Читать книгу Love Islands: Passionate Nights - Дженнифер Хейворд, Louise Fuller - Страница 14
ОглавлениеPREY TO WARRING EMOTIONS, Lucy was left to consider her options for three days while Dio disappeared to Paris for an emergency meeting with the directors of one of his companies over there.
By her calculation, that left eleven days of honeymoon time before he vanished across the Atlantic to Hong Kong.
She knew that she had been cleverly but subtly outmanoeuvred.
For a start, the story of the brand new school spread like a raging wild fire. He had played the ‘hot shot investor’ to perfection. Now, as far as everyone in the neighbourhood was concerned, ordering computers, stationery and getting the builders in was just a little formality because everything was signed, sealed and delivered bar the shouting.
If the whole pipe dream collapsed, Lucy knew that she would have to dig deep to find an excuse that would work. The blame would fall squarely on her shoulders.
The day after she and Dio had lunched in the café, Mark had arrived at work clutching brochures for computers and printers. He had made noises about getting the national press involved to cover a ‘feel good’ story because ‘the world was a dark place and it was just so damn heart-warming to find that there were still one or two heroes left in it’...
Lucy had nearly died on the spot. In what world could Dio Ruiz be classed as a hero?
No one had actually asked what the mysterious conditions were that had been imposed on her, for which she was very grateful, because she had no idea what she would have said.
They had been dependent on various money-raising ventures and government help to cover the scant lease on the building; now two members of the local council descended, beaming, to tell her that there were plans afoot to buy the place outright. They delivered a rousing speech on how much it would benefit the community to have the place brought up to scratch and in permanent active use.
They dangled the carrot of helping to subsidise three full-time members of staff who could perhaps assist in teaching non-English-speaking students, of which there were countless in the borough.
And, twice daily, Dio had called her on her mobile, ostensibly to find out how she was—given their new relationship, which involved conversation—but really, she knew, to apply pressure.
Two weeks...
And then, after that, freedom was hers for the taking.
Was he right? Would sleeping with him be such a hardship? They were married and, when she had married him, she had been hot for him, had counted the hours, the minutes and the seconds till they could climb into bed together. Her virginity was something precious to be handed over to him and she hadn’t been able to wait to do it.
She was still a virgin but she was now considerably more cynical than she had once been. And how precious was it, really? So once upon a time she had had a dream of only marrying for love and losing her virginity to a guy she wanted to spend her life with. She had woken up. Big deal.
And she was still hot for him. It pained her to admit it, especially since he had gloatingly pointed it out to her and, worse, had proved it by kissing her, feeling her melt under his hands.
What was the point in denying reality? She’d been damned good at facing reality so far; she had not once shied away from the fact that she was trapped in a marriage and forced to play the part of the socialite she probably should have but never had been.
On day three she picked up her mobile to hear his dark, velvety voice down the line and, as usual, she felt the slow, thick stir of her heightened senses.
Once more or less able to withstand the drugging effect of his personality, Lucy had now discovered that her defences had been penetrated on all fronts. Even when he was on the opposite side of the world, she just had to hear his voice and every nerve inside her body quivered in response.
Overnight it seemed as though all the walls she had painstakingly built between them had been knocked down in a single stroke.
‘What are you up to?’
Lucy sat down. Was she really interested in launching into a conversation about the porridge she had just eaten?
‘Marie has handed in her notice. I knew she was going to at some point. She’s far too ambitious to be cleaning. She’s got a placement at a college. So I’m afraid you’re going to have to find someone else to do the cleaning in the Paris apartment.’
‘I’m going to have to find someone else?’
‘Well, I won’t be around, will I?’ Lucy pointed out bluntly. She projected to when she would shut the door of their grand, three-storey mansion in London for good and she felt her heart squeeze inside her.
Sitting in the first class lounge at JFK airport, Dio frowned. By the time he returned to London, he wanted an answer from her, and the only answer he was prepared to accept was the one he wanted to hear.
