In Bed with a Stranger

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In Bed with a Stranger Page 2

by India Grey


  Not meeting his eye, Sophie shook her head.

  ‘No, he hasn’t mentioned it.’

  The fact was he hadn’t mentioned anything much. Before he went he’d warned her that phone calls were frustrating and best avoided so she hadn’t expected him to ring, but she couldn’t help being a bit disappointed that he hadn’t. She had written to him several times a week—long letters, full of news and silly anecdotes and how much she was missing him. His replies had been infrequent, short and impersonal, and had left her feeling more lonely than if he hadn’t written at all.

  ‘I just hope he doesn’t hate me too much, that’s all,’ Jasper said unhappily. ‘Alnburgh meant everything to him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault that Kit’s mother disappeared with another man when he was just a little boy, is it? And anyway, it’s all in the past now, and, as my barking-mad mother would say, everything happens for a reason. If Kit was the heir there’d be absolutely no chance I’d be marrying him. He’d need a horsey wife who came complete with her own heirloom tiara and a three-year guarantee to produce a son. I’d fail on all counts.’

  Her tone was flippant, but her smile stiffened slightly as she said the bit about the son. Jasper didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘You come closer than Sergio. You’d both look good in a

  tiara, but you certainly have the edge when it comes to bearing heirs.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  It was no good. To her shame both her voice and her smile cracked and she had to press her hand to her mouth. Across the table Jasper looked horrified.

  ‘Soph? What’s wrong?’

  She grabbed her drink and took a gulp. The gin was cold, bitter, good. It felt as if it was clearing her head, although that was probably an ironic illusion.

  ‘I’m fine. I finally saw a doctor about the monthly hell that is my period, that’s all.’

  Jasper’s eyes widened. ‘God, Soph—it’s nothing—?’

  She waved a hand. ‘No, no, nothing serious. It’s as I thought—endometriosis. The good news is it’s not life-threatening, but the bad news is that there’s not much they can do about it and it could make getting pregnant a problem.’

  ‘Oh, honey. I had no idea having children was so important to you.’

  ‘Neither did I, until I met Kit.’ Sophie slid her sunglasses back down, feeling in need of something to hide behind. Having spent years listening to her mother and the women in the haphazard commune in which she’d grown up analyse everything in minute, head-wrecking detail, she usually went out of her way to avoid any kind of serious discussion, but there was part of her that wanted to share this bittersweet new feeling. ‘Finding out it might be difficult has made me realise how important it is—how’s that for irony?’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, the doctor didn’t say it was impossible, just that it could take a long time and it was best not to leave it too long.’

  He reached across the table and took her hand.

  ‘So when are you going to start trying?’

  Sophie looked at her phone again and looked up at him with a determined smile. ‘In about twenty-seven and a half hours.’

  The second hand quivered slightly as it edged wearily around the clock face. Sitting on a plastic chair in Intensive Care, watching it with wide-eyed fatigue, Kit kept thinking that it wouldn’t make it through the next minute.

  He knew the feeling.

  He had been here since late afternoon, English time, when the emergency medical helicopter had finally landed, bringing Sapper Kyle Lewis home. Sedated into unconsciousness, with bullets in his head and chest, it wasn’t quite the homecoming Lewis had looked forward to.

  Kit sank his head into his hands. The now familiar, tingling numbness was back, stealing up through his fingertips until he felt as if he were dissolving.

  ‘Coffee, Major Fitzroy?’

  He jerked upright again. The nurse in front of him wore a blue plastic disposable apron and was smiling kindly, unaware of the stab of anguish her question caused. He looked away, his teeth gritted.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Can I get you anything for the pain?’

  He turned, eyes narrowed. Did she know that he was the reason Lewis was in the room behind him, hooked up to machines that were breathing for him as his mother held his hand and wept softly, and the girlfriend he had spoken of so proudly kept her terrified eyes averted?

