by Penny Jordan
‘Here…give me your hand.’
Reluctantly, Rosy did so, tensing slightly as he removed the ring from its box and slid it firmly down over her ring finger.
‘It’s…it’s very beautiful,’ she told Guard politely. ‘Thank you.’
‘Is that the best you can do? You sound like a child thanking an adult for some extra pocket money. It is customary to thank one’s prospective bridegroom in a rather more intimate fashion for such a gift.’
His glance dropped to her mouth as he spoke, and Rosy was irritated by the wave of self-consciousness that swept over her. He was doing it deliberately, of course. Well, she’d show him. Gritting her teeth, she lifted her face obediently towards his, instinctively closing her eyes as she waited…and waited.
When nothing happened, she opened her eyes and glared angrily at Guard.
‘If that’s the best you can do, then the more of this marriage of ours that’s conducted out of public view, the better,’ Guard told her cynically. ‘For your information, my dear Rosy, a newly engaged, supposedly ecstatically in love woman does not screw up her face and react to the thought of being kissed by her fiancé as though she’s been told she has to take a dose of medicine.’
‘But we aren’t ecstatically in love,’ Rosy reminded him crossly.
‘And for all the reasons I’ve already been through with you, it is extremely important that no one else other than us knows that,’ Guard pointed out. ‘Edward isn’t a fool, Rosy,’ he warned her. ‘If he thinks he’s got the slightest chance of disputing your claim to this place, he’s going to take it.’
‘So what am I supposed to do?’ Rosy demanded defensively. ‘Take lessons in how to kiss a man as though I love him when I don’t? No, thanks, I don’t need them,’ she snapped.
‘No? That’s not the impression I got. A kiss between two committed lovers is nothing like the jumbled, bungled efforts you’ve obviously experienced,’ Guard told her.
Rosy glared furiously back at him, caught between anger and embarrassment. She wanted to tell Guard that she knew exactly what it felt like to exchange wildly passionate kisses with a man she wanted, but she was uncomfortably aware that it simply wasn’t true.
The kisses and the men she had known so far had all left her depressingly unmoved.
‘I’m not an actress, Guard,’ she told him more cautiously instead. ‘I can’t manufacture passion to order…’
‘No?’ Guard commented softly. ‘Then perhaps it’s time you learned.’
He was still holding her hand; holding her hand and standing so close to her that all he had to do to close the gap between them was simply to take a single step towards her.
Rosy tensed as she waited for him to imprison her in his arms, knowing he was far too strong for her to be able to break free; but instead he slowly lifted his free hand and gently brushed her hair back off her face.
‘This is how a man deeply in love touches a woman, Rosy,’ he told her quietly. ‘She seems so vulnerable, so delicate, so precious to him that he’s half afraid to touch her, half afraid that the merest sensation of her skin against his fingertips will ignite a passion within him that he simply cannot control. He wants her…her wants her desperately and overpoweringly, and yet at the same time he wants to go oh, so slowly with her, to savour and hold on to every millisecond of contact with her.
‘He is caught between those twin needs—his hunger for her, his urgent desire to possess and devour her, and his desire to worship her, to give her all the pleasure he can…all the pleasure there is. And so he touches her skin, gently and perhaps even a little unsteadily and, as he does so, he looks into her eyes, wanting to see in them that his passion, his need, his love are reciprocated, wanting to see that she knows and understands how great the strain of his self-imposed self-control is.
‘If she does return his feelings, she, too, will reach out and touch him.’
Mesmerised by the soft timbre of Guard’s words, Rosy didn’t even blink as he lifted her left hand to his jaw.
Freed momentarily from the hypnotism of his eyes, she flinched a little beneath the sharp quiver of unexpected sensation that ran through her body as her fingertips touched the slight roughness of Guard’s jaw.
He had turned his head away from her and she gasped out aloud as she felt his lips caressing the soft centre of her palm and then the inside of her wrist where her pulse was beating so fast that its frantic race was making her feel quite dizzy.
