'Then don't,' she said simply.
She sensed, rather than saw, the shudder that ran through him.
'You're sure you know what you're saying?' he questioned her a little roughly.
'I might be half-asleep, but I'm not rambling,' she assured him softly.
'I hope not! And I don't want you to forget it this time, either,' Lewis instructed in a suddenly hard tone. 'I want you to remember every single second of it.'
That wouldn't be difficult. Lorel had the feeling that it was going to be emblazoned on her memory for the rest of her life.
Lewis didn't waste any time. His hands were already moving over her compulsively, removing the rest of her clothes while he murmured softly with pleasure at the treasures he was uncovering. His movements seemed to Lorel to be both familiar and yet, at the same time, completely new to her. It was a fascinating combination of sensations, which she found curiously arousing.
She undid the buttons on his shirt as surely as if she had done it a dozen—a hundred—times before. Then she laid her palms flat against the hard warmth of his chest, feeling the contraction of his muscles as he instantly responded.
'Do you remember how much I enjoyed it when you touched me?' he murmured huskily.
No, she didn't remember, but it didn't matter. It was almost better like this, discovering it all over again, giving in to the impulse to explore further until Lewis exclaimed out loud, his breath abruptly catching in his throat.
'Cut that out,' he growled with mock fierceness. 'Or this will be over in two minutes, not five!'
There was now a ragged impatience in his voice. He picked her up and tossed her lightly on to the bed, stripped off the last of his own clothes, and then slid down beside her.
His kisses were bruising this time, marking her mouth and her skin as his lips travelled over her at random. His fingers explored with equal restlessness, not caring how intimately they touched and caressed, leaving all of Lorel's nerve-ends in total disarray.
When he moved still closer, his skin felt unexpectedly silky against her own, and hot, very hot. Or was the heat coming from her own body? She didn't know; could no longer tell. Tiredness and an aching sense of pleasure spread through her in equal measure. Her limbs felt as if they were floating, her head was woolly, and yet parts of her were on fire.
She looked up at Lewis confusedly, and muttered something incoherently under her breath. Although he couldn't possibly have understood the words, he seemed to know exactly what she had said.
'It's all right, sweetheart,' he murmured. 'Leave everything to me.'
His, movements were hard and sure; his hands guided and positioned her, and then gentled when they detected a faint flutter of nervousness. Her mind and senses spinning, Lorel blindly followed and obeyed.
Deeper and deeper he took her, sometimes leading, and sometimes waiting for her to catch up, his own impatient desires held tightly in check. It was like an intricate dance, which could only be performed perfectly when the two partners were completely in step.
Then darkness began to whirl about them; the dance became faster and more frenzied, and Lorel heard her own breath gasping softly in her lungs. Lewis heard it and moved again, closing the circle, and sliding his mouth over her own to catch her stifled words of love and delight.
Lorel dimly realised that his own needs had finally reached the stage where they were becoming quite unmanageable, but it didn't seem to matter. Each wave of pleasure that lapped over her was a little fiercer than the last, as the dance whisked her faster and faster towards its exquisite climax, where she hovered in suspended delight for what seemed like half a lifetime before her sweat-soaked and pleasure-drugged body at last drifted back to reality.
Lewis lay as still as she did, his weight crushing her, and his heart pounding wildly against her own ribs. At last, his heartbeat and breathing eased back to near-normal, and he carefully shifted his weight off her.
'Still awake?' he murmured against her ear.
'I think so,' Lorel muttered. 'Although I might well be dreaming. It's hard to tell.'
'Do you usually have dreams that interesting?' he teased gently.
Lorel began to smile, but half-way through it turned into a yawn.
Lewis pulled her closer, so that she was comfortably wedged up against him. 'Go to sleep,' he ordered softly.
Obediently, Lorel closed her eyes. In just seconds, she had forgotten all her problems and slid into a gentle and peaceful state of oblivion.
When she woke up again, it was morning, and she gradually became aware of three things.