  ‘Your face,’ the nurse said gently. ‘I know you were seen to in the field hospital, but the medication they gave you will have worn off now.’ She tilted her head, looking at him with great compassion. ‘They might only be superficial, but these shrapnel wounds can be very painful as they heal.’

  ‘It looks worse than it is.’ He’d seen his face in the washroom mirror and felt dull surprise at the torn flesh and bruising around his eyes. ‘Nothing that a large whisky wouldn’t fix.’

  The nurse smiled. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you one of those here. But you could go home now, you know.’ The plastic

  apron crackled as she moved past him to the door of Lewis’s room, pausing with her hand on the doorplate. ‘His family’s here now. You’ve looked after these boys for five months, Major,’ she said gently. ‘It’s time you looked after yourself.’

  Kit got a brief glimpse of the inert figure in the bed before the door swung shut again. He exhaled heavily, guilt squeezing the air from his lungs.

  Home.

  Sophie.

  The thought of her almost severed the last shreds of his self-control. He looked at the clock again, realising that although he’d been staring at it for hours he had no idea what time it was.

  Almost six o’clock in the evening, and he was almost three hundred miles away. He stumbled to his feet, his mind racing, his heart suddenly beating hard with the need to get to her. To feel her in his arms and lose himself in her sweetness and forget …

  Behind him a door opened, pulling him back into the present. Turning he saw Lewis’s girlfriend come out of the room, her thin shoulders hunched, her pregnant stomach incongruously out of proportion with the rest of her. Slumping against the wall, she looked appallingly young.

  ‘They won’t say anything. I just want to know if he’s going to be OK.’ She spoke with a kind of sulky defiance, but Kit could see the fear in her face when she looked at him. ‘Is he?’

  ‘Wing Commander Randall’s the army medic here. According to him, he’s over the worst now,’ Kit said tersely. ‘If soldiers survive the airlift to the camp hospital their chances of survival are already ninety-seven percent. He’s made it all the way home.’

  Her scowl deepened. ‘I don’t mean is he going to survive. I mean is he going to be OK? I mean, back to normal. Because I don’t think I could stand it if he wasn’t …’ She broke off, turning her face away. Kit could see her throat working franticallyas she swallowed back tears. ‘We don’t even know each other that well,’ she went on, after a moment. ‘We’d not been going out long when this happened.’ A sharp gesture of her head told him she was referring to the pregnancy. ‘It wasn’t exactly planned but, as my mum says, it was my own fault. Just got to get on with it now.’ She looked at Kit with dead eyes then; inky tears were running down her face. ‘And what about this? If he’s … I dunno … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? But whose fault is that?’

  Mine, Kit wanted to say. All mine.

  What right did he have to forget that?

  Sophie’s eyes snapped open.

  She lay very still, staring into the soft summer darkness, all her senses on high alert as she listened out for a repeat of the sound that had woken her.

  Or maybe it hadn’t even been a sound. Maybe it was just a feeling. A dream perhaps? Or an instinct …

  She sat up, struggling from sleep, the hairs rising on the back of her neck. The blood was swishing in her ears, but outside she could hear the usual sounds of the city at night—traffic on the King’s Road, a distant siren, a car moving through the square below.
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br />   And then something else, closer, inside the house. A muffled thud, like something being dropped, followed by the soft, heavy tread of someone coming slowly up the stairs.

  Sophie froze.

  Then, with a muttered curse, she kicked off the covers and scrambled to her feet on the bed, looking frantically around for a weapon and finding herself fervently wishing she’d taken up cricket or baseball. Her heart was galloping. It was no good—there was nothing remotely suited to fending off an intruder within reach, and she realised that she should simply have rolled off the bed and hidden underneath it …

  A shape appeared in the doorway, filling it, just as Sophie’s

  pounding heart seemed to have filled her throat. It was too late to move now, too late to do anything but brazen it out.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she croaked. ‘I have a weapon.’

  With what sounded like a sigh the intruder took a step forwards.

