Just for a Night (11 page)

Pride alone propelled her out of the room. No way
did she want James coming to her room and making a scene.

The walk down the corridors and along to James's wing did not take nearly long enough. Before she knew it she was standing at his door, and before she knew it he was sweeping that door open as though some sixth sense had told him she was there.

‘Where in hell have you been?' he snapped, and, grabbing an arm, yanked her into the bedroom. Just as swiftly he shut and locked the door behind him.

There were no lights on in the room, she noted shakily, yet it wasn't in darkness. The curtains at the main windows were wide open and an eerie silver moonlight was streaming in, making the blues in the room look grey and the gold like platinum.

James was wearing a darkly patterned silk robe, tightly sashed around his waist as though he had sashed and resashed it many times in the last hour. His obvious agitation made her feel a little better. Clearly he wasn't in the habit of making midnight assignations with women he had not promised to love and cherish, but from whom he'd exacted a promise of total sexual surrender for one long, mad, marvellous night.

Suddenly it was all too much for her, and with a soft sound of just such sexual surrender she threw her arms around his neck and lifted her mouth for him to crush.

He crushed it at first. Then adored it, tasting her tongue and licking at her lips, making her mouth feel
not so much a mouth but an exquisite meal, to be savoured before being devoured.

She was melting against him when his mouth turned savage again as abruptly as it had gentled, making her moan beneath its onslaught, half in fear, half with a wild, mutual passion.

He must have heard the fear, however, for he dragged his mouth away and buried it in her hair, his breath hot and ragged. ‘You don't know what you do to me,' he rasped. ‘I've been in hell all week. But this last hour has unravelled me completely. I'm not going to be able to last.'

His confessed vulnerability was oddly reassuring and sweetly touching. She pulled back to cup his face and look up at him.

‘James,' she said softly, and traced over his face and mouth with gentle fingertips. ‘Darling James…we have all night, remember? It doesn't matter.'

He groaned and opened his lips to take one of her fingertips between them. Desire flashed like lightning through her, and without thinking she pushed the finger further inside his mouth, watching with wide eyes and pounding heart while he sucked on it.

Marina had read about women going weak at the knees over a man but had thought it a melodramatic exaggeration.

But it wasn't. As he sucked her finger she literally went weak at the knees, her legs turning jelly-like. Her head began to whirl. She had to take her finger out or risk collapsing!

She plucked it away with a low moan of regret and
he just stared at her. Her hands moved as in a dream, slipping the robe from her shoulders to let it flutter to the floor. Then came the nightie, one strap at a time, till she was standing naked before him.

She had never felt so desirable in all her life. His hungry gaze gobbled her up, especially her breasts which already ached for his touch. She felt their aroused heaviness lift upwards when she raised her hands to pluck the pins from her hair. She dropped them on the carpet, one at a time, letting the mass of red-gold curls tumble around her bare shoulders in erotic disarray.

‘I don't think one night is going to be enough,' he said thickly, and bent to scoop her up into his arms.

He carried her over and lay her down in the softest of mattresses and pillows. The blue and gold quilt was already thrown back, she realised as she sank into snow-white linen. Her hands lifted languidly again, to rake her hair out onto the pillow. If she was going to live out a fantasy, then she was going to do it right.

‘Are you going to close the curtains?' she asked, her voice sounding as thick as treacle.

‘And block out such a sight? God, no.' He began unsashing his own robe. ‘Do you know what you look like lying there in the moonlight? Have you any idea?'

He shrugged out of his robe and Marina snapped out of her dreamworld. For never had she seen a man so fiercely erect. Not even Shane, who was a very virile fellow. James was awesome in his need. Like a volcano rising up and ready to explode.

The sight unnerved her momentarily.

‘Don't…don't forget to use protection,' she said in a breathy little voice.

‘I'm well prepared,' he assured her, and pointed to a pile of foil squares on the bedside table.

‘Oh…'

He reached to pick one up and Marina turned her head away. She didn't want to watch.

But what if he asked
her
to put one on him later in the night? She turned her head back, only to find the deed already done.

Now she felt a fool. James's need for her wasn't embarrassing. It was beautiful.
He
was beautiful.

