‘Bad dream. Sorry.’ He finally managed a lazy smile behind which to hide.
But Tory wasn’t fooled. ‘You get them often, don’t you?’
She didn’t know how she knew this. She just did.
He shrugged. ‘Not really.’
Tory took that as a yes.
‘Things you’ve seen?’
‘Partly.’
It was a brief admission. Tory didn’t press him further. If he wanted to tell her more, he would.
‘I should be going,’ was what he said now.
But he made no move. Perhaps he couldn’t. She was standing too close.
And Tory didn’t want to take a step back because she’d finally accepted. This man was her fate, for good or ill. She was tired of running from it.
She looked at him with solemn, unswerving eyes. She wanted him to take her, cover her body with the hard heat of his, be gentle, be rough, control her, possess her, but ultimately love her. She longed for it even as she acknowledged that loving this man might destroy her—especially if he couldn’t love her back.
Lucas held her gaze and understood. Not totally. But enough to know she’d surrendered herself to an inevitability he’d recognised from the beginning. Him and her. Together.
He took her hand and drew her gently down. He put an arm round her waist. She was soft and warm and yielding. His desire for her was immediate but this time he didn’t want to rush things.
He waited for her to make the first move. She did so tentatively, a finger tracing the small scar that puckered the corner of an eyelid. Then, braving rejection, she cupped his face with her hands and put her mouth to his.
It was the lightest of kisses, her dry lips on his. Chaste but somehow sexy, too. He had to stop himself kissing her back.
Tory wasn’t discouraged by his lack of response. She understood, too. This time she had to make the running, do the seducing.
It wasn’t going to be hard. His hands had already left her waist to curve round her hips and his lower body shifted against her in arousal.
She threaded her fingers into his thick dark hair until she could pull back his head slightly and once more put her mouth to his, only this time she slid the tip of her tongue between his lips, moistening them. She withdrew immediately, however, when he began to kiss her back and nuzzled teasingly at his neck, twining her arms round, softly licking and tasting his skin, biting his earlobe with gentle savagery until she felt him draw several deep, unsteady breaths. Then she slid her mouth back to his and stole his breath and his reason as she kissed him with unfettered passion.
Lucas’s resolve to take things slowly broke like glass shattering as he thrust his tongue inside her sweet, moist mouth and she twisted in his arms, small firm breasts against the wall of his chest, nightgown riding up, soft bare bottom against the hardness of his groin.
They explored each other’s mouths with desperate thirst while their bodies strained to join, be one. All thought was lost in the heat of desire. His hands were everywhere, sliding up her back, round to her breasts, down to her buttocks, between her thighs. Then, still seated, they shifted until she was kneeling, her legs straddling his as he dragged her nightgown over her head and put his mouth to her breasts and began to suckle on her nipples with a hunger matched by the yearning noises she made.
When he finally entered her, it was with gentle, skilled fingers. She was already damp with desire and her body closed round him in spasm, then opened and shut like a flower as he pleasured her to the point of orgasm.
She moaned when he suddenly stopped and pushed her away slightly. Then she opened her eyes and realised.
Lucas had unzipped himself, taking out flesh that throbbed painfully in long denial. She made to touch him, to offer him the same satisfaction, but he caught her hand. He was ready to come and wanted, needed to be inside her.
Tory wanted it, too, shifting with him as he went to the edge of the seat, uncoiling her legs, tilting her hips until he was able to touch his swollen flesh against the soft, moist lips of hers. Then he lifted her slightly to push inside.
Tory didn’t expect it. Not the first exquisite pain from the intrusion of his manhood, nor the pleasure that followed. She was gasping with it as he raised her to meet his thrust, bracing herself against his legs and arching back to accommodate him, crying aloud each time he pierced her to the core until they came together in a blend of agony and ecstasy.
She collapsed against him, naked in his arms, stifling a sob of fright that she could feel like this, riven yet complete, fractured yet whole.