First—and most important—Lewis was no longer sharing the bed with her. In fact, there was no sign that he had ever been there. The pillow had been carefully fluffed up where his dark head had dented it, and the bedclothes straightened on his side. Then she noticed the scrawled note on the table beside her.
She grabbed it, and hurriedly scanned the couple of lines it contained.
'1 thought I'd better leave before Maria comes up with your breakfast tray. I don't want her to know that she's totally failed in her efforts to guard your virtue! Lewis.'
Lorel read it through twice, oddly disappointed at the impersonal tone of the note. No words of love, or even affection. Even the scribbled signature had been added without any endearment attached to it.
She slowly swung her legs over the side of the bed, and then just sat there for a few moments, still feeling an unexpected physical tiredness, even after her night of very sound sleep. Then she made her second discovery of the morning. Her missing chunk of memory had come back at some time during the night, while she had slept. The blank couple of days were now perfectly clear in her mind—it was as if they had never been missing. She could recall absolutely everything, from her first meeting with Lewis on the station, to the moment when she had stolen his briefcase.
With a small shiver, she also remembered that first time he had taken her to bed. It had been just as good as it had been last night, which was perhaps why she had felt such a strong sense of guilt and shame afterwards. To share all that deep intimacy with someone who, at the time, she hadn't even known very well— no wonder she had preferred to push it right out of her memory! She supposed it had been her way of pretending to herself that it hadn't even happened.
But it had. And so had last night. Lorel shivered again, from the certainty that Lewis intended to take things even further.
A slight cramping pain in the pit of her stomach brought the third revelation of the morning to her attention. In fact, there was a familiar ache starting up all around her lower body, and her eyes began to register comprehension.
A hurried trip to the bathroom confirmed her suspicions. Whatever had caused that hiccup in her monthly cycle, it definitely wasn't pregnancy. The discovery numbed her. She hadn't realised that she had already begun to accept her pregnancy as a fact. Faced with the incontrovertible evidence that no baby existed, she felt an appalling sense of emptiness. The fierceness of her reaction stunned her. She had expected to feel utter relief if a pregnancy test proved negative. Instead, she just wanted to sit down and cry from the sheer sensation of loss.
She stayed in the bathroom for ages, trying to get herself together. It's much better this way, she argued weakly with herself. She couldn't shake off the deep sense of resentment, though, at the way her body had played such a mean trick on her.
She finally washed, and got dressed. Then she went back into the bedroom and sat by the window for a while. The city glowed in the clear morning sunshine. Venice—the magic city, she thought to herself. Well, this morning it somehow seemed rather tarnished.
Maria brought in her breakfast tray a little later, but Lorel didn't feel like eating. In fact, she wasn't sure what she felt like. The last twenty-four hours had been such a mixture of highs and lows that her head— and her emotions—were still whizzing round in dizzy circles.
Half an hour later, there was a light tap at the door, and this time it was Lewis who came in. Alt
hough Lorel had been expecting to see him, the actual sight of him still made her stomach flip right over.
He stood just inside the doorway, his blue gaze resting on her thoughtfully.
'Are you hiding from me?' he said at last.
'Yes,' she said, with complete honesty.
'I thought so. Want to tell me why?'
Lorel shifted position a little restlessly. There were several things she wanted to tell him, but she supposed she ought to get the most important one over with first.
'My period's started,' she said bluntly. 'I'm not pregnant. The sickness and dizziness must have been just a virus, after all.'
To her surprise, a look of acute disappointment crossed Lewis's face.
'I thought you'd be relieved,' she said slowly.
'Why did you think that?'
Lorel had the impression that the question had come out rather more harshly than he had intended. She gave a puzzled frown. She hadn't expected him to react like this.
'Well, it's a let-out for you, isn't it?' she reminded him, reluctantly putting into words what had been very obvious to her ever since her discovery this morning. 'You don't have to feel responsible for me any more. You're free of any commitments.'
