by Penny Jordan
And tomorrow? When she had to face Marcus’s anger and rejection?
But this wasn’t tomorrow. It was today. It was here and now. She was already dealing with Marcus’s rejection and had been for years. Why shouldn’t she sweeten it with the kind of memories that would burn within the shrine of her most secret places for ever?
‘Marcus... Marcus...’ she whispered fiercely against his lips, and she lifted her mouth to his, wriggling as close to him as she could, oblivious to the fact that her movements had caused the press-studs fastening her fragile silk dress to pop open until she felt the unwanted presence of its small cap sleeves halfway down her arms.
The unwanted intrusion of her dress and its unfamiliarly draped sleeves was easily dealt with. She simply dropped her arms and let it slide down to the floor, to pool round her feet, then stepped out of it. Thus freed, she lifted her arms and wrapped them tightly round Marcus’s neck, standing in only one shoe, a thin silk camisole and matching fluted-legged brief French knickers. Ridiculously, perhaps, one of the first things she had done after Nick’s betrayal and their subsequent divorce was to go inside the Agent Provocateur shop she walked past most days on her way to her office and treat herself to the kind of underwear that every sensual woman had a right to enjoy—even if her husband had labelled her as sexless.
Marcus was trying to say something to her, she realised, as she rubbed her nose against the bare flesh of his throat with open sensual pleasure, breathing in the scent of him. And she could feel his fingers biting into the soft skin of her upper arms, too. But she was too lost in the sheer wonder of the moment, and what was happening, to pay any attention to what he might be trying to say. Why speak, after all, when they could be doing this? Lucy decided giddily in adrenaline-and love-fuelled need, as she created around herself the familiar fantasy that had comforted her Marcus-deprived body for so long. The fantasy in which Marcus just could not resist her and didn’t even want to. Poor Marcus. He was probably dreadfully uncomfortable in all those clothes—that tie, that buttoned-up shirt—surely it behoved her to aid him with their removal?
She tried for the tie first, her tongue-tip pressed firmly against her teeth as she worked at the knot with eager fingers.
‘Lucy!’
‘Mmm?’ She had worn a tie at school, as part of her uniform, so surely unknotting this one...?
‘Lucy...’ Marcus’s hands covered her own. Lucy looked up at him and gave him an approving smile. Obviously he shared her own eagerness for him to be rid of his clothes and wanted to help her. She intended to say as much to him, but suddenly she became distracted as she looked at his mouth, and then she couldn’t look away again.
‘Marcus.’ She whispered his name in dizzy delight as she looked at it and longed for it, touching her own tongue to her lips as her eyes darkened with the heat of her own hunger for him.
Reaching up, she pressed her mouth tenderly against his. His lips felt firm and strong, his flesh sensuously distracting and hunger-inducing as she breathed tiny kisses against it, little nibbles that grew bolder as each taste fuelled her need for more. Marcus’s hands left her arms and gripped her waist.
It was nice to be held so tightly, she acknowledged, but it would be even nicer if he were to touch her breast. So much easier, surely, for her to simply take his hand and place it against the warm swell of her own flesh beneath the thin silk of her cami and hold it there whilst her tongue darted excitedly against the closed line of his mouth, begging for entrance to the pleasures that lay beyond them...
‘Lucy!’
What was Marcus doing? He couldn’t be pushing her away. Frantically she reached out to him, then lost her balance and started to fall backwards onto the bed behind her.
Immediately Marcus made a grab for her, but it was too late, and somehow or other she was lying on the bed, with Marcus on top of her. The full weight of his body was pressing her down into the mattress and it felt so good. In fact it felt, he felt like heaven...like everything good she had ever experienced in the whole of her life, only ten times more than that. She exhaled in delighted bliss and wrapped her arms tightly round his neck, pressing her mouth against his, her lips parted invitingly.
