Lost in Love

Woul

d he expect her to sleep here with him tonight? Her gaze settled on his dark silk robe, and almost instantly she conjured up a vision of him throwing it there, his body smooth and tight and disturbingly graceful in its nakedness. No pyjamas to be seen. She knew without having to look that she could turn this room upside-down without finding any. Guy never wore anything in bed. ‘Except you,’ he’d grinned once when she had dared ask the question. ‘You are all I need to keep me warm.’

God. Her chest lifted and fell on a thickened heave of air. She just couldn’t do it—couldn’t! Not just calmly go to bed with him tonight as if nothing untoward had occurred in the last four years!

Shifting jerkily, she sent that damning bed one last pensive glance before she walked out of the room and stood, hovering in the hallway, small teeth pressing down on her trembling bottom lip as she glanced at the other couple of doors which led off from here.

More bedrooms? Her heart thudded with hope, and she stepped over to open the one next to Guy’s, almost wilting in relief when she saw it was indeed another bedroom.

Perhaps, she mused thoughtfully as she quietly closed the door again, if she played it very carefully, this would be the room she’d sleep in tonight—alone. She knew Guy, knew his strengths and his weaknesses. With a little clever manipulation on her part, she should be able to swing things to suit herself.

‘What are you doing?’ His voice made her jump, and swing around to find him standing in the sitting-room doorway.

‘Checking out my prision,’ she countered. ‘Why, have you some objection to my doing that as well?’ Her tone was a challenge as well as a defiance to his power over her.

‘No, no objection,’ he assured, leaning his shoulder against the open door and thrusting his hands into his pockets as he studied her narrowly. ‘So, what have you discovered—besides the fact that I have no “little fancy piece” hidden away in one of the other rooms?’ he mocked.

The thought having never entered her head, Marnie was instantly on the attack at being reminded of his—habit of travelling nowhere without the necessary woman in tow.

‘So, where is she, then?’ she demanded. ‘Perhaps occupying the suite next door?’

‘Wherever she is, she will sleep alone tonight.’ His dismissive shrug was both lazy and indifferent, but his eyes held a promise that left Marnie in no doubt why this faceless creature would be alone.

Quelling the urge to tell him that he too was in for a disappointment, she kept balefully silent instead.

He wasn’t sure what was going on behind the look, but experience warned him that something was, and he continued to study her narrowly for a few tense seconds before letting out a dry little sigh and levering himself away from the door.

‘Dinner’s getting cold,’ he murmured.

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Then we’d better go and eat it, hadn’t we?’ And in a complete turnabout of mood she sent him a bright smile as she walked past him. ‘What did you order?’ she asked as she went over to the heated serving trolley to begin lifting covers curiously. ‘Mmm,’ she drooled, ‘is that freshwater bream? Oh, you darling, Guy, I haven’t eaten freshwater bream in years! Fancy you remembering how much I love it! What’s for starters?’ she asked eagerly, lifting covers and peering inside with an outward ignorance of the frowning suspicion written on his face. ‘Melon. Great!’ She sat herself down at the table. ‘If there is one thing for which I could never fault you, Guy,’ she enthused, ‘it was your unerring ability to always know exactly what to order for me.’

With a flick of her freshly combed hair, she sent him a wide, warm smile, wanting to laugh at his comical expression. Guy had always had difficulty following her quickfire changes of mood. He had never been certain of what she was really thinking or feeling at any one time. The fifteen years that separated their ages had their advantages on both sides, and for Marnie it meant she was like a completely new species of woman to a man of his sophistication. It had always puzzled her as to why he should turn his practised eye on someone so young and obviously unsophisticated as herself. In the end she had decided it must be the Italian in him, demanding an untouched woman for his wife, and finding innocent virgins of a more mature and sophisticated age was well nigh an impossibility these days. So once she had decided that her innocence was her only attraction she had gone into emotional hiding, treating him to a clever blend of light-hearted affection and flirtatious mockery that kept him constantly unsure of her.

Marnie had never considered herself a fool. Her mother had died when she was only sixteen, leaving her and Jamie to cope alone in the big bad world outside. But, although Jamie was several years older than Marnie, he had never been a strength for her to rely on, and she had had to learn quickly to fend for herself. Sheer guts and determination had taken her through her final few years at school and on to art college. She had paid her own way by working seven nights a week as a waitress in a wine-bar, learning very early on how to deflect any male interest in her without once feeling the urge to experiment with what they were offering her. She was willing to paint anything and everything that brought her a fee for doing it, and by the time she was in her second college year had already built a reputation for herself as an artist—nothing spectacular, but good enough to have the small commissions coming in on a regular basis. By her twentieth birthday she had had her own small flat, run her own small car—with a lot of nursing from her brother—and had already found it necessary to resign from college so she could meet her growing commitments, her career seeming to create itself out of nothing for her.

No. Nobody’s fool but Guy’s, she concluded. Falling in love with him had to go down as the biggest piece of folly she had ever committed in her short, busy life! Not that she had ever let him know how completely he had beguiled her. And anyway, she had fought it, fought her feelings all the way through their short, hot, volcanic courtship and right into their equally short, hot and volcanic marriage.

She’d decided that he wanted a virgin for a wife and a woman he had trained to his own personal sexual satisfaction in his bed, which was exactly what he got—and nothing else. While she got—well, what she deserved, she wryly supposed. A man who gave her everything from fine clothes and fast cars to long, hot, passionate nights that left her replete but spent, having had to fight the urge to tell him just how wretchedly she loved him.

But that was a long time ago, she concluded as she glanced up to catch him still watching her narrowly and smiled a bright, false, capricious smile which made his own mouth turn down into a scowl. Now, even the love was dead, choked out of her by his own uncaring hands, and all that was really left between them was a bitter enmity mutually felt, and a refusal on his part to let go of something he considered his property.

On a mental shrug, she turned her attention to the dinner-trolley, intending to serve up the melon Guy had ordered as a first course, but his hand, coming tightly around her slender wrist, brought her attention sharply back to him. He was glaring at her, his dark brown eyes brooding and intent.

‘I cannot pretend to know what was just going on behind that false smile of yours, Marnie, but I do warn you, most sincerely, to take care.’

The warning shivered through her. She might pride herself on being no one’s fool, but neither was Guy. ‘All I want to do is eat my dinner,’ she said. ‘You did promise me dinner and a bed, didn’t you? So let me eat, then find the bed.’

‘My bed,’ he agreed with grim satisfaction, letting go of her wrist and sitting back in his chair, relaxing because he believed she’d walked herself right into that trap when really it was she doing the trapping.

‘My own bed,’ she corrected, placing large spoonfuls of the beautifully prepared melon into two dishes before passing one to him. ‘I’ll be sleeping alone tonight and every night until we are married again,’ she flatly informed him.

‘You’ll sleep where I tell you to sleep, when I let you sleep,’ he countered, just as flatly.

Marnie turned her attention to the melo

n, taking a small square into her mouth and murmuring at the sweetly delicious taste. ‘This is very good,’ she announced. ‘Try it. It has something added to it that gives it a fantastic tangy flavour.’

He ignored her. ‘We have a bargain, Marnie,’ he reminded her. ‘I dig your brother out of his mess and you—’