‘If you’d wanted a simpering idiot for a wife, Guy,’ she mocked, ‘then you would not have looked twice at me.’
‘True.’ He smiled, relaxing enough at last to begin enjoying his melon. ‘It has always been a big regret of mine that I did not take my own advice on that first day we met, and just turn tail and run in the other direction before I did take that—fatal second look.’
His eyes gleamed at her and Marnie grimaced, knowing exactly what he meant. Until he had met her, Guy had been used to women simpering all over him. He had been used to them sending out promises to him with their eyes, using every sexual lure in the book to attract his attention. He could handle all that by either responding or ignoring it depending on his mood. Marnie, by contrast, had never gone out of her way to attract him—and if anything had done everything she could to freeze him out. Guy had done all the running, all the careful luring—until the days and weeks of patient but fruitless persuasion eventually turned him into a quick-tempered and very frustrated man while Marnie, though half out of her mind in love with him, had continued to hold herself aloof, pretending to even be a little amused by his attention.
The bream was all it promised to be, and they managed to finish their meal in a companionable manner, both deliberately keeping the conversation light after that. The new mood suited Marnie. Having planted the seed of doubt about their sleeping arrangements tonight, she was quite happy to let that seed take root before she tackled the problem again. She wasn’t worried; she knew she could win this one. Guy was an honourable man in his own way, and it was to that honour she was going to plead.
So it was gone ten o’clock before they both sat back in their seats and away from their empty coffee-cups, and Marnie stretched into a tired yawn which announced that she was more than ready for bed. ‘Can I borrow one of your shirts to sleep in?’ she asked, getting to her feet.
Guy rose more slowly, the relaxed mood they’d managed to maintain throughout the meal shot to death. ‘You will need no shirt to keep you warm tonight, Marnie,’ he informed her smoothly, ‘for I will be right beside you to ensure you do not catch a chill.’
Marnie paused in her movement away from the dining-table and took her time turning back to face him with a look of grave contemplation. ‘You know, Guy,’ she said quietly, ‘for all that has gone between us—and some of it I accept has not been particularly nice—I have never once doubted that you respected me deeply as a person.’
The remark took him completely by surprise, sending him erect in a way that said she’d activated his enormous banks of pride. ‘Which I do,’ he immediately confirmed.
‘And before we were married the last time—and no matter how—passionately you desired me, you always managed to demonstrate that respect by drawing back before you became too—carried away.’
He nodded curtly. ‘You are referring, no doubt, to the fact that I wished my bride to come to me innocent on our wedding night.’
‘Quite,’ she agreed, unexpectedly touched by the degree of reverence he’d placed in that statement. ‘You do know, don’t you, Guy,’ she went on, holding his gaze steady with her own, ‘that there has been no other man but you in my life?’
His eyes blazed with a pride and a triumph he could not contain. ‘I accept that—totally.’ His trust in her was unequivocal—another fact which unexpectedly warmed her. ‘It—it has always humbled me, Marnie,’ he murmured huskily, ‘that you can be so pure of heart and body when I know the depth of the passion which runs in your veins. Are you afraid that I may hurt you?’ he asked suddenly, completely misunderstanding the point she was trying to make. He came around the table to take her shoulders in a gentle reassuring grip. ‘I am very aware of the length of time it has been since we made love with each other, Marnie. And I am hungry for you—quite desperate in fact to feel your body warm and responsive beneath my own again, but my loving will be as gentle as it was the first time I took you as my own. You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘No—you’ve…’
Misunderstood, she had been about to say. But his mouth was drowning out the telling word before it reached her lips, and nothing, nothing in all her careful planning prepared her for the kind of kiss he offered her, though perhaps his words should have done as he began to kiss her with such exquisite sweetness that she felt herself being hurled back across five long years to that moment on their wedding night when Guy had taken her in his arms as his wife.
