by Penny Jordan
‘I thought you were angry with me,’ Rosy whispered. ‘In the morning when I woke up and you weren’t there…’
‘I thought you wouldn’t want me to be there.’
Rosy gave him an uncertain look.
‘But you must have known. You must have guessed that I—’
‘That you what? Responded passionately to me? Yes, I knew that, but then you’ve always been passionately intense about everything you’ve done.’
‘But I begged you to make love to me,’ Rosy reminded him, half-ashamed. ‘I…’
‘You told me you wanted me, but I dared not let myself believe that that was anything more than the impulse of the moment, a reaction brought on by the trauma of what you were enduring. And then, of course, I also had my guilt to deal with.’
‘Your guilt? For making love to me?’ Rosy asked him, frowning.
‘Among other things,’ he agreed.
‘What other things,’ Rosy demanded, perplexed.
‘Agreeing to marry you instead of trying to help you find some other way round the problem,’ he told her, watching her face carefully. ‘Taking advantage of Edward’s decision to move in here…’
‘Taking advantage? In what way?’
Guard looked at her and then at the bed.
‘In the way that led to your and my becoming lovers. Do you honestly think I couldn’t have gone and got your clothes for you if I’d really wanted to, Rosy?’
‘But you didn’t want to sleep with me. You said so,’ Rosy protested.
‘Oh, Rosy,’ Guard groaned. ‘Of course I wanted to sleep with you. I wanted to sleep with you, touch and kiss you, love you. I wanted it all and more—much, much more. I wanted you to hold me, to touch me, to want me. To love me,’ he told her huskily.
He cupped her face and looked down into her eyes.
‘Do you really believe I couldn’t have found some way of getting rid of Edward, some way of ensuring that we didn’t have to share a room, if that was really what I’d wanted? Have I shocked you?’
Rosy shook her head.
‘Surprised me,’ she admitted. ‘I had no idea.’
‘I think I fell in love with you the night I found you poaching,’ Guard told her softly. ‘Grubby, undersized, very angry—a little girl, still, in so many ways and yet in so many others very, very much a woman. Or at least that was what my emotions and my body told me. My mind…’ He shook his head.
‘I knew it was too soon. You were too young. You didn’t even like me. But then you went on not liking me—not liking me but reacting so emotionally to me that I couldn’t stop myself from clinging to the hope that maybe…just maybe—’
‘I’d fall in love with you,’ Rosy broke in softly.
‘Is that what’s happened, Rosy?’ he asked her quietly.
Rosy shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t fallen in love with you, Guard,’ she told him firmly, lifting her hand to his face in an instinctive gesture of comfort as she saw his pain. ‘Falling in love is for teenagers, girls. I’m a woman. I love you, Guard,’ she told him emotionally. ‘I love you as a woman loves a man—wholly, completely, for ever.’
She trembled as she saw the moisture in his eyes, reaching up to pull him down against her, whispering to him, ‘Oh, Guard…Guard…’
Some time later, lying naked in his arms, watching as he reached out his hand to cup her breast, reluctant, it seemed, even now to release her, she smiled lovingly at him.
His thumb stroked the tip of her nipple, swollen still from their earlier lovemaking.
‘Were you really jealous of Ralph?’ she marvelled.
‘Extremely,’ Guard responded wryly. ‘A fact which Edward played on to very good effect.’
‘He manipulated us both,’ Rosy acknowledged. ‘What did you say to him to make him leave, Guard?’ she asked him.
Guard’s head paused in its descent towards her breast. ‘I told him that if he ever, ever said or did anything to upset you again, I’d make him regret it for the rest of his life. I also told him that if he wasn’t out of the house and out of our lives within half an hour he’d find his financial and business affairs under the kind of scrutiny that would make the Fraud Squad look tame.’
His mouth opened gently over her nipple.
