by Penny Jordan
He didn’t need Ruby’s fingers gripping his arm or her nails digging into his flesh to tell him what she was feeling. Sander could feel her need in his own flesh and hers as the movement of her body quickened and tightened. Even before she cried out to him he was aware of her release, and the quick, fierce pleasure of her orgasm filled his own body with fierce male satisfaction, swelling his sex to a hard urgency to play its part in more of that pleasure.
But not yet—not until he was sure that he had given her all the pleasure he could.
For Ruby, the sensation of Sander’s lips caressing their way down her supine body was initially one of relaxed easy sweetness—a tender caress after the white-hot heat that had gone before it. She had no intimation, no warning of the fresh urgency to come, until Sander’s lips drifted across her lower belly and the ache she had thought satisfied began to pulse and swell in a new surge of need that shocked her into an attempt to deny its existence.
But Sander wouldn’t let her. Her protests were ignored, and the growing pleasure of her wanton flesh was cherished with hot swirls of desire painted on her inner thighs by the stroke of his tongue—a tongue that searched out her desire even more intimately, until its movement against the hard swollen pulse of her clitoris had her abandoning her self-control once more and offering herself up to him.
This time her orgasm was short and sharp, leaving her trembling on the edge of something more. Agonised by the ache of that need, Ruby reached out to touch Sander’s body, but he stopped her, shaking his head as he told her thickly, ‘No. Don’t. Let me do this instead.’
She could feel the glide of his body against her own, his sex hard and slick, probing the eager moistness of hers, and her muscles quickened in eager longing, matching each slow, deliberate ever deeper thrust of his body within her own.
Aaahhh—how she remembered the first time he had shown her this pleasure and revealed its mystery. The way it had taken her beyond that small sharp pain which had caught at her breath and held her motionless beneath his thrust for a handful of seconds before her arousal had made its own demands on her, her muscles softening to enfold him, just as they were doing now, then firming to caress him, her body driven by its need to have him ever deeper within her.
This was what her body had yearned and hungered for—this completeness and wholeness, beyond any other, as she clung to Sander, taking him fully within her and holding him there, welcoming and matching the growing speed of his rhythm.
He was lost, Sander recognised. His self-control, his inner self stripped away, taking from him his power to do anything other than submit to his own need as it rolled over him and picked him up with its unstoppable force.
He heard himself cry out, a male sound of mingled agony and triumph, as Ruby’s fresh orgasm took them both over the edge, his body flooding hers with his own release.
Her body still racked by small aftershocks of the seismic pleasure that had erupted inside her, Ruby lay silently against Sander’s chest, heard their racing heartbeats gradually slowing.
Tonight they had shared something special, something precious, Ruby thought, and her heart overflowed with love.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE twins’ matter-of-fact response to their return to the island proved more than any amount of words how comfortable they had been in Anna’s care during her absence, Ruby reflected ruefully in her bedroom, as she changed out of the clothes she had travelled home in. Sander had gone straight to his office to check his e-mails.
But getting changed wasn’t all she needed to do.
Her handbag was on the bed. She opened it and removed the pregnancy testing kit she had bought in Athens. Her hands trembled slightly as she took it from its packaging, her eyes blurring with emotion as she read the instructions. Six years ago when she had done this she had been so afraid, sick with fear, dreading the result.
She was equally anxious now, but for very different reasons.
Things had changed since she had first realised that she might be pregnant again, she tried to reassure herself. When Anna had referred to her love for Sander, initially Ruby had wanted to deny it. But once that truth had been laid bare for her to see she hadn’t been able to ignore it. Of course she loved Sander. The real shock was that she hadn’t realised that for herself but had needed Anna to tell her. Now, just thinking about him filled her with aching longing and pain.
Maybe this baby would build the bridge between them, if she lowered her own pride and told him how she felt. She had begged him to give her the possession of his body—would it really be so very difficult to plead with him to accept her love? To plead with him that this child might be born into happiness and the love of both its parents? He loved the twins—surely he would love this child as well, even if he refused to accept her love for him? Telling herself that she must have faith that the love she had seen Sander give the twins would not be reserved for the twins alone, she walked towards the bathroom.
Ten minutes later Ruby was still standing in the bathroom, her gaze fixed on the telltale line. She had known, of course—impossible for her not to have done. But nothing was the same as visible confirmation. Against Sander’s explicit wishes she had conceived his child. Ruby thought of the contraceptive pills she had taken so carefully and regularly every evening, in obedience to Sander’s conditions for their marriage. Perhaps this baby, conceived against all the odds, was meant to be—a gift to them both that they could share together? She put her hand on her still flat body and took a deep breath. She would have to tell Sander now, and the sooner the better.
The sudden childish scream of anger she could hear from outside had her letting the test fall onto the marble surface surrounding the hand basin as she ran to the patio doors in the bedroom in automatic response to the outraged sound. Outside on the patio, as she had expected, she found the twins quarrelling over a toy. Freddie was attempting to drag it away from Harry, whilst Harry wailed in protest. Anna, alerted as Ruby had been by the noise, wasn’t far behind her, and the two of them quickly defused the situation.