Lewis came further into the room. 'Have I ever said I wanted that kind of freedom?'
'No,' she muttered. 'But ‑'
'But what?' he demanded, his tone still rough.
Her nerves suddenly felt very frayed. 'No man wants to be tied to someone because of an unplanned baby,' she snapped back at him. 'It's a well-known fact. I should think you're very relieved that things have turned out this way.'
'Stop assuming that you know what I'm feeling. You don't!' He ran his fingers irritably through his hair. 'Sometimes I think that you never have done,' he added, in a dark tone.
Lorel instantly bristled. 'That's hardly surprising. You never tell me!'
His blue eyes shot round to fix on her. 'What exactly do you mean by that?'
'Take last night,' she retorted, with a sudden surge of resentment. 'Did you enjoy it? Was I anything more than a couple of pleasant hours in bed? Did it mean anything to you?'
Lewis stared at her in sheer disbelief. 'How the hell can you think it didn't?'
'Quite easily! I'm not a mind-reader. I need to be told how you feel about things—about me,' she finished, on a rather faltering note.
Lewis came a little nearer. 'I'm not much good at putting things into words,' he growled.
'Well, you'd better try, or we're never going to get any of this sorted out.'
'Where do you want to start?' he said, after a short pause.
'Right at the beginning, I suppose.' Lorel lifted her head. 'Oh, there's something else you ought to know. I've got my memory back.' Her eyes briefly sparkled. 'Every single second of it,' she added meaningfully.
'Then you know by now that I didn't force you into bed with me on that train.'
'I think I knew it all along,' she admitted frankly. 'It was just an excuse to keep you at arm's length. I was nervous about getting involved with you.'
'Am I that alarming?' he asked drily.
'No, not really. It was just me, being a coward.' Lorel suddenly grinned. 'When I first met you, I didn't think you were alarming at all. Just a mannerless pig!'
Lewis's eyebrows shot up. 'I hope you've changed your opinion of me since then.'
'Yes, I have,' she said kindly. 'There are days when I'm really quite fond of you.'
'You were more than fond of me last night,' he reminded her.
The colour flooded into her face. 'I know,' she mumbled.
'In fact, at one point you even said that you loved me,' Lewis went on.
She looked at him guardedly. 'That might have been just a slip of the tongue.'
'It might have been,' he agreed, his gaze flicking over her assessingly. 'Yet I don't think that it was.'
Nervousness made her tone edgy. 'You're assuming an awful lot!'
'Perhaps.' His blue eyes glinted. 'But I think that I'm entitled to, don't you?'
Lorel wasn't sure how to answer that, so she stayed silent.
'I wonder what it is about you,' he went on musingly, almost as if speaking to himself. 'There have been women in my life before—a couple of the relationships nearly became serious, although I found myself backing off at the last minute—but none of them were quite like you.'
'In what way?' Lorel asked curiously.
A wry smile settled around Lewis's mouth. 'In any way at all. Believe it or not, I don't usually take women to bed when I've known them for only a few hours. Yet I could hardly keep my hands off you on that train. And when you hit your head and couldn't remember any of it, I was partly furious because I thought I'd lost the advantage that had given me, and partly relieved, because I realised it gave me the chance to make a fresh start with you. I thought you might appreciate a more conventional approach!'
Lorel remembered something else. 'I only fell and hit my head because you were chasing me,' she reminded him tartly. Then she gave a rueful grimace. 'This whole thing has been a big mix-up right from the start, hasn't it?'
Lewis looked at her steadily. 'Does that really matter, as long as we know where we're going from here?'
'I suppose not.' Then she frowned at him. 'Where are we going?'
'How about back to England, to meet my family?' Lewis suggested.
She blinked. 'Your family?'
'You'll like Katie, and you'll probably be charmed by Felix, my stepbrother—although not too charmed, I hope,' he said warningly. 'As for Rita, my stepmother ‑' Lewis gave a resigned shrug. 'She'll probably drive you a little crazy, but I think you're tough enough to cope with her.'
