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Marcus looked at the night-dark peaks of her nipples and then bent his head to suckle erotically on one of them, whilst his fingers stroked deeper and more firmly. Still caressing her, he arched Lucy back against his arm so that her whole body was offered up to him.
He could feel her moving urgently against him as her desire quickened.
‘Marcus,’ Lucy moaned, ‘I think I’m going to come…’
‘Good,’ he told her thickly, as he lifted his mouth from her breast to her lips. ‘I want you to.’
‘I want you inside me,’ Lucy begged.
‘Later. Don’t talk now,’ he told her. ‘Just enjoy.’
Don’t talk. Lucy closed her eyes and gasped as her body tightened and pleasure began to shudder through her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘MARCUS, are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’
They had just returned from visiting her parents, who were overjoyed about the fact that they were to marry, and yet despite the delight with which everyone had greeted the news of their engagement, since they had returned to London Lucy had begun to be gripped by an increasingly intense feeling of sadness and foreboding.
Her vision was clouded with emotional tears as the October sunshine shone in through the windows of the pretty breakfast room overlooking Marcus’s garden and bounced off the facets of her engagement ring. She had fallen in love with the simple rectangular diamond with its emerald cut facets the moment she had seen it, and when Marcus had picked it up and said quietly, ‘I rather like this one, but of course it must be your choice,’ she had been so thrilled she had almost cried with happiness. She had been happy—then!
In Majorca, swept away on a tide of sex and fantasy, she had felt as though anything was possible—even Marcus coming to love her—but now, back in London, certain realities were refusing to go away.
‘What exactly do you mean?’ Marcus demanded. He was frowning at her with that familiar blend of impatience and irritation that always cramped her stomach and squeezed her heart with pain. ‘I should have thought from the response we’ve had from our families to the news of our impending marriage that it is obvious that we are very much doing the right thing.’ He stood up and strode to the window, and Lucy gripped her mug of coffee with tense fingers. It was clear that he didn’t want to continue the discussion, but she needed to. She needed…She needed his love, she admitted helplessly. And in the absence of that she needed some kind of acknowledgement of her own fears, and his reassurance that there was nothing for her to fear. She needed hope, and the belief that he could grow to love her. But she couldn’t tell him any of those things, she admitted painfully, because she knew that he wouldn’t understand her needs and that he would be irritated by them.
‘Our families assume that…that we care about one another,’ she told him carefully instead. ‘They don’t know the truth. And I don’t know if a…a relationship—a marriage—without love can survive.’
‘Love?’ Marcus shook his head, his expression darkening. ‘Why is everyone so obsessed by this delusion that what they call love is something of any value? It isn’t,’ he told her harshly. ‘You should know that. After all, you married Blayne because you loved him, and look where that got you.
‘You and I have the kind of practical reasons for marrying one another that are far more important than love. I need and want a wife who understands my way of life and who shares my desire for children—I certainly do not want to be the first Carring not to produce an heir or heiress. Sexually, as we have both already shown, we are compatible. You want children, and you are not the kind of woman who would want them outside a committed relationship. You married once for so-called love, Lucy. I should have thought you were intelligent enough to recognise that that was a mistake, and not want to repeat it.’
‘But what if one day you fall in love with someone else, Marcus?’
‘Fall in love?’ He looked at her as though she had suggested he murder his own mother. ‘Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve been saying? So far as I am concerned sexual love is merely a cloak to cover juvenile and selfish—self-obsessed!—emotional folly, allied to lust. My father fell in love, or so he claimed, when he left my mother. He abandoned her and us because of that love, and if it hadn’t been for the accident that killed him he would have destroyed the bank as well as my mother’s happiness. I saw then what love was, and I swore that I would never ever allow myself to indulge in such a thing.’
But you were six years old! Lucy wanted to protest. But wisely she refrained from doing so. She had had no idea that Marcus held such strong and bitter views about love, or that he was so antagonistic toward it.