She held out her arms and he joined her on the bed, kissing her hungrily. Her own need, which had receded with their separation, quickly raced back. Soon she could not get enough of his tongue in her mouth, or that hand which was stroking up and down her leg. Gradually it moved higher, then around between her thighs. Once there, it did not hesitate. It was focused and experienced and merciless.

In no time Marina was on the brink, and she burst from his mouth, gasping. Her back began to arch away from the bed, her flesh tensing in readiness for that electric moment when everything twisted even tighter before splintering apart. He immediately moved between her legs and surged into her, deep and hard. She caught her breath, and tried to stop herself from coming. But such was the burst of emotional and physical satisfaction at being one with him at last that her body refused to obey.

She cried out, her face grimacing in that strange
agony which was really ecstasy. And then she felt
him
coming, shuddering violently into her. Her mind spun out into a vortex where all those tortuous feelings he'd been evoking in her since they'd met sought to find total satisfaction.

She found herself raking her nails down his back and digging them into the taut muscles of his buttocks. But if it was pain she was wanting to impart, then she failed. The only sound he made was a long, low groan of raw animal pleasure.

It did wicked things to her, that groan. She vowed to make him groan many times during the night; she vowed to make him suffer for doing this to her—for making her love him even more than she had before.

‘W
HY
is it,' James said softly, shortly before three, ‘that the more I make love to you, the more I want to?'

He was lying on his side, propped up on his left elbow and trickling the tassel of one of the curtain cords over her nearest nipple.

Marina said nothing. She just clenched her jaw in futile denial of her own rapid resurgence of desire.

He started on the other nipple. ‘You have such lovely breasts,' he murmured, and bent to lick the stiffened peak to an even greater state of acute sensitivity. After spending a full five minutes on this torture, he trailed the tassel down over her ribs and stomach, encircling her navel before moving down to her thighs, by which time Marina was breathing heavily and desperately wanting to part those thighs wide, to beg him to run that tantalising tassel over far more intimate places.

But a certain feminine stubbornness was creeping into Marina, an innate desire not to be so easy, she supposed. It was silly at this point, she knew, but she could not seem to help it. She kept her legs stubbornly closed, even when he drove her mad with that tassel trailing up and down her thighs.

Her resistance was perverse, really, because he'd
already kissed every inch of her, already reduced her several times to a quivering, mindless creature, unable to stop him doing whatever he pleased, wherever he pleased.

In the end, he stopped and frowned at her. ‘What's wrong?' he asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘You don't want me to make love to you again?'

She said nothing. Wild horses were not going to drag the admission from her that she was dying for it already.

‘Would you like to do it to me? Is that it?'

Her eyes blinked with the alien notion. For she had never ever made love to a man, not even Shane. He hadn't asked for it and she'd never offered, though she'd seen it often enough in the movies. It seemed the only position these days for sex scenes: the woman on top. To Marina it always looked choreographed, and frankly rather embarrassing.

‘I…I've never done that sort of thing before,' she confessed.

His eyes showed surprise. ‘Why's that?'

‘I guess I…I never wanted to. And none of the men I've slept with have ever asked me to.'

‘Not even Shane?'

‘No.'

‘I see. At least, no, I
don't
see. Damn it, Marina, must you confuse me even more than I am already?' He glared down at her with a mixture of exasperation and bewilderment. ‘So tell me, exactly how many men have there been in your life so far?'

‘Exactly how many women have there been in yours?'

The counter-question threw him. Clearly he could not even hazard a guess.

‘Never mind,' she muttered. ‘I get the point. I have technically had three lovers before you. But two of them were really just boys. I dated them at teachers' college. They were students, like me, with either limited experience or knowledge. I'm not sure which.'

She sighed at the memory. She'd been such a child at the time, yet thought herself so grown-up. All of eighteen and nineteen! ‘I believed I was in love both times,' she said. ‘But sex proved such an anticlimax on each occasion that I eventually decided what I felt couldn't possibly be love.

‘That's why when sex with Shane was so unexpectedly good, I did the reverse and believed I
had
to be in love with him. Although, to be fair to myself, he was also very kind to me when I needed kindness. My mother had just died and I needed…someone.'

‘I can understand that,' James murmured.

He idly resumed tantalising her with the tassel. Over her stomach this time. ‘So you really haven't had all that much experience…?'

