by Trish Wylie
‘You have got to be kidding me!’
When she didn’t lift her hips, he set both hands on them and lifted her, kneeing what she could now see was a pillow beneath her, so that her pelvis was tilted up. And she groaned, because she knew he could get a deeper angle that way.
‘Are you trying to kill me? I thought you liked me.’
‘I’m demonstrating how much I like you. Sometimes actions speak louder than words…’ He lifted her heavy legs and wrapped them around his waist and Merrow used every ounce of strength she had left to lock her ankles, despite her continuing vocal protests.
‘Seriously, are you on something, you know, some kind of drug enhancing—?’ She cried out as he filled her with one long thrust. ‘Oh!’
He chuckled as he leaned in for a languid kiss, his words rumbling against her lips while the vibration of his chuckle reverberated inside her. ‘Nope. This is all me.’
He slid out, almost leaving her before he thrust forward to emphasise the word ‘me’.
The muscles in his arms strained, his elbows bent as he held his full weight off her body and kissed her again.
‘You see—’ his hips flexed back, and forwards a little harder ‘—I’ve noticed—’ and back, and forwards a little harder again ‘—I don’t seem to be—’ and again ‘—satisfying you enough—’ and again ‘—so I aim—’ again ‘—to fix that.’
‘You don’t—oh—’ she felt the knot of tension build again ‘—you don’t think—mmm…’ Her hands rose to grip hold of his biceps, his arms wobbling when her fingernails dug into his skin so that she knew the kind of self-control he was exerting. ‘How can you think—I’m—oh-h-h—not—Alex—?’
When he kissed her again, suckling on her bottom lip, running his tongue along the inside of her upper teeth, he slowed the pace, and the angle the pillow had raised her into, combined with the pressure of his hard pelvis rocking against her already tender bundle of nerve endings, threw her into another sudden, shockingly deep orgasm.
‘Alex!’ She groaned against his mouth when he continued moving, making the ripples last longer. ‘You’re going to have to call an ambulance for me. How can you think for one second—?’
He kissed her slowly, softer this time, nibbling on her lower lip and looking down at her with a gaze that made her shudder with a wave of what briefly felt like fear again,
‘You keep running out on me, O’Connell.’
She swallowed hard.
He flexed his hips back, then forwards. ‘You never stay. I can’t be tiring you out enough.’
So this was his answer? He was going to leave her so completely sexually exhausted that she’d have no choice but to fall asleep in his arms, and stay that way, his body tangled with hers until she eventually woke up beside him?
Even as he straightened out his arms, his chest lifting to let a whisper of cool air brush over her highly sensitised breasts, she still felt as if her chest were being crushed. He was using the best sex of her life to get her to participate in something she viewed as way more dangerous than the best sex of her life.
If she stayed—
He increased the tempo and her breathing sped up again, even as she frowned up at the tightening cords in his neck.
If she let him hold her all night—
Her vision blurred as she saw his jaw clench, as she felt him increase the pressure again, changing the angle of his thrust so that he was once again grinding against her most sensitive place, forcing her headlong into another cataclysmic explosion.
If he started to take as strong a hold over her heart as he already held over her body—
She arched upwards and closed her eyes tight, her teeth biting her bottom lip hard enough to have drawn blood, her fingers sliding down his arms to grasp on his large hands flat against the sheets. And she felt the blood burn through her veins as he went still, his hard length pulsing inside her while bright sparks of light exploded like fireworks behind her clamped eyelids.
If he made her fall for him—
She lay very still for a long, long while, her body humming as she fought for some control over the wave of emotion consuming her. She couldn’t let it happen. She wouldn’t let it happen. ‘Perfect’ never lasted, did it?
‘O’Connell, look at me.’
She pursed her lips together to get the feeling back into the now swollen lip she had bitten down so hard on. And she took a deep, shuddering breath before she dared to open her eyes and look up at his face.
