by Penny Jordan
‘Mrs Fraser? Yes, she is booked into room number 113.’
Room 113…That was his room. There had quite obviously been a mistake. He was just about to say as much to the receptionist when a middle-aged couple came up to the desk.
‘We’re booked into room 204,’ the man explained to the receptionist. ‘But there’s a street light outside and it’s disturbing my wife. I wonder if we could possibly change to another room?’
The receptionist immediately shook her head, explaining regretfully, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re fully booked. A large party of Americans…We don’t have a single empty room.’
No empty rooms. So that put paid to his own as yet unspoken request to book into another room…a room that was not already occupied by Polly, Marcus acknowledged.
Grimly he turned and headed back towards the lift.
Five minutes later he was in the hotel bedroom gazing down at Polly’s sleeping body.
Like him, she had obviously booked a room here which meant…Which meant what? That even though he had seen her leaving the restaurant with Phil Bernstein she was plainly not spending the night with him. Had they quarrelled, perhaps? Had he…? Had she…? Jealousy had to be the most damaging, soul-destroying waste of time there could be. It had been bad enough when it had just been his jealousy of his dead cousin he’d had to contend with, but this…
Softly he spoke Polly’s name, but she was so deeply asleep that she didn’t waken.
The sensible, the right and proper thing for him to do now would be to persist and wake her up, explain the situation to her and then offer to spend the night sleeping in a chair.
But, faced with the prospect of the next day’s long flight ahead of him, the thought of trying to sleep upright in an uncomfortable and undersized armchair was not an appealing one.
Quietly unlocking the side of the wardrobe where he had placed his overnight bag, Marcus hung up his jacket and then made his way to the bathroom. The towels he had used earlier had been carefully refolded on the drying rail to make room for the one Polly had used. Smiling at this evidence of her housewifeliness, he undressed and turned on the shower.
It was the noise of the water that woke Polly. At first confused and half asleep, she thought it had started to rain—very hard—and then, as she became fully awake, she thought she must be able to hear the shower in the adjoining bedroom: But then, as she lifted her head from the pillow and saw the bar of light showing under the closed en suite bathroom door, the full realisation that someone was actually in the shower in her room, hit her.
Without considering that she could be putting herself in danger, she got out of bed, pulling on the hotel robe as she marched purposefully towards the bathroom door and pushed it open.
As he saw the bathroom door opening Marcus quickly grabbed a towel, turning off the shower.
‘Marcus!’ Polly gasped in disbelief. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ Marcus asked her laconically.
‘This is my room,’ Polly informed him angrily. ‘How did you get in, and why are you having a shower?’
‘Correction, this is our room,’ Marcus informed her grimly. ‘It seems that the hotel has made a mistake and booked us both into the same room—perhaps because we share the same surname and the same address. I don’t know, and right now I don’t particularly care just how the error occurred. But what I can tell you, before you say anything else, is that the hotel is fully booked and there are no spare rooms.’
‘What?’ Polly rubbed her eyes sleepily. She felt as though she had strayed into some weird surreal dream. It seemed an impossibly bizarre coincidence that she and Marcus should have been given the same room, but one look at his face warned her that he was in no mood for her to tell him that she didn’t believe him. And besides, what possible motive could he have for lying?
And then a horrible suspicion struck her.
‘You haven’t brought…anyone back with you, have you?’ she asked him huskily.
There was a small, sharp silence before Marcus replied curtly, ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Oh…’
She stifled a huge yawn. Even though the sound of the shower had woken her up she was still feeling the effect of the herbal sleeping tablet she had taken. Her eyes felt heavy and she longed to go back to bed, curl up and go back to sleep. To stifle another yawn she raised her hand to her mouth, and as she did so her overlarge robe fell open revealing the soft satin-skinned curve of her breast.