That was what he wanted to chat about now. He certainly didn’t want to have a tedious conversation about their apartment in Paris and finding a cleaner to replace the one who had quit. He didn’t want her to start the process of withdrawing from the marriage. No way. Nor had he contemplated the prospect of not getting what he wanted from her.
It occurred to him that there really was only one topic of conversation he was willing to hear.
‘I’ll cross the bridge of hiring a new cleaner when the time comes.’
‘Well, it’ll come in the space of two weeks, which is when Marie will be leaving.’
‘What are you wearing? It’s early over there...are you still in your pyjamas? Does it strike you as a little bizarre that we’ve never seen each other in the confines of a bedroom, wearing pyjamas?’
Lucy went bright red and cleared her throat. ‘I don’t know what my clothes have to do with anything...’ She automatically pulled her dressing gown tighter around her slender body and was suddenly conscious of her bra-less breasts and the skimpiness of her underwear.
‘I’m making small talk. If we’re to spend the next two weeks together—’
‘Eleven days,’ Lucy interrupted.
Dio relaxed and half-smiled to himself. He had made sure to phone her regularly while he had been away. Over the marriage, they had managed to establish a relationship in which she had been allowed to retreat. That retreat was not going to continue.
And now, without her having to say it, he could hear the capitulation in her voice. It generated the kick of an intense, slow burn of excitement.
‘If we’re to spend the next eleven days together, then we need to be able to converse.’
‘We know how to converse, Dio. We’ve done a great deal of that over the course of our marriage.’
‘Superficial conversation,’ Dio inserted smoothly. ‘No longer appropriate, given the fact that our relationship has changed.’
‘Our relationship hasn’t changed.’
‘No? I could swear you just told me how long we’re going to be spending on our long-overdue honeymoon...’
Lucy licked her lips nervously. The dressing gown had slipped open and, looking down, she could see the smooth lines of her stomach and her pert, pointed breasts.
She had made her mind up about his ultimatum and she hadn’t even really been aware of doing so.
Soon that flat stomach and those breasts would be laid bare for him to see and touch.
A little shiver raced through her. She slipped her finger beneath her lacy briefs and felt her own wetness. It shocked her. It was as if her body was already reacting to the knowledge that someone else would be touching it—that Dio would be touching it.
‘Okay,’ she said as loftily as she could manage. ‘So, you win, Dio. I hope it makes you feel proud.’
‘Right now, pride is the very least of the things I’m feeling.’ His voice lowered, sending a ripple of forbidden excitement through her.
Out of all the reasons she had privately given herself for yielding to his demands, she now acknowledged the only reason that really truly counted for anything.
It had nothing to do with the school, duty towards her students or, least of all, money.
She had yielded because she fancied him and because she knew, as he did, that to walk away from a dry marriage would be to wonder for ever what it might have been like to sleep with him.
Her head might not want to get into bed with Dio but her body certainly did and this was her window.
The fact that there were a lot of up sides and bonuses attached to her decision was just an added incentive.
‘I’d tell you what I’m feeling,’ he said roughly, ‘but I’m sitting in the lounge at JFK and I wouldn’t want anyone to start noticing the hefty bulge in my trousers...’
‘Dio! That’s...that’s...’
‘I know. Unfortunate, considering I’m going to have to wait a few more hours before I can be satisfied.’
‘That’s not what I meant!’
‘No?’
‘No,’ Lucy told him firmly. To add emphasis to her denial, she very firmly tightened the dressing gown so that she could cover up her treacherously over-heated, semi-naked body. ‘I... I’m happy to discuss the details of...er...our arrangement.’
‘Speak English,’ Dio said drily.
‘I’ll do this honeymoon business with you but only because I don’t have a choice.’
‘That’s not very enthusiastic,’ Dio admonished, hanging onto his temper. If he could put his feelings to one side, if he could forget her duplicitous take on their marriage, then he was damned if he was going to let her get away with dragging her feet and somehow blaming him for the fact that she wanted to sleep with him.
‘Everyone expects you to descend and start flinging money at the school.’
‘I find it doesn’t do to mould your life according to other people’s expectations.’
‘How do I know that once this so-called honeymoon of ours is over you’ll do what you say...?’