‘A man in love will take his time in reaching his ultimate target,’ Guard was telling her softly. ‘He’ll kiss her throat, her ears…’
Rosy trembled as she felt the soft brush of Guard’s mouth against her skin.
‘But all the time what he really wants…’
Rosy tensed as she felt the warmth of Guard’s breath moving across her face. Her mouth had gone apprehensively dry, her lips parting a little in her need to draw extra air into her lungs.
‘Her mouth will draw him like a magnet…lure him, make him ache from head to foot in his need to taste its velvet softness—to taste her, to possess her in what is in reality a sensual preparation and stimulant, a taste of what is to come when they enjoy a far more intimate exploration of one another.
‘When a man in love kisses a woman’s mouth and explores the taste of her already, in his mind, in his body, he is imagining—anticipating—the far more intimate taste of her.’
Rosy shivered. She was drowning in a flood of consuming heat caused by what she told herself was fury and embarrassment at what Guard was doing…saying to her.
She could feel the warmth of his breath against her lips, the heat of his palm against her scalp beneath her hair as he supported her head with one hand; the other was slowly caressing her back, stroking dangerously along her spine.
‘He kisses her gently at first,’ Guard told her. ‘Like this…’
The pressure of his mouth against hers, so light that it was barely there at all, should surely not be having such a traumatic effect on her, Rosy fretted anxiously. It was sheer instinct, her desire to get what was, after all, an extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing episode well and truly behind her, that was making her want to press her mouth more urgently against Guard’s.
‘And then, as his need for her overwhelms him, like this…’
Rosy gasped in protest as the pressure of Guard’s mouth on hers changed and hardened so quickly and devastatingly that shock paralysed her.
So this, then, was the way a man kissed, the way his mouth moved with hard urgency on yours, Rosy thought dizzily, the way the embrace involved not just the pressure of his mouth on your own but the whole of his body…and the whole of yours as well.
She was trembling, Rosy recognised, trembling helplessly, overwhelmed by her awareness of the vast gulf which lay between Guard’s sexual experience and her own.
And the shock of that knowledge was somehow like a physical pain, aching through her body, making her eyes sting with sharp tears.
When the pressure of Guard’s mouth against her own eased, she felt almost sick with relief, until she realised that he wasn’t going to release her at all—that he was—
‘Open your mouth, Rosy,’ he instructed her. ‘Only children kiss with their mouths closed, or didn’t you know that?’
‘Of course I know,’ she snapped indignantly, stiffening in outrage as Guard refused to let her continue, covering her mouth with his own, drawing the breath from her as he demonstrated what he had just been telling her.
Rosy had exchanged such kisses with boys before, exchanged them and felt mildly saddened because she was not feeling the almost mystical intense passion and sense of intimacy she had expected to feel.
But with Guard it was different…With Guard…
She could feel herself starting to tremble convulsively as her body registered its awareness of what was happening.
Confused, bewildered thoughts tumbled headlong through her brain as she tried to comprehend why it was that Guard’s mouth�
��Guard’s kiss…Guard’s manufactured and totally fictitious passion should have the power to deceive her senses into believing…wanting…
With a small, frantic cry, she jerked back from him. She had never seen Guard’s eyes look so…so…
She flinched as he reached out and touched her bottom lip with his thumb, demanding raggedly, ‘Don’t…’
‘Turn round,’ Guard told her.
Unwillingly she did so.
‘Now look in the mirror.’
Guard was standing behind her, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders, his face unreadable as Rosy focused unwillingly on their reflections.
‘When a woman’s been thoroughly kissed…properly kissed,’ Guard told her quietly, ‘it shows here…’
Rosy tensed as he reached out and touched the swollen fullness of her mouth, her eyes immediately darkening in response to his touch.
‘And if she’s particularly sensitive and responsive,’ Guard continued calmly, ‘it even shows here as well.’