He was still breathing hard. He had short tendrils of blond hair sticking to the sheen of perspiration on his forehead. But he was studying her with a small frown on his face.
While she continued to stare back, he rested his weight on one elbow, and leaned his upper body closer, lifting his other hand to thumb moisture from the corner of her eye. And he frowned harder as his eyes studied it, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger.
Then he looked back into her eyes. ‘Did I just hurt you? Was I in too deep?’
‘No.’ She grimaced inwardly at his choice of words, but pinned a smile in place and tried to lighten the moment. ‘Though I might just need that ambulance now.’
But Alex didn’t smile back, his eyes narrowing. He searched her eyes, leaned away a little and broke the bond between their lower bodies before moving back to her side, turning over to reach for the duvet, and covering their bodies before he propped his elbow and rested his head on his hand.
Merrow prayed for the strength to bluff her way through, turning her head on the pillow to look up at him, raising her eyebrows.
‘You didn’t hurt me, Alex, I promise. And for the record, I’ve never been so satisfied—seriously. Any man who can make a woman weep with pleasure should feel pretty damn proud of himself.’
The frown softened, but a look of suspicion remained in his eyes. ‘If that’s the only reason then I’d be pretty proud of myself.’
‘It is.’ It was the first time she’d lied outright to him. And that hurt.
‘I’m not so sure.’ He reached out to do his usual brushing-back of hair off her cheek, his deep voice low and heartbreakingly persuasive. ‘What is it you’re so scared of, O’Connell?’
This. It would have been the honest answer. But instead she lied to him again, the cramp in her chest increasing with each lie. ‘I’m not scared.’
She rolled onto her side, lifting her hand to his face, as if the fact she wasn’t afraid to reach for him were some kind of reassurance she was telling him the truth. Her palm cupped his square jaw, the tip of her thumb fitted perfectly into the dimple in his chin. And her gaze softened; he really was a very beautiful man, wasn’t he? Yes, he carried the confidence that came with knowing that, because how could he not know how he looked? But he never abused the gift; arrogant on occasion, yes—cocky, without a doubt—but never as much of an ass as he could have been if he’d been vain.
It was an element of his danger…
His hand slid down to her neck, fingers tangling in her hair. ‘So what excuse do I get tonight? I know you don’t have an early meeting with a client, ’cos you’re working with me tomorrow. I know you’re not meeting the rest of the musketeers for breakfast, ’cos we’re meeting Mickey D for coffee. You can’t have laundry again, ’cos you’ve done laundry at least three times this week already. So what’s going to get you out of my bed this time? When it would make much more sense for you to stay over the odd night, to throw a toothbrush into your bag, or some of that tiny excuse for underwear—neither of which would take up that much room in your bag realistically…’
A toothbrush, fresh underwear, and then she’d be keeping a change of clothes here, would have a drawer of her own in one of the massive dresser drawers on the far side of the room. She’d have products lined up on the shelves in the bathroom beside his pathetically male lack of stuff…
Tangled. She’d be letting her life get even more tangled up in his, like weaving the threads into a tapestry where the pattern would never quite work
.
‘I have Fred to think of.’
‘You can’t hide behind a goldfish. It’s a physical impossibility.’
‘With any pet comes responsibility. And I already killed Wilma.’
‘Maybe it was just Wilma’s time to go. Now she’s swimming in the great toilet bowl in the sky…’
She laughed when he chuckled at his own joke. ‘You’re mean.’
‘No, you’re mean.’ He sidled a little closer to her, the heat building between their bodies beneath the heavy duvet as he looked into her eyes with an intense gaze. ‘You know I haven’t slept right one single night since we started this?’
Her eyes widened in surprise. ‘You haven’t?’
‘Nope.’ He shook his head against her hand, and aimed a petulant-little-boy look at her that made her smile again. ‘You wreak havoc with my sleep pattern. You tire me out, then we get all snuggled in and the next thing I know you’re waking me up to skip across town and check your place didn’t catch fire while you were gone. Then when I stay awake long enough to know you’re hopefully home in one piece and I finally get back to sleep, I wake up horny in the morning with no one here to help me do anything about it. That’s mean.’
