by Penny Jordan
As fresh heat filled her face, Rosy retreated to the far side of the bed.
‘What is it, Rosy?’ he teased her. ‘Afraid your unbridled desire for me might get totally out of control at the thought of my vulnerable, naked body in bed next to you, and that you might…’
Rosy knew that he was only joking, laughing at her, but, for some extraordinary reason, instead of being relieved by his attempt to lighten things, she actually felt—
She swallowed hard, too distressed by her emotions to allow herself to give them a name.
Not trusting herself to speak, she reverted instead to childhood, picking up a pillow from the bed and hurling it angrily at Guard.
He caught it with derisive ease, openly laughing at her.
‘Baby,’ he taunted her. ‘Well, if that’s the way you want to behave, Rosy…’
He moved so quickly she had no chance to evade him as he scooped her up off the floor and held her at arm’s length, still laughing at her as she kicked out protestingly, demanding to be set free.
Still laughing, Guard started to comply with her request but, as he released her waist, and her toes touched the floor, Rosy felt the towel start to slide from her body.
It was like that moment in the château bedroom all over again, only this time…This time…
As she struggled frantically with numb fingers to resecure the towel, she heard Guard saying quietly, ‘Maybe you’re right, Rosy. Maybe sleeping together isn’t such a good idea after all, but I’m afraid we just don’t have any choice,’ he added, his voice suddenly unfamiliarly harsh. ‘Neither of us has any choice, so we’ll just have to make the best of things. At least the damn bed’s big enough to allow us both some degree of privacy…’
No wonder Guard looked so angry with her, Rosy acknowledged, as he disappeared into the bathroom, leaving her to crawl miserably beneath the bedclothes. If she hadn’t been such an idiot and forgotten to move her clothes…
Her throat felt tight with suppressed tears and her feet were cold, she decided miserably. Why on earth had she been such an unsophisticated idiot and made all that fuss about not having her nightshirt? It was obvious from the way Guard had acted, the way his manner had changed after he had seen her naked body, that he didn’t have the smallest degree of sexual desire for her.
Which, of course, was just as it should be—and just how she wanted it to be, wasn’t it…? Of course it was, she told herself firmly as she lay as close as she could to the cold edge of the bed and closed her eyes, trying to ignore the sounds coming from the bathroom.
Unlike her, Guard obviously preferred to shower. She gave a small, unhappy shiver as she was unexpectedly tormented by a mental image of his naked body, his skin gleaming wetly like heavy, rich satin.
She didn’t want him. Of course she didn’t…She didn’t even like him, never mind love…
With a small, defensive sob, Rosy reached for one of the spare pillows and held it down firmly over her ears, blotting out the tormenting sounds from the bathroom.
CHAPTER NINE
ROSY woke up with a start. Someone was knocking on the bedroom door. She tensed as she recognised Edward’s voice calling Guard’s name and her own.
Guard. Her tension increased as she recognised that the reason she felt so deliciously warm and had no doubt been so reluctant to wake up was that, somehow or other, she had relinquished her hold on the edge of the bed and was now lying virtually in the centre of it, curled up next to Guard.
‘It’s all right, Rosy, you stay there. I’ll go and find out what he wants,’ she heard Guard telling her as he sat up and switched on the bedside lamp, swinging his legs on to the floor at the same time. Rosy hastily averted her gaze from his naked body.
A warm glow suffused her skin as she didn’t look away quite quickly enough and was left with a vivid image of the awesome perfection of his body.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him pick up his robe from the end of the bed and shrug it on, and expelled a small sigh of relief.
‘Yes, Edward, what it it?’ she heard Guard asking grimly, as he half opened the door, positioning his body, she noticed gratefully, so that Edward couldn’t see past him into the room. But Edward, it seemed either couldn’t interpret Guard’s body language or preferred not to do so, and virtually pushed past him, exclaiming, ‘It’s Margaret! Is Rosy…?’
He seemed more disappointed than relieved to see her there, Rosy recognised as Edward came to an abrupt halt at the foot of the bed.