The clinical detachment with which he so accurately traced a circle around the areola of her nipple took Rosy’s breath away so completely that she was unable to utter any kind of protest.
Because of her thick sweater it was impossible for him to see—to know—how her nipples had swelled and hardened when he kissed her. Totally and completely impossible.
And there was certainly nothing in his clinical detachment to suggest that he did know, Rosy reflected with feverish relief as he released her and stood back from her.
Even so, she could still feel the hot, self-conscious colour sweeping up over her body despite her efforts to suppress it.
She struggled to think of something to say—some throw-away, casual remark to make—but her brain refused to supply one, her thought processes reduced to a thick, immobilising, treacle-like sludge.
As Guard turned away from her to walk towards the door, she found herself wondering silently how many women there had been in his life who had generated the reality of the passion he had manufactured to show her.
As he reached the door, he turned back towards her, warning her, ‘It’s too late to change your mind now, Rosy.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘YOU’RE doing what?’
There was no mistaking the shock nor the anger in Ralph’s voice, Rosy recognised unhappily.
It had taken her over a week to bring herself to the point of telling Ralph about her marriage. Not because she had anticipated his reaction—she hadn’t—but because she had been afraid that he would guess the truth.
Peter, as well as Guard, had warned her of the dangerous position she could put herself in if people started suspecting that her marriage was simply a ploy to keep the house.
‘You and I may know how altruistic your motives are,’ Peter had told her, ‘but others may not.’
‘Guard says that Edward could bring a case for fraud against us,’ Rosy had told him. ‘Is that true?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Peter had agreed cautiously. ‘But he would have to have strong, almost irrefutable proof that the marriage was sham in order to do that. To be able to prove, for instance, that there was quite definitely no possibility of the marriage producing a child…’
‘But there isn’t,’ Rosy had told him quickly. ‘You know—’
‘I know, you know and Guard knows,’ Peter had anticipated her, ‘but no one else knows—nor must anyone else know.’
And so Rosy had put off telling Ralph about her marriage, afraid that she might not be able to play her role of deliriously-in-love bride-to-be adequately enough to deceive him.
In the end, though, it wasn’t her lack of love for Guard he had questioned, but Guard’s for her.
‘For God’s sake, Rosy, don’t you see what he’s after?’ Ralph demanded. ‘He wants the one thing that he knows his money has never and will never be able to buy.’
‘You mean me?’ Rosy quipped.
‘No, I don’t. I mean Queen’s Meadow,’ Ralph told her grimly. ‘It’s no secret that he’s always wanted the house. Your grandfather refused to sell it to him.’
‘Guard and I love each other, Ralph,’ Rosy interrupted him, superstitiously crossing her fingers in the folds of her skirt as she did so, glad that Ralph was looking directly at her as she told the lie.
‘Oh, Rosy…can’t you see? Men like Guard don’t fall in love with—’
He broke off, his thin, slightly foxy face flushing slightly. ‘Look, I don’t want to hurt you, Rosy. You’re an attractive girl—a very attractive girl—but in terms of…of experience, you and Guard might almost have come from different planets.
‘You’ve seen here at the shelter the havoc that unbalanced relationships can cause, the pain that comes from an unequal relationship. Can you honestly tell me that you and Guard are equals in every way; that you and he…?’
‘We’re in love, Ralph,’ Rosy repeated. ‘And—’
‘And he’ll teach you everything you need to know. Both in bed and out of it. Rubbish,’ Ralph told her. ‘If you really, honestly believe that, then you’re not the person I took you for. Sure, he’ll enjoy playing with you for a few weeks—a few months possibly—but after that…Don’t go through with it, Rosy. You don’t need to marry him. You—’
‘Yes, I do.’
The quiet, sad admission was made before Rosy could help herself, the words spoken so softly under her breath that Ralph couldn’t hear them.
