Bewildered, she parted her lips. He dropped it in and automatically she swallowed. 'But you-'
'We don't need it to happen this soon. Success might conclude other pleasures that are for the moment… for me at least,' he conceded raggedly, 'far more important.'
An odd little twinge of pain coloured her relief at his change of heart. He could not have told her more clearly that for him pregnancy would be a sexual turn-off, or possibly the final act of the whole charade he had involved her in.
'Aren't you pleased?' he probed.
'Ecstatic… but you want everything I've got to give in return,' she whispered tightly, understanding that, for this present forbearance on his part, there would be a price.
A questing hand closed over one small firm breast and her eyes slid shut in an involuntary reflex, every tiny muscle tautening beneath her skin in a hot rush of anticipation.
'And that's incredibly generous, isn't it?' he said thickly. 'Considering that I could take it without asking.'
His other hand skimmed down the pale length of her thigh and her senses leapt wildly. Her own hands dug like talons into the embroidered bedspread beneath her, so fierce was the temptation to touch him. She would submit, that was all. Nothing more, nothing less.
Laughing softly, he divided the robe, bent his dark head over her quivering stomach and let his mouth roam over her responsive flesh. 'I'm going to drive you out of your mind,' he promised.
Shedding the twin of her own robe, he rearranged her on the bed as if she were a doll. She collided with the rapacious hunger glittering in the all-male appraisal devouring her pale body, lingering on the swell of her breasts and the sleek curve of her hips. And she burned all over, self-conscious in one sense but strangely proud in another.
She was breathing very fast as she looked up at him, her tormented green gaze wandering from his broad shoulders down to the rough curling hair defining his muscular chest and beyond to his hard flat stomach. About there, she closed her eyes tightly, willing herself into stillness and silence.
He closed his mouth round a rosy nipple and teased her with his teeth. A whimper of stifled sound escaped her. She felt the erotic pull deep in the pit of her stomach like a key turning in a lock. He leant over her, delving his tongue between her soft lips and plundering the response she could not withhold. She was shaking, alternately hot and cold with the force of her own arousal. It had happened so fast, she couldn't control it.
His slim hands moved over her with ruthless precision, now hard, now gentle and always, always one agonising step behind where she needed them to be. She couldn't stay still, she couldn't stay quiet. He was slowly and inexorably working down her quivering length, leaving no part of her untouched. His teeth nipped playfully at a sensitive spot on her thigh and her back arched, the heat building to a cruel pitch as his fingers toyed with the damp auburn curls crowning her most tender flesh. She moaned out loud, choking back his name, panting for breath.
'Let go,' he demanded. 'Or I'll make you let go.' And then he did what she had never allowed him to do before, something so intimate it was unbearable, something so exciting, it drove her right off the edge. Parting her locked thighs, he buried his mouth against that most secret place and tasted her, and after that there was nothing she could do but feel. A primitive avalanche of wild sensation took over and wave upon wave of explosive pleasure shuddered through her in an earth shattering climax of passion that took all else before it.
'You're mine, absolutely, unequivocally mine.'
Not quite sure she was even conscious, she felt her eyes cling to him as he knelt at her feet, surveying her with triumph. Hard hands curved to her hips as he pulled her to him and there wasn't a resistant bone in her body. He drove into her hard and deep until she didn't know where she began and he ended. Her heartbeat slammed into overdrive as he set a savage rhythm. Her skin, slippery with sweat, slid exquisitely against his and she was suddenly, incredibly at fever pitch again, her fingernails raking the smooth damp skin of his back in that instant of raw, electrifying pleasure that freed her from the chains of the mortal world.