She heard Marcus make a thick muffled sound. Surely not a groan? And then his hands were in her hair, his fingers hard and warm against her scalp as he held her head in sensual imprisonment and his mouth moved on hers.
Had she imagined she knew what a kiss was? She had known nothing—less than nothing, Lucy admitted, as the emotional champagne bubbles of delight and disbelief exploded inside her and raced along her veins into every part of her body. Most especially to those bits of her body that were particularly receptive to the kind of pleasure Marcus was giving her. Even her toes were curling, in a silent exclamation of thrilled awe.
So this was what it felt like to be truly aroused by and responsive to a man. No wonder in times gone by mothers of impressionable daughters had guarded them so ferociously. Already she was hooked on what Marcus was giving her; already she wanted and needed more. His tongue-tip teased the sensitivity of her lips with small, almost whip-like tormenting caresses before suddenly hardening and thrusting deep into her mouth, not just once but repeatedly, until her whole body was shuddering in rhythmic response to those thrusts.
Dizzily Lucy reflected that she’d asked for one miracle but had actually got two! Was that how it worked with this miracle thing? Once you had tuned in to miracles, so to speak, did they just keep on coming? Little miracles popping up here, there and everywhere?
‘Oh, I do so hope there will be more,’ she whispered ecstatically as Marcus released her mouth.
‘What?’ he demanded, looking down at her, all blazing impatience and irritation and lethal male desire.
‘More,’ she repeated sweetly, giving him a beatific smile. ‘I would like more, Marcus. Much more,’ she emphasised.
‘You want more?’ he repeated.
Why was he looking at her like that? As though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing? As though the hard pulse of his erection didn’t exist?
Lucy wasn’t going to let herself be dragged out of her fantasy.
‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. Now that he had kissed her, and she had tasted him, her body was so fixated on him that it would probably mount an all-out rebellion if it was denied him now. She wanted him and she was going to have him, she decided firmly. She deserved to have him.
‘It’s been such a long time, you see,’ she told him. And it had. Such a very, very long time since she had first looked at him and wanted him. And now here was her very own personal miracle, making it possible for her to have him. So of course she wanted more of them—and of him, too. But right now she didn’t have time to explain all of that to him because right now...right now she had far more important and exciting things she wanted to do.
She looked up into his eyes and then gave in to the temptation to stroke her tongue-tip along the line of his throat. She heard him groan, felt him shudder, and then his hands were on her body, as she had so much longed for them to be, cupping her breasts whilst she tugged off his tie and her fingers worked busily to unfasten the buttons of his shirt. The pads of his thumbs were stroking her erect nipples, working the silk of her camisole against them until she moaned in helpless delight at the effect his deliberate stroking of the fine silk against her sensitive flesh was having on her.
But she got her own back. She had unfastened his shirt and was free to slide her hands inside it, palms flat against the hard muscle of his chest. She lifted her head and kissed his collarbone, stringing tiny kisses together in mute arousal. His fingers plucked erotically at one nipple whilst her own urgent movements brought the other free of her cami. She flicked her tongue-tip urgently against the small stone hardness of Marcus’s flat male nipples, tasting first one and then the other, tormenting herself with the knowledge of the pleasure that lay ahea
d of her when she allowed her hands and her mouth to move down over his body.
Marcus bent his head and kissed her throat. His fingertip traced the shape of her ear whilst his teeth nibbled gently on her lobe, and then his mouth caressed the flesh just behind it. A spasm of intense pleasure and longing shot through her, and she arched her back to bring her breast fully into his hand, a small, keening moan bubbling in her throat. Her toes curled, and automatically she opened her legs in eager supplication.
Against her body she could feel the erect heat and hardness of Marcus’s own arousal, whilst what he was doing to that tiny spot of flesh was practically bringing her to the point of orgasm all by itself.