He tried to soothe her with gentle kisses, hugging her to him, whispering, ‘I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.’
She shook her head against his shoulder rather than tell him that pleasure overwhelmed her, that love for him was her undoing.
‘Shh. Shh. It’s okay.’ He half carried her to the bed, then lay down beside her, stroking the unruly hair back from her face, brushing a tear away with the back of his fingers. ‘Do you want me to go?’
Tory shook her head again and looked at him with sad, dark eyes, unable to express her true feelings.
She wanted him to love her.
He did. After they’d lain together for a while, still on the bed, then wordlessly begun to touch, he loved her the way he knew so well. This time slowly, infinitely gently, undressing to feel the glide of her soft, curving body against the slick sweat of his, learning each part of the other, tasting fingers, toes, the most intimate places until pleasure was a long drawn sigh that left them too high to talk.
Yes, he loved her—if only with his body.
They slept and woke with the sun to make love again and lie, content, in each other’s arms. That was how they were discovered.
By Alex.
They had ten seconds warning at most.
Tory heard the outer door opening, thought it imagination, then heard it shutting.
They both heard the tentative knocking on her bedroom door.
‘Tory, are you back?’ Alex called softly and, eliciting no response, stuck his head round the door.
They weren’t caught in the act, but close enough. Tory had managed to sit up, grab a sheet and clutch it to her front. Lucas merely leaned back against the headboard, naked.
Alex took in the scene, too thunderstruck in the first instant to say a word.
When he eventually did, it was a somewhat anticlimactic, ‘R-right.’
Tory frowned darkly. She didn’t feel anything was right. Spending the night with Lucas wasn’t something she’d intended sharing with Alex.
‘Boss.’ Alex actually nodded in Lucas’s direction, before leaving with a ‘Excuse me. I think I’ll go make coffee.’
‘Curious,’ drawled Lucas when Alex finally bowed out the door, barely able to hide a grin. ‘He took it amazingly well, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I…yes.’ Tory supposed she should explain and turned to do so.
‘Perhaps he’s gone off searching for a loaded shotgun. What do you think?’ Lucas lifted a brow in her direction.
‘I think you know,’ Tory countered.
‘Know what?’
‘That Alex was up in Edinburgh, hoping for a reconciliation with his wife.’
‘But if you knew—’ Lucas cut across his own question and, staring hard at her, answered for himself, ‘You couldn’t care less, could you? Which probably means one of two things—you and Alex are finished, or you and Alex never started.’
‘The latter.’ Tory didn’t see any point in keeping up the pretence. She’d used Alex merely as protection against ending up in bed with Lucas—pretty ineffective protection as it turned out. ‘He was broke and homeless so I took him in until he could find somewhere else.’
‘Like a stray dog?’ Lucas commented dryly.
‘Quite,’ Tory agreed, ‘only a dog would probably be more house-trained.’
Lucas smiled at the acerbic comment. It wasn’t directed at him, after all.
‘So has he f
ound somewhere?’ Lucas was still not happy at the idea of Alex’s proximity, however platonic the relationship.
‘No, and I can hardly kick him out now.’ She sighed in exasperation. ‘Not if we’re going to get any sort of promise out of him to keep quiet.’
‘About?’
‘You and I. In bed. Together.’
She spelled it out for him although she didn’t really think it necessary.
He astounded her by replying almost casually, ‘Do we have to keep it quiet?’
‘Yes, of course. I can’t possibly go on working at Eastwich with everyone knowing that you and I are…’ She searched for the right words.
‘Are?’ he prompted and when she didn’t come up with anything, suggested, ‘Living together?’
‘We’re not.’
‘We could be.’
Tory stared at him in surprise. He’d asked her before but that was so she’d move out on Alex. Now that was hardly necessary.
‘Why not?’ he added simply, and, catching her chin with one hand, tried more effective persuasion.
