But then they were still making love—with their eyes and his body movements—and the way she lay there, following the removal of each piece of clothing with such devotion, flooded each newly revealed part of his compact muscle-structure with a burning sense of masculine arrogance.
‘You study me with the curiosity of a virgin,’ he murmured as he came to lie beside her.
She just smiled a bewitchingly provocative smile, and in the next moment he rolled her onto her back and punished the smile with a kiss that changed the whole tempo of what he had been creating before.
Samantha placed her hands on his body and this time he didn’t attempt to stop her. Each touch became a deliberate torment, heightening the senses to a pitch that was almost savage in their quest to wring the most from the other. She stroked his arms, his back, dug her nails deep into the flesh which formed his lean, tight buttocks, and his teeth grazed tauntingly across a nipple then hungrily drew the whole stinging areola into his mouth.
And hot—he was hot. His skin was hot, his mouth—the moisture within it. She drew in a tight breath of air and found the scent of his body so intoxicatingly hot it turned the air to a thick, smooth, sensual steam she was reluctant to breathe out again.
When he came back to plunder her mouth, she responded by closing her arms around him and flattening her body up against his body, breast to breast, hips to hips—soft pulsing sex making contact with hard probing sex. He rolled with her until she was lying on top of him, her kissing him, her moving on him, her hair—having escaped from its knot long ago—tumbling in a silken trail of spiralling waves all around his face and shoulders.
Then her knee began to protest at the uncomfortable pressure she was placing upon it and, on a tiny groan, it was she who was changing their position, rolling onto the mattress beside him and trying to bring him with her. But he was too shrewd for his own good. He’d heard the groan and had recognised it for what it was. Before she realised what he was doing he was leaning down to kiss the hairline pink scars which criss-crossed the once smooth and perfect area.
‘No,’ she whimpered, strangely upset by what he was doing, and she reached to grasp a fistful of his hair to pull him away again.
He let her do it, but came to lean over her with a face carved with tension. ‘If you ever put your life at risk again, I will personally kill you!’ he rasped at her furiously.
She still held tight to a fistful of his hair, and in reply she brought his mouth onto hers to kiss away the fear raking through him. And it was fear; she knew that instinctively. It filled her with a most peculiar feeling of warmth tinged with aching despair.
And, as if he knew it, he entered her like a man caught between two kinds of hell. It should have hurt it was so fierce and possessive. But it didn’t hurt. It was in fact the most exquisite sensation she felt she had ever experienced. He thrust deep and she welcomed him like a long-lost, desperately missed lover.
‘André,’ she breathed again.
It sent him spinning over that finely balanced edge between control and sexual insanity. He drove into her like a man who was being given his last chance to experience this level of ecstasy. And she took each hot, lancing thrust with gasps of pleasure, growing shrill the closer she came to reaching the goal he was driving her towards.
Yet when she reached it she went quiet, and his hand trembled when it raked up to push the tendrils of hair away from her face, so he could watch this woman, who did everything with such frightening totality, absorbing each consuming wave of pleasure he was inducing, in a silence that pierced his heart with the knowledge that she was no longer of this world but floating on another plane entirely.
Then he joined her. With one more sweet, slow plunge, his eyes drew closed and his features grew sharp as he began to spill out his own fierce pleasure.
Neither of them was aware of anything much for the next few, communal minutes while they made a slow return to a sanity that seemed more exhausting than the climb out of it.
Then he became conscious of his weight pressing heavily down on her and reluctantly decided to move. His careful withdrawal from her body caused a final mutual spasm of residual pleasure, then cool air touched their sweat-sheened flesh as he rolled onto his back beside her on the bed.
After that they just lay there, with eyes closed and bodies slack, waiting for reality to come filtering back in. It was the calm after the storm with another storm hovering in the near distance, threatening to roll in depending on what they both chose to do or say next.
Eventually he turned, moving onto his side to face her, and touched her cheek with a finger. ‘Okay?’ he asked huskily.
Samantha nodded, and though her eyes flickered open she couldn’t seem to bring herself to look at him, so she stared at the ceiling instead while she admitted sombrely, ‘I knew your touch.’
The finger stilled in its gentle tracing of her cheekbone. Reaching up, she caught the finger, clutching at it hard as she added shakily, ‘I knew you.’
He didn’t try to recover the finger. In fact he didn’t do anything but lie very still. ‘You say knew not know,’ he remarked finally. ‘Is that significant?’
She closed her eyes again, nodded and felt a tear creep out from the far corner of each eye. ‘Nothing else,’ she whispered. ‘I just—know your touch, and for a while I knew you…’
Which was why she was gripping his finger so tightly, André pondered grimly to himself. And wanted to cry with her, it was that damned wretched.
‘I’m so afraid it will be all I’ll ever know now.’
On a sigh he gathered her in, kissed her brow, stroked his cheek over her tumbled hair, and left his finger right where it was, because—hell—if she did need to touch him then let her keep the finger! He didn’t need it. But, God, he needed her.
‘It will be okay.’ He tried to sound reassuring, though he was no more certain of anything than she was herself. ‘Trust me, cara, and I will promise to get you through this as quickly and as painlessly as I can.’