‘You don’t.’ Dio was affronted. He had always been a man of his word, which was saying something, in a world where very few men were. He might not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth but he knew one thing for sure: in his business practices, and in fact in his whole approach to life, he was a damned sight more ethical than a lot of his counterparts whose climb up the ladder had been a great deal less precarious than his had been!
‘You’ll have to rely on that little thing called trust.’
Lucy didn’t say anything and Dio felt the significance of her silence like a disapproving slap on the face.
Rich, coming from the ice-maiden who had strung him along.
‘I’m not a man who breaks his word,’ he said coolly. ‘I know many who do.’
Lucy thought of her father, who had cheated so many people out of their pensions, and she flushed guiltily. Were Dio’s thoughts running along the same lines? He might have married her for all the wrong reasons but then he had never claimed to love her, had he? Even when they had been dating, he had never talked about love.
And something deep inside her knew that, if he had given his word, then he wasn’t going to break it.
‘Shall I book somewhere?’ she asked stiffly. ‘I expect you want to use one of the houses...’
‘I think you can climb out of “personal assistant” mode on this occasion,’ Dio said softly. ‘It somehow ruins the...sizzle.’
His husky voice was doing all sorts of peculiar things to her body and she squirmed on the chair, idly glancing round at all the top-notch, expensive equipment in the very expensive kitchen.
‘I surely need to book flights for us?’ Lucy intended to do her very best not to let either of them forget that their weird honeymoon was built on stuff that was very prosaic.
This wasn’t going to be one of those romantic affairs where they would spend their time whispering sweet nothings and staring longingly at one another over candlelit dinners before racing to their room so that they could rip the clothes off one another.
This was more getting something elemental out of their systems.
‘Don’t give it a thought,’ Dio said briskly. ‘I’ll get my secretary to do the necessary.’
‘But where will we be going? And when, exactly?’
‘I’m at JFK now. When I return to London, I’ll have a quick turnaround. Be prepared to be out of the country this time tomorrow.’
‘What? I can’t just leave here at a moment’s notice.’
‘Of course you can. My secretary will take care of everything. You just need to get ready for me...’
‘Get ready for you?’
Dio laughed at the outrage in her voice. He was so hard for her right now, he was finding it difficult to move.
Small, high breasts... He had glimpsed the shadow of her cleavage in some of the more daring dresses she had worn to social events over the course of the marriage. He wondered what colour her nipples were. She was a natural blonde and he imagined that they were rosy pink, kissable nipples. He wondered what she would taste like when he buried himself between her thighs.
He wondered who else she had shared her body with before she had met him.
It was a grimly unappealing thought and he ditched it before it had time to take root.
‘Use your imagination,’ he drawled. ‘Get into the head set...’
‘Yes, sir...’ Lucy muttered under her breath and she heard his soft laughter down the end of the line. Sexy laughter. The laughter of a man who’d got exactly what he wanted. She fidgeted a little more and forced herself to focus. ‘And what should I pack?’
‘Don’t. I’ll make sure that there are clothes waiting for you at the other end.’
‘I don’t want to be dressed up like a Barbie doll,’ she told him quickly. ‘That’s not part of this arrangement.’
‘I shall see you very soon, Lucy...’
‘But you still haven’t told me where we’ll be going!’
‘I know. Isn’t it exciting? I, for one, can’t wait.’
And he disconnected. Lucy was left holding a dead phone and feeling panicked because now there was no going back.
She tried to think of life after the next ten days but she found her mind getting stuck with images of Dio in bed with her. After she had discovered the truth behind their sham of a marriage, she had told herself that that was why he had not tried to get her into bed before they had tied the knot.
She had thought that he was being a gentleman, respecting her wish to wait until they were married before having sex. She had been too embarrassed to tell him that she was still a virgin, and anyway the subject had not arisen.
Instead, he had been stringing her along. She had stopped day dreaming about him but the day dreams were rearing their heads once again and she couldn’t stop them.
How was she supposed to travel to some unknown destination? They could be going to the Arctic, the Caribbean or a city somewhere. Had he even decided or was he going to let his assistant choose where they went?