  ‘Where I’ve just come from we don’t call that a weapon. We call that a TV remote.’

  His voice was hoarse with fatigue, sexy as hell and instantly familiar.

  ‘Kit!’

  It was a cross between a shout of jubilation and a sob. In a split second Sophie had bounded across the bed and he caught her as she hurtled into his arms, wrapping her legs tightly around his waist as their mouths met. Questions half formed themselves in her brain, bubbling up then dissolving again in the more urgent need to feel him and touch him and keep on kissing him …

  He lowered her onto the bed without breaking the kiss, and his mouth on hers was hard and hungry. Sliding her hands into his hair, she felt grit. He smelled of earth and antiseptic, but beneath that she caught the scent that made her senses reel—the dry cedar-scent that was all his own, that she had craved like a drug.

  ‘I thought …’ she gasped ‘… you weren’t home … until tomorrow.’

  His lips found hers again.

  ‘I’m here now,’ he rasped against her.

  Now that they were both together on the bed, that was all that mattered.

  Desire gushed through her, slippery and quick. Laying her down on the bed, he straightened up, towering over her for a second. Shadows obscured his face, but in spite of the darkness she caught the silvery glitter of his eyes and it sent another wave of urgent need crashing through her. Rising up onto her knees, she pulled off her T-shirt, stopping with

  her mouth the low moan he uttered as her naked body moved against him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she murmured moments later, fumbling for the buttons on his shirt with shaking fingers.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was a primitive growl that came from low in his chest. He pulled away, half turning as he yanked his shirt from his trousers and wrenched it over his head. In that moment the light from the street filtering through a gap in the curtains caught his face and Sophie gasped.

  ‘No—you’re hurt. Kit, your face—’

  She got to her feet, reaching for him, taking his face between her hands and stroking her thumbs with great tenderness over the lacerations on his cheekbones until she felt him flinch away.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  His hands slid around her waist as his mouth came down on hers again, and the feel of his bare chest, hard against her breasts, was enough to banish the anxiety that had leapt in her, along with every other thought in her head that wasn’t concerned with the immediate need to wrap herself around him. To feel him against her and inside her until there were no joins left and the distance of the last one hundred and fifty-four days was forgotten.

  His hands were warm on her back, moving across her quivering skin with a certainty and steadiness of touch she couldn’t possibly match as she struggled to undo his belt, impatient to get rid of the last barriers that stood between them. She gave a gasp of triumph as she managed to work the buttons free. Swiftly he kicked off his desert combats and they fell back onto the bed.

  None of it was as she’d planned. There was no champagne, no sexy silk nightdress, no sense of seduction, no conversation, just skin and hands and a need so huge she felt as if it might break her wide open.

  There would be a time for talking. Later. Tomorrow.

  This was the best way she knew of bridging the spaces between them, of telling him what she wanted him to know, of reaching him. Just like the first time they’d made love, on the night he’d found out that Ralph Fitzroy wasn’t his father. There had been nothing she could say then because it was too big, too raw, too complex, but for a while it had been flamed into insignificance in the heat of their passion.

  His body was rigid with tension, his shoulders like concrete beneath her fingers. They were both shaking, but as he entered her she felt some of the tightness leave his body as if he too felt the wild, exhilarating rightness that surged through her. Her arms were locked around his neck, their foreheads touching, and the feel of his breath on her cheek, his skin, was almost enough to make her come. Her body shivered and burned, but fiercely she held back, tightening her muscles around him, holding on like a woman in danger of drowning.

  With a moan he slid his arms beneath her back, gathering her up and pulling her hard against his chest as he sat up. Sophie wrapped her legs around his waist, and the increase in pressure was enough to tip her over the edge. She let go, arching backwards and gasping as her orgasm ripped through her.

  He held her, waiting until it had subsided before pulling her back into his arms and burying his face in her neck. She could feel him inside her still, and slowly she rotated her pelvis, stroking his hair, holding him tightly until he stiffened and cried out her name.