Once they had done so, Anna said matter-of-factly, ‘You will have your hands full if it is twins again that you are carrying.’
Ruby shook her head. She wasn’t really surprised that Anna had guessed. The homemade ginger biscuits that had discreetly begun to appear with her morning cup of weak tea had already hinted to her that Anna shared her own suspicions.
Sander pushed back his chair. They had only arrived at the villa an hour ago, and yet already he was conscious of an urge to seek out Ruby, and with it an awareness that he was actually missing her company—and not just in bed. Such feelings made him feel vulnerable, something that Sander instinctively resisted and resented, and yet at the same time he was opening his office door and striding down the corridor in the direction of their bedroom.
Ruby would be outside with the twins. As their father, he could legitimately get changed and go and join them. Doing so would not betray him. And if he was there as much so that he could be with Ruby as with his sons, then only he needed to know that. The conditioning of a lifetime of fearing emotional betrayal could not be overturned in the space of a few short weeks. Others close to him, like Anna and Elena, might admire Ruby and think her a good wife, but Sander told himself that he needed more proof that he could trust her.
He noted the presence of Ruby’s open handbag on their bed as he made his way to the bathroom, but it was only after he had showered and changed that he noticed the discarded pregnancy test.
The first thing Ruby saw when she went back into the bedroom was Sander’s suit jacket on the bed. Her heart started to hammer too heavily and far too fast, with a mixture of guilt and fear. She walked towards the bathroom, coming to an abrupt halt when she saw Sander standing beside the basin, holding the telltale test.
There was a blank look in his eyes, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. A blank look that was soon burned away by the anger she could see replacing it as he looked at her.
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‘You’re pregnant.’
It was an accusation, not a question, and Ruby’s heart sank.
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I thought I might be, but I wanted to be sure before I told you. I know what you said when we got married about me taking the pill because you didn’t want another child—and I did take it,’ she told him truthfully. When he didn’t say anything, but simply continued to look at her she was panicked into pleading emotionally, ‘Please don’t look at me like that. You love the twins, and this baby, your baby, deserves to be loved as well.’
‘My child? Since you have said yourself that you were on the pill, it cannot possibly be my child. We both know that. Do you really think me such a fool that I would let you pass off a brat conceived with one of the no doubt many men who happened to be enjoying your body before I found you? If so, then you are the one who is a fool. But you are not a fool, are you, Ruby? You are a venal, lying, amoral and greedy woman.’
The words exploded into the room like randomly discharged machine gun fire, meant to destroy everything it hit. Right now she might be too numb to feel anything, but Ruby knew that she had been mortally wounded.
‘You obviously knew when you demanded that I marry you that you were carrying this child,’ Sander accused her savagely.
He had claimed that he was not a fool, but the opposite was true. He had allowed her to tempt him out of the security of the emotional mindset he had grown up with and to believe that maybe—just maybe—he had been wrong about her. But of course he had not been. He deserved the punishment of what he was feeling now for dropping his guard, for deliberately ignoring all the safeguards he had put in place to protect himself. The bitter, angry thoughts raked Sander’s pride with poison-dipped talons.
‘I thought you had married me for the financial gain you believed you could get from our marriage, but I can see now that I didn’t recognise the true depth of your greed and lack of morals.’
Ruby couldn’t bear any more.
‘I married you for the sake of our sons,’ she told him fiercely. ‘And this child I am carrying now is yours. Yes, I took the pill, but if you remember I wasn’t well whilst we were in London. I believe that is how I came to conceive. In some circumstances a…a stomach upset and nausea can damage the pill’s efficiency.’
‘A very convenient excuse,’ Sander sneered. ‘Do you really expect me to believe it, knowing you as I do? You didn’t marry me for the twins’ sake, Ruby. You married me for my money.’
‘That’s not true,’ Ruby denied. How could he think so badly of her? Anger joined her pain. Sander had called himself a fool, but she was the fool. For loving him, and for believing that she could reach out to him with that love.
‘I know you,’ he repeated, and hearing those words Ruby felt her self-control break.
‘No, you don’t know me, Sander. All you know is your own blind prejudice. When this baby is born I shall have its DNA tested, and I can promise you now that he or she will be proved to be your child and a true sibling to the twins. However, by then it will be too late for you to know it and love it as your son or daughter, Sander, because there is no way I intend to allow my children to grow up with a father who feels and speaks as you do. You love the twins, I can see that, but as they grow to be men your attitude to me, their mother, your suspicions of me, are bound to contaminate their attitude to my sex. I will not have my sons growing up like you—unable to recognise love, unable to value it, unable to even see it.
‘Do you know what my worst sin has been? The thing I regret the most? It’s loving you, Sander. Because in loving you, I am not being a good mother to my children. You’ve constantly thrown at me my behaviour the first time we met, accusing me of being some wanton who came on to you. The truth is that I was a seventeen-year-old virgin—oh, yes you may look at me like that but it’s true—a naive and recklessly silly girl who, in the aftermath of losing her parents, ached so much for love to replace what she had lost that she convinced herself a man she saw across a crowded bar was her saviour, a hero, someone special who would lift her up out of the misery of her pain and loss and hold her safe in his arms. That was the true nature of my crime, Sander—idolising you and turning you into something you could never be.