Uncomfortably conscious of her nudity, Rosy clutched the bedclothes protectively to her body as Guard demanded curtly, ‘What is it, Edward? What’s wrong with Margaret?’
‘Er…she’s got a headache, and I was wondering if Rosy had some aspirin or something. We can’t seem to find ours.’
‘Headache?’ Guard’s eyebrows snapped sharply together in anger. ‘You wake us up at two o’clock in the morning because your wife’s got a headache?’
‘Well, it’s more of a migraine than a headache,’ Edward defended himself.
‘If Margaret suffers from migraines, I doubt very much that mere aspirin would do anything for them,’ Guard told him.
Rosy struggled to sit up slightly, and keep her body covered up at the same time as she told him quickly, ‘I’m sorry, Edward, but I don’t have anything like that up here. You should find some downstairs in the medicine cupboard in the kitchen. Poor Margaret,’ she added sympathetically. ‘She must be in dreadful pain…’
‘Yes, well, I’ll go down and see if I can find something for her,’ Edward told them. ‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you…’
He didn’t look sorry at all, Rosy reflected uneasily as Guard walked with Edward to the door and very pointedly opened it for him.
‘Poor Margaret,’ Rosy repeated nervously as Guard walked back towards the bed.
‘Poor Margaret indeed—if in fact she does have a migraine,’ Guard responded grimly. ‘Personally, I doubt it, and in fact—’
‘What do you mean?’ Rosy asked him anxiously, her body suddenly tense with apprehension. ‘Are you trying to say that Edward woke us up deliberately so that he could check—?’
‘That we were actually sleeping together? I think there’s a strong possibility,’ Guard confirmed grimly.
The severity of Guard’s expression made Rosy’s heart miss an anxious beat.
Looking away from him, she nibbled worriedly at her bottom lip.
The bed dipped slightly beneath Guard’s weight as he got in beside her and switched off the bedside lamp.
‘Guard,’ Rosy asked him in a small voice, ‘how suspicious do you think Edward really is? I mean, he must have guessed something, mustn’t he, to come down here…?’
‘It looks like it,’ Guard agreed after a small pause but, as Rosy made a small distressed sound, he added, ‘But there’s no point in jumping to conclusions, or in worrying, and after all, nothing he saw in here tonight could possibly have given him the confirmation he was looking for—far from it.’
Rosy knew that Guard was speaking the truth, but she still felt disturbed and on edge.
‘Edward’s gone now. Go back to sleep,’ Guard told her.
‘I can’t,’ Rosy admitted shakily. ‘I’m afraid, Guard,’ she added. ‘What if Edward does find out and…?’
She heard the rustle of the bedclothes as Guard turned over and switched on the lamp.
‘There’s nothing for you to be afraid of,’ he told her quietly as he looked down at her.
He was half sitting up, the bedclothes round his waist, the upper half of his body exposed as he leaned over her.
‘What is it, Rosy? You’re not crying, are you?’ he asked her softly.
Quickly Rosy shook her head, but she knew he must have seen the suspicious shine in her eyes.
‘You said we’d go to prison,’ she told him in a stifled voice, by way of explanation.
‘I said we could,’ Guard corrected her.
Rosy saw his chest expand as he drew in
a deep breath. An odd frisson of sensation ran across her skin, as delicate as the velvet touch of a cat’s sheathed paw and yet, at the same time, so powerful that she rushed into speech to try to stifle it.
‘I never thought I could ever be so afraid of someone like Edward,’ she told Guard huskily.
‘And I never thought I’d see the day when you admitted that you were afraid of anything—especially to me,’ Guard responded. ‘It’s all right, Rosy. I promise you that everything’s going to be all right. Come here…’
When he reached out and took her in his arms, Rosy was too surprised to speak.
How long was it since anyone had held her like this, comforted her like this? she wondered shakily as Guard reached up and smoothed her hair back off her face.
