‘You know me, Marnie,’ he murmured. ‘I need little sleep.’
No, four hours a night was just about his limit, she recalled. As to the rest of the hours of darkness—well, Guy had had his own method of amusing himself, a method that was best not dwelt upon right now.
She curled herself up in the corner of the sofa while he prepared the tea. He wasn’t such a chauvinist that he’d ever minded taking on such a menial task. In fact, Marnie could recall several times when he had wandered into her studio in their London apartment with a tea-tray in his hands.
‘Drink it,’ he had used to command; peer over her shoulder at whatever she was working on, give no opinion whatsoever, brush a light kiss across the exposed nape of her neck, then walk out again, whistling quietly to himself.
They’d been married for several months before it had dawned on her that he only used the tea as an excuse to enter what was essentially her domain. If she turned and smiled at him he used to grin and pull her into his arms for a good long kiss before walking out again. If she ignored him, she used to receive that peck on the neck before he wandered out, whistling. But he never tried to break her concentration.
‘Why?’ she asked him once.
‘You have two great passions in your life, Marnie,’ he said. ‘One is your work and the other is me. When you are working, your art takes precedence. I am man enough to accept second place on those occasions so long as, once your work is done, I then fill your world.’
It was a shame he had not applied the same philosophy to himself.
‘Here.’ He offered her a cup and saucer.
‘Thank you.’ She took it from him, then watched as he took his brandy glass and threw himself down in the chair opposite her, his weariness showing in the long sigh he gave as he stretched himself out, long tanned legs with their liberal covering of crisp dark hair extending beyond the black silk covering of his brief robe.
Marnie swallowed drily, lowering her eyes to the steaming brew in her cup. Looking at him hurt. It always had, even when they’d been supposedly happy. He was that kind of man, painfully, heartbreakingly beautiful.
‘How is your father?’ she enquired, as a direct snub to the kind of thinking she had been about to indulge in.
‘Resigned to using a walking stick, at last.’ Guy grimaced. Roberto, like his son, had his fair share of pride. When a slight stroke had left a stiffness down one side of his body, he had not taken kindly to the idea of using a stick to get about. ‘He has a different stick for all occasions now,’ he added drily. ‘Your doing, I suspect.’ There was a half-question in his mocking gaze.
Marnie smiled. ‘I just happened to mention to him—in passing, you know—how interesting a man of his good looks and charm could look sporting a walking stick.’
‘You mean you pandered to his ego.’
‘The Italian in him,’ she corrected. ‘Goodness, but you Latin types place so much importance on your outward appearance,’ she complained. ‘I don’t think there is a race of people more egotistical, arrogant, proud—’
‘It was all of those things which attracted you to me once,’ Guy mildly pointed out.
She ignored the remark. ‘I thought,’ she went on consideringly instead, ‘that since I have to be in Berkshire myself next week I might call in to see him on my way. I could perhaps beg dinner and a bed for the night, then I can spend the whole evening flattering him a little before I need to be on my way.’
‘We shall certainly be going to Oaklands,’ Guy murmured slowly, watching her through hooded eyes. ‘But, as to anything you have planned in Berkshire, I am afraid you will have to cancel it.’
Marnie uncurled her legs from beneath her, alarm skittering along her spine. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded sharply.
Guy yawned lazily. ‘Exactly what you think I meant,’ he said, getting up to pour himself another drink. ‘As from tonight, you became my property again—which means you’ll be taking no more commissions which take you away from home.’
‘I won’t give up my work for you, Guy!’ she stated sharply.
‘You will do exactly as I say,’ he informed her, quite casually, as though the subject did not warrant him raising his voice to it. ‘Accept, Marnie—just as my father has had to accept his walking stick—that you are mine again, and in so being your commitments to me will override any others you may have already made.’
‘Not my work.’ She shook her head adamantly. ‘I will not give up my work and—dammit, Guy, but you can’t make me!’
‘I can,’ he assured her, ‘and I intend to.’
