Читать книгу Back In The Marriage Bed - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 8

‘NOW, you’re sure you’re feeling all right?’ Helena checked as Annie dropped her and Bob off at the airport.

‘I’m fine. Stop fussing,’ Annie told her with a good-natured smile as she hugged them both and kissed them goodbye. ‘And to prove it I’m going to go home and make a start on that gardening I’ve been threatening to do for months.’

The garden of her small house was long and narrow, and enclosed at the back by a high brick wall which ensured her privacy but gave the garden a rather closed-in feel.

For Christmas, amongst the other gifts they had given her, Bob and Helena had given her a gardening book with some wonderful ideas plus a very generous gift voucher for a local garden centre, and Annie, who had been studying the book intently, had now come up with her own design for the garden based on the principles in the book.

The first thing she needed, she had decided, was some pretty coloured trellising to place against the walls, and so, after she had watched Bob and Helena’s plane take off, she headed back to her car and drove towards the garden centre.

Several happy and productive hours later Annie climbed back into her car again. She had chosen and ordered her trellising, and made arrangements for it to be delivered, as well as getting from the man in charge of the fencing department the telephone number of someone who would come out and fix it in place for her.

As she started her car engine Annie was humming happily to herself. It was a bright sunny day, a brisk breeze sending fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky, and on impulse, instead of taking the direct route back to her own home, Annie opted instead to head towards the river.

The prettily wooded countryside on the outskirts of the town was criss-crossed with narrow country lanes, confusingly so at times—especially when one descended down through the trees and lost sight of the river, as she had just done, Annie recognised as she came to an unmarked fork in the road and paused, not quite sure which road to take.

Instinctively she wanted to take the right-hand fork, even though logic told her the left must lead down towards the river. With a small mental shrug Annie gave in to instinct and then wondered just what she had done as the road she had chosen narrowed virtually to a single track, winding up a sharp steep hillside banked with hedges so thick and high it was impossible for her to gauge just where she was. And yet even though she knew she had never driven up it before Annie felt that the road was somehow familiar.

She gave a small gasp as she rounded a particularly sharp bend and saw in front of her the entrance to a large Victorian house. On the top of each brick gatepost was an odd metal sculpture. The sculptures were made from the harpoons used on the ships of the man who had built this house from the money he had made from his whaling fleet. And how had she known that? Annie wondered in bemusement as she stopped her car just inside the drive to the house and switched off the engine. She must have read it somewhere, she acknowledged. She had read avidly in the long months of her recovery, books on every subject under the sun, including some on the local history of the area.

And yet…Unsteadily she got out of her car, her heart starting to beat very fast as she walked towards the house. The rhododendrons flanking the drive obscured the sunlight, throwing out dark shadows so that when she actually stepped back into its full beam it dazzled and dizzied her, making her rock slightly on her feet and close her eyes, only to open them again as she felt something coming between her and the warmth of the sun.

‘You!’ she whispered, her whole body shivering in a mixture of shock and delight as she saw who was standing in front of her. ‘It’s you,’ she whispered a second time, her eyes glowing with bemusement and happiness as she stepped towards the man who had come out of the house to stand in front of her.

Close to and in the daylight he was so exactly the man from her dreams that the awesome nature of the impulse that had brought her here to him held Annie motionless in an invisible bubble of iridescent joy.

It was true. She had been right. There was something fateful, fated about him…about them…

Her eyes focused on him, eagerly absorbing every detail of him and mentally checking them off against her own private blueprint. His eyes were exactly the same dark dramatic blue she had dreamed of, his skin the same taut sheeny tan, his hair the same inky almost blue-black. Everything about him was just as she had dreamed—everything. Even his mouth. Especially his mouth!

His mouth. Annie shivered in sensual delight as she looked at the hard male curve of his upper lip, the sensual promise of his much fuller lower one. If she closed her eyes she would be able to recreate the sensation of it closing over her own, hungrily coaxing her lips to part whilst he caressed them, filling her with his life’s breath whilst she…

‘So you came.’

His voice reverberated through her, its tone unexpectedly harsh, even a little terse, but wholly recognisable and familiar.

The intensity of her emotions made her shudder as violent spasms of recognition racked her. She had travelled such a long way to reach this moment, this heartbeat out of infinity.

‘Yes,’ she whispered in response, her voice cracking against the dryness of her throat. ‘You…you knew that I would?’ she asked, her emotions so heightened that she felt as though she had suddenly entered an extra dimension of awareness.