And what was it going to be like when he returned to the house?
The knowledge that they would be cooped up together for the better part of a fortnight would lie between them like a lead weight...
Wouldn’t it?
She was a bundle of nerves as evening drew round. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t dress up for his arrival. Usually, she never dropped the role unless she was on her own. Usually he saw her formally attired, even when she was in casual clothing.
But things were different and she had defiantly chosen to wear a pair of jeans and a faded old tee-shirt from her university days. Nor was she plastered with make-up and she hadn’t curled her hair. Instead, she was a make-up-free zone and her hair hung heavily just past her shoulders, neatly tucked behind her ears.
She was in the same place as she had been when she had confronted him with talk of divorce, standing in the drawing room. And she was just as jumpy.
And yet, staring through the window into the, for London, relatively large garden with its row of perfectly shaped and manicured shrubs, she didn’t hear him until he spoke.
‘I wondered if you would wait up for me.’ Dio strolled into the drawing room, dumping his jacket, which he had hooked over his shoulder. It had been a tiresome flight, even in first class, but he felt bright eyed and bushy-tailed now as he flicked his eyes over her.
He’d half-expected her to go into a self-righteous meltdown between speaking to her on the phone and showing up at the house. She was very good at adopting the role of blameless victim. He guessed that the lure of money was irresistible, however. She might play at her volunteer work and make big plans to teach but teaching didn’t pay nearly enough for her to afford the sort of lifestyle to which she had always been accustomed.
Cynicism curled his lips when he thought that.
‘Drink?’
A feeling of déjà vu swept over Lucy as she helplessly followed him into the kitchen, although this time she had eaten, and she expected he would have as well, so there would be no pretend domesticity preparing a meal.
‘I thought we could chat about plans for tomorrow,’ she began valiantly. ‘I need to know what time we will be leaving. I... I’ve packed a couple of things...’ He looked drop-dead gorgeous and she could feel the electricity in the air between them, sparking like a live, exposed wire. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
And the way he was looking at her, his pale eyes skewering her, brought her out in a nervous wash of perspiration.
She wanted crisply to remind him that their arrangement was for the honeymoon period, which technically would only start when they reached wherever they were heading, and so for tonight they would retreat to their separate quarters as per normal. However, her tongue seemed to have become glued to the roof of her mouth.
‘Have you been thinking about me?’ Dio asked lazily. ‘Because I’ve been thinking about you.’ And marvelling that it had taken them this long to get where they were now, but then again the whole question of the penniless divorce had driven the situation.
He walked slowly towards her and she gave a little nervous squeak. ‘I thought we were going to...er...well, when we were away...’
‘Why stand on ceremony? The honeymoon’s been cut a little short by my unexpected meeting in New York anyway, so fair’s fair, wouldn’t you say? I don’t want to be short-changed on time. If I’m to pay for two weeks, then I want my two weeks, or as good as...’
The last thing Lucy was expecting was to be swept off her feet. Literally. The breath whooshed out of her body as she was carried out of the kitchen. She felt the thud as he nudged the door open with his foot and then she was bouncing against him, heart racing as he took her up the stairs.
To his bedroom, which she had been into many times before. It was a marvel of masculinity. The colours were deep and rich, the furniture bold and dark with clean lines. Even with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she could visualise it. Once, when he had gone away, leaving the house a lot earlier to catch a transatlantic flight, she had gone into the bedroom to air it before the cleaner came and had remained frozen to the spot at the sight of the rumpled bed, still bearing the impression of where he had been lying. She could remember tentatively touching it and then springing back because it had still held the lingering warmth of his body.
It had shaken her more than she had thought possible.
He dumped her on the bed and then stood back, arms folded, for once lost as to what his next move might be.
He had been fired up with confidence downstairs, when he had hoisted her into his arms like a true caveman and brought her to his bedroom. But now...
She looked unimaginably beautiful and unimaginably fragile, her eyes wide and apprehensive, making him feel like a great, hulking thief who had snatched her from her bed and carried her off to his cave so that he could have his wicked way.