‘I still can’t believe that Edward would actually do something like that,’ she whispered. ‘That he would actually come here in the middle of the night to check…’
‘Stop thinking about it. He’s gone now,’ Guard soothed her.
‘Yes, I know,’ Rosy responded, lifting her head from his shoulder to look anxiously into his eyes. ‘But, Guard, if we hadn’t been sharing the bed…If you’d been sleeping in the chair or if I’d been—’
‘Wearing your nightshirt,’ Guard interrupted her wryly. ‘As I said, Rosy, forget it.’
‘I can’t,’ Rosy protested, shivering suddenly and burying her face against Guard’s shoulder. ‘I can’t.’
‘Rosy.’
Rosy tensed as she heard the harsh tension in Guard’s voice, but she didn’t respond to the pressure of his hand on her shoulder urging her away from his body. She didn’t want to move away from him, she recognised; she didn’t want to go back to her own cold and lonely side of the bed. She didn’t want…
‘Rosy.’
Her body quivered as the warm gust of Guard’s fiercely expelled breath touched her skin.
‘Rosy…’
His voice sounded different now—thicker, slower, less determined, more—
Her heartbeat had become dangerously unsteady. The warmth of Guard’s breath against her skin told her just how close his mouth was to her throat, so close that if she just moved the tiniest little bit…
She shivered in sharp pleasure, her pulse-rate accelerating frantically as she felt Guard’s mouth brush her skin.
‘Rosy…you know what’s going to happen if you don’t let go of me, don’t you?’ she heard Guard warn her softly.
Let go of him? Her eyes widened in shock as she realised what he meant. Somehow, without knowing she had done so, she had curled one hand possessively around the hard muscles of his forearm, or at least as far round them as her slender fingers could stretch. Let go of him? But she didn’t want to let go of him, she recognised with a shiver of intense sensual awareness. She wanted to stay exactly where she was with his body next to hers, his hands…his mouth…
‘Guard.’
Could he hear the shocked confusion in her voice, the need…the desire…?
Her eyes widened as his hand slid beneath her hair to cup her face and she saw that he had. His own eyes looked darker, brighter, the pupils enlarged.
Nervously, Rosy caught her bottom lip between her teeth.
‘Don’t do that,’ she heard Guard protest in a thick, slurred voice.
And then it was his mouth, his teeth, that released her tortured lip from its bondage, explored and caressed it, driving her to such an unimagined frenzy of need that Guard had to hold her down against the pillow while he satisfied her frantically whispered pleas to be kissed properly and not so cruelly teased.
‘Properly…Like this do you mean, Rosy?’ she heard him demanding rawly before his mouth covered hers.
No one had ever kissed her so intensely, so demandingly before, but it was the strength of her own passion that shocked her, not Guard’s. It was as though her untutored body had somehow developed a wilful sensuality of its own.
Without any conscious effort on her part her body arched, her arms clung, her lips parted and, if she could have done so, a stunned, shocked part of her recognised, she would have wrapped herself so intimately and erotically around Guard that—
If she could have done so? She trembled as Guard dragged his mouth away from hers and muttered roughly, ‘My God, Rosy, you witch. If I didn’t know better I’d—’
He didn’t finish his sentence; the hand which had been caressing the smooth skin of her back had come to rest against the side of her breast and, without even having to think about it, Rosy had moved just enough for the warmth of his palm to cover the hard point of her nipple. The urge to move against that warmth, deliberately create an erotic friction that could only intensify the sharp, deep yearning flooding her body, was so intense that she had to stifle the vocal expression of it in her throat.
But Guard must have heard it, or knew without having to hear it, because his fingers were already caressing her nipple, his mouth moving downwards over her body.
As she felt his mouth carefully take the place of his fingers, drawing her nipple with agonising slowness into a moist caress, Rosy shivered helplessly, her eyes betraying her sensual vulnerability when Guard slowly released her nipple and then told her rawly as he circled the damp areola with one fingertip, ‘That’s nothing, Rosy. But this…’
As his mouth recaptured her nipple and he started to suckle rhythmically, the feeling that poured through her was so intense that her whole body twisted frenziedly, her nails digging into Guard’s skin.