  Together they collapsed back onto the bed. Cradling his head against her breasts, Sophie stared up into the darkness and smiled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  KIT woke suddenly, his body convulsing with panic.

  It took a few seconds for reality to reassert itself. It was light—the cool, bluish light of an English morning, and the sheets were clean and smooth against his skin. Sophie was lying on her side, tucked into his body, one hand flat on his chest, over his frantically thudding heart.

  The fact that he wasn’t actually walking along a dust track towards a bridge with a bomb beneath it told him he must have slept. After a hundred and fifty-four largely sleepless nights it felt like a small miracle.

  He shifted position slightly so he could look into Sophie’s sleeping face, stretching limbs that had stiffened from being still for so long. His heart squeezed. God, she was so lovely. The summer had brought out a faint sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and put a bloom into her creamy cheeks. Or maybe that was last night. The erection he’d woken up with intensified as he remembered, and he looked at her mouth. Her top lip with its steep upwards sweep and pronounced Cupid’s bow was slightly swollen from his kisses.

  It was also curved into the faintest and most secretive of smiles.

  Deeply asleep, she looked serene and self-contained, as if she was travelling through wonderful places where he could

  never hope to follow, full of people he didn’t know. No godforsaken, mine-strewn desert roads for her, he thought bleakly.

  The light filtering through the narrow gap in the curtains gleamed on her smooth bare shoulder and cast a halo around her hair. Picking up a silken strand, he wound it lazily around his finger, thinking back to one of the last times he had lain here beside her and asked her to marry him.

  What a fool. What a selfish, stupid fool.

  Anything could have happened. He thought of Lewis’s girlfriend; her terrified eyes and her swollen stomach. We don’t even know each other that well … If he’s … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? What if it had been him instead of Lewis? They’d only had three weeks together. Three weeks. How could he have expected Sophie to stand by him for a lifetime when he barely knew her?

  The gleaming lock of hair fell back onto her creamy shoulder, but he left his hand there, holding it in front of his face and stretching his fingers. They shook s
lightly, prickling with pins and needles, and he curled them into a fist, squeezing hard.

  Harder.

  The bones showed white beneath his sun-darkened skin and pain flared through the stretched tendons, but it didn’t quite manage to drive away the numbness, or stop the slide-show that was replaying itself in his head again. The heat shimmering over the road, the hard sun glinting off windows in the buildings above. That eerie silence. The way everything had seemed to slip into slow motion, as if it were happening underwater. His hands trembling uncontrollably; the wire cutters slipping through his nerveless fingers as the voice in his earpiece grew more urgent, telling him that a sniper had been spotted …

  And then the gunshots.

  He sat up, swearing under his breath. Dragging a hand

  over his face, he winced as he caught a scab that had begun to form on one of the cuts across his cheekbone.

  He was home, and back with Sophie. So why did it feel as if he were still fighting, and further away from her than ever?

  Sophie stopped in the kitchen doorway.

  Kit was sitting at the table with the pile of letters that had come while he’d been away, drinking coffee. He was wearing jeans but no shirt, and his skin was tanned to the colour of mahogany. Sophie’s stomach flipped.

  ‘Hi.’

  Oh, dear. Having leapt out of bed almost as soon as she opened her eyes, brushed her teeth like a person on speeded-up film and even slapped a bit of tinted moisturiser onto her too-pale cheeks before running downstairs, it was ridiculous that that was all she could manage. Hi. And in a voice that was barely more than a strangled whisper.

  He looked up. The morning light showed up the mess of cuts and bruising on his face, making him look battered and exhausted and beautiful.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘So you are real,’ she said ruefully, going across to fill the kettle. ‘I thought I might have dreamed it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done that while you’ve been gone—dreamed about you so vividly that waking up was like saying goodbye all over again.’ She stopped, before she said any more and gave herself away as being a terrifying, crazy, obsessive fiancée. To make it sound as if she were joking she asked, ‘Did they let you off a day early for good behaviour?’

 

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