by Penny Jordan
CHAPTER SIX
‘I NOW pronounce you man and wife.’
It was over, done. There was no going back. Ruby was shaking inwardly, but she refused to let Sander see how upset she was.
Upset? A small tremor made her body shudder inside the cream Vera Wang dress she had not wanted to wear but which the personal shopper had included amongst her purchases and which for some reason she had felt obliged to wear. It was, after all, her wedding day. A fresh tremor broke through her self-control. What was the matter with her? What had she expected? Hearts and flowers? A declaration of undying devotion? This was Sander she was marrying, Sander who had not looked at her once during the brief ceremony in the anonymous register office, who couldn’t have made it plainer how little he wanted her as his wife. Well, no more than she wanted him as her husband.
Sander looked down at Ruby’s left hand. The ring he had just slipped onto her marriage finger was slightly loose, despite the fact that it should have fitted. She was far too thin and seemed to be getting thinner. But why should her fragility concern him?
It didn’t. Women were adept at creating fictional images in order to deceive others. To her sons Ruby was no doubt a much loved mother, a constant and secure presence in their lives. At their age that had been his own feeling about his mother. Bitterness curled through him, spreading its poisonous infection.
In the years since the deaths of his parents he had often wondered if his father had given in so readily to his mother’s financial demands because secretly he had loved her, even though he’d known she’d only despised him, and she, knowing that, had used his love against him. It was a fate he had sworn would never be his own.
And yet here he was married, and to a woman he already knew he could not trust—a woman who had given herself to him with such sensuality and intimacy that even now after so many years he was unable to strip from his memory the images she had left upon it. He had been a fool to let her get close enough to him once to do that. He wasn’t going to let it happen again.
Neither of them spoke in the taxi taking them back to the hotel. Ruby already knew Sander had some business matters to attend to, which thankfully meant that she would have some time to herself in which to come to terms with the commitment she had just made.
After Sander had escorted them to the suite and then left without a word to her, after kissing the boys, Ruby reminded herself that she had not only walked willingly into this marriage, she was the one who had first suggested it.
The boys were tired—worn out, Ruby suspected, by the excitement of being in London. A short sleep would do them all good, and might help to ease her cramped, nauseous stomach and aching head.
After removing her wedding dress and pulling on her old dressing gown, she put the twins to bed. Once she had assured herself that they were asleep she went into her own bathroom, fumbling in her handbag for some headache tablets and accidentally removing the strip of birth control pills instead. They reminded her that although Sander might have made her take them she must not let him make her want him. Her hands shook as she replaced them to remove the pack of painkillers. Just that simple action had started her head pounding again, but thankfully this time at least she wasn’t sick.
She was so tired that after a bath to help her relax she could barely dry herself, never mind bother to put on a nightdress. Instead she simply crawled beneath the duvet on her bed, falling asleep almost immediately.
Ruby woke up reluctantly, dragged from her sleep by a sense of nagging urgency. It only took her a matter of seconds to realise what had caused it. The silence. She couldn’t hear the twins. How long had she been asleep? Her heart jolted anxiously into her ribs when she looked at her watch and realised that it was over three hours since she had tucked the twins into their beds. Why were they so quiet?
Trembling with apprehension, she pushed back the bedclothes, grabbing the towel she had discarded earlier and wrapping it around herself as she ran barefoot from her own room to the twins’.
It was empty. Her heart lurched sickeningly, and then started to beat frantically fast with fear.
On shaking legs Ruby ran through the suite, opening doors, calling their names, even checking the security lock on the main door to the suite just in case they had somehow opened it. All the time the hideous reality of what might have happened was lying in wait for her inside her head.
In the dreadful silence of the suite—only a parent could know and understand how a silence that should have been filled with the sound of children’s voices could feel—she sank down onto one of the sofas.
The reason the twins weren’t here must be because Sander had taken them. There could be no other explanation. He must have come back whilst she was asleep and seized his opportunity. He hadn’t wanted to marry her any more than she had wanted to marry him. What he had wanted was the twins. His sons. And now he had them.
Were they already on a plane to the island? His island, where he made the laws and where she would never be able to reach them. He had their passports after all. A legal necessity, he had said, and she had stupidly accepted that.
Shock, grief, fear and anger—she could feel them all, but over and above those feelings was concern for her sons and fury that Sander could have done something so potentially harmful to them.
She could hear a noise: the sound of the main door to the suite opening, followed by the excited babble of two familiar voices.
The twins!
She was on her feet, hardly daring to believe that she wasn’t simply imagining hearing them out of her own need, and then they were there, in the room with her, running towards her and telling her excitedly, ‘Daddy took us to a café for our tea, because you were asleep,’ bringing the smell of cold air in with them.
Dropping onto her knees, Ruby hugged them to her not trusting herself to speak, holding the small wriggling bodies tightly. They were her life, her heart, her everything. She could hardly bear to let them go.
Sander was standing watching her, making her acutely conscious as she struggled to stand up that all that covered her nudity was the towel she had wrapped round her.
