‘Is that good?’
His voice sounded thicker, deeper, sending a message to her own senses like a note running along a wire. He was plucking erotically at her nipples, his tanned skin a contrast to her own pale softness and the dark hot flush of her engorged flesh.
His hands moved lower down, over her ribcage, lower…Lucy sighed and squirmed, closing her eyes in anticipation of the pleasure to come.
‘No…open your eyes and watch me,’ Marcus insisted thickly.
He was stroking her sex. Lucy couldn’t remove her aroused gaze from the movement of his hands. Her heart started to hammer against the wall of her chest as slowly and deliberately he folded back the soft flesh—just as she herself had done earlier. She looked into the mirror and saw in his eyes that he had seen her, had known what she was thinking. What she had been wanting. What she had been on the verge of doing….
‘Isn’t this better?’ he demanded softly. ‘Why pleasure yourself, Lucy, when I can do it for you?’
His mouth caressed the magic spot just below her ear and her whole body convulsed.
‘Did you know that the nerve-endings in this spot here are directly connected to your nerve-endings right here?’ she heard him whisper in her ear, as he kissed her skin again and stroked his fingers over the eager, dark pink wetness of her sex, rubbed his thumb-tip slowly over her clitoris.
Once. Twice. And then faster. Until she was breathing frantically fast and her whole body was shuddering in the grip of orgasm.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even stand. She felt boneless, weightless…and pleasured. Pleasured, but not satisfied, she knew, as Marcus swung her up into his arms and carried her over to the bed.
Only when he had placed her on it and removed his own robe, only when her reckless longing had directed her fingers to reach out and stroke the length of his erection and back again, and she had allowed herself to enjoy the delicious pleasure touching him had relayed via her fingertips to each and every one of her senses, did she think to say uncertainly, ‘Marcus, I don’t think we should be doing this…’
‘Why ever not? You enjoyed it last night, didn’t you?’
Enjoyed it? Of course she’d enjoyed it. But that wasn’t the issue, or the point she was trying to make.
And yet she was murmuring dizzily, ‘Oh, yes, I did.’
‘And so did I. So there’s no problem, is there?’
‘No, I don’t suppose there is,’ Lucy agreed weakly.
How could there be any kind of problem when Marcus was touching her like this? Kissing her like this? ‘Mmm,’ she sighed happily against his mouth, and she reached up and wrapped her arms tightly around him.
CHAPTER SIX
LUCY looked at the pillow next to her own. It was still squashed from having Marcus’s sleeping head lying on it. She reached out and tenderly traced the indentation, a smile of soft happiness curving her mouth. Last night had been so wonderful—and what had made it even more wonderful had been falling asleep cuddled up next to Marcus, free to snuggle in against him and breathe in the scent of him. She had woken up several times during the night, just for the pleasure of reassuring herself that he was still there.
But he wasn’t always going to be ‘still there’, was he? She had no idea what had prompted Marcus to indulge in this brief and unexpected sexual adventure with her, but she knew already how much it was going to hurt when he grew tired of it—and of her. She didn’t want Marcus for a brief fling. She wanted him for life. Despair swamped her earlier euphoria.
‘Come on, sleepyhead, wake up. I’ve ordered breakfast, and it will be here any minute.’
Marcus! Lucy shot upright in the bed, and then blushed and reached for the protection of the duvet to cover her bare beasts, all too aware of the amused and quizzical look in Marcus’s eyes. He sat down beside her, firmly removed her ‘protection’, and bent his head to kiss first one nipple and then the other. Then he murmured appreciatively, ‘Maybe I should phone Room Service and tell them to delay breakfast.’
‘Mmm,’ Lucy agreed weakly, and then grabbed for the duvet again when there was a knock on the door.
‘I’ll get them to take our breakfast through my suite onto the terrace,’ Marcus offered, leaving the bed to go and close the shutters for her. ‘But don’t you dare go back to sleep.’
Sleep! That was the last thing she felt like doing, Lucy thought as she headed for the shower.
‘I was just about to come and make sure you hadn’t gone back to sleep,’ Marcus told her ten minutes later, when she opened the shutters and walked through the patio doors onto the terrace.
‘I’ve ordered coffee for you,’ he continued. ‘And fruit juice, and poached eggs with tomatoes and mushrooms. There’s some toast as well.’
‘A cooked breakfast? Yuck.’ Lucy shuddered as she sat down and immediately looked longingly at the coffee pot.
Marcus was already pouring coffee for her, and she breathed in its rich aroma whilst her tastebuds prepared themselves for their morning surge of caffeine. Marcus, she noticed, was drinking green tea.
‘The body needs protein in the morning,’ Marcus told her firmly, as he removed the cover from his own breakfast. ‘It can’t function properly without it.’
‘Oh, thank you, Dr Atkins,’ Lucy retorted sourly as she reached for her coffee. But the eggs did look appetising. She reached out and pinched a mushroom from Marcus’s plate.
‘Eat,’ Marcus commanded, handing her her own breakfast. ‘As soon as we’ve finished breakfast I’ll go and ring Beatrice and check what time she’s expecting to meet up with us,’ he added, as she tucked into her eggs and realised just how hungry she actually was. ‘But first there is something I want to discuss with you.’
Lucy had to put down her coffee cup because her hand had started to tremble. Here it was—the demand for an explanation she had been dreading so much.
‘If it’s about last night…and…and the day before…’ she began defensively.
‘It is,’ Marcus agreed. ‘It seems to me, Lucy, that it would be a very good idea if you and I were to get married.’
Had she head him correctly? Was he trying to make some kind of joke? ‘Married
? You mean, as in to one another?’ she asked him cautiously.
‘Of course I mean as in to one another.’
‘But—but, Marcus…why? I mean, why would you—we—want to do that? I mean, you don’t even like me very much!’ Lucy blurted out, too shocked not to be honest.
‘I think that you and I would be very well suited to one another.’
Lucy reached for her coffee cup and took a deep gulp. He hadn’t said that he did like her, she noticed. And he certainly hadn’t said that he loved her.
‘We share a similar background, and I suspect a very similar outlook on life. We both, I think, want children, and, despite the ending of your marriage to Nick, I believe that, like me, you think of commitment made to another person via marriage as one that is made for life—for better or for worse, in a relationship to which one is totally committed. Because make no mistake—if we do marry, I shall be committed completely and totally to our marriage, and to you and to our children, and I shall expect the same commitment from you.’
Total and complete commitment from Marcus to her? Was she dreaming?
‘But—but…’
‘But what?’ Marcus demanded coolly. ‘As the last two days have proved, we are exceptionally sexually compatible.’
‘But people don’t get married just because they are having good sex together!’ Lucy protested. ‘You can’t want to marry me because of that, Marcus.’
‘There are other reasons,’ he agreed.
‘What other reasons?’
‘I’ll be thirty-five in December,’ Marcus told her calmly. ‘All the men in my family—my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather and back beyond that—married before they were thirty-five. It’s a family tradition, and one I have no intention of breaking.’
Did he mean that if she refused him he would find someone else who wouldn’t?
She thought about how it would feel, being married to Marcus without being loved by him when she loved him so much. It would hurt—and very badly. Then she thought about how she would feel seeing Marcus married to someone else because he wanted to be married before his thirty- birthday.