'Er—why should I want to meet them?' Lorel asked carefully.
'Isn't that obvious?' replied Lewis, his face perfectly bland. 'It's only reasonable that they should meet my future wife before the wedding.'
'Wedding?' Lorel repeated, parrot-like, her mind a little too numb to find anything more intelligent to say.
'You love me,' Lewis told her calmly. 'And I'm damned sure I must love you, or I'd never have let you turn my life upside-down the way you have. What else can we do, except get married?'
Lorel was suddenly a little irritated at the way he was railroading her into this.
'A lot of things!' she retorted. 'Anyway, I'm not absolutely sure that I do love you.'
Lewis remained unruffled. 'Of course you do,' he replied cheerfully. 'In fact, I think you fell for me the first moment you saw me. There are a lot of people who scoff at love at first sight, but I reckon that you could prove them wrong.'
She glared fiercely at him. 'You are so big-headed! And wrong! I'm far too sensible to fall in love with some stranger I met on a train.'
'Then why did you jump into bed with me?' came Lewis's calm challenge. 'You're not the sort of girl who's going to clamber into anyone's bed unless you've got pretty strong feelings for them.'
That effectively silenced her, because he was right. He was always right, she thought to herself a little sulkily. It was going to be quite infuriating if he kept it up right through their married life.
Married life? she repeated to herself silently. Married—to Lewis?
He stood and quietly watched her come to terms with the idea.
'We've only known each other three weeks,' she muttered at last.
'That's quite long enough for me. I know exactly what I want—all you've got to do now is to make up your mind.'
Lorel chewed her lip warily. 'There's still such a lot we don't know about each other.'
'What do you want me to do? Fill in a written questionnaire, giving all the missing details?' Lewis gave a sudden, impatient shake of his head. 'We know all we need to know, all the important things. The rest we can learn as we go along.'
He made it sound so easy, so straightforward—and so tempting!
She remembered something else. 'You were really upset when I told you there wasn't any baby, weren't you?' s
he said quietly.
'Yes, I was,' he admitted frankly. Then his eyes glowed. 'Although it shouldn't be too difficult to remedy the situation—if you want to.'
'Yes, I do,' she said in a soft voice.
Lewis's features relaxed. He walked slowly over to her, and then stood there, looking down at her.
'You're willing to risk it, then?'
Lorel looked directly back into his vivid blue eyes. 'I don't think it'll be such a risk.' Then she grinned. 'After all, you're a very successful businessman,' she reminded him. 'You wouldn't take on any new venture unless you were very sure it was going to succeed!'
'I've never taken on anything quite like this before,' Lewis remarked wryly. 'But I'm damned sure it's going to turn out to be the best move I've ever made in my life.'
'All right, then.' She nodded happily. 'Marriage it is.' Then she grinned again.
'What are you laughing at?' he demanded.
'You look so very pleased with yourself. Like a small boy at Christmas, who's just been given the very present that he wanted.'
Lewis's own mouth curled up at the corners. 'Perhaps that's how I feel. Except that I got to open my present last night;' he went on, in a more husky tone.
'And did you like it?' Lorel asked demurely. 'Did it live up to your expectations?'
'Yes,' he said simply. Then his eyes gleamed. 'So much so, that I'd like to play with it all over again,' he added throatily.
'That's not possible at the moment,' Lorel reminded him regretfully.
'It doesn't matter. I've already decided that, from now on, we're going to do things properly. There'll be no more games in the bedroom until after we're married.'
Lorel wrinkled her nose in disappointment. 'None at all?'
'Perhaps just a kiss—or maybe two,' Lewis conceded. 'So that we don't entirely forget how to go about it. But that's as far as it goes,' he went on sternly. 'If necessary, I'll take Maria home with us, to act as temporary chaperon until we're married.'
Lorel looked at him mischievously. 'She hasn't done a very good job so far,' she reminded him.
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