‘No.' Her voice was as taut as her stomach muscles.

‘That's a very exciting thought,' he said, trailing the tassel up over her breasts and up to her mouth, where he danced the ends of the golden threads over her softly quivering lips. ‘Are you enjoying what I'm doing at the moment? You certainly seem to be.'

Her face flamed and she nodded, her tongue suddenly thick in her throat.

‘If I asked you to, would you do it to me, Marina? Would you do all those things you have never done with a man before? You know what I mean, don't you?'

She nodded again, her heart pounding in her chest.

He stopped the torture with the tassel, and, taking her nearest hand, opened her clenched fingers and wrapped them tightly around the cord. Then he lay back on the bed beside her, his eyes shutting as he scooped in, then exhaled several very deep breaths.

Her stomach churned as she propped herself up on one arm and stared, first down at the cord in her hand, then over at his outstretched nakedness. She wanted to. Oh, yes. She wanted to touch him and kiss him all over, to trail the tassel over
his
flesh till he was groaning with passion. She wanted to make love to him better than all those other women, the ones he could not count.

But she had no experience to fall back on, and her mouth went dry at the prospect at making an utter fool of herself.

‘You don't have to do anything you're not comfortable with,' he reassured her softly, even while his eyes remained shut. ‘I'll love anything you do to me. Anything at all.'

Marina gathered all her courage and just began, her hand trembling. His chest quivered at the first touch of the soft golden threads, his lungs expanding on an inward gasp of pleasure. She took confidence from the
sound and started trailing the tassel over his broadly muscled male chest. He sucked in sharply again when she grazed over his nipples.

So she did it again. Then again, thrilling to the sight of those small nubs expanding into twin peaks of expectant nerve-endings. Marina knew how they felt, for she had felt the same thing herself. With the knowledge of her own experience in mind, she bent over him and used her tongue on them in long, teasing licks, and eventually he gave out a muffled groan, the sound vibrating with tortured arousal.

A bolt of adrenaline raced through her as she discarded the cord and moved her mouth and hands slowly downwards, over his ribs and onto his stomach. When she swirled her tonguetip in his navel, his stomach fluttered wildly. When she moved on even further, she felt every muscle in his body freeze in anticipation of what was to come.

She didn't dare look up to see if he'd opened his eyes. If she did, this new and intoxicating boldness might fail her. As it was, she felt dizzy with an unexpected sense of power, and possessed by the most incredible passion. She'd never realised how exciting taking control of lovemaking could be, how much she would revel in the feel of his hardness beneath her hands and within her mouth.

‘Don't stop,' he rasped when her head finally lifted. ‘For pity's sake, don't stop.'

It still seemed the ideal time to do so, and to reach for one of the foil packets. He groaned and grimaced, his whole body as tightly strung as his face. She took
her time, partly because she'd never actually put a condom on before but mostly because underneath her seeming cool she was so hopelessly excited she couldn't think straight.

‘God, yes,' he cried, when she finally moved to straddle him. When she began lowering herself rather gingerly onto his powerful erection, he took hold of her hips and pulled her down onto him more quickly.

Marina gasped at the feel of his flesh impaling hers, her mouth drying as her lips parted and hot, shallow breaths puffed from her panting lungs.

He reached up to knead her swollen breasts, crushing them together then drawing them down, down to his mouth. She bent forward in a type of daze, only dimly aware that she was no longer in control.
He
was.

He was suckling on her breasts and she was moaning, moaning and moving her bottom, writhing in her need. His own buttocks were rocking against the bed, setting up a frantic rhythm inside her. With a tortured gasp, she plucked her nipple out of his mouth and straightened so that she could match his movements with more uninhibited fervour. She no longer thought such an act embarrassing, or ridiculous. She no longer thought at all.

They came together like a thunderclap, and their cries echoed through the room. Afterwards she collapsed upon his chest, utterly spent. James clasped her close and buried his lips in her hair.

‘God, how am I going to live without you?' he muttered.

The very real bleakness in his voice stirred Marina to hope as she had never hoped this past week. She waited breathlessly for him to say he loved her, to ask her to stay in England with him. But he remained silent. Clearly, no matter what his feelings for her, they were not strong enough, or deep enough, for him to change the path of his life.