The sardonic raising of his brows brought her climbing furiously to her feet. ‘But y-you let me continue working the last time we were together!’ she choked. ‘I—’
‘Just one of the mistakes I made in our marriage,’ he declared. ‘One which will be corrected this time around.’
Struggling to maintain a grasp on her sanity, Marnie tried to be reasonable. In all honesty, she had not expected this. Of all the other horrors she had forced herself to think about concerning the situation, this was one she had not even so much as considered!
‘But—my work is my life!’ she cried. ‘You know it is! You can’t just—’
‘I can do whatever I please,’ he cut in with infuriating calm. ‘One of the most fundamental errors I made when dealing with you before, Marnie, was—’
‘Sleeping around!’ she snapped out bitterly.
His curt nod was an acknowledgment of a direct hit, but barely rattled his composure. ‘Was allowing you,’ he went on regardless of her outburst, ‘too much of your own way. I let you roam about the countryside like a gypsy with hardly a complaint. I let you choose which friends I could keep and which I had to discard. I…’
‘You didn’t discard Anthea, I made painful note!’
‘I let you, Marnie,’ he continued grimly, ‘run my life to such an extent that I began to lose my own identity!’
‘You lost your identity?’ she scoffed out scornfully. ‘What do you think our marriage did for me? I became Guy Frabosa’s woman! The silly child-bride who was as naïve as she was blind!’
‘But that is just the point,’ Guy put in silkily. ‘You are no longer a child, Marnie. Remember that, because I don’t intend to treat you as one. This time you will be a proper wife to me—a full-time wife! The kind of wife every man who is honest with himself wants in a marriage, which is the old-fashioned, home-loving, child-bearing kind!’
Her face drained of colour, the uncaring arrogance of his words hurting her in a way Guy would never know. ‘God, how I hate you!’ she whispered, teeth clenched and chattering in the bloodless tension in her face.
‘And what a passionate hatred it is,’ he derided. ‘For if I touched you now, Marnie, while you hate so spectacularly, you would go up in flames, and you know it!’ With a condemning flick of his black gaze he glanced down her quivering body, missing nothing, not the hectic heave of her breasts or the damning evidence of her nipples pushing hard and tight against the fine white silk covering of his shirt. ‘Your body yearns for mine,’ he accused condemningly. ‘That is why you fight so hard against your own desires, Marnie: because you want me. Want me so badly that it was a relief to you when your brother gave you the opportunity to place yourself at my mercy!’
‘That’s a lie!’ she rasped. ‘I despise the very thought of you so much as touching me!’
‘Is that so?’ he murmured silkily, lifting his hand towards her in a way that had her shrinking shakily back from him.
‘No decent woman would ever want you, Guy,’ she threw at him contemptuously. ‘Not one who has seen with her own eyes how freely you put yourself about!’
‘You only saw what you think you saw!’ he snapped, angry suddenly because the argument had taken a turn he had much rather it hadn’t. ‘But that period in our lives is no longer up for discussion,’ he then stated grimly. ‘I have tried too many times to make you listen while I explained it all to you; now I find I no longe
r want to. What has gone before today, Marnie, is now dead and gone, and must now be forgotten, because what follows in its wake will begin with a new set of rules which will leave no room for further dissension, on either side.’
Dead, gone, forgotten. Those three words echoed hollowly in her mind, bringing her swooping down from anger into weariness far more successfully than any attempt at subjugation on Guy’s part.
‘Let me continue working,’ she requested. If he would just concede this one point to her, then perhaps, she hoped, she could manage to put the rest aside as he wanted her to do. ‘The only thing I’ll ask of you, Guy!’ she pleaded when she saw the uncompromising set of his jaw. ‘The rest I—promise to abide by, so long as I can at least have my work!’
‘No compromises this time. I’m sorry.’ He sounded it too, his tone rough but firm. ‘But your work got in the way of us ever having a chance of making a success of our marriage the first time around. This time it has to be different.’
‘And your other women?’ she demanded. ‘Do they stop also?’
‘Do you want them to?’ he enquired smoothly.