The kiss quickly threatened to get out of control and Tory pulled away, shuffling to the other side of the bed to drag on a T-shirt and jogging bottoms. She didn’t need sex clouding the issue.
He followed suit, dressing in his clothes from last night, but all the time talking her round. ‘You could come stay with me. I’ve bought an apartment in town. You could keep this place and sublet it to Alex. You can always get the sanitation department in when he vacates,’ he finished on a wry note.
‘I don’t know.’ Tory wasn’t averse to the idea. She wanted to be with Lucas. But it seemed a giant step. She’d never lived with a man before, not even her ex-fiancé.
He came round the bed to take her in his arms and, smiling down at her, ran on, ‘I have nice clean habits, always replace the top on the toothpaste and put the toilet seat back down.’
It wasn’t the most romantic of propositions but it made Tory smile and she nodded, thinking she could later change her mind.
She should have know better, of course. With Lucas things tended to happen yesterday.
‘You finish dressing and I’ll go speak to Alex,’ he announced and padded out to the living room, still in his bare feet.
When she later emerged, feeling a little shy, it was to find the two men chatting over a breakfast of beer and corn chips—all that Alex had bought in—having already settled arrangements.
Tory scarcely believed it and remained much in the same state until four days later when she moved into Lucas’s trendy loft apartment sited in a warehouse by the river.
For a while it continued to seem unreal to her, eating and sleeping and rising with Lucas before each going off in their separate cars to Eastwich, careful to maintain distance. That proved easier than she could have hoped, as Alex kept a discreet silence before eventually leaving for a new job with BBC Scotland, and his impressive replacement plus a new Lucas—appointed programmes director made contact unnecessary between her department and senior management. Given an almost free hand, she was increasingly confident about her documentary on the so-called bonding weekend and had followed it up by actually interviewing some of the participants—including Amanda who had chucked in her job to fulfil a long-held ambition to write a novel.
She still worked alongside Simon but he was deeply involved in his own project and, with Alex gone, had turned into a demon workaholic with no time to be curious about Tory’s private life any more.
That life was something else. At home, they laughed a lot, Lucas and she, and talked endlessly, greedy to know each other, their thoughts, dreams, fears and failures. She learned what those occasional nightmares were about—sights witnessed, the dead and dying, bombs missed, the bullet that hit, during his time as a correspondent. She reciprocated with tales of her childhood—ordinary everyday horrors of maternal abandonment followed by reconciliation, good times with her mother’s boyfriends, bad times with not so nice ones. She wasn’t looking for sympathy and neither was he. They were explanations of how they had come to this point, the events that had shaped them before they had met.
He cooked and she ate. They shopped together. He fixed things and she tidied. Someone else cleaned. They went out at times but mostly stayed in. They made love, often.
In time it became normal life. She stopped analysing it and worrying there was no future in it and just lived it.
And was happy—deliriously, amazingly, joyfully happy for four wonderful months—until one day the sense of unreality returned.
Lucas noticed her distraction straight away, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to discover the cause. He just knew that he’d made her happy all these months and suddenly she wasn’t. She continued to make love and let him hold her when it was over and fall asleep in his arms, but when the day came she was restless and anxious and evasive, and, like a coward, he didn’t ask why.
A week passed before Tory finally told him. She’d considered concealing it as long as possible but that seemed dishonest.
‘There’s something you should know,’ she announced over the dinner table, then followed it with a lengthy pause.
She’d been rehearsing the words all day but getting them out was something else. She half expected him to comment, That sounds ominous, but instead he sat, eyes fathomless, mouth unsmiling. He couldn’t already know, could he?
No, she was being fanciful. She decided to tell him the whole story in the hope he might understand and at least forgive.
‘When I was a child,’ she began quietly, ‘I had leukaemia. I was ten and I was treated with a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy which—’
‘What are you saying, Tor?’ Lucas’s face was ashen. ‘The cancer’s returned?’
