by Penny Jordan
Listening to him just now, it had almost been as though he was trying to claim that he felt he was in some kind of competition with her with her work and yet the two aspects of her life were completely different and separate issues.
When she walked into their bedroom he was standing in front of the window staring out of it. He didn’t turn round until she touched him. He looked pale and tense. His grey eyes were shadowed instead of warm with laughter, she noticed guiltily. How long was it since they had last laughed together? It had been his sense of humour that had first drawn her to him. And, as with his warmth and gentleness, she had felt able to respond to it and to him without fearing that she was in any way putting herself under his control.
‘Perhaps a few days away would be a good idea,’ she told him quietly. ‘We obviously need to talk…’
Beneath her arm she could feel the stiff resistance in his body. What more did he expect from her? she wondered angrily. Not, surely, an apology… For what? She had done nothing that he would not have done and felt he had every right to do had their positions been reversed.
It hurt her that he should reveal this unwanted side of himself to her; she had thought him above that petty need to have his ego nurtured and massaged which she despised in so many other men.
* * *
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Mark asked Deborah as he picked up their suitcase.
Deborah followed his glance towards her briefcase. She shook her head and tried not to feel guilty as she saw its bulging outline.
Ryan hadn’t been at all pleased when she had told him that she was going away. In fact, he…
‘Ready, then?’
Nodding, she picked up her lightweight jacket and followed Mark out of the room.
‘Where to?’ she asked him once they were in the car. He had insisted on keeping their destination a surprise and she had done her best to enter into the spirit of the thing, even though in reality she was still far too wound up over her work and their quarrel to feel like playing games.
‘At least these few days away together will give us time to talk,’ she commented as she followed his directions.
‘No,’ Mark told her shortly, adding less curtly, ‘Let’s just forget everything else for a few days, Debs, and enjoy being with one another. Guessed where we’re going yet… ?’
She frowned. What had got into Mark? He didn’t normally go in for that kind of escapism.
‘No…’ she responded absently. ‘You’ll have to tell me.’
‘Rimington,’ he announced.
Rimington? She was startled enough to turn her head to look at him. The small Yorkshire village was the place where they had spent their first weekend away as lovers. Their hotel had been quiet and remote, a converted Edwardian house set in its own parkland, with huge bedrooms and the original attached bathrooms.
It had been November then, the moors surrounding them damp and misty, the log fire in their room far too tempting to leave for very long… like their bed.
Mark had been the first man with whom she had felt truly able to express her sexuality. Joyously she had shown him how much she desired him, how intensely sexual he made her feel. That weekend had been the first time in her life she had felt truly able to let go and to allow someone else to enter the private world of her sensuality.
It had also been the first time she had experienced an orgasm with a man without having to work hard for it. And not just one. Her body, once it had made up its mind to accept Mark, had seemed intent on making up for lost time.
‘Hey—steady on,’ he had teased her at one point when she was urgently trying to re-arouse him with her hands and mouth. ‘I don’t have your powers of recovery,’ he had told her gently as he’d eased her slightly away from him.
She hadn’t been put off, though, whispering to him that he could still give her aroused body the satisfaction it wanted.
‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ he had murmured softly, his mouth at her breast, his hand sliding down between her legs while she’d clung to him and shivered with anticipatory pleasure.
Sexually they were still as good together, even if recently their lovemaking had become less intense and less frequent… much less frequent.
There had been more than one occasion recently when she had gone to bed after working late to find him already asleep… so deeply asleep that neither the touch of her hand on his body nor the warmth of her mouth against his ear as she’d whispered to him that she wanted him had been enough to wake him up.
‘Oh, Mark… Rimington——!’ she exclaimed now.
‘Don’t tell me…’ he interrupted her grimly. ‘You don’t want to go there…’
She shook her head.
‘Yes—yes, I do,’ she told him softly. ‘Of course I do.’
Perhaps Mark was right; perhaps she was allowing herself to become engrossed in her work… making him feel that she was shutting him out, even though he ought to know her well enough to realise that she’d never do that.
Rimington. Just the thought of going back there with him was lifting the burden of tension from her shoulders.
‘You’re right,’ she told him huskily. ‘We do need some time together… on our own…’
Mark flinched as he heard the sensual promise in her voice. When he had first booked this break for them it had seemed such a good idea; buoyed up with his harmless flirtation with the clerk, he had remembered how good that first weekend away together had been. He had never known such a generous lover as Deborah. There was no coyness about her, no game- or role-playing, no insistence on any pretence of him having to coax her into physical intimacy.
And then he had certainly not wanted or needed to feign sleep to avoid making love with her.
He tensed and moved uncomfortably in his seat. In every relationship there was bound eventually to be a diminution of that early urgent and compulsive sexual desire.
Diminution, yes… a total cessation… He had begun to wonder recently if there was something physically wrong with him as he’d struggled to force his body into reluctant arousal, panicking inwardly in case it failed him, but his physical response to the clerk had proved to him that there was nothing wrong with him physically… far from it.