She giggled, her heart warming at the thought of him worrying she’d got home while her head knew she shouldn’t allow herself to get sucked in by his sob story. ‘Poor, poor neglected child.’
He nodded when she moved her hand off his face, cradling the back of his head as she sidled in closer and lifted her leg over his. ‘Yup. Why do you think I insist on so many brunches?’
‘I love brunch.’ She massaged her fingers against the short coarse hair at the back of his head, and watched as his eyes grew heavy.
‘What does it say in your affair handbook about mistresses and sleep-overs with their playboy lovers?’
She weighed up the pros and cons of that for a while, until his thick lashes rose and he looked into her eyes again. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at her for a long while, and then the corners of his mouth lifted into the hint of a smile she loved so much.
And she was done for. ‘It says that maybe the mistress should try it once just to see. But the playboy lover shouldn’t take it to mean that the mistress doesn’t still have her own life.’
The hand on her neck moved, slid between their bodies and wrapped around her waist to tug her closer, his chin resting on the top of her head when she nestled in against his shoulder. ‘You see; I’m okay with that.’
‘You hog the duvet and I’m gone.’
‘You go and I promise you you’ll miss the best wake-up call of your year.’
She lay still for a long while, her fingers still massaging his scalp while she listened to him breathing, how the breaths evened out, growing deeper as he surrendered to sleep. And her heart ached again.
She needed her head examined.
What was she doing? Why could she never seem to resist when he set his mind to persuading her to do what he wanted? First it had been mixing with each other’s friends and PDAs, and now he had her sleeping over—his face the last thing before she surrendered to sleep, where she would spend the night in his arms, and when she woke up, his face would be the first thing she saw.
He didn’t want anything serious any more than she did. So why did he keep pushing the boundaries?
She turned around, as if somehow facing away from him would give her a little more distance. But he simply grumbled and pulled her back against him, his arm a possessive weight around her waist.
If he could just stop being so much more than she needed him to be at this point in her life, if he could just be—less perfect…
Alex grumbled again behind her, then rolled away to flick off the light switch before pulling her back into place. And Merrow lay very still, blinking into the darkness, waiting for his breathing to even out again.
‘Stop thinking about it and go to sleep, O’Connell.’
Damn! How did he know that? Sometimes he could be such a—
‘And stop calling me names in your head. I can hear you.’
She scowled into the darkness. But eventually the sound of his breathing and the steady beat of his heart against her back began to lull her into an irresistible sense of security. Because, all things considered, he really had done a very good job of tiring her out.
She just needed to remember not to rely on that sense of security. She needed to not feel so safe held in his arms. She needed to think about not caving in every single time he set his mind to persuading her to—
But sleep crept in and her thoughts went fuzzy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘OH I dunno. I liked the fuchsia one.’
‘Too pink with auburn hair.’
‘The gold one was sexy.’
‘Get away with you. She looked like an Oscars statue in it.’
Merrow let the debate continue as she flicked through the racks of clothes in her favourite vintage clothing store. Normally a day with her friends trawling the shops and sipping foamy coffees as they watched the world go by was her idea of heaven.
But she’d had her visions of heaven altered some of late. And she couldn’t remember ever feeling that one damn dress was so important before!
If Alex had ruined shopping for her there would be hell to pay…
‘What about this one?’ Lisa held a blue seventies off-the-shoulder number up in front of her body.
But Merrow merely shrugged silently. It wasn’t ‘the one’. And the dress they found would just jump straight out and announce itself as ‘the one’, she felt. It would have to be that special. Because she’d never actually been to a party with the equivalent of Irish royalty before and she needed every confidence booster she could find, thanks anyway.
Lisa lowered the dress and studied her profile when she went back to the racks. ‘Okay, what’s up?’
‘There’s nothing up.’
