Her hands moved over his back, clinging lovingly to the hard muscles as she wrapped her arms around him, kissing the salt skin of his throat, loving the moist heat of his shoulder as her mouth moved slowly over it. His tongue touched her ear, investigating each delicate convolution and she shuddered in fierce pleasure, muffling the small sounds of delight she couldn’t subdue against the heat of his skin.
‘Don’t do that!’ His voice was hoarse and strained, sending shivers of reaction racing over her skin as he pressed his lips to her ear. ‘Don’t try to hide from me how you feel, Jenna. I want to hear it,’ he told her thickly, cupping her face with hands that trembled slightly, momentarily stilling the arousing movements of his body within her own. ‘I want to hear your pleasure…I want to see it…taste it…’ He groaned suddenly and then kissed her with a suppressed violence that shattered her languorous spiral of desire and turned it instead into a white-hot, aching need that twisted and coiled inside her, making her arch pleadingly against his body and respond feverishly to his kiss.
Her blood sang through her veins, her breathing constricted. Huskily she cried out his name, lost to everything but the intensity of the feeling inside her. A terrifying heat burned her skin, turning it slick with sweat so that it clung to James’s. He groaned something unintelligible against her mouth and moved fiercely within her, demanding and getting her response to his urgency. She was racing towards the outer limits of the universe with no means of controlling her pace, with nothing to hold on to except James…She clung desperately to him, her body convulsing in the first primitive spasms of pleasure.
‘Jenna!’ He cried out her name and it seemed to echo hollowly round the room as his body released a fierce heat within her and shuddered to a climax that matched her own.
Tears ran freely down her face, but they were not tears of pain or anguish, simply tears of joy and release. There would never be anything else in her life to equal this pleasure, this giving of herself wholly and completely to the man she loved. But who did not love her, she told herself on the edge of exhausted sleep. James did not love her.
She woke up once towards dawn, and knew immediately that James was also awake. His mouth touched her throat, his hand gently cupping her breast, slowly caressing the warm fullness of it. She made a lazy sound of pleasure deep in her throat and turned into his arms.
‘Tell me something…’ His voice reverberated against her ear and she curled in sleepy appreciation of his reaction to her.
‘What?’
‘Tonight when we made love, was I the one you took into your body, Jenna, or was it still your fantasy lover?’
Still her fantasy lover? Jenna frowned in the darkness. Did James still really believe that lie she had told him when they were first married? Surely he must have guessed that she had used it merely as a means of defence, as a protection against the desire he had aroused within her? She frowned a little more, remembering how on previous occasions he had also demanded to know who had been in her mind while he made love to her body. A curious tension gripped her. Could it be possible that he could…but no…It was just male sexual jealousy, nothing more.
She wanted to tell him the truth, but she sensed that to do so would be to leave herself too vulnerable to him. It would be safer and wiser to let him go on doubting. All at once their earlier quarrel came back to her. James wanted her to tell Lucy the truth. He wanted to end their marriage, she was sure of it. Last night had simply been an expression of a man’s physical need, nothing more.
She thought for a moment before answering his question, and then glad of the darkness to conceal her expression from him she said lightly, ‘Does it matter? Lots of women have fantasies about men other than their husbands.’
She wanted to cry out in protest as he withdrew from her turning over on to his side, unbearably hurt by his mocking, ‘No, I suppose not, especially when it has such an extremely erotic effect on you.’
She only realised how angry he was when he added bitingly, ‘Perhaps the next time we make love you’d like me to be my ancestor physically as well mentally. Maybe I could hire the appropriate costume…It would be quite interesting to see what effect that has on you, if simply imagining that I’m him can…’ He broke off as Jenna burst out, ‘Stop it…stop it!’ and laughed savagely before saying finally, ‘There are those who do say that there’s a remarkable family resemblance between us, but I can’t say that I find your response to me exactly flattering. Not when I know that in reality you’re making love to a man who’s been dead for over a hundred years.’
Jenna felt as though she had been physically and mentally mauled. James had hurt her before, but it had been nothing like this. She crept out of his bed and went into her own room, gathering up her discarded clothes as she did so. They could not continue to live like this. The thought struck her that perhaps James was making life as impossible for her as he could in the hope that she might be the one to leave, to leave him with the Hall.
Strangely enough, the thought of losing the house did not affect her at all.
* * *
‘Where’s Lucy?’
They were having breakfast, James was reading his paper, Sarah had a book open in front of her, but now both of them looked up as Jenna came in with some fresh coffee. Munching a piece of toast, Sarah said in surprise, ‘Oh, didn’t you know? She’s gone out. She left just after she spoke to you, James,’ Sarah added, turning to her step-brother. ‘I saw you both coming in from outside. It isn’t like Lucy to be such an early bird, normally I have to drag her out of bed.’
A cold fist closed round Jenna’s heart. She looked into James’s face but could discern nothing from it. He had threatened last night that if she did not tell Lucy the truth herself, he would do it for her.
Had he carried out that threat? Had he told Lucy the truth about her parenthood?
Jenna ached to demand the truth from him, and couldn’t repress a small sigh of relief when Sarah finished her coffee and said lightly, ‘I’m going to see how they’re getting on with the work on the hall ceiling. See you both later.’
When she had gone, before Jenna could say a word, James frowned and said thoughtfully, ‘Has it struck you that Sarah could have a crush on young Bob? She seems to spend an awful lot of her time watching him work.’
‘Never mind Sarah,’ Jenna exploded. ‘What about Lucy? You told her, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’ she demanded, standing up and pacing anxiously, coming to an abrupt halt in front of the window which she stared out of blindly. ‘You can’t wait to get rid of me, can you? You don’t give a damn about Lucy, you never did. All you wanted was this place. Well
, you can have it and welcome. I couldn’t live here with you now, even if you begged me, not after what you’ve done. How could you?’ she whispered in a choked voice turning to look at him, her face white with strain. ‘How could you? Didn’t you think of the effect it might have on her of——’
She gasped in shock as he got up from the table and came towards her, grasping her shoulders and shaking her almost violently.
‘Just what in hell are you talking about?’ he demanded thickly. ‘Just what sort of man do you think I am, Jenna?’ He released her, his face contorting in a brief expression of disgust. ‘I don’t need to ask that really, do I? You’ve already told me. Well, for your information I didn’t tell Lucy the truth—you did. She overheard part of our conversation last night, it seems. I found her wandering round the garden early this morning. Like her, although for different reasons, I hadn’t been able to sleep. I guessed at once that she knew.’
Jenna said nothing. She couldn’t have spoken to save her life. She sank down on to the cushioned window-seat, her body trembling with aching despair. ‘What did she say to you?’ she asked in a husky voice. ‘What…’
‘She asked me if what she had heard was true—apparently she didn’t hear all of it, only the first bit. She was so shocked that she didn’t stop to listen to any more. I told her as much as I could.’
‘Oh, my God, she must hate me,’ Jenna said quietly, pressing her hands to her face. ‘For her to find out like that.’