‘No. No, nothing like that. I’m completely cured of it,’ Tory assured him hastily. ‘I’m sorry. I’m telling this badly…’ She took a deep unsteady breath before going off on another apparent tangent. ‘Do you remember outside Charlie and Caro’s, when I said I’d never have children?’
He nodded, blue eyes fixed intently on her.
‘The thing is—’ she licked dry lips ‘—such treatment for cancer has the side effect of making people infertile.’
She paused, giving that fact a chance to sink in. A range of emotions passed over his face, too quickly for her to really read, before he murmured, ‘The way you said it, I thought it was a lifestyle choice.’
‘I probably gave that impression,’ she admitted, ‘but, at the time, I didn’t feel obliged to go into detail.’
‘And since?’ he challenged.
Tory hung her head a little. She’d had several chances to tell the truth but had ducked them. ‘I was afraid you’d dump me.’
‘Because you couldn’t have children?’ An angry edge had crept into his voice. ‘You don’t think much of me, do you?’
‘Charlie Wainwright dumped me,’ she said in her defence.
‘That’s why you broke up?’
‘Pretty much.’
He frowned darkly. ‘I suppose you kept it from him, too.’
She nodded. ‘At first. But then I didn’t see us as a long-term thing.’
‘You became engaged,’ he reminded her heavily.
‘We were at a New Year’s party at his parents’.’ Tory wanted him to understand how it had been. ‘Loads of people there and, out of the blue, Charlie proposes in front of them all. I should have said no, I accept that now.’
Lucas also knew her well enough. ‘Only you didn’t want to embarrass him?’
She gave a nod, before conceding, ‘I guess I fancied it a little, too, the whole package. Up till then Charlie’s mother had been pleasant enough to me and his father was really nice and there were so many of them, Wainwright cousins and uncles and aunts. You felt it was a real family, that you’d almost be part of a dynasty… Do you know what I mean?’
‘I should.’ Lucas gave a dry smile. ‘I was an in-law for four years, remember.’
‘Y
es, of course.’ Tory had momentarily forgotten his first wife had been Charlie’s sister.
‘I was similarly seduced,’ he admitted, ‘being also an only child from a single parent set-up. But the Wainwright clan can be claustrophobic after a while, and too dependent.’
Tory realised he was referring to his own experience with the Wainwrights and raised a questioning brow.
‘When I married Jessica,’ he went on to explain, ‘I was earning a relatively modest salary as a correspondent. She couldn’t manage to live on it, nor did she want to, and she couldn’t see why we had to when her parents were willing and able to supplement it, not to mention my wealthy stepfather…Call it male pride but I didn’t like taking handouts.’
A shrug dismissed it as any big deal but his tone had said something else. Like all marriages, his and Jessica Wainwright’s had been less than perfect.
‘I appreciate that,’ Tory said supportively.
He gave her a brief smile. ‘One of life’s ironies, I suppose, that I eventually did make it, but at the time money was our greatest source of conflict.’
‘But you were happy, by and large?’ Tory asked.
‘Mostly.’ It was a measured response, qualified by, ‘Not the way I’ve been with you… You know I’m in love you, don’t you, Tor?’
It was the first time he’d used the word love. Another of life’s ironies. A week ago she would have wept with joy at it.
‘Don’t, Luc!’ She knew he might take it back all too soon. ‘Not till I’m finished saying what I have to say.’
‘I thought we had. You can’t have children,’ he stated baldly. ‘I can live with that.’
It wasn’t what Tory wanted to hear.
‘I can’t,’ she replied quietly.
His eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘I…let me explain it all,’ she ran on. ‘So Charlie and I got engaged and I tell him the truth next day. I don’t know what I expected. At any rate, he couldn’t live with it. His branch of the Wainwright family depended on him, so I let him off the hook.’
Lucas saw her eyes reflect painful memories and reached across the table to cover her hand with his. ‘Well, I for one am glad you did. Who needs kids?’ He made a dismissive gesture.
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