Marina had not really expected him to. Men like him did not marry girls like her. A soul-sinking acceptance of the situation combined with her physical exhaustion, and she sighed a deep yawn.

‘Don't go to sleep, for pity's sake,' he groaned. ‘The morning will come soon enough.'

‘It's almost morning now,' she told him drowsily.

‘We still have a couple of hours. Talk to me,' he urged as he held her and stroked her spine. ‘Tell me all about yourself. Tell me about your childhood, your teaching. Tell me what you do in a typical day. I want to know everything about you, Marina.'

It seemed pointless, but she did as he asked and told him of her upbringing, her school days, her wish to become a teacher—but not in her mother's riding school. She told him of her college years and how, after her unsatisfactory relationships with the opposite sex, she'd steered clear of boyfriends for a few years and filled her life with her career.

And as she talked that crushing exhaustion gradually left her. Just before the dawn it was James who fell asleep, leaving Marina to disentangle herself from his leaden arms. She crept back to her room, where she sat in an armchair and watched the sun rise. She
dozed in the chair for an hour or so, waking when the mantel clock donged seven. With a sigh she rose and made her way to the shower, wondering as she stepped under the jets of hot water if James was still asleep.

She rather resented washing the smell of him from her. Making love with this man who she knew she
really
loved had been the most incredible experience she had ever had. She would never forget it. Neither would she regret it.

To know true love was a rare thing, she believed. That was why it had been impossible for her to turn her back on it entirely, to not grab the one opportunity she was given to consummate her feelings, even if having that one incredible night with him made her grieve over all the coming nights—and years—when she would never know his touch again.

Marina felt the tears come then. She lifted her face and let the water wash them away before she ended up with great puffy red eyes. There were too many intuitive people around Winterborne Hall for her to go down to breakfast looking as if she'd been crying.

It was while she was under the shower and had moved on to shampooing her hair that Marina suddenly remembered her hairpins, scattered all over the floor by the bed in James's bedroom.

She didn't know what to do. James was certain not to see them. Men like him, who had nothing to do with housework, would never notice a few hairpins lying on the carpet. But a housemaid would. And so would Mildred. They were very distinctive-looking
pins, especially made for putting up long hair. Two and two would soon make four in the mind of whoever found them.

Marina knew she could not bear to go through this day fearing she was being looked at, and sniggered over, and pitied.

She had no alternative but to go and get them.

She dressed quickly, in the jeans and white shirt she'd worn over on the plane. She hadn't come with a whole swag of clothes for cooler weather and had little choice.

It was just going on eight by the time she was ready for her rescue mission. Drying her hair had taken some time, but she didn't want to waltz around the house at this hour with dripping locks. It would look suspicious. This way, if she ran into anyone in the hallways, she could say she was an early riser and was going for a walk.

Unfortunately James's room was not situated between her room and the staircase which led downstairs. Hopefully, being Sunday morning, not too many people would be up and about yet. She wasn't expected down to breakfast till nine, James having made this arrangement with Talbot over dinner the night before.

Rebecca was a worry. Children were notorious early risers. Then there was Mildred, who no doubt was of the old school who got up at the crack of dawn. Still, the housekeeper was more likely to already be downstairs. Or in church, with a bit of luck.

A peep out of the bedroom door showed an empty
hallway. Marina scooped in one last steadying breath, then made a determined dash in the direction of James's room, hurrying along the wide polished and carpeted corridors, not stopping on the way to admire any of the gilt-framed portraits and landscapes as she'd done during her tour the previous day.

Once in front of James's solid wooden door she knocked, before fear and panic got the better of her.

When Talbot opened the door, she almost died.

‘Yes, miss?' he said, without turning a hair, as though it was perfectly normal for breathless ladies to call upon the Lord of the Manor at eight in the morning.

‘I…er…I was hoping to have a brief word with James. Is he…er…in?'

‘His Lordship is in the shower. Can I help you with anything, perhaps?'

‘No. No, I don't think so.' She glanced past the butler and into the room, trying to see if the pins were still on the floor. The bed, she could see with a sinking heart, was already made. A tray with a silver coffee service and a newspaper was on the bedside table nearest the door—the same bedside table which the night before had held much more intimate items. ‘Er…what time did James say breakfast was last night?'