His hand stroked her hip and then slid lower, finding the soft curve of her bottom beneath the wide silky leg of her fluted French knickers. Some women thought thongs were sexy, but right now Lucy felt that what she was wearing and the access to all areas they gave Marcus was far more alluring. Without any need to remove them, his hand had already moved from her bottom to the soft silky curls of hair between her legs, and his thumb was massaging slow circles against her mound before his fingers started to tease her open.
Lucy moaned and writhed and lifted her body up to his hands, then gasped as he stroked deftly into her wetness in the very same heartbeat as his lips started to caress her tight nipple.
She felt as though a magical cord was somehow stretched from her breast to her belly, and that what Marcus was doing to her was tightening it to the point where she wanted to scream with urgent longing for him to do more, to take her further, deeper.
‘Marcus, I’m going to come,’ she protested thickly. But instead of heeding her warning and removing his clothes, so that he could slide into her, he lifted his head and looked steadily at her whilst his fingers moved more purposefully over her. Over her and into her. Stroking her, teasing her, until she was so hot, and so wet, and so wanting...
‘I’m not coming until you’re inside me,’ she told him, panting out the words as she struggled to hold back her orgasm, her fingers closing over him through the fabric of his clothes and her body shuddering violently in excitement as she realised how thick and strong he actually was.
He undressed with speedy efficiency, scarcely giving her time to enjoy the pleasure of looking at his naked body. Then he undressed her as well, and then positioned himself between her welcoming, eager thighs.
‘Missionary position?’ she huffed, pulling a small face.
‘It’s all we’ve got time for if you want me inside you when we come,’ Marcus told her rawly, before bending his head to kiss her naked breasts in turn whilst he rubbed the hard hot head of his erection against her clitoris until she called out frantically to him, begging him to satisfy her.
Lucy felt her orgasm seize her in its seismic grip with his third thrust, her muscles fastening round him to hold and caress him, to draw from him the sharp, sweet juice of life itself.
* * *
She knew the moment she opened he eyes that she wasn’t in her own bed. But it was several seconds before she realised just whose bed she was in—or rather whose bedroom, since the room she was in was obviously a guest room. Marcus’s guest room. In Marcus’s Wendover Square house.
She gave a small despairing groan as the events of the previous afternoon and evening formed images inside her head—images she was forced to view without the protection of her earlier adrenaline-induced armour.
What on earth had possessed her to behave like that? Granted, she loved Marcus, and always would love him, but last night she had... She swallowed uncomfortably whilst her whole body burned in the flames of her own shocking memories.
She looked at her watch. Ten a.m.
She shot upright in the bed. It couldn’t possibly be! She’d always woken up at seven at the very latest—always. Even on her honeymoon.
But last night with Marcus she’d had the kind of sex, the quality of sex that she most definitely had not had with Nick—either on her honeymoon or at any other time.
Marcus? Where was he? She hauled up the duvet, holding it to cover her naked breasts, even though some sixth sense told her that the house was a Marcus-free zone. Her clothes, which she could blush-makingly remember abandoning all over the place, had been thoughtfully retrieved and neatly folded—although she couldn’t see her knickers—and there was an envelope propped up on the tallboy with her name written across it in Marcus’s imperious hand. Keeping the duvet wrapped around herself, she got out of bed and padded over to the tallboy. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper on which Marcus had written economically.
Your underwear is in the dryer. Don’t leave without having some breakfast—coffee, fruit, cereal, etc, in cupboards and fridge. Will be in touch this p.m. re visit to Beatrice.
Her knickers were in the dryer! How domestic, how authoritarian—how Marcus.
And how lovely to know they would be clean. If she had one tiny little hang-up, it was that she was almost too neat and tidy—and everything that went with that, Lucy admitted as she hurried into the bathroom. But then boarding school did that to a person, she reflected, as she stood beneath the refreshing sting of the shower, lathering her skin and her hair.
The décor in Marcus’s house might be slightly old-fashioned, but the guest bathroom was well stocked with everything that an overnight visitor minus her sponge bag might need. Lucy smiled approvingly when she found a new toothbrush as well as toothpaste in the basket beside the basin, along with a new comb, a small unopened jar of face cream and even deodorant.