Behind him she could see the open door to the house. Beyond it, she knew, lay a large hallway, with a table on which would be a bronze of the man who had originally commissioned the house, and into the stairway that curled upwards from it would be carved all manner of sea creatures, both real and mythical; leaping dolphins, graceful whales, octopuses, sea horses and mermaids.

‘I…’ His voice sounded terse and strained, as though he too was aware of the enormity of what was happening, and as she looked at him and saw the way his gaze suddenly shifted, as though he couldn’t quite meet her eyes, she was overwhelmed by a sudden flood of fiercely protective love.

Instinctively she moved towards him, her hand resting lightly on his arm as she whispered protectively, ‘It’s all right…everything’s all right. I’m here. We’re…’

Beneath her fingertips she could feel his muscles bunching, clenching, and as she looked up into his face she could see the tight white line of his mouth. Her own body registered the aftershock of what he was feeling in the rush of almost seismic shudders that jolted his body.

‘Can we…can we go inside?’ she asked him hesitantly.

The house drew her, compelling her to walk towards it. It was almost as though she knew it already, its shape, its rooms, its history, even its scent…Just as she knew him…

Now it was her turn to shudder and to tense, but she was already inside the hallway and he was right behind her, blocking out the light from the doorway.

‘I never thought this could happen,’ she told him simply as she let her dreamy-eyed gaze absorb the wonderful reality of him.

He was tall, much taller than her, but she had known that, and broad too. She already knew just how he would feel and look beneath that soft checked workshirt he was wearing, without those old faded jeans that hugged the taut strength of his thighs. There would be a small scar just inside the right thigh, a tiny indentation, the relic of a boyhood accident. She would place her lips to it and he…

She was trembling wildly now, unable to stop what she was feeling, what she was wanting. A shudder of almost orgasmic sensitivity ripped through her as she watched him. She loved him so much!

‘Can we…can we go upstairs?’ she asked him huskily, her eyes never leaving his face as she waited for his response.

It seemed a lifetime, an aeon before he replied, both his mouth and his voice oddly stiff as he eventually responded, ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Yes,’ she told him boldly. ‘Yes, it is…what I want.’ I want…I want you. I love you. She ached to tell him, but events were moving too fast to give her time to make such an emotional statement.

Instead…

She started to release his arm and turn towards the stairs, and then, impetuously, she reached up and touched his face with her fingertips, absorbing through them the longed for human warmth, the human reality of his skin, not a dream lover’s flesh any more but that of a real man, a real lover.

Although he was clean shaven she could feel the rasp of his skin where he shaved, a prickle of such intense maleness against the acute female sensitivity of her own fingertips that she almost cried out in the raw shock of it, snatching her fingers away as though they had been burned, her eyes wide and dark, almost haunted as she looked up to his.

‘You want me,’ he said rawly. But it was a statement rather than a question. Still Annie nodded her head, mute, dumb, now that the final moment, the final acknowledgement of what lay between them, of what fate had ordained for them, was actually here.

Her glance darted over his face as nervous as that of a woodland fawn. His eyes…navy blue now, and smouldering with heat; his cheekbones…taut and hard where the flesh stretched across them, his mouth…

She felt giddy, dizzy with the force of her own longing. The silence, the tension between them stretched out like the thinnest of ice over the deepest, coldest and most dangerous water there could be, inviting only the most reckless, only the most foolhardy, to dare its danger.

‘Come here,’ he commanded her with soft force.

Immediately she did so, closing the gap between them as she moved, almost swayed into the burning inferno of his body heat, the breath driven out of her lungs in a soft, yearning gasp of delirious pleasure as his arms finally closed around her and she turned her face up to his for his kiss, her own lips so soft, swollen, parting with moist longing.

‘Oh, yes…Yes…You want me…’

She heard him etch out the sharp, stingingly sensuous words against her mouth, his voice creamy with satisfaction and male pride as his arms made a tight, imprisoning band around her and he bent her back over them, so that the cradle of her pelvis was thrust up tight against his own body.

And then his mouth finally came down on hers in a kiss that her shocked senses registered as being so raw and branding, so determined to imprint on her his stamp of possession, so intent on taking her and breaking her in the most primitive of man to woman embraces that she almost sobbed aloud in an appeal for his awareness of her vulnerability, her lack of experience, her unknowingness. And yet in some confusing way she did know, did recognise.

‘Was that good?’ she heard him asking her in a low, satisfied voice when he finally released her kiss-bitten mouth, and then, before she could answer, before she could move, he was lowering his head again, to make the same hot, mouth-biting love assault on the erect peak of her nipple, his fingers expertly pushing her clothes out of the way of one soft sweetly pink-apexed breast whilst his lips, too hungry to wait, eagerly caressed the other through the thin fabric of her bra and shirt.