The problem must lie elsewhere, then… with Deborah? Or rather with his reaction to her?
It wasn’t that he had stopped loving her, he knew that, and he had hoped originally that this time away together would help to restore the sexual chemistry which had once burned so strongly between them, but Deborah’s reaction to what he had done had left him physically numb, his masculinity somehow threatened and under attack.
He didn’t want to talk to her and he didn’t want to go to bed with her either, he recognised bitterly. If the truth were known, he was sick and tired of the new role in their lives which she seemed to have cast for him, just as he was sick and tired of Ryan’s mocking comments and constant allusions to Deborah’s controlling position in their relationship.
Couldn’t she see how hard things were for him at the moment… couldn’t she understand… ?
‘Oh, Mark, this is going to be such a wonderful weekend… just the two of us.’ Her eyes were shining.
* * *
‘When you said you wanted to go out for a walk, I didn’t realise you meant a full-blown hike,’ Deborah laughed protestingly as she caught up with Mark, who was walking with the group’s leader.
‘You’re the one who’s always complaining that we don’t get enough exercise,’ Mark reminded her.
They had arrived at the hotel late the previous evening and it had been dark by the time they had unpacked.
Deborah had pulled a face when he had insisted on their having dinner in the dining-room rather than ordering a room-service meal, but she had accepted it tolerantly enough, just as she had when he had spent the rest of the evening in conversation with a fellow guest, leaving Deborah to make what conversation she could with the man’s shyly timid wife.
She ha
d frowned a little this morning when he had got up before her and then come back to announce that he had booked them both on to a local organised walk.
‘Come back to bed,’ she had suggested, smiling invitingly at him; the spring sun had warmed the pale ivory of her skin to soft gold and he’d known that it wasn’t the coolness of the air on her naked body that was flushing her nipples into rosy hardness, but he had still shaken his head, telling her,
‘We can’t; the walk starts in three-quarters of an hour.’
And he had deliberately stayed downstairs, waiting to come up and announce what he had done until he knew that there would not be enough time for them to make love.
Her sunny acceptance of his refusal and her good humour during the walk had only added to his guilt and also, oddly, to his anger against her. It would have been easier for him to justify what he was doing if she had objected or protested.
‘Mmm—I can’t wait to get back to our room and that lovely big bath,’ she whispered in his ear, teasingly nuzzling it while no one was looking.
* * *
‘Oh… that bath felt good, and so do you,’ Deborah told Mark as she slipped behind him, pressing her wet body against his, sliding her hands beneath the shirt he was just fastening over his chest.
‘Hey, watch it—my shirt’s getting wet,’ Mark complained.
Deborah laughed. ‘Take it off, then,’ she suggested as she bit playfully at the warm flesh of his shoulder.
Standing together like this, with her behind him, her fingertips stroking lightly against his skin, it was not after all as difficult as he had dreaded to will his senses into a state of desire and his body into a state of arousal, Mark discovered to his relief.
Deborah was no textbook lover—she was far too sensual and imaginative for that—her slow fingertip-stroking of his skin deliberately tantalising.
‘Had enough?’ she asked mischievously when he trapped her provocative fingertip flat against his belly and then added as she pressed herself closer to his back, ‘Mmm… I do love your body, Mark. It feels so good to touch… Just the way a man’s body should feel…’
‘Oh… and how exactly is that?’ Mark asked her. He felt safer now with the movement of her hand stilled and under his control. ‘Or do I already know the answer to that one?’ he added mockingly as he glanced wryly at his own erection.
Deborah laughed.
‘No… not because of that, you vain creature… not that it isn’t a very… tempting sight,’ she added judiciously. ‘No, what I meant was that you feel good to touch—here,’ she explained as she lifted her other hand and slowly traced the width of his chest. ‘And here,’ she added softly as her fingertips ruffled through the fine softness of his body hair.
‘And here.’ Her voice had taken on a betraying husky note as she outlined the hard curve of his buttock and then traced the edge of the hairline that surrounded his penis.
‘You taste good as well,’ she mumbled as she bit gently at his shoulder. ‘Taste good, smell good, feel good… Oh, Mark.’
He felt her body quiver with sexual tension as she moved urgently against him.
‘I want you so much,’ she told him.
He could feel the power her need gave him, weakening her, strengthening him; she was vulnerable now, dependent on him… at his mercy.
In his mind’s eye he saw again the pouting mouth of the temporary clerk, her lush breasts, and the subtle envy in the eyes of the other men who had watched her flirting with him.
He could feel his erection harden and strengthen.
He released Deborah’s hand, turning around and taking hold of her forearms.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he told her as she tried to reach out and caress him. ‘You can look but you’re not allowed to touch.’
He kissed her before she could give voice to the startled surprise he could see in her eyes, teasing her mouth with small butterfly kisses that made her moan in frustrated protest and demand huskily, ‘No… not like that, Mark… Kiss me properly.’
