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The taxi had been booked for two-thirty, and when, shortly after one, she heard a car, she thought there had been some mistake. She was poised at the top of the stairs, ready to descend, when the door burst open and Luke strode into the hall. He looked up at the precise moment that Genista looked down, dizzily trying to comprehend that what she was seeing was real and not merely feverish longing.
‘Luke!’
His face paled when he saw her.
‘I forgot something,’ he told her brusquely. ‘I thought you’d be gone.’
‘I couldn’t face the drive, so I decided to go by train. The taxi couldn’t pick me up until two-thirty.’
Seeing him like this, just when she was on the point of taking herself out of his life for ever, was the cruellest blow she had yet endured. The sight of his dark head, his body encased in the immaculate business suit, made something snap inside her. The stairs seemed to shimmer and move below her. She blinked, trying to focus, and swayed, reaching dizzily for the banister. The small sound of protest in her throat alerted Luke. As the stairs rushed up to meet her, he dropped his briefcase and started to run. She felt herself falling and cried out fearfully.
‘It’s all right, you’re quite safe.’
Luke’s arms closed round her, the soft wool of his suit beneath her cheek, his voice rough and uneven.
‘Let me get you back to the bedroom.’
She felt him lift her, carrying her to the room they had shared for such a brief span of time. The dizziness was gone, but her pulses still pounded, although this time it was not with fear. Luke bent to lower her on to the bed, and all at once his expression changed, his face bitter with a pain that made Genista catch her breath.
‘Oh God, Genista!’ she heard him mutter hoarsely against her hair. ‘I can’t let you go. Don’t ask me to, I beg you. I give you my word I won’t lay a finger on you…won’t do anything you don’t want me to do. We’ll start all over again, I promise you, and this time…’
She must have made a sound, because he suddenly released her, turning his back on her to stare out of the window. ‘I didn’t come back because I’d forgotton something,’ he told her abruptly. ‘I came back because I had to see this room once more; to try and imprint on my mind the memory of you in it, in my bed—in my arms. God knows I’ve given you good reason to hate and despise me,’ he went on. ‘First I took your virginity; then I gave you a child. You’d think pride alone would keep me away from you when I know how you feel about Bob—didn’t I hear you tell Lucy with my own ears how you felt about love? But none of it makes any difference. I only have to look at you and I ache for you. I fell in love with you the moment you walked into Greg Hardiman’s flat. Until that moment I’d never believed in love at first sight. I was bored, on the point of leaving, when suddenly you walked in and and it was as though I’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. I took one look at you and knew. And you looked back. In my arrogance I thought you felt the same. My feelings for you were so intense that I couldn’t believe you weren’t feeling them to.
‘Then you gave me that brush-off. I wanted to hate you, to hurt you as you’d hurt me, and then I found out that you were the girl Greg had told me was having an affair with Bob. I nearly went mad with jealousy. I couldn’t bear to think of him looking at you, touching you…I had to take you away from him, so I forced you into marriage. I told myself that in time you would come to love me. You had to love me. That night when I made love to you, I thought I was going out of my mind. Every instinct told me that you’d never known any man, but I couldn’t rely on my instincts. I knew you and Bob had been lovers! When I discovered the truth I could have killed myself. But I didn’t.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘Perhaps it would have been better if I had done, that at least would have been a quick death. This way, dying slowly inch by inch, hurts far more.
‘Any decent self-respecting man would have set you free then, but I couldn’t. I told myself I wouldn’t touch you, that I’d wait and teach you to love me, but I couldn’t stop myself from wanting you. I knew that forcing you to respond to me sexually would only increase your loathing of me, but it was the only way I could reach you, the only way I could make you come alive for me. Bob possessed your heart, and I told myself that possessing your body was some compensation, but it wasn’t. I can’t go on any longer, Genista. Bob is married and intends
to stay married. So won’t you give me a chance? I promise I won’t so much as lay a finger on you unless you ask me to, I…’
Genista could bear it no longer. Luke had humbled himself enough, and listening to him she had run the whole gamut of emotions from sheer disbelief through pain to tear-filled joy as she heard him describe the emotions which up until now she had thought hers alone. Luke loved her!
He still had his back to her. She left the bed and walked up to him without making a sound, but some sixth sense must have alerted him. He turned towards her, his hands tightening on her shoulders with a pressure that bruised her bones as he held her away from him. If she had not believed his words, his face was sufficient to assure her that he was speaking the truth. It was the face of a man who has endured untold agony, and she longed to reach up and smooth away the pain.
‘You said you wouldn’t touch me,’ she reminded him gently, watching the immense self-control with which he withdrew his hands, clenching and unclenching his fingers as though the action brought him some measure of physical relief.
‘Unless I asked you to.’
He turned away from her, and a quiver of pain ran through her. They had wasted so much time already, it seemed pointless to torment him now.
‘Please touch me, Luke,’ she begged hungrily, letting both her eyes and her voice betray her need. ‘Take me, possess me, and make me whole again, because without you I simply can’t function. You’ve taught me the true meaning of love, you’ve brought my body to full womanhood, and shown me things I never knew existed. I love you!’
The words were smothered beneath his mouth, his whole body shaking feverishly as he dragged her against him. For a moment neither spoke, content for the drugging, endless kiss to say all that needed to be said. Their clothes were an unbearable barrier which neither hesitated to remove, and Genista gasped once as she felt the driving force of the passion Luke had dammed up, and then she was joining him joyfully, urging him to show her that she was not merely dreaming.
He carried her to the bed and laid her on it tenderly, kissing her as he had done once before, with the same reverence that worshipped the perfection of her femininity, just as she gloried in his intense maleness.
This time there were no barriers. She was able to see so much that had been hidden from her before. Just as she had hidden her love from Luke so he had concealed his from her. Her body quivered in pleasure beneath his hand as she abandoned herself to his mastery, touching new pinnacles of pleasure, her body so acutely sensitised to him that even the lightest puff of breath aroused and enticed.
Her hands explored his body with a freedom she had never allowed herself before, and with his possession came a pleasure that transcended everything that had gone before.
In its sweet aftermath she lay supine in his arms, glorying in the heavy thud of his heart beneath her ear and the sure knowledge that the pleasure they had just shared had been mutually overwhelming. It hadn’t taken the hoarse words of love Luke had muttered between his kisses, nor his brief triumphant cry at the moment of possession, to tell her this; she had seen it in his face when he told her of his suffering, and known that it had never been and never could be merely desire which had prompted his actions.
Jilly had been right after all. He had fallen in love with her at first sight. The knowledge made her feel humble and grateful that she had been granted this second chance to seize the precious gift she had wantonly spurned earlier through ignorance.
‘I never loved Bob—not in the way you thought,’ she told him gently. ‘But I daren’t take the risk that you might go to Elaine.’ Quickly she told him about Elaine’s operation, drawing a soft groan of self-anger from Luke’s throat.
‘I’ll make it all up to you,’ he swore huskily. ‘When they told me at the hospital that you were carrying my child, I could have killed Verity for preventing me being at home to stop you leaving.’
Genista trembled. Verity! She had forgotten her!