‘Mmm…’ Rosy closed her eyes, stretching her body luxuriously beneath his caress. ‘I thought you’d—’
‘What?’ Guard asked her throatily, releasing her nipple to smile into her arousal-darkened eyes. His hand stroked the satin-soft skin of her thigh, his own eyes darkening as she made a small, soft sound of pleasure.
‘Is there something else you’d rather be doing?’ he suggested.
‘No…nothing,’ Rosy denied, unsteadily.
Guard’s mouth returned to her nipple, caressing it with such slow deliberation that it was almost a torment.
‘How would you like it if I did that to you?’ she protested as her body started to tremble with arousal.
‘Try me,’ Guard invited her.
For a moment she thought he was joking, but then she realised that he meant it.
Shyly and a little uncertainly at first, she touched the soft-haired flesh of his chest with her lips, slowly moving closer to his flat male nipple.
The sensation of taking it into her mouth was unexpectedly erotic, so much more so than she had anticipated that it made her tense slightly and hesitate.
‘No, Rosy…Don’t stop…don’t stop,’ she heard Guard groan thickly as his hands came up and held her head against his body. She could feel his fingers trembling slightly against her scalp, feel the fierce, fast beat of his heart, the arousal of his body as it responded to her hesitant suckling.
If touching him like this gave him so much pleasure, then how much more pleasure could she give him by caressing him with the same kind of intimacy he had shown her?
She almost started to ask him, but then stopped. There were some things, she decided quietly, that a woman needed to discover for herself.
He didn’t say anything when she touched his thigh, nor when she placed some light butterfly kisses over his belly, but she could feel his tension, feel it in his sudden almost painful grip on her wrist as she moved down his body.
He didn’t try to restrain her, but he didn’t encourage her either, and for a moment Rosy almost changed her mind.
What if he didn’t want her to…? Didn’t like…? But she wanted to, she recognised, on a sudden sharp ache of desire. She wanted to touch him, taste him, know him with the same intimacy with which he knew her.
The musky, male scent of his body made her own ache sharply. She could feel his tension as she slowly slid her mouth down over him, touching him with her tongue, delicately exploring him, startled by the surge of pleasure that what she was doing gave her, the immediate and now easily recognised reaction of her flesh to what she had always naïvely assumed was a caress that sexually pleased only the recipient and not the giver.
Guard’s hand fell away from her wrist as a deep shudder racked his body. Beneath her fingertips the muscles in his thigh were tense.
‘Rosy…Oh, God, Rosy…No more. No more,’ she heard him protest in a stifled voice as she continued to caress him. His hands gripped her shoulders and his body writhed fiercely as he almost dragged her up the bed.
‘Didn’t you like it?’ Rosy asked him uncertainly as he buried his mouth in her throat.
‘Like it…?’ His body shook as he rolled her on to her side and his hand stroked her thigh, lifting it. ‘Like it? Yes, I liked it,’ he told her roughly as he started to move against her.
‘But you didn’t show it. You didn’t hold me against you the way you did when I sucked you here,’ she told him, touching his nipple.
Her voice had become breathy and soft as she felt him enter her.
‘That wasn’t because I didn’t want to. It was because I dared not,’ Guard told her rawly. ‘Did you want me to?’
‘Yes,’ Rosy admitted. ‘Yes, Guard, it made me want you so much.’
‘That’s good,’ Guard told her, ‘because it certainly made me want you.’
As he moved inside her, Rosy wrapped herself blissfully around him.
‘Oh, Guard, that feels so good…so good…so good.’
‘Still love me…?’
Sleepily, Rosy opened her eyes. She was lying curled up against Guard’s body where she had fallen asleep after the last time they had made love.
‘Mmm…More than ever,’ she told him. ‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes,’ Guard told her quietly. ‘Above and beyond anything else there ever has been in my life or ever will be. You are my life, Rosy. My life and my love. Today, tomorrow, always and for ever. I love you.’
ISBN: 978-1-408-93001-4
Unwanted Wedding
© Penny Jordan 1995
First Published in Great Britain in 2008
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