Fortunately her hair was naturally straight, so she had no need to do anything other than wash and comb it, knowing that by the time she reached her office it would have dried. And even more fortunately, given the time and the fact that she had a considerable amount of paperwork to attend to, she could go straight there and change into a pair of jeans once she got there. She always kept several changes of clothes there, just in case.
Her head had begun to ache unpleasantly—a combination of anxiety about what Marcus might be likely to say to her about last night and lack of caffeine, Lucy decided as she made her way downstairs in her silk dress but minus her stiletto shoes.
Marcus’s kitchen was, of course, immaculate. Having retrieved her underwear from the laundry room and quickly put it on—no matter how saucy it might be, she simply was not a ‘no knickers’ girl, Lucy decided firmly—she hurried into the kitchen, desperately in need of a very strong cup of coffee.
Ten minutes later, after going through every cupboard and finding only decaf, she was forced to admit that there was an unbridgeable gap between her idea of what constituted a proper breakfast drink and Marcus’s.
Decaf. She screwed up her nose in distaste as she made herself a cup and munched half-heartedly on a banana.
Those butterflies in her stomach weren’t there just because she needed her caffeine fix. They were there because last night she had seduced Marcus. Because she had thrown herself at him—and onto him. Her face started to burn, and not just with the guilty embarrassment she ought to be feeling. Her mental self might feel guilt and shame and be dreading having to face Marcus, but her physical self was positively crowing with delight, reliving with relish every single intimate caress and kiss. It certainly had no intention of feeling any kind of shame whatsoever.
But what about her emotional self? Lucy wondered sadly as she let herself out of the house, carefully checking that the door had locked behind her before setting off to walk the short distance to her Sloane Street office. Her emotional self was caught between the two opposing forces of her mind and her body. Her emotional self loved Marcus and yearned for him to love her back. Her mental self said that it was simply not possible, and warned her of the pain and humiliation she was courting. Her physical self, on the other hand, was still wallowing in the triumphant afterglow of sex with a lover who had elevated the experience to a p
lane hitherto unknown to her other than via fevered fantasies and lustful daydreams.
Add to all of that the fact that the thought of seeing Marcus again was making her feel physically sick with apprehension, and it was no wonder her head was pounding, Lucy decided as she hurried into the coffee shop she regularly used to obtain her daytime caffeine fix. To her relief she was the only customer.
‘Your usual?’ the girl behind the counter asked cheerfully.
‘Please, Sarah—no, make that two,’ Lucy told her. ‘And a couple of chocolate brownies as well.’
Sarah gave her a wicked grin.
‘Caffeine and carbs? It must have been a good night last night.’
‘The best—at least what I can remember of it,’ Lucy agreed, rolling her eyes and grinning back. But the truth was that the first bit of her light-hearted response to Sarah’s teasing was exactly that—the truth. It had been the best—and was likely to remain so, she reminded herself grimly as she gathered up her double espressos and her brownies and stepped back into the late-morning sunshine.
Marcus would certainly not want a rerun, and now that she had had her fantasies come to life—now that she knew just how far short they had fallen of the reality of the heaven of Marcus’s arms around her, Marcus’s mouth on hers, Marcus’s lovemaking—she was going to have to spend the rest of her life not just knowing she could never love anyone else but also knowing that she was never going to want to have sex with anyone else.
It was a miserable thing to have to admit to herself as she hurried into the building that housed Prêt a Party’s offices, pausing to exchange smiles with Harry the doorman as she did so.
Once, Prêt a Party’s offices had been filled with the busy hum of telephones ringing, clients calling, the laughter of her two best friends and partners. But now they were empty and silent. Kicking the door closed as she balanced her coffee, Lucy fought the temptation not to think about how Marcus had kicked the bedroom door open last night—and what had happened after he had.