleep,’ he instructed almost soothingly.

She closed her eyes, heard him discard the towel which was all that had interrupted her view of that lean, lithe golden body. The mattress gave ever so slightly, the sheet slid and then the light went out.

Silence fell. Leah lay as still as a corpse but considerably more wide awake, knowing that she could not possibly sleep with Nik lying naked within a foot of her, his every restive movement filling her with instinctive alarm and rocketing tension.

* * *

Wonderfully warm and relaxed, Leah gave a sinuous little wriggle and the hard heat of the body next to hers tautened. Her lashes lifted. She looked up into smouldering black eyes, fringed by ebony lashes. The impact of those eyes was mesmerising. Her blood leapt in her veins and her heat raced. She felt dizzy, breathless and utterly dispossessed of all rational thought.

A fingertip stroked along the lush ripeness of her lower lip. ‘Open your mouth for me. I want to taste you,’ Nik urged huskily.

Held fast by his searing gaze, she instinctively obeyed and with a stifled groan of satisfaction he crushed her slender form to him, his hands sweeping over her hips and her back as his hard, demanding mouth took hers with savage intensity.

A sweet, twisting ache stirred in her belly. The tip of his tongue snaked between her readily parted lips, erotically probing the tender inner reaches to make her quiver with helpless excitement beneath him.

With insistent hands Nik tugged the thin straps of her nightdress down from her shoulders, baring the pouting swell of her breasts. His sure fingers cupped and explored the straining mounds and caressed her nipples until they were throbbing and stiff. Uncontrollably her hips arched up to his, her thighs trembling in response as her hands rose and tangled in his thick black hair.

Her heart hammered wildly in her chest as he released her reddened lips. He teased her sensitised breasts, his tongue skimming down the valley between them while his hands toyed with the rigid peaks he had created. Heat was surging through her in waves of violent response and when he employed his mouth on her tender flesh instead she moaned low in her throat, subjected to a storm of exquisite sensation that tantalised and tormented.

She was intoxicated, enslaved by passion, lost in a world of intense and drugging pleasure. With a soft growl of anticipation, Nik took her mouth again with compulsive hunger and pulled her against him, his hand sliding through the silvery curls at the apex of her thighs, searching out the silken softness beneath with intimate expertise, each sensual invasion calculated to heighten the fevered and mindless response he was receiving.

It was a sweet agony of delight that made Leah sob and pant for breath. Her hips jerked and lifted of their own volition, the demanding ache of desire rising to an unbearable pitch. A whimper of frustration was torn from her. His hands sank beneath her as he slid between her thighs. He threw back his head and raised her to meet the powerful thrust of his hard body. With an earthy groan of unashamed pleasure, he drove his rigid, swollen length into her yielding depths.

Leah felt her body stretch to accommodate his raw invasion, the sensation still new enough to shock, and then he moved inside her, creating an insatiable need that burned through her entire body. Unconsciously her fingers dug into his smooth, muscular back, her breath sobbing in her throat with every urgent thrust. Ecstatic sensation took over as he possessed her so thoroughly that she was driven out of her mind with sheer, splintering pleasure. And when release came it consumed her utterly for long, timeless moments and then dropped her down gently into sweet, drowning languor.

‘Heaven is said to come to he who waits,’ Nik murmured silkily, curving her confidently into the damp, hot heat of him. ‘But I was always a speculator...and patience is not one of my virtues.’

Exhausted, satiated, Leah couldn’t think straight, and while her mind was endeavouring to function again she slid back into sleep. When she wakened again the curtains were wide, the sun high in the sky and a breakfast tray, its contents congealing now, lay on the cabinet on her side of the bed. She looked for Nik, found him gone, and felt dismayingly alone.

It was midday but as she dived out of bed all that she could think about was the events around dawn. Her crumpled nightdress lay in a heap on the carpet like an accusing statement and a flush of shame flamed over her skin, a sigh of intense mortification dragged from her as she looked at the evidence in horror.

He had woken her up, he had deliberately woken her up out of a sound sleep and ensured that she didn’t have a chance to consider what she was doing! She washed herself from head to toe in the shower but she couldn’t wash away the intimate ache that reminded her of his lovemaking.

Why did she blame him? she asked herself abruptly. Why did she keep on kidding herself that he was the only one responsible for what happened every time he touched her? The truth was that when Nik touched her she melted, she burned, she craved with a wanton lack of control that was so obvious to her, it could scarcely be a revelation to him. Without the smallest effort, he had taught her to want him before she’d even known what wanting was.

Five years ago that instinctive desire had made her uneasy, embarrassed and stilted in his presence. She hadn’t been ready for that intensity and when Nik had left her to sleep alone it had been a relief to close out those disturbing sensations which had once afflicted her whenever he was close. But when he had chosen to smash down that wall she had put up in self-defence he had unleashed a flood of passion as powerful as a tidal wave.

For she had never stopped wanting him any more than she had denied herself the ludicrous responsibility of buying his socks. The one personal thing she had ever done for him and she had clung to it right to the bitter end. God, it was so pitiful; little wonder he had laughed. Nik probably had more socks than Imelda Marcos had had shoes. Tears stood out in her anguished eyes as she saw inside herself.

Some rejected women clung, she had bought socks with the compulsion of a fetishist, fixed stupid flower arrangements in his wing of the house to remind him of her existence, turned herself slowly but surely from an unsophisticated teenager into one of the most elegant women in London. There wasn’t a bit of her she hadn’t made over for his benefit. It was pathetic to love a man so blindly—utterly, unforgivably pathetic.

For she did love him. She had fought that love with Paul and denied its existence, unconsciously fighting for the freedom that her pride demanded. And nothing had changed. Nik didn’t love her, never would love her. He was just stuck with her. On his side the sex was merely...merely functional. He woke up in bed with a female body and what happened next was one of the very few things that was entirely predictable about Nik. So she needn’t start telling herself that her husband had suddenly begun to find her an unbearable temptation. Nik was a very virile male and he wasn’t given to soul-searching over something as basic as his sexual needs.

But he wouldn’t let her go unless that certificate turned up and for the very first time Leah was consumed by a need to know more. Was it a marriage certificate, a birth certificate, a share certificate...? Dully she enumerated several more possibilities. The first two were unlikely, she decided. Nik had said he was protecting his family. He had never mentioned himself, so had someone committed some sort of crime in his family? Embezzlement, financial skulduggery?

Sheathed in a cunningly cut blue dress, she walked out on to the wide terrace that overlooked the sea and the cliffs far below. In any other mood, she would have wanted to take in the spectacular view and explore the rest of the house but her sole driving compulsion was to find Nik. He was standing on the terrace, dark and lean and lithe in tailored cream chinos and an open-necked black shirt. As he heard her steps, his dark head turned.