‘What’s wrong? Don’t you like my kisses any more?’ Mark teased her, pretending not to understand what she meant. It gave him an odd, unfamiliar thrill of pleasure to hold her to ransom like this, to feel her body quivering in his hold as he withheld from her the stimulation and satisfaction he knew she wanted.
‘Mark…’ He could hear the tension in her voice but ignored it, bending his head to circle her nipples with his tongue, first one and then the other, drawing slow, delicate, leisurely circles while she tensed and tried to move her body so that he would take her nipple fully into his mouth.
He had discovered very early on in their sexual relationship just how sexually sensitive she was to that particular type of caress—mainly, if he was honest, because she had told him so, whispering to him how she liked to be stroked and sucked, arching her back and moaning with pleasure when he caressed her the way she wanted.
In those early days there had even been occasions when she had actually orgasmed just through that stimulation alone, and she had admitted openly and freely to him that the sight of her own breasts taut and wet from his suckling was something that she found almost as visually arousing as the sight of his erect penis glistening slickly from the intimate caress of her mouth.
No, there were no sexual secrets about her body that she had withheld from him, no inhibitions about her telling and showing him how best to help her towards orgasm. No secrecy or mystique. No coyness about showing him her pleasure—or lack of it.
‘Have you ever thought about faking it?’ he had asked her wryly one afternoon when she had forthrightly informed him that it just wasn’t going to happen and that she was, thank you very much, on this occasion at least, quite happy to forgo her orgasms.
‘Fake it?’ She had looked at him in open surprise. ‘What would be the point?’ she had asked him. ‘It would be an insult to both of us; it would devalue our sexual relationship completely, and I wouldn’t dream of insulting you by doing it. My orgasm isn’t something you can either give to me or withhold from me,’ she had pointed out calmly. ‘And since you don’t bestow it on me, it isn’t your responsibility when I don’t have one. It’s up to me to tell you what can and can’t help me to have one.’
‘Oh, I see—and my role in all this is just to follow your instructions, is it?’ He had laughed.
Yes, he had laughed then. When had he stopped laughing? Mark wondered as he felt her heartbeat speed up and her breathing become shallow.
‘Mark…’
He ignored the protest in her voice and made his way slowly down her body, rimming her navel with his tongue-tip in the same way he had done her nipples. Her stomach quivered, a rash of gooseflesh breaking out beneath the smooth skin as she trembled slightly.
He knew that if he were to release her arm now and slide his hand between her legs, parting the full outer lips of her sex, he would discover that she was moist and eager for his touch, but he didn’t do that. Instead he kissed his way back up over her body, this time avoiding her breasts and concentrating instead on the sides of her arms, the pulse-point in her wrists, the inner curve of her elbows.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he told her thickly, catching hold of the arm he had just released as she reached out to touch him. Holding it behind her back, he pulled her fully against him, watching as her eyes dilated in increased arousal at the movement of his body against her own.
Even though he knew that sexually she was ready for him, he could sense her shock when he dropped back into the chair behind him, taking her with him, positioning her against him so that he could enter her immediately. For a moment her body tensed as though it might reject him, but then she shivered and made a familiar little moan of eager arousal, clinging to him as he moved fully into her.
He sensed that he had caught her off guard by entering her so quickly and without any intimate preliminary caresses, but he knew from the speed and urgency with which she climaxed that she was aroused by the unexpectedness of what he had d
one.
‘Not had enough of me already, have you?’ he asked her as she lay panting against him.
Deborah opened her eyes and stared at him. She wasn’t used to Mark being so sexually aggressive. Normally she would have found such aggression more of a turn-off than a turn-on, but after his recent disinclination to make love it was such a relief to be reassured that he did still desire her that she was ready to overlook his uncharacteristic behaviour.
‘Me, tired?’ she scoffed. ‘Since when… ?’
He was, she realised, still hard inside her.
‘You want it… then go ahead, help yourself to it,’ he told her softly as she lay straddled across his lap.
This time it took her slightly longer to climax, her muscles trembling slightly when she finally relaxed against him.
‘Mmm… I think we’d be more comfortable continuing this in bed, don’t you?’ Mark murmured to her as he eased her slightly away from him.
‘Continuing… ?’ Deborah blinked. ‘I know the air up here is supposed to be very bracing,’ she joked. ‘Oh, Mark, it’s been so long since we’ve done anything like this.’ She arched shakily towards him as his mouth caressed her breasts. ‘It feels so good knowing you still want me. Mmm—you feel so good,’ she told him in a muffled voice as she pushed him gently away and slid down his body so that she could take him in her mouth.
They made love twice more before Deborah protested tiredly that she was going to need a sleep before she could even think about getting ready for dinner.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so sexually satisfied, so content and replete. Exhausted, she crawled beneath the duvet, holding it up until Mark joined her, her last act before she gave in to the physical exhaustion claiming her to reach out for some tissues to soak up the familiar seepage of Mark’s semen from between her legs.
As she did so, she recognised that her brain was trying to tell her something important, but her need to sleep was too intense for her to listen. As she sank into sleep she was smiling happily, moving back to curl her body into the familiar warm spoon-shape of Mark’s.