God. She closed her eyes, swallowing on the bank of bitterness lying like acid in her throat. ‘Do what you want,’ she sighed, turning towards the door. ‘I find I don’t give a damn!’
‘Then why all this fuss?’ he demanded. ‘For someone who professes not to care at all, Marnie, you are giving a remarkable show of caring—perhaps too much?’
There was enough truth in that final taunt to sting her into spinning back to face him. ‘I will always despise you for forcing me into accepting you back like this! Is that what you want?’ she asked. ‘A woman—a wife who will resent every moment she has to spend in your arms? Is the price you’re going to pay for having me back in your life really worth the satisfaction you think you’ll feel at managing it?’
‘I know it will be,’ he said, taking the single stride which brought his body hard up against her own. She took a jerky step back, and found her back pressed hard against the solid wood of the door.
‘Let go of me,’ she muttered, trying to push his hands away. ‘Your touch makes my skin crawl!’
Guy smiled. ‘Crawl with what, I wonder?’ he murmured, placing his hands on her waist and crushing the fine silk fabric of his shirt against her naked flesh.
She began to tremble, tremble so badly that she could barely breathe. ‘No,’ she groaned as he began to lower his mouth to hers.
‘No?’ he taunted. ‘Are you very sure of that?’
His mouth landed, splitting her sanity into a million atoms of pure sensation. He began slowly drawing the silk up her body, drawing her deeper and deeper into the kiss as he slowly—agonisingly almost—exposed the bottom half of her body then pressed the thrusting heat of his own against her. Her senses responded instantly, making her squirm in an effort to combat the flood of sensual delight that ran through her.
She felt drenched in her own desire; her mouth opened, parting to allow him to deepen the kiss. His hands reached the undercurve of her breasts, the silk bunched up beneath them, and on a smooth sensual movement he slid his fingers beneath to cup and lift her before knowingly brushing his thumbs across the waiting points of her nipples.
She moaned, moving instinctively against him, her hands dragging tensely up the sides of his lean body to clutch at the bunched muscles of his shoulderblades. ‘Stop it,’ she gasped.
He ignored her. Her fingers clenched, then gripped hard, digging into the taut flesh beneath them as she fought the rage of feeling she was suffering inside. ‘Why don’t you just stop trying to fight me, Marnie?’ Guy murmured seductively. ‘You know you want to.’
‘No—’
‘Yes!’ he insisted, and parted her lips with the sensual force of his own. It was a kiss like no other. Hungry, passionate, charged with an angry urgency that sent her senses spinning out of control. Hazily, she tried to stop herself responding. But it was too late; their tongues met in a wild tangling that set them both breathing harshly.
His hands moved, but before she had a chance to groan out in protest at losing their electric caress to her breasts they were sliding sensually down her body to cup possessively at her buttocks, and it was only as he thrust his lower body towards her that she realised he had untied his robe, and she stopped breathing altogether as he pushed the throbbing fullness of his manhood between her trembling thighs.
‘God in heaven,’ he breathed, dragging his mouth from hers so he could bury it in her throat.
Her face was pushed against the thick mat of crisp dark hair on his chest. She tried to pull herself together, sucking in deep gulps of air, but the thundering sound of his heartbeat against her parted mouth seemed to overwhelm everything. They were almost one. Their bodies melded so closely together that she felt drunk and dizzy with the pleasure of it. His fingers were tense and restless, kneading her tender flesh while her own had somehow found their way over his shoulders and were clinging to the muscled tautness of his neck.
He moved against her, just once, shuddered violently and stopped, his breathing so harsh that she realised just how close he was to losing complete control.
‘Guy,’ she whispered desperately, not really sure what she was pleading for.
‘Give me back my promise, Marnie,’ he pleaded huskily against her throat. ‘I need to be inside you.’
Oh, God. She closed her eyes. This should not be happening. She should not be allowing this to happen! It was lust, she told herself madly. Sheer uncontrollable lust. The last time she had seen him this aroused, it had been in the arms of another woman.