‘There’s something up. Did you have a row with Alex?’
‘No.’ She sighed as the others crowded in. ‘I did not have a row with Alex.’
Gracie laid a hand on her arm. ‘If you tell us he pulled a Dylan we’ll all go round his house and help you cut up his clothes into tiny wee pieces.’
Her mouth twitched at the thought. It was what they should have done with Dylan, but they hadn’t thought about it till afterwards, when they’d downed a large bottle of champagne to celebrate his ‘demise’ and made a list of the things they ‘could’ have done to get him back for his dastardly deeds. Somehow, she suspected if Alex ever did anything to merit their equivalent of ‘just desserts’ his wardrobe loss would prove much more expensive than Dylan’s ever would have.
‘No, he didn’t pull a Dylan.’
‘Better not think about it either. Where did you say he was this weekend? It’s not Galway again, right?’
Ouch. Well, no, it wasn’t Galway, but planting that idea in her head didn’t help. It was the first weekend they’d spent apart in coming up on six weeks, and Merrow hated that she missed him so much. That was what she got for getting into the routine of staying at his place on a Friday and Saturday night—to say nothing of the night or two midweek. She even had a toothbrush and a change of clothes there, already.
‘He’s up north somewhere racing sail-boats. He’ll be back tomorrow night.’
‘I thought there had to be a reason for that tan. Sailing makes sense.’ Lou moved in and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. ‘You miss him, that’s all. You’ll be grand when he’s home.’
Hell, even the musketeers were seeing them as a couple now. She rolled her eyes, and now she thought of them as the musketeers too! That was Alex’s doing—again. Damn him to hell in a handbag. A very small handbag. And not even a nice handbag.
‘Listen to Lou, she knows what she’s talking about.’ Gracie’s blonde head bobbed.
Yes, because as the only married one amongst them that automatically made Lou the fountain of all knowledge when it came to relationships. Well, it wa
s Lou’s fault they’d been in Galway in the first place—it had been her hen weekend—so, as far as Merrow was concerned, it was partly her fault she was in her current predicament.
Lisa parted the clothing on the rail and inserted the blue dress at random. ‘We don’t blame you for falling for him. He’s yum.’
There were nods of agreement.
‘There’s no point in me falling for him,’ she mumbled in reply as she moved out of Lou’s embrace towards a dress peeking out at her near the end of the rack. ‘An O’Connell isn’t going to end up playing happily ever after with a Fitzgerald.’
‘Oh, you did not just say that!’
Crap. She needed to complain more quietly next time. These three never missed a thing.
‘Why doesn’t an O’Connell end up with a Fitzgerald? And don’t you dare say you think you’re not good enough for him!’
‘I don’t think that. It’s got nothing to do with him and me.’
‘Well, who does it have something to do with, then, if it’s not you two? How many people are in this relationship with you?’
‘It’s not a relationship. It’s just sex.’ But that was yet another lie, wasn’t it? She was getting good at this lying lark.
Or not. ‘Rubbish.’
‘Look—’ dropping her hand from the edge of the material that had caught her eye, she swung round to face her friends ‘—you guys know me and you’ve all met my family. Do you really see my lot mixing in with the Fitzgerald dynasty? And no matter what any of you say, you can’t deny that any “relationship” at some point involves families mixing together. It can’t be avoided.’
They stared at her for a stunned silent minute. It was the tone of her voice that had probably done it. Because Merrow knew there had been an edge of desperation in there. She just desperately needed someone to understand why she was struggling so badly of late. Anyone.
Just one of them then, dammit!
Lisa, ever the brutally honest one of them, tilted her head and crinkled her nose as she examined the ceiling. ‘You gotta admit that would make for an interesting wedding day.’
‘See!’ She raised her arm and dropped it to her side, exhaling with relief that finally someone could see her point of view. ‘I can just see my mum with Arthur Fitzgerald—he could chat about winning international awards for architecture, and she could give him some tips on the art of tantric yoga.’