‘It will be painful, then?’
‘Yes.’ He sighed; it was no use denying it. It was, after all, why they were supposed to be taking things so carefully.
And why they should not even be here like this.
Fool, he cursed himself. A ban on intimacy to this degree should have been a foregone conclusion to anyone with intelligence. Keep your hands off until you have a right to touch, he’d told himself, because he was acutely aware that he had lost that right twelve months ago. So what had he done? Within twenty-four hours of setting eyes on her again he’d tumbled her into the nearest bed and taken just about every liberty he could with her.
Well done, André, he mocked himself harshly. At least last time you managed to wait a whole week before you took her to bed. This time you could barely manage a full day.
Well not again, he vowed. Not until she recovered every last wretched memory! Then he almost groaned in frustration when she began absently stroking the tip of his finger over the softness of her lips. His body quickened. He shut his eyes and grimly forced his senses back into the cupboard they had been languishing in for a whole, miserable year.
‘Come on,’ he said, and got off the bed then bent down to lift her to her feet. Already he was getting used to waiting patiently while she used his forearms as support until she gained a reasonable balance.
‘Okay?’ he prompted when her grip slackened.
‘Mmm,’ she said.
Looking down to check for himself that she was indeed managing before he took his arms away, he saw long and slender naked flesh, pearly white skin and a cluster of fine ginger curls, which reminded him of certain sensual pleasures he still hadn’t reacquainted himself with… Then he had to turn away before she could see what was happening to him.
‘Right, go and have a quick shower, then pack your things while I do the same,’ he instructed briskly, striding around the room to pick up his clothes. ‘I would like to leave here within the hour if we can do it.’
‘We’re still leaving today?’
Her tone alone was enough to have him straighten, with his final piece of clothing, to see her still standing where he had left her, looking like a beautiful Titian goddess, wearing a lost and frightened expression on her face that cut him to the quick.
She didn’t want to leave Devon and what she had come to feel safe with. And he had no choice but to insist they leave, because her past was in London—and his future, if she was going to let him have one once she recovered her memory, that was.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘London,’ she murmured, and he hated to see that vulnerable expression hollowing out her lovely green eyes. It was impossible not to respond to it, and on a sigh he walked back to her, kissed her once, firmly.
‘Home,’ he corrected firmly. ‘We are going home…’
CHAPTER NINE
THEY were an hour into their journey before either of them spoke more than a few frustratingly short syllables without a protective coating of politeness on their voices.
Home, he’d said, and instantly the barriers had gone back up between them. He’d erected his wall, Samantha suspected, because he wasn’t going to change his mind and didn’t want to argue about it. She had put her wall up because she wanted to argue but didn’t seem to have any grounds to do so.
Home was home. Of course he wanted to take her back there, she reasoned. Or why else would he go to all this trouble to come and get her? Home probably also held a million clues as to why she was like this, and if she wanted to recover her memory then home was the most logical place to go and look for it.
But accepting all of that didn’t stop her from dreading the moment. So it was easier to be silent than risk letting it all spill out.
Only, the silence was also causing the kind of tension in the small confines of the car that was obviously beginning to get to him, going by the frequent, tight glances he kept flicking at her.
‘What do you think it is I am taking you to?’ he exploded as if on cue at her last thought. ‘Hell and damnation?’
Turning her face to the car’s side window, she refused to answer, and he began muttering some really choice curses, most of them in rich Italian, which quite colourfully described his irritation with sulky females, the heavy traffic on British motorways, and the whole situation in general.
‘Have you always had such a filthy temper?’ she asked coldly when he eventually sizzled into silence.
‘No, I caught it from you,’ he replied, changing lanes and increasing his speed, mainly, she suspected, because it gave him something to do. ‘With anyone else I am as cool-tempered as an arctic frost.’
‘That surprises me.’
‘Why should it?’ he threw back. ‘I run a multinational corporation. You don’t do that efficiently when you let your emotions rule your head.’
‘The Italian temperament is notoriously volatile,’ was all she said to that.
It was like a red rag being waved at an angry bull. ‘I make love in Italian too,’ he gritted, drawing a parallel even he didn’t understand.
‘Your first name is French, though, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘My mother was French,’ he explained. ‘My father Italian. But I was born and bred in the city of Philadelphia. The Mongrel, you used to like to call me,’ he added with a smile. ‘So I used to retaliate and call you—’
‘The Alleycat,’ she said.
His foot slipped off the accelerator. She straightened in her seat and the ensuing silence was stunned.
‘You remember,’ he breathed, getting a hold of himself only enough to concentrate on his driving, while she continued to sit there staring straight ahead and looking pale again.
Seeing the sickly pallor, he began to get worried, ‘Samantha,’ he prompted, suddenly feeling trapped there on a three-lane motorway doing seventy miles an hour. ‘Talk to me,’ he commanded.
But it became clear that she couldn’t. With a flashing glance in his mirrors, he indicated and began switching lanes. If the worst came to the worst, he decided, he could pull onto the hard shoulder now, without causing a multi-car pile-up.