‘No—!’ From somewhere she found the strength to push him away, sending him staggering backwards in surprise while she turned, trembling badly, to press her face into the door.
‘Why not?’ he rasped, his voice so raw she barely recognised it. ‘You want me! You can no longer go on pretending you do not!’
‘And for that I hate myself,’ she confessed wretchedly. She spun round, eyes bright with pain and unshed tears. ‘Can you even begin to know what it feels like to want a man you’ve seen with your own eyes beneath the naked body of another woman?’
Guy blanched, his hand coming up between them in abject appeal. ‘No! Marnie, it—’
But she reeled away from him, her arms once more hugging herself protectively. ‘No,’ she choked, cutting him off before he could even begin the explanation she heard hovering on his tongue. ‘Nothing—nothing can ever dismiss that vision from my mind, Guy. Nothing, do you understand?’
On a choking sob, she turned and fled from the room, taking that final bitter vision with her.
She could still replay, with vivid accuracy, that dreadful night she had found him in bed with Anthea. He had not been long behind her in returning to their apartment, but finding her locked behind her studio door and refusing to answer his plea for her to open the door had driven him to kicking it down.
‘Will you let me explain?’ he had rasped, coming swaying to a halt as the solid wood door with its freshly splintered lock landed with a resounding crash against the wall behind it. ‘It was not what you think!’
It was probably the only time she had ever seen him looking anything but immaculate. His clothes, hastily pulled on, hung about him. Shirt half fastened, trousers creased and beltless. Wherever his jacket had been, it had not been on his back. Face white and drawn, eyes wild, and his hair, that head of silky black hair, a crumpled mess—made that way by Anthea’s fingers.
The memory of all of that still had the ability to crush her inside. A living nightmare four years on.
Her refusal to so much as look at him, never mind listen to him, had him dragging her against his violently shaking frame. ‘Marnie,’ he’d pleaded hoarsely. ‘You have to listen to me!’
The stench of whisky had been strong, mingling with a cloying perfume that made her gag, his touch so repulsive to her that she had had to wrench herself free and run into the bathroom, where she was violently sick whi
le Guy had stood, leaning heavily against the door-frame, watching her suffer with a look of hell in his eyes.
‘I was drunk,’ he’d said. ‘I had been drinking steadily all day. I arrived at the party already slewed out of my mind. Derek took one look at me and pushed me up the stairs and into that room where he stripped me off and put me to bed. I never knew another thing until Anthea…’
She had turned on him then, her eyes touched with a kind of madness. The sickness had left her weak and shaky, but the bitterness and pain had been making the adrenalin pump hotly through her blood, and she had launched herself at him, her hand making violent contact with his face, her fingers, unknowingly set into claws, scoring into the taut flesh of his cheek.
He hadn’t even flinched. He had just stood there staring at her, grim, white-faced and with tortured eyes, but passive.
She remembered standing there for a wild unaccountable moment watching the blood begin to trickle down his cheek, following its progress with a kind of dazed fascination, not really aware that she had actually inflicted the wound on him.
‘I hate you,’ she’d whispered then, in a voice so devoid of emotion that he had shuddered. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done to me, and I shall never forgive you—never.’
She had turned away, meaning to leave right there and then. But Guy had made the mistake of touching her, begging her again to just listen to him, and she had turned on him again, hitting out at him with her fist, her feet, showering blows on his body while once again he stood rock-solid-still and let her do her worst until, weak with exhaustion, she had collapsed against him, to sob brokenly into his gaping shirt.
Without a single word he had just picked her up in his arms and carried her through to their bedroom, where he’d laid her down and covered her with the duvet before turning and walking out of the room. Leaving her alone to weep.
She had been alone ever since.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘LOOK.’ The grim tension simmering between them had not eased in the slightest over the last two miserable days, and Guy was at last sounding utterly fed up as he drove them from the airport into London. ‘I am not prepared to argue about it any more! We are going directly to my apartment and that’s where you will sleep tonight!’
Lost in Love Page 8