Marcus felt as though someone had kicked him in the stomach, and the urge to take hold of her and bury his face in the creamy scented warmth of her neck, to slide his hands inside her robe and touch her, feel her naked body against his own, was so acute and overwhelming that he had to remind himself of just what Polly was doing in London to stop himself from giving in to it. And because of that, and his unwanted jealousy, he heard himself demanding angrily, ‘Just why are you here anyway? I should have thought the least Bernstein could have done was to offer you a room for the night, even if he didn’t want you sharing the one he had.’
Polly could hardly believe her ears.
What Marcus was implying about her wasn’t just ugly, it was also offensive, and she knew that if her senses, her emotional responses hadn’t been softened and dulled a little by the sleeping tablet they would probably have reduced her to shocked, shamed tears.
Holding her head up high, she told Marcus quietly, ‘You shouldn’t judge others by your own standards, Marcus. Phil did offer me a room. In fact—’ she gave him a small sad smile, ‘—he offered me a suite…’
Now her eyes were clouding with tears, and as he read the underlying message in her words Marcus cursed himself under his breath. What on earth had possessed him to be so stupid?
‘You might consider me to be some silly middle-aged woman so desperate for sex that I’ll grab at any chance to…to have a man,’ she told him, scarlet-cheeked, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I am one.
‘I just can’t get it right with you, can I, Marcus? You’re either condemning me for being dull and boringly faithful to my husband’s memory or you’re accusing me of having some kind of mid-life sexual problem.’
‘Polly,’ Marcus protested, reaching out to stop her as she started to turn away from him, but she had moved too quickly and as she pulled away he was left holding the empty fabric of her robe.
As she felt the towelling fabric slide free of her shoulder and then her body Polly gave an outraged gasp of shock, turning back to try to hold onto it; but it was too late.
For a second neither of them moved, and even though Polly was burningly conscious of the way Marcus was looking at her body, of the tension she could feel emanating from him, the hot male desire she could almost feel filling the distance between them, it was as though somehow she was experiencing these things at a distance. It was as though it could not possibly be happening, not possibly be her standing here, her body naked to Marcus’s black-eyed burning scrutiny, her nipples taut and full, aching with a sensuality that shocked as well as tormented her, her belly soft, quivering with that same feeling.
And then Marcus moved and she was jerked sharply into reality, crying fiercely, ‘No,’ as she backed away from not just the physical presence of him but the dangerous heat and scent of him as well.
He might be nearly as naked as she was herself but his was a different kind of nudity—a man’s nudity—which somehow, instead of robbing him of control and power, only seemed to reinforce it, just as it reinforced his maleness.
‘Polly,’ Marcus repeated fiercely as his fingers curled imprisoningly round her upper arm.
He had only meant to hand the robe back to her. That was all. But somehow, once he felt the soft warmth of her skin, that intention was lost, flattened beneath the fierce onslaught of his own desire, and instead of covering her with the robe he was still holding he let it drop to the floor, covering her instead with his own body.
Frantically Polly tried to
fend him off, but it was too late. When she had denied any need or desire for Phil Bernstein she had been speaking the truth, but when it came to Marcus himself then she was everything he had accused her of being she acknowledged defencelessly. Then she wanted him…needed him…ached for him so much that—
Deep in her throat she gave a small whimper of pain and self-recrimination, but her body, her emotions, her love, didn’t want to listen.
This was Marcus who was holding her, touching her, wanting her…
No, not here. She tried to warn herself. To him she was just a woman…just a substitute for the woman he must really want…She had no idea why he had returned to the hotel without Suzi. The other girl had been making it plain enough earlier that she wanted him and Marcus must have felt that as strongly as Polly had herself. No wonder he was now so fiercely and angrily aroused. No wonder he was touching her, kissing her with so much starving hunger, she acknowledged as her head fell back under the onslaught of the savage, burning kisses he was pressing against her throat.
