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His chest felt tight with the intensity of his emotions—emotions that were totally at odds with his nature. He had never felt like this before, never imagined he could feel like this—possessed by the kind of raw, out-of-control male needs, thoughts and desires he had believed himself too much in control ever to know. That it was a woman like Lily who had made him feel them only made the situation so very much worse. How could he, of all men, be reduced to this by a woman he should only despise?
He looked at the closed door to the bedroom. The Marco he recognised, the Marco he had always believed himself to be, would have lost no time in going back into the bedroom and ejecting Lily from his bed, if necessary. However, the Marco he was now simply didn’t trust himself to go back into that room with her—because he knew that, far from ejecting her from his bed, he was more likely to end up back in it with her. That, of course, could not be allowed to happen.
How she must be laughing at him, gloating over her hold over him. Marco paced the room, his thoughts feeding his anger, knowing that he could neither escape from it or from her—Lily—the cause of it.
In the bedroom Lily lay tensely in the bed, watching the door. Marco had been so contemptuous of her, and she couldn’t blame him. What on earth had possessed her to behave in the way she had? She, of all people, who had grown up fearing a woman’s need to give herself completely to the man she loved because of what it did to a woman. She who had grown up believing that sexual desire was something that at its worst led to abuse and degradation, used by one person to have power over another, and at best took from those who experienced it all control over themselves and their lives. She had always been so glad that she was immune to its call, unconcerned about discovering its allure and power. She had felt safe in her celibate world—a world in which she could breathe the dusty air of the past instead of the high-octane air of a world she had learned to mistrust.
Anton Gillman had brought her a fear that had dominated every aspect of her life—a fear that ridding herself of her virginity the minute she was sixteen, with a boy as clumsy and untutored as she herself had been had calmed to some extent, but not banished for ever. Everything she had done in her adult life had been to keep herself safe from what she had left behind—even her choice of career. She had been too confident that she had succeeded, though. She recognised that now. Too ready to believe that she was safe from the problems she had seen sex cause in the lives of others.
The truth of that had been brought home to her now. Only minutes ago in Marco’s room, in Marco’s bed and in Marco’s arms, she had forgotten everything she had ever learned, too aroused by her own desire for him to recognise or care about her own danger.
She wanted to creep away and hide herself somewhere like the child she had once been, hiding in the cupboard off the studio where her father had kept some of his photographic equipment. But there was no hiding place from what was within herself. Her body was still tight with longing. Shamefully, she knew that it wouldn’t take much at all for her desire to be reawakened to the point where it was out of her control. Marco’s single touch, his briefest kiss, would be enough to do it.
Marco! She had come here to his suite because at some deep emotional level she had felt that he represented the protection and security she had always wanted and never had. But now she knew that Marco was far more dangerous than any threat Anton might make to her.
What would she do if Marcus came to her now and took her back in his arms?
The leap of aching longing that gripped her told her all she needed to know. Not that Marco was likely to do that, of course. He had made that more than plain. But she couldn’t get out of the bedroom without going into the sitting room beyond it, and she couldn’t do that, Lily knew. If she did she couldn’t trust herself not to humiliate herself even more by begging Marcus to take her back to bed.
An instinct she desperately wanted to ignore was trying to tell her that what had happened had not been a merely physical act, disengaged from her mind and her emotions. She didn’t want to listen to it, and she certainly wasn’t going to believe it. Yes, she had been overwhelmed—but that was just because she wasn’t used to such an intensity of physical desire. Nothing more.