She looked up as the office door burst open and a woman, accompanied by two small children, came rushing in demanding to speak to Ralph.
Liz Phillips was one of their regulars at the shelter, periodically leaving her violent husband, announcing that there was no power on earth that could ever make her go back again, only to do exactly that within weeks of having left him.
‘She must love him so much,’ Rosy had commented innocently when she had first started working at the shelter.
‘Yeah, like an alcoholic loves his drink, an addict his next fix; she’s addicted to him, to the violence of their relationship,’ Ralph had told her grimly. ‘A part of her needs and craves what she sees as the excitement and uncertainty of their relationship. But for every Liz Phillips we get here, we get a hundred women who do genuinely want to break away from their relationship and start again, who need us to help them to make that break.’
‘How do you recognise the difference?’ Rosy had asked in bewilderment.
‘With experience,’ Ralph had told her shortly. ‘Like everything else.’
Then, she had thought that Ralph was being unfairly hard. Now she knew better but, for once, as she finished her work, it was not the concerns of the shelter and its inmates that were absorbing her, but her own worries.
Guard had not looked too pleased when she had told him she wanted to invite Ralph to their wedding, but Rosy had remained adamant that she wanted him there.
Peter was giving her away. Guard had drafted a notice to be put in the Press, announcing their marriage; only a handful of people had been invited to the actual ceremony.
The ceremony. In two days’ time she and Guard would be married. Husband and wife. It was a situation her imagination could still not encompass. She and Guard…husband and wife…Mr and Mrs…She and Guard participating in a deception which, if it was ever discovered…
Did all brides feel like this? Rosy wondered nervously as the car stopped outside the church and Peter got out. Or were her hands icy-cold, her mind and emotions frozen and numb simply because of the circumstances surrounding her particular marriage?
This morning, putting on her wedding-dress, standing stiffly in front of the mirror while Mrs Frinton fussed over her, fastening the hundred and one tiny satin-covered buttons that ran from the nape of her neck right down under the bustle and bow that ornamented the back of her dress, she had felt such anguish and guilt, such pain, that she had been tempted to tear off the dress and simply walk away…disappear. But then Peter had arrived and with him the flowers Guard had sent h
er, and events had developed a momentum it was impossible for her to resist.
And now here she was, walking into the lofty parish church, past the stained-glass window donated by one of her ancestors. The ivory satin of the wedding-dress, which had been her mother’s and was a Dior original into which she had still had to squeeze herself—despite the weight she had lost this last week—so tiny had been her mother’s waist, still had, clinging to its folds, a faint hint of the perfume Rosy could remember her mother wearing. Wearing it made her feel as though she was carrying a little of her mother with her.
That knowledge brought hot tears to her eyes which she fiercely blinked back.
The veil, once white but now ivory with age, had been her great-grandmother’s. In wearing garments which had originally been worn with love, she felt as though she were somehow compensating for the lack of emotion in her own marriage.
Marriage. It wasn’t a marriage, she reminded herself starkly. It was a business arrangement, that was all. A contract…
The church felt cold, the stone slabs beneath her feet striking icy-cold through the thin soles of her shoes.
The church was bleakly empty, only the first two pews filled. Someone, Guard presumably, had arranged for the hugely extravagant cream and white floral decorations which warmed the cold, austere dimness of the building.
As she saw Guard for the first time Rosy’s footsteps faltered slightly and, even though he could not possibly have heard the soft, distressed sound she suppressed, he turned round.
He looked so remote and distant. It seemed impossible to imagine that she was actually marrying him. Rosy shivered, glad of the protection of her veil to hide her expression from him.
‘Edward’s watching you,’ Peter warned her. ‘Smile.’
Edward. Rosy hadn’t even realised he was in church, but now she could see him, and with him his wife and his sons—two pale, subdued copies of their mother, hair slicked back, school uniforms on. Rosy flinched slightly as she looked hurriedly away from the taller of the pair.