And Marnie, with that memory filling her mind, responded, her mouth clinging to his while she tried desperately to untangle the past from the present, tried to remember why she was here and who she was with and what he would do to her if she so much as lowered her defences an inch. But the kiss was special, tender, loving, offering promises she’d once yearned for with all her heart. And as he gently urged her closer to the hard-packed, powerful wall of his chest she let herself relax, let her arms creep hungrily around his neck, let her lips part and their tongues meet and the heady, hot tide of desire wash languidly over her.
‘Marnie,’ he whispered against her clinging mouth. ‘Sweet—sweet heaven.’
Then he brought her tumbling back down to a horrified sense of what was actually happening as he bent to lift her into his arms.
‘No—!’ she cried, twisting away from him before he’d managed to do more than flex his muscles in readiness to lift her.
He staggered slightly at her sudden escape, and Marnie found herself standing, swaying dizzily barely a foot away from him, breathing hectically, her eyes dark and glowing with a crazy mixture of self-aimed fury and deep disturbing sensuality.
‘What do you mean, no?’ he demanded in husky-voiced bewilderment.
Marnie swallowed, having to fight for breath before she could answer. ‘I w-won’t be seduced into your bed, Guy,’ she whispered.
‘And why not?’ he demanded arrogantly. ‘It was a mutual seduction, Marnie. I was being beautifully seduced also.’
Her cheeks coloured then went pale because she knew he was telling the truth. She had lost all control of herself for a moment there, had been more than matching him kiss for hungry, seductive kiss.
‘You’re used to it. I’m not.’
He stiffened. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ he demanded.
‘It means,’ she said, outwardly beginning to pull herself back together, although inside she was a quivering, shivering wreck, ‘that I expect you to treat me with the respect you’ve just claimed you always had for me by allowing me to keep my body for my husband alone.’
Silence, as he stared at her with a slow dawning understanding that took the light of passion out of his eyes, to be replaced with a look of hard, cynical appreciation when he realised just how cleverly she had been manipulating him all evening. ‘You truly are the most cruel and calculating bitch of my acquaintance,’ he then said, quite casually.
Her chin came up, defiance masking the sudden twinge of remorse she experienced inside. ‘I can’t ever forgive you, Guy,’ she told him flatly. ‘And although I also can’t deny that you—you can make me want you physically, I’ll never let you touch my heart again.’
‘When did you ever?’ he drawled, and turned away from her, but not before she’d glimpsed the look of bitterness in his eyes. ‘Go.’ He waved a careless hand towards the sitting-room door. ‘Go to your cold and lonely bed, Marnie,’ he invited. ‘Take your high-minded principles and your unforgiving heart with you, since they seem to be the kind of bed partners you prefer. But remember this,’ he added as he turned back to face her grimly. ‘We have made a bargain tonight. And I expect you to stick to your side of it as fully as I intend to stick to mine. The day we become man and wife again, Marnie,’ he ordained, ‘will also be the day you will accept me back into your bed, and I will expect both the principles and the unforgiving heart to step aside for me.’
‘Then you expect too much,’ she said, forcing herself to move towards the sitting-room door.
‘And why do I?’ he posed sil
kily. ‘I always believed, Marnie, that one first had to care to hurt as badly as you profess to do.’
‘I cared,’ she said, spinning back to face him. ‘Or why else did I marry you?’
His smile was both mocking and self-derisive. ‘I thought we both knew the answer to that, my dear. Because I gave you no damned choice.’
CHAPTER FIVE
NO CHOICE. Well, of everything he’d said tonight, Guy had been most right about that. If she had been given any choice at all, she would never have let him talk her into marrying him.
Bullied, Marnie corrected, and smiled bleakly into the dark silence which shrouded her in her bed. From the first moment he had ever set eyes on her Guy had pursued, seduced and bullied her until eventually she had wilted under the strain of it all and finally let him marry her.
Sighing, she turned on to her side to gaze sleeplessly out on to the clear navy blue sky beyond her bedroom window.
