‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Mark asked Deborah as he picked up their suitcase.
Deborah followed his glance towards her briefcase. She shook her head and tried not to feel guilty as she saw its bulging outline.
Ryan hadn’t been at all pleased when she had told him that she was going away. In fact, he…
‘Ready, then?’
Nodding, she picked up her lightweight jacket and followed Mark out of the room.
‘Where to?’ she asked him once they were in the car. He had insisted on keeping their destination a surprise and she had done her best to enter into the spirit of the thing, even though in reality she was still far too wound up over her work and their quarrel to feel like playing games.
‘At least these few days away together will give us time to talk,’ she commented as she followed his directions.
‘No,’ Mark told her shortly, adding less curtly, ‘Let’s just forget everything else for a few days, Debs, and enjoy being with one another. Guessed where we’re going yet… ?’
She frowned. What had got into Mark? He didn’t normally go in for that kind of escapism.
‘No…’ she responded absently. ‘You’ll have to tell me.’
‘Rimington,’ he announced.
Rimington? She was startled enough to turn her head to look at him. The small Yorkshire village was the place where they had spent their first weekend away as lovers. Their hotel had been quiet and remote, a converted Edwardian house set in its own parkland, with huge bedrooms and the original attached bathrooms.
It had been November then, the moors surrounding them damp and misty, the log fire in their room far too tempting to leave for very long… like their bed.
Mark had been the first man with whom she had felt truly able to express her sexuality. Joyously she had shown him how much she desired him, how intensely sexual he made her feel. That weekend had been the first time in her life she had felt truly able to let go and to allow someone else to enter the private world of her sensuality.
It had also been the first time she had experienced an orgasm with a man without having to work hard for it. And not just one. Her body, once it had made up its mind to accept Mark, had seemed intent on making up for lost time.
‘Hey—steady on,’ he had teased her at one point when she was urgently trying to re-arouse him with her hands and mouth. ‘I don’t have your powers of recovery,’ he had told her gently as he’d eased her slightly away from him.
She hadn’t been put off, though, whispering to him that he could still give her aroused body the satisfaction it wanted.
‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ he had murmured softly, his mouth at her breast, his hand sliding down between her legs while she’d clung to him and shivered with anticipatory pleasure.
Sexually they were still as good together, even if recently their lovemaking had become less intense and less frequent… much less frequent.
There had been more than one occasion recently when she had gone to bed after working late to find him already asleep… so deeply asleep that neither the touch of her hand on his body nor the warmth of her mouth against his ear as she’d whispered to him that she wanted him had been enough to wake him up.
‘Oh, Mark… Rimington——!’ she exclaimed now.
‘Don’t tell me…’ he interrupted her grimly. ‘You don’t want to go there…’
She shook her head.
‘Yes—yes, I do,’ she told him softly. ‘Of course I do.’
Perhaps Mark was right; perhaps she was allowing herself to become engrossed in her work… making him feel that she was shutting him out, even though he ought to know her well enough to realise that she’d never do that.
Rimington. Just the thought of going back there with him was lifting the burden of tension from her shoulders.
‘You’re right,’ she told him huskily. ‘We do need some time together… on our own…’
Mark flinched as he heard the sensual promise in her voice. When he had first booked this break for them it had seemed such a good idea; buoyed up with his harmless flirtation with the clerk, he had remembered how good that first weekend away together had been. He had never known such a generous lover as Deborah. There was no coyness about her, no game- or role-playing, no insistence on any pretence of him having to coax her into physical intimacy.
And then he had certainly not wanted or needed to feign sleep to avoid making love with her.
He tensed and moved uncomfortably in his seat. In every relationship there was bound eventually to be a diminution of that early urgent and compulsive sexual desire.