Going back to her bedroom, she discarded the towel and grabbed a clean pair of knickers before reaching for her old and worn velour dressing gown. She was too worked up and too anxious to get back to the twins as quickly as she could to care what she looked like or what Sander thought. The fact that he hadn’t taken them as she had initially feared paled into insignificance compared with her realisation that he could have done so. Now that she had had a taste of what it felt like to think she had lost them, she knew more than ever that there was nothing she would not do or sacrifice to keep them with her.
Her hands trembled violently as she tied the belt on her dressing gown. From the sitting room she could hear the sound of cartoon voices from the television, and when she went back in the boys were sitting together, watching a children’s TV programme, whilst Sander was seated at the small desk with his laptop open in front of him.
Neither of them had spoken, but the tension and hostility crackling in the air between them spoke a language they could both hear and understand.
Her headache might have gone, but it had been replaced with an equally sickening sense of guilt, Ruby acknowledged, when she sat down an hour later to read to the boys, now bathed and in bed. She watched them as they fell asleep after their bedtime story. Today something had happened that she had never experienced before. She had slept so deeply that she had not heard anything when Sander returned and took her sons. How could that be? How could she have been so careless of their safety?
She didn’t want to leave them. She wanted to stay here all night with them.
The bedroom door opened. Immediately Ruby stiffened, whispering, ‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve come to say goodnight to my sons.’
‘They’re asleep.’ She got up and walked to the door, intending to go through it and then close it, excluding him, but Sander was holding it and she wa
s the one forced to leave and then watch as he went to kiss their sleeping faces.
Turning on her heel, Ruby headed for her own room. But before she stepped inside it her self-control broke and she whirled round, telling Sander, ‘You had no right to take the boys out without asking me first.’
‘They are my sons. I have every right. And as for telling you—’
Telling her, not asking her. Ruby noted his correction, consumed now by the kind of anger that followed the trauma of terrible shock and fear, which was a form of relief at discovering that the unthinkable hadn’t happened after all.
‘You were asleep.’
‘You could have woken me. You should have woken me. It’s my right as their mother to know where they are.’
‘Your right? What about their rights? What about their right to have a mother who doesn’t put her own needs first? I suppose a woman who goes out at night picking up men needs to sleep during the day. And knowing you as I do, I imagine that is what you do.’
Sickened by what he was implying, Ruby said fiercely, ‘Knowing me? You don’t know me at all. And the unpleasant little scenario you have just outlined has never and would never take place. I have never so much as gone out at night and left the twins, never mind gone out picking up men. The reason I was asleep was because I haven’t been feeling well—not that I expect you to believe me. You’d much rather make up something you can insult me with than listen to the truth.’
‘I’ve had firsthand experience of the truth of what you are.’
Ruby’s face burned. ‘You’re basing your judgement of me on one brief meeting, when I was—’
‘Too drunk to know what you were doing?’
His cynical contempt was too much for Ruby’s composure. For years she had tortured and tormented herself because of what she had done. She didn’t need Sander weighing in to add to that self-punishment and pain. She shook her head in angry denial.
‘Foolish and naive enough to want to create a fairy story out of something and someone belonging in reality to a horror story,’ she said bitterly. Too carried away by the anger bursting past her self-control, she continued, ‘You need not have wasted your contempt on me, because it can’t possibly match the contempt I feel for myself, for deluding myself that you were someone special.’
Ruby felt sick and dizzy. Memories of what they had once shared were rushing in, roaring over her mental barriers and springing into vivid life inside her. She had been such a fool, so willing and eager to go to him, seeking in his arms the security and safety she had lost and thinking in her naivety that she would find them by binding herself to him in the most intimate way there was.
‘So much drama,’ Sander taunted her, ‘and all of it so unnecessary, since I know it for the deceit that it is.’
‘You are the one who is deceiving yourself by believing what you do,’ Ruby threw at him emotionally.
‘You dare to accuse me of self-deception?’ Sander demanded, stepping towards her as he spoke, forcing her to step back into her bedroom. She backed up so quickly that she ended up standing on the trailing belt of her dressing gown. The soft, worn fabric gave way immediately, exposing the pale curve of her breast and the darker flesh of her nipple.
Sander saw what had happened before Ruby was aware of it herself, and his voice dropped to a cynical softness as he said, ‘So that’s what you want, is it? Same old Ruby. Well, why not? You certainly owe me something.’
Ruby’s despairing, ‘No!’ was lost, crushed beneath the cruel strength of his mouth as it fastened on hers, and the sound of the door slamming as he pushed it closed was a death knell on her chances of escape.
Her robe quickly gave way to the swift expertise of Sander’s determined hands, sliding from Ruby’s body whilst he punished her with his kiss. In the mirror Sander could see the narrow curve of her naked back. Her skin, palely luminous, reminded him of the inside of the shells washed up on the beach below his home. Against his will old memories stirred, of how beneath his touch and against it she had trembled and then shuddered, calling out to him in open pleasure, so easily aroused by even the lightest caress. A wanton who had made no attempt to conceal the passion that drove her, or her own pleasure in his satisfaction of it, crying out to him to please her.
