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‘Guy,’ she whispered desperately, not really sure what she was pleading for.
‘Give me back my promise, Marnie,’ he pleaded huskily against her throat. ‘I need to be inside you.’
Oh, God. She closed her eyes. This should not be happening. She should not be allowing this to happen! It was lust, she told herself madly. Sheer uncontrollable lust. The last time she had seen him this aroused, it had been in the arms of another woman.
‘No—!’ From somewhere she found the strength to push him away, sending him staggering backwards in surprise while she turned, trembling badly, to press her face into the door.
‘Why not?’ he rasped, his voice so raw she barely recognised it. ‘You want me! You can no longer go on pretending you do not!’
‘And for that I hate myself,’ she confessed wretchedly. She spun round, eyes bright with pain and unshed tears. ‘Can you even begin to know what it feels like to want a man you’ve seen with your own eyes beneath the naked body of another woman?’
Guy blanched, his hand coming up between them in abject appeal. ‘No! Marnie, it—’
But she reeled away from him, her arms once more hugging herself protectively. ‘No,’ she choked, cutting him off before he could even begin the explanation she heard hovering on his tongue. ‘Nothing—nothing can ever dismiss that vision from my mind, Guy. Nothing, do you understand?’
On a choking sob, she turned and fled from the room, taking that final bitter vision with her.
She could still replay, with vivid accuracy, that dreadful night she had found him in bed with Anthea. He had not been long behind her in returning to their apartment, but finding her locked behind her studio door and refusing to answer his plea for her to open the door had driven him to kicking it down.
‘Will you let me explain?’ he had rasped, coming swaying to a halt as the solid wood door with its freshly splintered lock landed with a resounding crash against the wall behind it. ‘It was not what you think!’
It was probably the only time she had ever seen him looking anything but immaculate. His clothes, hastily pulled on, hung about him. Shirt half fastened, trousers creased and beltless. Wherever his jacket had been, it had not been on his back. Face white and drawn, eyes wild, and his hair, that head of silky black hair, a crumpled mess—made that way by Anthea’s fingers.
The memory of all of that still had the ability to crush her inside. A living nightmare four years on.
Her refusal to so much as look at him, never mind listen to him, had him dragging her against his violently shaking frame. ‘Marnie,’ he’d pleaded hoarsely. ‘You have to listen to me!’
The stench of whisky had been strong, mingling with a cloying perfume that made her gag, his touch so repulsive to her that she had had to wrench herself free and run into the bathroom, where she was violently sick whi
le Guy had stood, leaning heavily against the door-frame, watching her suffer with a look of hell in his eyes.
‘I was drunk,’ he’d said. ‘I had been drinking steadily all day. I arrived at the party already slewed out of my mind. Derek took one look at me and pushed me up the stairs and into that room where he stripped me off and put me to bed. I never knew another thing until Anthea…’
She had turned on him then, her eyes touched with a kind of madness. The sickness had left her weak and shaky, but the bitterness and pain had been making the adrenalin pump hotly through her blood, and she had launched herself at him, her hand making violent contact with his face, her fingers, unknowingly set into claws, scoring into the taut flesh of his cheek.
He hadn’t even flinched. He had just stood there staring at her, grim, white-faced and with tortured eyes, but passive.
She remembered standing there for a wild unaccountable moment watching the blood begin to trickle down his cheek, following its progress with a kind of dazed fascination, not really aware that she had actually inflicted the wound on him.
‘I hate you,’ she’d whispered then, in a voice so devoid of emotion that he had shuddered. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done to me, and I shall never forgive you—never.’
She had turned away, meaning to leave right there and then. But Guy had made the mistake of touching her, begging her again to just listen to him, and she had turned on him again, hitting out at him with her fist, her feet, showering blows on his body while once again he stood rock-solid-still and let her do her worst until, weak with exhaustion, she had collapsed against him, to sob brokenly into his gaping shirt.
Without a single word he had just picked her up in his arms and carried her through to their bedroom, where he’d laid her down and covered her with the duvet before turning and walking out of the room. Leaving her alone to weep.
She had been alone ever since.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘LOOK.’ The grim tension simmering between them had not eased in the slightest over the last two miserable days, and Guy was at last sounding utterly fed up as he drove them from the airport into London. ‘I am not prepared to argue about it any more! We are going directly to my apartment and that’s where you will sleep tonight!’
Marnie’s mouth was set in a petulant line, Guy’s own expression not much better. The row about where she would sleep tonight had been going on since they’d boarded his private jet in Edinburgh. She was tired, irritable and depressed—the worst of those three things being the tiredness, since she had barely slept a wink during the two nights they had spent in Edinburgh. If she hadn’t been lying there tossing and turning restlessly while she battled with her black memories, she had been lying there battling against the damned traitorous way her body wanted to remember how good Guy could make it feel if she would only give in and let him.
‘I’m not intending running away, for God’s sake,’ she sighed wearily.
‘No? Well, I am not prepared to trust your word on that. So stop nagging!’
‘I only want to get a decent night’s sleep in my own bed before I have to face your father tomorrow! God knows,’ she complained, eyeing her sadly creased and unhappy dress with distaste, ‘I must look a wreck! All I want now is a shower, a change of clothes and my own bed for one last night! I couldn’t care less about running away, Guy! I don’t think I have the energy left in me to try!’ she added drily.