From beneath her semi-closed eyelids she could see their entwined reflections in the bathroom mirror. Marcus’s arms were wrapped around her, holding and supporting her. The pale fairness of her skin looked femininely fragile in contrast to the darker, more bronzed masculinity of his, just as the raw, male definition of the muscles beneath his skin highlighted the soft, female roundness of her own body. Male to female, female to male—how perfect they looked together.
A sharp shudder went through her and she moaned under her breath, her eyes closing completely as Marcus’s hand cupped her breast. Small, intensely violent shudders of pleasure burned through her, almost too intense to be borne.
She was thirty-seven years old and nothing she had experienced, either with Richard or since, in the celibate years of her widowhood, had prepared her for what she was feeling now.
Shockingly, she was suddenly hungry for everything that Marcus could give her, every last drop of sensation and pleasure—all of it. All of him.
Her own hands reached out to smooth the taut muscles of his arms, his skin. He felt male and alive, the movement of his muscles somehow so different from her own. Behind her closed eyelids she could picture him mentally as she touched him, but soon mentally visualising him wasn’t enough—she wanted to see him in reality. Her eyes flickered open as she spread her hands as wide as she could over his back, which was strong, alien, exciting. His skin felt so hard, and hot. Richard, while tall, had been more angular than Marcus, less heavily muscled, more of a boy still than a man.
‘Polly.’
She could hear the raw urgency in his voice and at some deep level her senses recognised the sharp need wrapped in the rough velvet huskiness, and she responded to it, sensually, triumphantly, pleased that she could so affect him. Her hand lifted to his face; her fingertips stroked exploratively along his jaw, which was excitingly rough where his beard was growing in a betraying dark shadow. A frisson of sensation ripped through her sensitive body, as intense and betraying as though he had actually bent his head and rubbed that faint raspiness against the most sensitive parts of her.
Slowly she traced the shape of his mouth, her eyes luminous with emotion and expectation. Her lips had parted, her breathing quick and unsteady.
Mesmerised, she returned the intensity of his concentrated fixation on her, gaze to gaze, neither of them moving, and yet somehow she felt as though they were moving together in some secret, intimate dance, following a tune that only they could hear. Her fingers stilled against his mouth and Marcus started to caress them, delicately, with little licks and nibbles, until she was moaning out loud—a soft, keening sound; the sound of a woman.
A woman…Yes, that was what she was now—a woman, not a girl, and Marcus was her man!
Unable to stop herself, she glanced sideways into the mirror again. He still had the towel he had picked up when she’d walked into the bathroom draped round his hips.
‘Take it off,’ she told him thickly, touching it with her free hand. ‘I want to see all of you, please.’
Silently Marcus did as she commanded whilst Polly drew in her breath, held it and then let it out again on a slow, shuddering sigh. Automatically she reached out to touch him, her fingertips sketching the shape of his shoulders and arms, registering the faint tremor of his muscles as she stroked delicately along his forearm, and then the far stronger tremor that shook him when she touched his waist, his hip, the hard flat planes of his buttocks…
‘Polly!’ She heard him grinding out, the fierce, stark sound of his voice shocking her into immobility as in it she recognised the curtness and the grimness she was so used to hearing from him.
‘For God’s sake…’ His voice was thicker now, not angry as she had first thought but…tortured almost. ‘If you don’t…’
If she didn’t what? She could feel herself starting to tremble as she waited to hear him tell her to stop touching him, reality suddenly imposing itself on her in starkly jagged pangs of self-consciousness. But as she made to move away from him, her face starting to burn with the hot realisation of just what she was doing, Marcus suddenly reached for her, begging her hoarsely, ‘Polly, don’t stop—look at what you’ve done to me.’ And, as he moved slightly away from her, Polly realised why he had been so careful not to close that final distance between them. Heat scorched through her body as she witnessed his open arousal. This was the male form in all its dark, dangerous beauty, she recognised shakily. This was man at his most primeval, his most potent…and just seeing him made her want to…made her feel…
Deep down inside her Polly was conscious of such hungry yearning, such a sense of emptiness waiting to be filled, such a need, that she actually felt the intensity of it make her eyes burn with anguished tears. Longingly she swayed towards Marcus, her whole body curving in an arc of supplication and invitation, her eyes heavy with the knowledge of her love and wanting.