His jaw felt like a piece of rock. Reaching across the central console, he took a tight hold on her hands where she held them knotted together on her lap. ‘Speak,’ he ordered tightly.
This time he managed to get through to her. ‘I’m all right,’ she insisted, but they both knew that she wasn’t. ‘I’m not going to fall into a hysterical fit.’
‘Ask me the same question,’ he mocked. Then he saw a sign up ahead warning of a service exit and threw up a silent thanks to whoever had put it there.
A few minutes later he was pulling them into a parking bay, shutting down the engine, then climbing out of the car and swinging around the long bonnet to open her door. She was still too pale, too still.
‘Come on,’ he said, firmly urging her out of the car and into his arms. The worst of it was that she went without a murmur, burying her face into his throat then just standing there, letting his warmth and his strength infuse a little bit of both back into her.
‘Sorry,’ she murmured eventually, straightening away from him a little. ‘It was shock, that’s all, to hear myself saying it and know I was speaking the truth.’
His hands came up to cup her face, lifting it so he could search her clouded eyes. ‘It was no big thing,’ he gently dismissed. ‘I suppose we should be worrying if you don’t have the occasional memory flash.’
‘Is that what the doctor said?’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘But I’m not supposed to push it, which I did just now by bringing up the past. So it’s me who should be apologising, not you.’
It was such a sweet thing to say she wanted to start crying. Maybe he saw the tears threatening, because his tone suddenly became very brisk. ‘Now we’ve stopped, let’s go and find a drink and a sandwich or something.’
Subject over—put away. Samantha had no wish to argue with that decision.
Half an hour later they were back on the road, and the day was beginning to draw in around them. After a coffee and a sandwich she was feeling a bit better, less tense about the whole London situation, and definitely more relaxed with him. ‘Tell me about Bressingham,’ she said.
He glanced at her, then away again, and for a while she thought he wasn’t going to answer. It was, after all, another part of that past he had made taboo between them. ‘You remember something else?’ he questioned eventually.
‘Just the name.’
He nodded, and took another few moments to take this reply in. ‘The Bressingham is a hotel,’ he then announced. That was all, no elaboration.
Samantha began to frown. ‘One of yours?’ she asked.
‘We occupy six major sites in London alone,’ he supplied.
‘Is that where I met you? Did I work at the Bressingham Hotel?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Which is why Stefan Reece specifically connected the hotel with me,’ she therefore concluded.
‘Just look at that,’ he suddenly exclaimed, indicating the road directly ahead of them. ‘We are about to be engulfed in one hell of a cloudburst, looking at the spray coming off the road.’
He was right and they were. It hit almost at the same moment they noticed it. ‘No talking now, while I concentrate,’ André instructed as the windscreen wipers leapt into life.
Sublimely unaware that she had been smoothly put through several diversions in the last sixty seconds, Samantha didn’t even think of arguing when they were shrouded in a wet grey mist which cut visibility down to an absolute minimum.
To ease the silence, he reached out and switched on the radio, and two seconds later a preset pop station began singing out the latest rock ballad obsessing the pop charts at the moment.
He didn’t bother to change the station and she didn’t mind the music. So they drove on through the rain cocooned in their own small, dry world with the music and inane DJ chatter to keep them company, and the
steady swish of the car wiper-blades slowly luring Samantha into a light slumber.
From the corner of his eye André saw her body relax and was at last able to ease some of the tension out of his own. There was a very fine line between telling outright lies and merely bending the truth a little, he observed very grimly. Reflecting on their last conversation, he couldn’t quite clear it with his conscience that he had managed to tread that fine line all the way.
The problem was that the Bressingham was one of several major issues that had placed them in this situation in the first place. And, until he had decided which issue to tackle first, he had no wish to tackle any.
‘Ever heard the adage that real life is stranger than fiction?’ The DJ’s voice cut into his brooding. ‘Well, listen to this…’
Go to hell, André thought, and switched stations. He had his own stranger-than-real-life situation tying him in knots right here. He didn’t need to listen to anyone else’s!
The rain stopped as they were driving down the Kensington Road. As if sensing the difference when the wipers fell silent, Samantha stirred, stretched, opened her eyes, and found herself staring straight into a pair of warmly familiar dark brown eyes.
‘Hi,’ he murmured softly, and her stomach turned over.
‘Hi,’ she responded, feeling shy beneath the intimacy of his gaze. Stupid she knew, after the kind of intimacies they’d shared this afternoon. But she still made quite a play out of sitting up properly to give her an excuse to break that eye contact.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, glancing out of the window.
‘Stuck in traffic,’ he answered wryly. ‘You slept for over an hour,’ he added as the car began crawling forward. ‘Which had me wondering if you didn’t sleep much last night.’
Last night felt a long way away to Samantha—several very long lifetimes in fact. ‘The rain’s stopped,’ she said. It was her way of ignoring his question.
‘Only just,’ he replied, and turned off at the next junction, taking them past place names she recognised but didn’t know why she did. If anyone had asked her she would have claimed never to have even visited London, never mind lived here.
The Unforgettable Husband Page 9