‘And as for all those other men you like to accuse me of being with—they never existed. Not a single one of them. Do you really think I would be stupid enough to trust another man after the way you treated me? Yes, I expect I deserved it for behaving so stupidly. You wanted to teach me a lesson, I expect. I’m only surprised, knowing you as I now do, that you seem unable to accept that your lesson was successful.
‘There was only one reason I asked you for marriage, Sander—because I thought it would make you back off. But then, when I realised you genuinely wanted the twins, it was as I told you at the time—because I believe very strongly that children thrive best emotionally within the security of a family unit that contains two parents who intend to stay together. I grew up in that kind of family unit, and naturally it was what I wanted for my sons.
‘What you’ve just accused me of changes everything. I don’t want you poisoning the boys’ minds with your own horrible mindset. This baby will be their true sibling, but somehow I doubt that even DNA evidence will convince you of that. Quite simply it isn’t what you want to believe. You want to believe the worst of me. Perhaps you even need to believe it. In which case I feel very sorry for you. My job as a mother is to protect all my children. The twins are two very intelligent boys. They will quickly see that you do not accept their sister or brother and they might even mimic your behaviour. I will not allow that to happen.’
Initially he had been resolutely determined to deny that there could be any truth in Ruby’s angry outburst. But beneath the complex defence system his own hurt emotions had built up to protect him from the pain caused by his mother, tendrils of something ‘other’ had begun to unfurl. So small at first that he thought he could brush them away. But when he tried Sander discovered that they were rooted in a bedrock of inner need it stunned him to discover. When had this yearning to throw off the defensive chains that imprisoned him taken root? How could this part of him actually be willing to take Ruby’s side against himself? Struggling against the opposing forces within himself, Sander fought desperately for a way forward.
This was so much worse than anything she had imagined might happen, Ruby acknowledged. She had feared that Sander would be angry, but it had never occurred to her that he would refuse to accept that the child she had conceived was his. She should hate him for that. She wished that she could. Hatred would be cleansing and almost satisfying.
She would have to leave the island, of course. But she wasn’t going anywhere without the twins. They would miss Sander dreadfully, but she couldn’t risk them starting to think and feel as he did. She couldn’t let his bitterness infect them.
She turned to look through the still open patio doors, her vision blurred by the tears she was determined not to let him see.
‘There’s no point in us continuing this discussion,’ she told him. ‘Since it’s obvious that you prefer to think the worst of me.’
Without waiting to see if he was going to make any response Ruby headed for the patio, anxious to put as much distance between them as she could before her emotions overwhelmed her and the tears burning the backs of her eyes fell.
From the bedroom Sander watched her, his thoughts still at war with themselves. Ruby had reached the top of the flight of marble steps that led down to the lower part of the garden.
Blinking fiercely to hold back her tears, Ruby stepped forward, somehow mistiming her step, so that the heel of her shoe caught on the top step, pitching her forward.
Sander saw her stumble and then fall, tumbling down the marble steps. He raced after her, taking the steps two at a time to reach her crumpled body where it lay still at the bottom of the first flight of steps.
She was conscious—just. And her two words to him as he kneeled over her were a
gonized. ‘My baby…’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘SHE’S coming round now. Ruby, can you hear us?’
Her clouded vision slowly cleared and the vague outlines of white-clad figures formed into two nurses and a doctor, all three of them smiling reassuringly at her. Hospital. She was in hospital? Automatically she began to panic.
‘It’s all right, Ruby. You had a nasty fall, but you’re all right now. We’ve had to keep you sedated for a few days, to give your body time to rest, and we’ve performed some tests, so you’re bound to feel woozy and confused. Just relax.’
Relax! Ruby put her hand on top of the flat white sheet pulled tightly over her body. She was attached to some kind of drip, she realised.
‘My baby?’ she demanded anxiously.
The nurse closest to her looked at the doctor.
She’d lost her baby. Her fall—she remembered it now—had killed her baby. The pain was all-encompassing. She had let her baby down. She hadn’t protected it properly, either from her fall or from its father’s rejection. She felt too numb with grief to cry.
The nurse patted her hand. The doctor smiled at her.
‘Your baby is fine, Ruby.’
She looked at them both in disbelief.
‘You’re just telling me that, aren’t you? I’ve lost the baby really, haven’t I?’
The doctor looked back at the nurse. ‘I think we should let Ruby have a look for herself.’ Turning to Ruby, he told her, ‘The nurse will take you for a scan, Ruby, and then you will be able to see for yourself that your baby is perfectly well. Which is more than I will be able to say for you, if you continue to upset yourself.’
An hour later Ruby was back in her hospital room, still gazing in awed delight at the image she’d been given—an image which showed quite clearly that her baby was indeed safe.