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A fleeting frown touched her forehead but she did not quite connect with his meaning. His mouth had found the soft, scented valley between her breasts and all power of thought was cast into oblivion. His tongue laved a taut pink nipple, lingered, circled, teased until her fingers clawed into his tousled hair and he ended the torture, giving her what she mindlessly sought until excitement arrowed a tight, coiling message of need to the very heart of her and her nails dug protestingly into his shoulders.
He lifted his head from her swollen breasts and let his hands shape the achingly tender flesh, making her arch her spine, and sweeping down over her quivering stomach to slide tormentingly against her where she most needed to be touched. The ache inside her was intensifying, the pressure was mounting and the motion of his hand as he delicately explored the moist heat of her femininity made her sob out his name as convulsive pleasure overwhelmed her, spinning her recklessly out of control.
In the moonlight he pulled back from her, totally, magnificently male, and she rejoiced in his virile splendour like an idolatress before a golden god. As he knelt between her parted thighs, he raised her and linked her fingers round his strong brown throat. Leaning forward, he slid his hands under her hips and lifted her, holding her poised above him. With a whimper of shock, her passion-glazed eyes clashed with the savage brilliance of his.
‘I want to watch you while I love you,’ he breathed fiercely. ‘I do not want you to forget who I am.’
A smile as untamed as he was slashed his darkly handsome features as he brought her down, the compulsive heat of his mouth stifling her cry at the powerful surge of his possession. His movements were fierce and elemental, invoking an intensity of sensation that brought her to screaming point. The dance of love was more erotic and more demanding than she had ever dreamt it could be. She was abandoned, divorced from everything but the shatteringly insistent demands of her own body. There was a glorious sense of oneness, of a joining that went beyond the physical as her spine arced in ecstasy and she was engulfed by wave upon wave of shuddering release.
It took her a long time to return to reality. Rafael was no longer with her. He was silvered shadow by the open door that led out on to the balcony. The merest hint of a breeze fluttered the draperies that had been drawn back, cooling her damp skin. She shifted over to the edge of the bed in a sensual, happy daze. ‘Rafael?’
‘Go to sleep.’
Her darkened eyes clung to his hard-edged profile. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she whispered.
‘You do not want to know.’
She pressed her hot face into a cold spot on the pillow. When he made love to her, the past and the present vanished. There was no thought and no discipline strong enough to withstand what he could make her feel. He knew that now without any shadow of a doubt. Had she possessed the same ability seven years ago, their marriage might have survived.
Silent submission had not been enough to satisfy Rafael. She had not rejected him. In the end he had rejected her. And as the physical gulf had widened between them the misunderstandings had begun to multiply. Dear God, she did not feel equipped to deal with the same situation in reverse. She was stunned by the power he had over her and tonight he had used that power as a weapon against her. Neither her pride nor her principles had protected her. On his terms she had surrendered to a purely physical experience that had nothing to do with the marriage bond and even less to do with sentiment. Did that make him feel good? Her stomach turned over sickly. Did that settle the score for the blow she had once dealt to his ego? But if that was true, where was his triumph? Brooding silence did not suggest satisfaction.
‘I do want to know,’ she said defiantly.
‘It is a most exquisite irony.’ Dark eyes flicked from the disordered bed to her flushed face, his meaning explicit. ‘I was thinking back through the years. Then this might have saved us…not forever, you understand, but for a little while longer.’
‘I don’t think so.’ His cool philosophical attitude chilled her. ‘After what happened in New York—’
‘It was the tip of the iceberg,’ he cut in roughly. ‘No marriage can survive without trust and without communication.’
‘Your idea of communication was a blazing row. I didn’t find it encouraging. As for trust?’ she muttered tightly. ‘Trust is something that has to be earned.’
‘Is it really? I loved you and I married you. What more did you want?’
‘Big deal,’ Sarah quipped.
‘Si…yes, for me it was a very big deal; it was the most important commitment I would ever make to another human being.’
‘I can remember you strolling in at dawn without a single word of explanation.’
‘Did you ask where I had been? No!’ he snapped.
‘If you’re trying to excuse yourself—’
‘For what?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘For stopping to give first aid to the victim of a road crash? For spending hours waiting for les flics to take my statement as a witness?’
Sarah had paled. ‘You saw an accident?’
‘What use is it to talk of this now? It is unimportant.’
It was not unimportant to Sarah. For her that night had been a milestone at the brow of what looked like an exceedingly slippery slope. She could remember the days before her father had taken a flat in the city, the last-minute cancellations, the late arrivals, but most of all she could remember her mother’s silence, the absolute insistence on behaving as though nothing had happened. For the first time she appreciated that she had distrusted Rafael long before he gave her any cause for suspicion. Her belief that he would inevitably betray her had been there right from the start.
‘Or is it? Now in your eyes we are equal,’ he gibed, his eyes glittering intensely over the pale oval of her face. ‘You are still my wife though you have slept with other men. But I should not be mentioning this fact when we have lived apart. It is fashionable to cultivate the short memory, es verdad? It is conventional to pretend indifference—’
‘Rafael—’ she broke in.
‘Crude and positively medieval of me to be thinking that that beautiful pale skin of yours carries more fingerprints now than a police file!’ he completed rawly. ‘No me gusta…I don’t like it. And don’t tell me that I do not have the right not to like it! I still don’t like it. I don’t accept it. I will not deny what I feel.’
His naked candour was shocking, oddly touching on some level that she flatly refused to probe inside herself. She could not fathom how he did it but guilt was surging up on her out of nowhere. She fought off a compulsion to tell the truth. After all, she had not told a lie in the first place. The ensuing complications were not her responsibility, were they?
‘Do you ever wonder how I felt in the same situation?’ she enquired unsteadily.
A lean hand made a fierce gesture of repudiation. ‘It is not the same! In no way is it the same! You didn’t want me any more. You wanted me to leave. You made that clear long before I went to New York.’
How could he have believed that? Was that how he had really felt? Rafael, so strong, so innately sure of himself? She was hit hard by the realisation that he had described exactly how she had felt and thought five years ago. The comparison, resurrecting as it did the anguish of rejection, anger and pain, was very disturbing. It was so difficult for her to believe that Rafael might have experienced anything similar. For so long she had lived with a picture of him swinging on his heel and walking away with little more than a backward glance, relieved to have his freedom back. Only now did she see that that had always been an unrealistic picture. Nobody as emotional as Rafael could possibly be that shallow.
‘I’m going out.’ Before she could speak, he strode into the dressing-room. Cupboard doors opened and slammed, drawers were rifled. She could see him through the ajar door. He was hauling on a pair of paint-stained jeans. Somebody had obviously made a most praiseworthy attempt to hide them. There was something inexplicably vulnerable about the long, golden-brown sweep of his back. Watching him spurred a curious pain within her.
She sat up and sighed. ‘There haven’t been any other men.’
A broad shoulder lifted in an infinitesimal shrug of indifference as he pulled on a shirt. ‘No importa.’
‘I never said that there were.’ Sarah was resisting a very powerful urge to throw something large and heavy at him. ‘You thought up the idea all on your own.’
‘I think what you wanted me to think.’
‘Well, perhaps a part of me did want you to think that for a while,’ Sarah confessed awkwardly. ‘But I don’t want you to think it any more.’
‘And I don’t want your lies!’ It was a contemptuous dismissal.
‘For the last time,’ she snapped, ‘I am telling you the truth.’
He released a derisive laugh. ‘You must think me a fool.’
Sarah nodded in furious agreement. ‘Yes, I am starting to think that. I’m also beginning to wonder why it should matter so much to you.’