For a moment Annie felt almost as though she was going to die from the shock of pleasure that sheeted through her, its intensity such that it made her catch her breath and feel as though her life itself was momentarily held in suspension. Behind her closed eyelids she could see the same brilliant whiteness she remembered from her moment of near-death: pure, burning, intense, soul-touching…like the very best kind of love itself.

Quickly she opened her eyes and focused on his downbent raven-dark head. The warm flesh of his exposed nape was a tantalising contradiction of his stance towards her and her reaction back to him, that of a man to a woman at its most sensually intense. That exposed nape was so very much that of a vulnerable boy, a child…the child they would one day have…

Immediately Annie tensed, as though somehow something had touched an exposed raw nerve within her memory. The pain, initially so intense that it had shocked her into protective immobility, was fading now, but it still had the power to frighten her.

‘What is it? Not second thoughts?’ he was asking her almost brusquely as his lips relinquished possession of her nipple and he lifted his head to look in her eyes.

In his own there was something, an expression, a darkness, that made her look away from him. Somewhere deep within her a pain, a wariness was stirring, but she quickly suppressed it. Nothing…nothing…could be allowed to spoil this special magical coming together. Nothing!

‘I…’ she began slowly, wanting to find the words to tell him how she was feeling, to ask him to help her smother the sharp needle of pain she could feel threatening her, to disarm it of its potential harm.

But instead of listening to her he shook his head and said smoothly, ‘I thought you wanted us to go to bed. You do want that, don’t you, Annie?’

Annie! He knew her name. Her heart slammed fiercely against her ribs, her whole body convulsed by the sweetly searing surge of her shock.

‘I…I want us to make love…’ she managed to tell him shakily, before adding breathlessly, so that he would know that her intuition, her knowingness, her acknowledgement of their shared fate matched his, ‘Upstairs…in the room…the room…’

‘I know which one,’ he assured her, and if her ears thought they had caught a rough, searing note of anger beneath the sensual smoothness of his low-toned voice she quickly assured herself that she had to have imagined it.

They walked upstairs together, one step at a time, her body pressed close to his, his arm around her as she leaned helplessly into him. On the half-landing she stopped, automatically gazing through the window towards the river.

‘This house was built by a whaling captain,’ she told him huskily.

‘Yes, I know,’ he agreed tersely, his arm dropping momentarily away from her.

‘I…I dream about it sometimes,’ she told him, searching carefully for the right words to tell him what she had experienced. ‘About…the room…and…and about you…’

Without saying anything else she moved back into the protection of his body, only realising that she had been holding her breath a little nervously when his arm finally rose and held her.

They had reached the top of the stairs and were standing in the doorway to the room before he said the words that made her heart turn somersaults of joy inside her body.

‘I dream of you too.’

He dreamed of her. She wasn’t alone in her belief…her recognition. Flooded with joy, she turned to him, holding his arm with her hand as she demanded, ‘You recognised me, then, the other night…in the restaurant?’

The abrupt, almost reluctant inclination of his head he gave in assent made her ache with female protectiveness. He felt embarrassed, almost afraid to reveal his vulnerability to her. Oh, how much she loved him. How wonderful it was that they had found one another.

‘It’s going to be so good,’ she told him tenderly. ‘We are going to be so good…’

Inside the room everything was just as she had dreamed. The large windows with the view of the drop down to the river and the fields and hills on the other side of it. The floor, wooden, polished, bare. The walls, bare too; the windows with their filmy ethereal curtaining. The bed…

Annie shivered as she saw it, unable to take her gaze off it as her eyes widened and focused unblinkingly on the oh, so familiar iron bedstead. Unlike hers, this, she knew immediately, was original. Very slowly and gently she reached out and touched the frame at the foot of the bed. The metal felt warm to her touch, warm and worn slightly with age. The bed was bigger than hers, much bigger, and piled high with creamy white traditional linen bedding. As she reached down and smoothed the edge of one of the covers she could almost smell the scent of lavender being released by her touch.

‘This bed…’ she began, dry-mouthed.

‘It’s a marriage bed,’ he told her quickly, and she could almost taste the bitterness in his voice. But before she could question it, turning to him, her eyes quickening with surprise, he was reaching for her, the fierceness, the immediacy of his desire surprising her. She had expected passion, intensity, and even male possessiveness, but this fierce, heated nowness he was exhibiting, this silent, hungry concentrated way in which he was reaching for her, holding her…