Afterwards, it was a long time before he released her from his weight. And she didn't want him to move. She wanted him to stay where he was forever. She felt glorious, and at the back of her woozy mind she knew that sensation wasn't likely to last. He rolled free and lay back for a few brief minutes, silent, in a damp golden sprawl of satiation on the other side of the bed. Incautiously she leant her chin on her elbow and looked at him, only to realise that his attitude of relaxation was highly deceptive. His superb bone structure was starkly apparent beneath his dark skin, grim tension etched into the forbidding line of his mouth. Without warning, he leapt off the bed, snatched up his robe and shrugged into it. She couldn't believe that he was just going to walk out after what they had just shared. Indeed, she let him get as far as the door before she was provoked into speech. 'I'm sorry, sir. Did I disappoint you?'
Lightning-fast, he spun back, the black brilliance of his gaze stabbing into her. 'That isn't amusing.'
Her eyes wide to hold back the scorching moisture welling up, Ashley retorted, 'It wasn't supposed to be. But I shouldn't have to tell a male of your experience that there's a certain form for these occasions-'
'And you would know all about that, wouldn't you?' His nostrils flared with distaste. 'How many other men have there been?'
She went white and regretted challenging him, but pride had demanded that she refuse to allow him to treat her in such a fashion. He had said that she was his wife. A husband didn't make love to his wife and then get up and leave her to sleep elsewhere without a word or even a gesture.
'Tell me,' he invited rawly. 'I want to know.'
'I don't think now would be the most auspicious time,' she said thickly, choking back the humiliated tears clogging up her throat.
'My imagination runs riot,' he intoned harshly. 'I'd prefer the truth.'
'You wouldn't recognise the truth if it bit you.' Tense as a bow string, her eyes huge in her drawn face, she whispered, 'I won't allow you to treat me like this. You said… you said the past was past-'
'How the hell can it be, when every time I touch you it comes alive again?' he slung back at her fiercely between gritted teeth. 'Do you think I want to feel like this? Do you think I enjoy lowering myself to ask such degrading and shameful questions?'
'What do you want? A list of names, places and times?'
Beneath her appraisal he went satisfyingly rigid. 'M-maybe you'd like me to score the names on this list,' she stammered, sick with revulsion.
All the angry colour was wiped from his taut features. 'Tell me, what was that you said about trusting you?' she muttered. 'Even four years ago, you didn't trust me.' She forced herself to look squarely back at him. 'And do you know why? I made this colossal mistake of being what you then called gloriously spontaneous and what I still call gloriously stupid. I went to bed with you the first night we met, and you're so buried in your medieval code of what constitutes a decent woman that you can't ever forgive me for that. It doesn't matter t
hat you were my first lover. The whole time we were together you were just waiting for me to do it again with someone else. And don't think I didn't know that!'
As she fired that final sentence unsteadily at him, she slid off the bed at speed and took refuge in the bathroom, shooting the bolt home on the door.
'Ashley… come out of there.'
Wordlessly she shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. This time he had gone too far. She had allowed him to go too far. But at no price was she prepared to live however briefly with a hypocritical, judgemental swine, who made her feel unclean. 'Do you think I'm proud that I can't keep my hands off you?' he had demanded in London. No, she could quite see, as he swiftly removed himself from her contaminating presence after satisfying his own lust, that he wouldn't be proud.
'Ashley… ' She switched on the shower purely to drown him out.
A long time later she crept out, no precise plan in mind except a fierce, overwhelming need to get away. Hurriedly she dressed, selecting a starkly cut white shift dress and a cerise jacket. After digging a few essential items into a beach-bag, she tiptoed out of the room and downstairs. The house was in darkness. The front doors were not even locked. As she came down the steps from the veranda, a white-clad figure rose from the shadows. 'Lady go out? Lady want car?' It was the middle of the night but his gap-toothed smile seemed to say that the eccentric habits of Europeans abroad were not worth even a show of surprise.
'Yes, car,' she agreed, delighted it was going to be so easy. 'I want to go to Colombo.'
'I get Bandu. Take time.' He looked anxious now. 'Can you take me?' Ashley asked hurriedly, envisaging the whole household being aroused.
'Me? Kumar?' Slapping his chest, he named himself and laughed with positive delight. 'Yes, I take lady. Kumar very good driver,' he asserted.