The first time she’d seen Guy, she had fancifully believed herself to have stumbled across some noble throwback from the last century.
He reminded her of the wicked baron portrayed in so many hot romantic novels. Big, dark and dangerous, with just enough charm to make the cynicism etched into his handsome face bearable. And more than enough sex appeal to make her heart quiver with a fatal mixture of excitement and alarm.
Of course, she’d known exactly who Jamie worked for that day she had decided on the spur of the moment to make a flying visit to her brother, but she hadn’t for one moment expected actually to meet the man himself. What she knew about Guy Frabosa had been learned from newspaper and magazine articles—most of them painting a picture of a man who lived and slept with his ego. But they also presented a man who spent most of his busy life jetting around the world keeping the family empire running smoothly, and so she had driven through the tall wrought-iron gates of Oaklands expecting to see nothing more than her oil-smeared brother in his element, working on one of the many high-performance cars in Guy Frabosa’s collection which he helped maintain, then leave again, completely untouched by the personality of the man who paid her brother’s wages.
Coming upon Oaklands itself, nestling in its own small private valley, had been an artist’s delight. And as she’d driven down the gently rolling hillside into the basin of the valley itself and cut across a wide stretch of tarmac roadway towards the elegant cream-painted Georgian mansion house she could see in the distance, it had never occurred to her that she had just driven over Guy Frabosa’s own personal racing track, or that it circumvented the whole estate, built by professionals for a professional to practise upon. Her concentration then had been too enthralled by the beauty of the gardens she had been passing through.
I could sit and paint this forever, she recalled thinking as she brought the car to a stop in the circular courtyard in front of the house and climbed out of her battered old Mini to absorb the wonderful air of peace and tranquillity around her. The air smelled fresh and country-clean, weighed down with the heady scent of roses—roses she had not known then were Roberto Frabosa’s pride and joy.
It was the distinctive throaty roar of a powerful engine revving that had told her in which direction to go looking for her brother, and she had followed the sound around the side of the house and along a pretty winding path through a narrow wood until she found herself standing on the edge of a courtyard that must once have been the stable-yard, but now housed the workshops and garages for Guy’s impresive collection of cars.
And it was there, while she stood beneath the shelter of a spreading chestnut tree, that she had experienced her first shock sighting of the man she had later married…
He was standing like a Michelangelo’s David among a clutch of Lowrie figures as his team of mechanics clustered around him, towering over them as he talked, his dark head thrown up at an arrogant angle while his mouth, firm and shockingly sensual, was stretched into a grin which completely belied the arrogance.
They were talking engines, of course, but then Marnie could only appreciate the sheer artistry of the scene—he, Guy, thrown into strong stomach-churning contrast, in his crisp white shirt and immaculate dark trousers, to the murky cluster of oil-stained-overalled men gathered about him.
A king with his minions, she titled the scene, already capturing it in oils in her mind. He spoke quickly but smoothly, the rich timbre of his voice, attractively spiced with an accent, reaching out to her across the cobbled courtyard to keep her held breathless and still.
Her experience of the opposite sex then was poor to say the least; not finding the time to learn about them had been the main culprit for her ignorance because she’d never seemed to have enough of it to spare for the lighter side of living. But even she, wrapped in the protection of her complete innocence, could pick up danger signals when they were there.
‘Marnie!’ It was Jamie who saw her first. And she just had time to see Guy’s dark head turn sharply, glimpse the sudden narrowing of his dark eyes, note the tensing stillness of his body, before she dragged her wide eyes away from him and forced them to rest on her brother.
Jamie came over to her, so pleased to see her that he was grinning from ear to ear. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded in surprise.
She told him, trying desperately not to allow her attention to wander over to where she knew Guy was watching them with that same silent stillness he hadn’t even tried to snap out of since their eyes clashed.
‘But this is great!’ her brother exclaimed. ‘Can you stay long enough to have lunch with me? There’s a pub just down the road from here that puts on a great ploughman’s; we could—’
‘Introduce me, Jamie.’