Immediately Marcus reached out to take her weight, holding her so that the heat of his body against hers, its power and its arousal, felt like a soothing balm to the aching heat that both consumed her and reinforced some deep inner emptiness.
As he bent his head and cupped her face with his free hand Polly turned so that her lips brushed his hard palm.
‘Marcus…please…’ she whispered, knowing he would understand just what it was she was pleading for.
‘Polly…’ She could hear the torment in his voice. ‘Have you any idea how long I’ve waited for this, wanted you like this?’ she heard him telling her thickly as he picked her up and carried her through into the bedroom.
‘But not even in my wildest dreams, my most intimate sensual imaginings, did I come anywhere near the reality of this…’ he told her rawly as he placed her on the bed and laid his head on her soft small belly. He kissed her skin, stroked it, both feeding and stoking the hunger she felt for him at the same time. Every touch, every kiss inflamed her even more, pushing her to sensual heights of pleasure she had never known existed.
His mouth against her breast, his tongue, sent little trails of fire running right through her. Twisting frantically underneath him, she cried out in ecstasy as he sucked fiercely on her breast. Pleasure like this was like a forbidden kingdom to her and she was almost afraid of entering it, of giving in, of giving herself up to what she was feeling; but to try to stop now, when her body was crying out for him, was impossible.
Mutely she tried to convey to him all that she was experiencing and feeling, reaching out for him and drawing him closer to her.
‘It’s been so long,’ she heard him saying hoarsely as he covered her body with his own.
‘Yes. So very long.’
He felt like hot velvet against her. Hot velvet encasing smooth liquid muscle.
Polly sucked in her breath as her body arched for his entry, quivering, waiting…wanting…eager and yet a little afraid. It had, as he had said, been so long.
It was nothing like her memories of the way it had been with Richard. There w
as no comparison, nor did she want there to be. This was her first time as a woman. Her first time with a man and not a boy. Each smooth thrust took him deeper into her body, closer to where she wanted him to be, and Polly clung to him in apprehensive exultation as each wave of pleasure took her nearer to fulfilment. His movements were different now—hotter, faster, and then deeper and slower, and her own body was picking up their rhythm, moving in counterpart to it.
It was like singing, soaring, floating, flying, catching the wind and riding with it—a joyful pain of love, an outpouring of it that seemed to burst from every pore of her body.
Polly had no words, no sounds, no thoughts to express the magnitude, the magnificence of what she was experiencing.
She felt the deep climactic shudders wrenching Marcus’s body, the hot burst of his completion deep inside her triggering off the seismic quakes of her own fulfilment.
Dreamily Polly tried to bring herself back down to earth. Marcus was saying something to her; smiling, she nestled closer to him, too exhausted, too blissfully content to listen properly or comprehend. It was more than her senses could take on board just to know what had happened, what they had shared. Conversation was completely beyond her, an impossibility.
Marcus could feel his hand trembling as he stroked Polly’s damp hair back off her face.
He had waited so long, loved so long, but never once had he imagined there would be—could be—anything like this. He was not a promiscuous man but there had been women, relationships…pleasure; but none of it—none of them—had ever come anywhere near this.
He cupped Polly’s face, wanting to tell her how he felt, how much he loved her, how insanely jealous he had felt tonight seeing her with someone else, but as he turned his head to look down at her he realised that she had fallen deeply asleep.
Very gently he lifted her, touching her tenderly beneath the bedclothes, kissing her lovingly before joining her there. His last thought as he switched off the light was one of awed disbelief that they should have shared what they had just shared.