Dio raked his fingers through his hair and moved to the window where he stood for a few seconds, looking outside, before snapping the wooden shutters closed, blocking out the street light.
Lucy stared at him from under her lashes. Her heart was still pounding and the blood was still rushing through her veins, hot and fierce. She wanted him so badly right now that she felt like she might die of longing, yet he was just standing there, looking at her with brooding stillness.
Maybe he had come to his senses, she thought.
Maybe he had realised that you couldn’t just bargain with someone’s fate the way he had with hers. Maybe he had seen the light and come to the conclusion that to blackmail someone into sleeping with you just wasn’t on.
And if that was the case then why wasn’t she feeling happier? Why wasn’t she sitting up and making a case for having her divorce without a bunch of stupid stipulations? Why wasn’t she striking while the iron was hot, trying to locate Mr Decent who must surely be there hiding behind Mr Caveman?
She wasn’t feeling happier because she wanted him, simple as that.
Maybe if he had never mentioned sleeping with her, had never looked at her with those amazing, lazy, sexy eyes, she would have walked away from their marriage with her head held high and all her principles burning a hole inside her.
But he had opened a door and she wanted that door to remain open. She wanted to enter the unexplored room and see what was there...
She stirred on the bed then pushed herself backwards so that she was propped against the pillows, which she arranged under her, her vibrant blonde hair tangled around her flushed face.
Dio was her husband yet she felt as tongue-tied as a teenager on her first date with the cutest boy in class.
‘Why are you just standing there?’ she challenged, dry mouthed. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted? To carry me up here so that you could get what you paid for?’
Dio flushed darkly and scowled. Was that how he had sounded? Like a thug?
‘Nearly a year and a half with no sex, Lucy. Are you telling me that I got a fair deal when I married you?’ His voice was harsher than he had intended and he saw her flinch.
‘Maybe neither of us got much of a fair deal.’
Personally, Dio thought the deal she had ended up with had been a hell of a lot better than his.
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘You brought me up to your room for sex and here I am. You’re getting what you paid for!’ Brave words, but the way she cleared her throat alerted Dio to the fact that she might be talking the talk, but that was where it probably ended.
It seemed just one more thing that wasn’t fitting into the neat slot he had shoved her into for the past year and a half.
A cold, opportunistic woman would surely not have been able to replicate the nervous wariness he could see beneath the brave statement of intent?
Her fingers wouldn’t be digging into her arms to stop them from trembling...
‘I find that I’m not as much into self-sacrificing martyrs as I had imagined,’ Dio said, pushing himself away from the window ledge against which he had been leaning.
‘Even the ones you forked out good money to buy?’
‘You were never that cynical, Lucy.’ He had a vivid image of her laughing at him with genuine, girlish innocence, the sort of girlish innocence that had made him lose his mind. She might not have been quite as innocent as she had pretended but she certainly hadn’t been as sharp-tongued as she was now.
‘I grew up,’ she said with painful honesty.
‘You can run along,’ he told her, reaching to the top button of his shirt. ‘I’ve had a long flight. I’m tired. I’m going to have a shower and hit the sack.’
She didn’t want him to.
She could play the passive victim and scuttle off but she wasn’t going to do that. She felt as though she had spent the past year or so playing the passive victim—had spent practically her whole life playing the passive victim—and now would be her only window in which to take control of a situation.
‘What if I decide that I don’t want to run along?’ she asked with considerable daring.
Dio stilled, hand still poised to remove his shirt. Her chin was mutinously jutting out and he smiled, reluctantly amused by the expression on her face: stubborn, holding her breath, eyes squeezed tightly shut..
‘What are you saying?’
‘You know what I’m saying.’
‘I like things to be spelt out in black and white. No room for error then...’
‘I’ve wondered, okay?’
‘Wondered what?’ He was standing right by the bed now, looking down at her with a smile of male satisfaction.
‘What it would be like...you know...? With you...’
‘Even though you’ve spent many months being an ice-queen?’
‘I’ve been very friendly with all your clients.’