Just like that, she recalled. Introduce me. Make me known. I want. Give me. Mine. It had all been there in that one huskily voiced demand.
Not that her brother noticed any of that as he happily complied, moving a step away from her to leave her feeling oddly exposed and very vulnerable to that hot dark stare. ‘This is my sister, Marnie,’ Jamie announced. ‘Marnie, meet my employer, Mr Frabosa.’
‘Guy,’ corrected the man himself, letting the true pronunciation of his name slide sensually off his tongue.
He lifted a long, tanned, beautifully constructed hand to her in invitation for her to take it. She did so nervously, trembling a little, a bit bewildered by what was happening to her churning insides, and shaken even more off balance when instead of the polite handshake she had been expecting he lifted her hand to his lips, his eyes refusing to break contact with the dense blueness of hers.
It had taken him just that long to make her fall head over heels in love with him—not that she’d understood what it was then. Because she was unawakened to her own sexuality and quite content to stay that way, that sudden overpowering burst of emotion had frightened her then—it still did now. But then she had been in no way equipped to deal with it, and the fact that he was making no effort to hide how powerfully she attracted him had the adverse effect of sending her scuttling off in the other direction. She snatched her hand away and took a jerky but very necessary step back from him, and he smiled at her in a way that mocked her small rejection.
He invited her to take tea in his home. She refused, reminding him coolly that it was her brother she had come here to see. When Guy then blandly informed her that Jamie would not be free from his duties until the evening and repeated the invitation while she waited for her brother to finish his work, she glanced ruefully at her brother, who was looking bemused at Guy’s announcement, and still refused to allow him to act host in her brother’s absence, inventing a fictitious date waiting for her in London which brought Jamie’s gaze swinging around to her in open-mouthed amazement, since he was well aware of her lack of interest in the kind of date she was implying. ‘I can only stay five minutes at most,’ she added hurriedly, wishing she had not given in to the sudden urge to come and see her brother.
Guy stared at her, bringing a guilty flush to her cheeks because the mockery in his gaze said he
knew she was lying, and with a bow and a smile that did nothing to ease her anxious desire to get away from him he excused himself and strode off towards the front of the house while Jamie stared after him in frowning confusion.
‘I don’t understand any of that,’ he gasped. ‘Guy isn’t usually so…’
‘Five minutes, Western!’ The curt warning had come from the disappearing figure of Guy Frabosa as he rounded the corner of the house.
‘I don’t understand that, either!’ Jamie exclaimed. ‘Why were you so cool with him, Marnie?’ he demanded, deciding that the blame for it all had to belong to her. ‘I thought it was very nice of him to welcome you like that—and you turn all icy on him—you’ve offended him now!’
‘I came to see you, Jamie,’ she reminded her brother coolly. ‘Not to take tea with a man who is a complete stranger to me.’
He shrugged, still baffled by the whole odd encounter, and walked her back around the house to her car, chatting lightly, but she could tell he was jumpy, eager to get back to work before Guy decided to come down on him a second time. And she was more than ready to get away before his boss disturbed her level senses a second time. Jamie saw her seated behind the wheel of her Mini, quizzing her on how it was running, and smiling when she assured him the little car gave her no trouble at all, her eyes skipping nervously along the rows of windows in the house, somehow knowing that Guy Frabosa was observing her departure from the shadows somewhere inside.
She turned the key in the ignition, now quite desperate to get away.
Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing.
After several tries, her brother muttered something derogatory about stupid women flooding the engine, and ordered her out so he could get in instead. He messed, he fiddled, then climbed out and lifted the bonnet, disappearing beneath it with all the concentration of a born mechanic while Marnie stood, knowing, without knowing how she knew, that her car had not let her down without help from somewhere.
She watched Guy stroll out of the front door with a fatalistic acceptance that must have shown on her face, because he sent her a lazy mocking look as he went to join her brother.
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