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‘You’re trying to say that you didn’t think I could be so aroused by such a simple touch; is that it?’ he picked up wryly. ‘Why not? After all, I can arouse you just as…simply…’
‘No,’ Polly protested explosively. ‘No. I want…’
‘You want?’ Marcus demanded grimly. ‘You want Bernstein—but it’s me you’re with, Polly, me your body is responding to.’
‘No,’ Polly repeated.
‘You want me to stop? You don’t want me to do this?’ Marcus challenged her, bending his head to cup her breast and slowly draw its hard crest deep into his mouth.
Polly tried to deny him, to tell him to stop, but instead of forming the words she wanted her lips would only part with a long, slow, tortured sound of female longing.
She might as well have spoken her need and longing out loud, because she recognised how Marcus reacted immediately, picking her up bodily and covering her with hot, slow kisses. Hot, slow kisses that became increasingly demanding and urgent with every step he took towards her bed. Did he touch Suzi like this? Did he make her feel like this…did he…?
She couldn’t bear it, Polly acknowledged; she couldn’t endure the agony of what she was thinking, imagining, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop him either. She wanted him too much, loved him too much. Why was he doing this to her? To hurt her, punish her, to show her how weak and vulnerable she was, to show her that he had guessed how she really felt about him? Or was he simply driven by male desire, taking her out of his need for someone else, simply because she was there and his hunger was so great that it had to be appeased?
‘No.’ The whimpering sound of agony was drawn from her throat in a wrenching sob of pain but it was too late; her body was already welcoming Marcus within it, and not just welcoming him but reaching out to hold and embrace him, to hold him possessively within her, drawing him in deeper, urging him.
Helplessly Polly gave in to the desire she could no longer control, everything else overturned and swept away by its pounding tumult. She cried out to Marcus to hold her, clinging to him as the climactic waves of her own pleasure rocked and buffeted her, needing him as her security, her safe place, her haven from their intensity. Needing the sweet, warm balm of his completion inside her to ease the raw emptiness that lay deep within her body.
Whilst she lay beneath him in exhaustion, sexually fulfilled but emotionally empty, so hungry that her need was a gnawing, burning rawness of pain, Marcus removed himself from her, saying thickly, ‘Well, whatever else Bernstein is doing for you, he certainly isn’t satisfying you in bed.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’ Polly retaliated immediately.
‘How do you think?’ Marcus taunted her, adding softly, ‘Or would you like me to prove it to you—again?’
Her throat ached with the weight of her pain, but there was still something she had to ask him.
‘Marcus…the notice period. You have to release me from it.’
‘Why? Because you went to bed with me?’ He laughed savagely as he shook his head and moved away from her to sit on the edge of the bed with his back to her.
‘Oh, no, the time to make that kind of demand was earlier, Polly…before…But then you weren’t really in any state to make any kind of demand other than the one you made for my body, were you?’ he said, with such devastating cruelty that it literally took Polly’s breath away.
‘That clause stays in place,’ Marcus told her softly. ‘So you might as well resign yourself to it, Polly. For the next six months you are mine…and you’d better make sure that Bernstein knows it because if you don’t I certainly shall.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘SIX months? Hell…’
Polly could hear Phil’s irritation at the other end of the telephone line. ‘What the hell possessed you to give him that kind of power over you, Polly? Your legal advisors—whoever they are—should have—’
‘Marcus and I use the same firm,’ Polly told him quickly. ‘They’re Richard’s family’s solicitors and—’
‘Don’t say any more. I get the picture. Well, if Marcus is determined to refuse to release you…’
Polly held her breath, half expecting Phil to say that he had changed his mind, that he would have to find someone else to run the hotel, but to her relief instead he said simply, ‘I guess I shall just have to be patient. Have you got any holiday due to you? Only that could cut down the six-month period.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t normally take a holiday as such…’ Polly told him doubtfully. ‘I don’t remember putting it in the contract, but it was all such a long time ago.’