Her coffee had gone cold, but she still kept her hands wrapped around her mug, as though she was trying to seek warmth and comfort from it.
‘What is it?’ he demanded when he looked at her and saw the despair in her eyes.
She shook her head. ‘I…I’m not sure we should get married, Marcus.’
‘It’s too late for second thoughts now,’ he told her sharply. ‘For one thing your mother is busily planning the wedding, and for another…’ He paused and then reminded her, ‘Let’s not forget that you could already be carrying my child. We are getting married, Lucy,’ he reinforced calmly. ‘And nothing is going to change that.’
Just as nothing was going to change the way he felt about love, or his antagonism towards it, Lucy recognised with despair. How could she have deceived herself into believing that he would grow to love her? Marcus would never love her. Marcus didn’t want to love her. He didn’t want to love anyone.
‘I want to talk to you about Prêt a Party,’ he continued briskly.
Lucy tensed. She didn’t want to talk to Marcus about her business. She had had a letter from Andrew Walker, reiterating that he didn’t want her to discuss their meeting with anyone and explaining that he was still out of the country on business and would be in touch with her on his return. Of course there should be no secrets between husband and wife, but she had given her word and she had no intention of breaking it—and besides…Nick’s betrayal of her trust had left a painful scar. She knew that Marcus would never cheat her financially, but her growing insecurity about the future of their marriage made her want to hold on tightly to the security of Prêt a Party. If at some future date Marcus chose to decide that their marriage wasn’t working with the clockwork efficiency that he had decided that it should, she might need her business—not just to support herself financially, but to validate her as a person.
‘I’ve decided that the simplest way to deal with the current situation would be for me to inject enough capital into the business to clear its debts,’ he said.
‘No! No—I don’t want you to do that.’
Lucy could see that her outburst had surprised him.
‘Why not? Less than two months ago you begged me to let you utilise what was left of your trust fund to put into the company.’
‘That was different,’ she told him stubbornly. ‘That was my money, not yours. And besides…’ She bit her lip. She couldn’t tell him about Andrew Walker—not yet—and even if she did she suspected that he would not understand why she felt able to accept both financial assistance and financial involvement from someone else, but not from him. Having one husband involved in her busines
s and virtually destroying it, and her, had taught her a harsh lesson. It wasn’t one she wanted to repeat.
Marcus frowned as he looked at her. It was obvious to him that Lucy was having second thoughts about their marriage. Was it because, despite all that he had done to her, she still loved Nick Blayne? And why was she rejecting his offer to pay off Prêt a Party’s debts?
‘Lucy…’
She stopped him fiercely. ‘Prêt a Party is my responsibility, Marcus, and I want to keep it that way.’
Her responsibility and her salvation, perhaps, should he ever decide to end their marriage.
A feeling of intense inner aloneness filled her. Sometimes it seemed as though her whole emotional life involved keeping painful secrets she could not share with anyone else. She badly wanted to cry, but of course she must not do so. Her two best friends had been so lucky, finding men who were their soul mates and true partners—men with whom they could share every part of their lives and themselves, from their most mundane thoughts to those that were most sacred and private to them. But not her. She never had and now would never be able to share her innermost longings and feelings with anyone.
She gave a small shiver. Marriage to Marcus would mean closing the door on the deepest of her feelings and shutting them away for ever. But she knew she simply wasn’t strong enough to let him walk away from her and find someone else. The pain would simply be too much for her to bear. And, as Marcus himself kept reminding her, it could already be too late for her to back out of their coming marriage. She might already have conceived.
Lucy looked at her watch. Marcus would be in Edinburgh by now. He had said that he would only be away for a couple of days, but already she was missing him.
Tonight was the launch of the new football boot—the last of Prêt a Party’s major events. She was pleased with the response she had received to the invitations she had sent out, and even Dorland was going to be there. Although corporate events, no matter how lavish, were not really his style.