‘Maybe I’ve been longing for a few of those smiles to be directed my way,’ Dio murmured. He slowly began unbuttoning his shirt, watching her watching him as his brown chest was exposed inch by inch.
Lucy was riveted. How long had she wanted this? How had this insane desire been so successfully hidden under layers of resentment and simmering anger, with a large dose of self-pity thrown in for good measure?
She watched as he tugged the shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, drew in a deep breath and held it as he shrugged off the shirt altogether, tossing it casually on the ground.
‘So, you’re curious...’ He felt as though he was suddenly walking on clouds. It was an extremely uplifting sensation. In fact, when it came to the feel-good factor, this was as good as it got. Her eyes were huge and, yes, curious. He was bulging in his trousers, thick and hard and desperate for a release, which he was going to take his time getting to.
Drugged by the sensational vision of him half-naked...her bronzed god of a soon-to-be ex-husband... Lucy was deprived of speech. She nodded and didn’t even bother trying to tear her eyes away from his glorious body.
‘I confess I’m curious too,’ Dio admitted, basking in her undiluted fascination with his body. ‘So it’s time for you to return the favour...’
‘Huh?’ Lucy blinked.
‘One good turn deserves another,’ Dio said drily. ‘Or, in this case, one semi-striptease deserves another.’
‘You want me to...?’
‘We’re man and wife.’ He gestured broadly. ‘A little bit of nudity should be as nothing between us.’
‘I hate it when you do that,’ she complained. He grinned and that grin erased all the forbidding, harsh lines of his beautiful face; made him seem almost boyish.
‘Do what?’
‘Oh, don’t play the innocent with me.’ But she smiled shyly and sat up. Her fingers were shaking; her hands were shaking. He had no idea that she had never done anything like this in her life before. Okay, at university there had been some good-natured fumbling with the two boys she had dated for six months and three months respectively. But they’d been boys and he was...
Dio...
Nerves ripped into her with a vengeance, but she had committed to this path, wanted this path, and she wasn’t going to give in to cold feet now.
But that didn’t mean that she wasn’t shaking like a leaf as she dragged the tee-shirt over her head and flung it to the ground where it joined his shirt.
He had folded his arms and was staring, just as though she really was performing a proper striptease for his benefit only.
Which, she supposed, she was, in a way.
She closed her eyes, reached behind, unclasped her bra and, still with her eyes shut, flung the bra onto the little growing heap of discarded clothes.
‘You can open your eyes,’ Dio drawled. He was surprised he could talk at all because the sight of her was enough to take his breath away.
He loved the way she was sprawled there on his bed, her head averted. He could see the tiny pulse beating in her neck and, God, he wanted to fall on her, take her, sate himself with her body.
She was beyond captivating.
Pale, slender, her small breasts pert and pointed, her nipples as pink as he had imagined, but bigger. Perfect, circular discs that sent his blood pressure soaring.
Lucy opened her eyes and slid a hesitating, self-conscious sideways glance at him. She had no idea where she had found the courage to do what she had done, but she had had to do it, and one look at the naked hunger and desire in his eyes was enough to restore every scrap of her wavering self-confidence. She glanced at his trousers, then back to his face, and he laughed.
‘So my beautiful ice-maiden thaws...’ He slowly unlooped his belt from his trousers and then pulled down his zipper. He was utterly confident when it came to his own nudity and he really liked the way she was still looking at him. He pulled down the trousers and his boxers in one easy movement, and her eyelids fluttered as she took in the impressive girth of his erection.
‘Your turn now...and then you can touch...’ He loosely held himself and noted her quick, sharp intake of breath. Just one more of those little hot reactions and he knew that he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened next.
Their eyes held and she wriggled her jeans down until she was left only in her panties. She couldn’t stop looking at his big hand holding himself.
‘Let me feel you first,’ Dio said raggedly. He reached down and slipped his hand to cup the moist mound between her legs, then he pushed his finger in before sliding it along the slippery slit until he felt the throbbing nub of her clitoris.
Lucy gave a long, low groan and parted her legs.
There was no room in her head to contemplate her absolute lack of experience.
He would find out soon enough...
