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Fran swallowed with nerves. She had never seen inside his bedroom, and just the thought of it made her wonder how many women had clambered willingly between the sheets with him. She wondered if Rosie… ‘No,’ she swallowed, shaking her head so that she could shake the thoughts away. ‘We might wake them.’
He saw the dark, scared look on her face, felt her tense beneath the arm he was holding her with and knew immediately what she was thinking. He turned her towards him and put both his hands on her shoulders.
‘Now listen to me, Fran,’ he said gently. ‘And believe me when I tell you that there are no ghosts to lay in this house of mine. None. And I won’t be any more specific than that. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? This is my sanctuary and my haven—’
She stared up at him, not quite believing what she thought he was telling her, hesitating over her words of reply. ‘You’re saying I’m the first woman you’ve ever brought here?’
‘No, not the first. The only woman,’ he corrected.
It was both a compliment and a declaration, so what jinx made her say, ‘Except for Megan, of course.’
He shook his head. ‘No, Megan never came here. I bought the house just after she—’ He hesitated, the word still sounded faintly obscene on his lips. ‘Died.’
There was a pause. Facts, however painful, could not just be brushed aside because you didn’t want to face them. ‘How long ago was that?’
‘Nearly five years.’
‘Oh, Sam,’ Fran reached her hand up and gently grazed her finger along the faint stubble of his chin. ‘Sam!’
It hit him hard—that tender touch, and this overwhelming need to possess her made him feel as vulnerable as a kitten. ‘But Fran—’ He forced himself to say the words which could deny him everything he wanted from her, and more…. ‘If the thought of other women is always going to be there like a barrier between us, then maybe it’s best if I just go now. It’s crazy to start something if it’s only going to be ruined by the past.’
She thought of him leaving her now, like this, and knew it was a complete non-starter.
Because Sam seemed fastidious where sex was concerned. She believed that, deep in her heart, despite what Rosie had said. And the better she knew him, the more she grew to know his fundamental decency. It all boiled down to whether she was going to let the fact that he’d had a brief fling with her friend affect her whole life? She shook her head. ‘No. You don’t have to go anywhere, Sam.’
He looked deep into her eyes. ‘No ghosts to come between us, then?’
She wound her arms around his neck shyly. ‘None.’
He groaned with pleasure as he drew her down onto the bed, peeling the nightgown up over her body as though he were slowly removing the skin of some very exotic fruit. ‘Shall we take this off?’
‘I think we’d better,’ she nodded, holding her arms up like a child being stripped out of wet clothes.
Sam, consumed by the urgent need to possess her, was also aware of an air of almost primitive hunger. It all seemed new, uncharted. As though he had never done this before.
He unzipped his jeans almost ruefully when he saw just how aroused he was. Saw her looking at him with a mixture of awe and excitement.
‘You know, this first time may not last long,’ he confessed, as he lowered his head to flick a pink tongue wetly over her nipple.
Fran gasped and closed her eyes as he began to nudge against her, not realizing that pleasure could be this acute. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she purred. ‘One way or another, it’s going to last all night.’
When Fran woke up in the morning he had gone. She lay naked and aching beneath the duvet for a moment while fractured memories of the night came flickering back into her mind, one by one.
They’d made love most of the night. She had a whole marriage to compare it with, yet it had been the best night of her life. So how guilty did that make her feel?
She looked for her nightgown which was lying in a heap on the carpet, and then at the clock. She sat bolt upright.
Ten o’clock!
And she was supposed to be cooking breakfast for Sam’s mother and his two sisters before they caught the train home! She jumped out of bed, consoling herself with the thought that at least she had made the kedgeree the day before.
She risked a glance in the mirror and then wished she hadn’t. Her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes rather gave the game away. Well, she would just have to brazen it out. And that meant throwing her clothes on and acting like nothing had happened.
There was a sink in her room, and she made the best use of it that she could. The old-fashioned strip wash made her shiver, but she welcomed it. The goose-bumps brought her crashing back down to earth, and that was the place she badly needed to be if she wasn’t going to give the game away to his mother, or his sisters.
She slipped into a pair of cream trousers and a simple cream sweater and walked barefooted towards the kitchen, to see if she could help.
Sam was standing by the Aga, frying bacon. Merry was buttering bread and reading the newspaper, while Maddy was busy chopping a melon and adding it to a rainbow pile of fruit already heaped in a glass dish.