In response, Guard’s suckling became deeper and more urgent; he pushed the bedclothes away from her body, his hand caressing the curve of her hip, sliding round to press firmly against the lower half of her stomach, just as though he knew that the ache he was causing in her breast had its beginning right there, deep inside her body where his hand rested, as though he knew that somehow, its warmth, its pressure did something to ease a little of the almost painful sharpness out of the ache that possessed her.
There had never been a time when she had ever felt anything like this, she acknowledged dizzily, when she had felt so—so driven, so—so in need, so helplessly out of control.
She shivered as Guard released her nipple and the air struck coolly against her hot, damp flesh.
In the soft light, she looked down at Guard’s dark head, still bent over her body as he kissed the hollow between her breasts and then moved lower.
Her own flesh looked so alien to her. Her breasts swollen…flushed—the one Guard had caressed still engorged, still aching…
She tensed as his tongue circled her navel, her body clenching.
Guard’s hand had left her stomach and was resting on her outer thigh, sliding beneath her to lift her so that—
Now she did protest, her eyes wild with shock at the sight of Guard’s dark head between her thighs, his fingers dark against her so much paler skin as he lifted her body effortlessly, arranging it, imprisoning it in a position of such intimacy that Rosy could feel herself flushing. But she still couldn’t drag her gaze away from the sight of his dark head bent over the most vulnerable, sacred part of her body.
When his lips brushed the soft flesh of her inner thigh, Rosy shivered uncontrollably, self-consciousness forgotten in the tide of sensation that flooded through her.
Guard was still kissing and caressing her skin, moving closer to the most sensitive part of her.
Even before he got there, her body was responding to him, aware of him, wanting him, ignoring the shocked demands of her mind that it abandon such wantonness.
Heat poured through her as she heard the thick, pleasured sound Guard gave when he discovered how femalely responsive she was to him—how welcome was the delicate touch of his tongue against the small nub of flesh so sensitive to his caress that Rosy’s whole body was gripped by the paroxysm of aching pleasure that shot through her.
She knew Guard must have felt it too, because his hands suddenly tensed on her body and he raised his head to look at her, the skin along his cheekbones drawn taut
and burning darkly with heat.
The look he gave her made her heart slowly somersault.
‘No,’ she protested huskily, as Guard bent his head back to her body.
‘Yes,’ he insisted thickly, telling her, ‘Have you any idea what doing this feels like? How addictive the taste of you is, how much I’ve wanted you like this? You’re right, Rosy,’ he said roughly. ‘You’re a woman—wholly, completely and utterly so.’
Rosy shuddered in silent ecstasy as his mouth refound her.
This time the pleasure was different because this time her body and her senses were prepared…knew. She held her breath as she felt the exquisite agony of anticipation build up inside her, releasing it on a sharp, aching cry of release as the pleasure engulfed her, sweeping her up in its roaring, leaping, flooding tide.
‘Guard, now, now…please…I want you inside me now.’
She cried out the words almost without knowing she was saying them, knowing only that there was a small part of her that still ached…that still needed, that felt empty and unfulfilled, and that the only thing that could satisfy it was the feel of Guard’s body within her, the sensation of him moving deep inside her. She felt him slowly release her, separating himself from her, smoothing away the bedclothes from her body and then kneeling back from her.
As he moved her breath caught in her throat. In the dim light she had seen the full power of his body—how aroused he was, how male.
‘Say that again,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me again that you want me.’
She should have been intimidated into desire-stifling, shy self-consciousness by the way he was looking at her, by the roughly aroused tone of his voice, but instead…
Instead she felt a power, a knowledge she had never known she could possess and, instead of flinching coyly beneath his regard, Rosy held his gaze, stretching her body with languorous sensuality, parting her legs, her spine arching slightly in subtle, sensual invitation as she told him huskily, ‘I want you, Guard. I want you now…please, now…now.’