Sander drove his tongue between her lips as fiercely as he wanted to drive out her memory. The honeyed sensuality of her mouth closed round him, inviting his tongue-tip’s exploration of its sweetest hidden places. The simple plain white knickers she was wearing jarred against the raw sexuality of his own arousal. He wanted her naked and eager, stripped of the lies and deceit with which she was so keen to veil her own reality. He would make her admit to what she was, show her that he knew the true naked reality of her. His hands gripped her and held her, moving down over her body to push aside her protective covering.
Her figure was as perfect as it was possible for a woman’s figure to be—or it would be if she carried a few more pounds, Sander acknowledged. From her shoulders, her torso narrowed down into a handspan waist before curving out into feminine hips and the high, rounded cheeks of her bottom. Her legs were long and slender, designed to wrap erotically and greedily around the man she chose to give her the pleasure she craved. Her breasts were full and soft, and he could remember how sensitive her nipples had been, the suckle of his mouth against them making her cry out in ecstasy.
Why was he tormenting himself with mere memories when she was here and his for the taking, her body already shivering in his hold with anticipation of the pleasure to come?
She was naked and in Sander’s power. She should fight him and reject him, Ruby knew. She wanted to, but her body wanted something else. Her body wanted Sander.
Like some dark power conjured up by a master sorcerer desire swept through her, overwhelming reason and pride, igniting a need so intense that she felt as though an alien force were possessing her, dictating actions and reactions it was impossible for her to control.
It was as though in Sander’s arms she became a different person—a wildly passionate, elementally sensual woman of such intensity that everything she was crystallised in the act of being taken by him and taking him in turn.
It might be her wish to fight what possessed her, but it was also her destiny to submit to it as Sander’s mouth moved from its fierce possession of hers to an equally erotic exploration of her throat, lingering on the pulse there that so recklessly gave away her arousal.
It was not enough to have her naked to his gaze and his touch. He needed to have the feel of her against his own skin. She was an ache, a need, a compulsion that wouldn’t allow him to rest until he had conquered her and she had submitted to his mastery of her pleasure. He wanted, needed, to hear her cry out that desire to him before he could allow himself to submit to his own desire for her. He needed her to offer up her pleasure to him before he could lose himself within her and take his own.
He was caught in a trap as old as Eve herself—caught and held in the silken web of a desire only she had the power to spin. The savagery of his anger that this should be so was only matched by the savagery of his need for the explosion of fevered sensuality now possessing them both. It was a form of madness, a fever, a possession he couldn’t escape.
Scooping her up in his arms, Sander carried Ruby to the bed, watching her watch him as he placed her on it and then wrenched off his own clothes, seeing the way her eyes betrayed her reaction to the sight of him, naked and ready for her.
Her eyes dark and wide with delight, Ruby reached out to touch the formidable thickness of Sander’s erection, marvelling at the texture of his flesh beneath her fingers. Engrossed and entranced, she stroked her fingertips over the length of him, easing back the hooded cover to reveal the sensitive flesh beneath it, not the woman she knew as herself any more, but instead a Ruby who was possessed by the powerful dark force of their shared desire—a Ruby whose breath quickened and whose belly tightened in pleasurable longing.
She looked up at Sander and saw in hi
s eyes the same need she knew was in her own. She lifted her hand from his body, and as though it had been a signal to him he pushed her back on the bed, following her down, shaping and moulding her breasts with his hands, feeding her need for the erotic pleasure she knew he could give her with the heat of his lips and his tongue on her nipples, until she arched up against him, whimpering beneath the unbearable intensity of her own pleasure.
The feel of his hand cupping her sex wasn’t just something she welcomed. It was something she needed.
Her body was wet and ready for him, just as it had been before. Just for a heartbeat the mistrust that was his mother’s legacy to him surfaced past Sander’s desire. There must not be another unwanted conception.
‘The pill—’ he began,
Ruby nodded her head.
A sheen of perspiration gleamed on his tanned flesh, and the scent of his arousal was heightening her own. It was frightening, this intensity of desire, this sharpening and focusing of her senses so that only Sander filled them. It had frightened her six years ago and it still frightened her now. The need he aroused within her demanded that she gave everything of herself over to him—all that she was, every last bit of her. The verbal demand he was making now was nothing compared with that.
‘Yes. I’m taking it.’
‘You swear?’
‘I swear…’
Sander heard the unsteady note of need trembling in her voice. She was impatient for him, but no more than he was for her. He had fought to hold back the tide of longing for her from the minute he had seen her again. It had mocked his efforts to deny it, and now it was overwhelming him, the fire burning within him consuming him. Right now, in this heartbeat of time, nothing else mattered. He was in the grip of a force so powerful that he had to submit to it.
They moved together, without the need for words, movement matching movement, a duel of shared anger and longing. Her body welcomed his, holding it, sheathing it, moving with it and against it, demanding that he move faster and deeper, driving them both to that place from which they could soar to the heavens and then fall back to earth.