In the kitchen the tap was running. As she went to turn it off Marcus followed her, standing behind her.
She could feel herself starting to tremble, her body caught up in the sexual surge of shock and excitement.
She heard him say her name, felt his arms come round her as he bent to kiss the side of her neck.
Instinctively she leaned back against him, sharply conscious of the feel of his suit-clad body, the fabric of his suit dark and slightly rough against her thin T-shirt, her bare skin, conscious too of a certain unexpected frisson of arousal at the contrast between the fabric of their clothes, the way they were dressed. There was something unfamiliarly erotic to her about their fulfilment of the rules of sexual stereotyping: Marcus, so powerfully male, in his formal business clothes; she, so vulnerably female, in her half-undressed state.
Silently she acknowledged to herself that there was something—some unexpected part of her that actually responded to that awareness, that the contrast between them was heightening her arousal; and that her apparent vulnerability was exciting to her.
And to him?
As she moved against him she could feel the hardness of his body and its tension.
‘Mmm… you feel good—very good,’ he added as he slid his hands up over her breasts. Her nipples, already hard and erect, responded to his touch, her breath locking in her lungs as he turned her round to face him and started to kiss her with real urgency.
Later she felt it must have been something about that naked, uncontrived, uncontrolled urgency which had broken down the barriers of self-consciousness. His touch… his words, but most of all his clearly demonstrated desire, made her feel that she could perhaps after a
ll be not only a ‘nice’ girl, but a woman as well… and a woman who could wantonly take her lover’s hand and urge him to touch her naked skin, to discover for himself how responsibly aware and aroused she felt.
They didn’t make love right there and then in the kitchen, too impatient to remove all their clothes, too hungrily eager for one another to care, but that was only because Marcus’s awareness of how close to her orgasm the hot suckling of his mouth against her breast and the eager, urgent stroke of his fingers against her flesh had brought her.
‘Not here,’ he had told her thickly when she had clung to him, reaching down to hold his hand against her body, arching herself into it, trembling with a mixture of arousal, need and fear of deprivation.
Yes—here, now. Now… she had wanted to protest as her body screamed its need for him, but old habits, old ingrained inhibitions held the words back, old ingrained beliefs that it was men who experienced uncontrollable desire while women… nice girls… controlled and ignored what they felt.
She had expected Marcus to release her, to let her lead him into the bedroom where they would both undress and then decorously make love, like adults, not like two crazy out-of-control teenagers, desperate to touch each other and be touched, as they had done in the kitchen.
With this in mind she started to turn away from him, but he stopped her, pulling her against him, picking her up, kissing her mouth as he pushed open the door, pausing just past it to run his free hand up over her body, his kiss deepening, hardening as he reached her breast.
Her body quickened, tensed, trembled, taut with urgency. The flat wasn’t large, the bedroom door open, the room itself quite small, but it seemed a lifetime to Eleanor before they reached it, Marcus’s mouth, Marcus’s body, Marcus’s hand as it travelled over her, stroking and touching her, absorbing her to the exclusion of everything else.
Later she hadn’t been able to piece together just how he had managed to go on touching and kissing her while undressing, but somehow he had; somehow he had undressed her as well without ever losing contact with her, so that by the time they were lying naked together on the bed she was so aroused that every touch, every sensation was acutely heightened, every smallest breath she took seeming to cause the tiny quivers of sensation rippling through her to increase. Just the touch of Marcus’s hands as he slid them into her hair, holding her head as he bent to kiss her, just the tiny abrasive movement of his body against hers, the thick, silky stroke of his body hair against her nipples, the slightly rough rasp of his jaw against her breast, the difference between the softness of her inner thigh and the abrasion of his fingertips, were all explosively sexually stimulating to her in her heightened state of arousal. In the end, just the feeling of the warmth of his breath against her body as he slowly stroked open the swollen outer lips of her sex, lingeringly caressing her flesh as though he not only derived pleasure from her ecstatic delight and arousal but as though the physical contact with her, the act of touching her was as intensely emotionally and sexually necessary for him as it was for her, was enough to bring her body to orgasm in a series of intensely powerful, visible physical contractions that left her shuddering helplessly, tears stinging her eyes, her throat raw, torn between elation over what she had experienced and guilt because she had enjoyed her own pleasure so selfishly and hedonistically, while Marcus…
‘You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to see you like this,’ she heard him telling her thickly as he held her. ‘How much I’ve wanted to know your body’s responsiveness to me… its arousal and desire.’ He bent his head and kissed her slowly, and then kissed her again.
Unexpectedly she felt her senses, her body quicken. She opened her eyes and stared at him, too startled to conceal what she was thinking and feeling, flushing a little when he looked back at her and she read in his eyes his recognition of her thoughts… her need…
Yes, it had all been very different then. Silently Eleanor closed her eyes, willing herself to try and sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
FERN woke up abruptly, momentarily disorientated by the unfamiliarity of her surroundings and the intensity of the dream she had just been having.
It had been a long time since she had even thought about her wedding, never mind dreamed about it, but tonight… She shivered, sitting up in the high old-fashioned bed and pulling the bedclothes securely around her body.
Now that she was properly awake she could detect the cold, sharp, slightly damp smell of the house’s age. Oddly, it wasn’t unpleasant, unlike her dream.
Hugging her arms around her knees, she stared towards the uncurtained window. Cressy had explained that as yet she had not had time to do anything other than make the most basic attempts to furnish and clothe the place.
‘Let’s face it,’ she had told Fern with a grin, ‘neither Graham nor I are the frilly, flowery furnishings type…’
‘No,’ Fern agreed. ‘What you need for here is masses and masses of old brocades; embroidered hangings, that kind of thing.’ Her artistic senses were already busy clothing the empty rooms.
Outside the window the landscape was still cloaked in darkness like the church in her dream, the figures around her vague and shadowy, all apart from the one she had cried out to in anguish as she heard the vicar pronouncing the word which had made her and Nick husband and wife.
Adam! She could still taste his name on her lips, feel the icy cold shock of her own despair and panic.
Adam… Adam… She had cried out in fear as she turned towards him. Towards him and away from Nick, the man to whom she had just made the most binding and compelling of life’s emotional vows.