Her breathing was coming in short pants and her breasts felt tight and sensitive, her whole body sensitised. The will to think or hold back was gone, burnt up in the restless urgency that had surfaced under his lovemaking. She clung to him, responsive to his every demand, overwhelmed by a primitive yearning.
‘You’re beautiful, Rosie, so beautiful.’ His lips were warm on her throat as he traced burning kisses over her skin. ‘Inside and out. And you don’t seem to realise it. I find that amazing.’ He raised himself slightly, looking into her flushed face as he said again, ‘So beautiful.’
She opened her eyes, staring into glittering blue made almost black with desire.
‘I don’t want an affair with you,’ he murmured, his body as hard as a rock. ‘I want more than that. I’ve fallen in love with you, Rosie. I’ve been fighting it since the first time I kissed you and I knew it deep inside, but I was hoping you would prove me wrong. That you would say or do something that showed me the image I had of you wasn’t real. But it is.’
She had frozen in his arms, her eyes wide. This wasn’t how it should be. Kingsley was a ‘no complications, love ’em and leave ’em’ type of guy, he’d said so.
‘Don’t you believe me?’ he said softly, becoming aware of her reaction. ‘Don’t you, Rosie?’
Her voice was a long time in coming, and then it was a whisper when she said, ‘I don’t know.’
For a long moment he studied her face, his blue eyes searching hers with their penetrating light, and then he straightened up and away from her, pulling her into a sitting position at the side of him. ‘You don’t feel the same,’ he said flatly. ‘Is that it?’
She swallowed but she couldn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know how I feel,’ she said on a deep shuddering breath. ‘This…this has all happened so suddenly.’
‘Not from where I’m sitting.’ There was a touch of wryness in his voice now. ‘In the past I’ve wined and dined and bedded them a hundred times over by now.’
‘Then…then how do you know you feel differently about me to all the others?’ she managed. ‘That this isn’t a passing whim?’
‘Do you really want to know?’ He was staring at her.
She looked at him then; the note in his voice demanded it. ‘Yes.’ But she wasn’t sure if that was true.
‘Because I didn’t want to wake up beside the others for the rest of my life,’ he said simply. There was a ringing silence but for the life of her she couldn’t speak. ‘What makes you so afraid of me, Rosie?’ he asked very quietly.
Her heart was pounding. This shouldn’t be happening now, not when his friend was so ill and he had to fly thousands of miles away. It wasn’t fair to him. ‘I…I didn’t say I was frightened of you.’
‘You don’t have to.’ He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘But for the life of me I don’t understand why. At first I thought it was something physical, especially because you haven’t dated in so long, but we’re fine that way, aren’t we?”
It was a question and she answered it. ‘I think so.’
‘So I waited on that score, trying to show you in every way I could apart from the ultimate act that it would be fine, that I wouldn’t hurt you, that you just had to relax and let yourself know me a little. But today—’ He stopped abruptly, raking back his hair. ‘You were with me every inch of the way.’
Her body was rigid, her head whirling.
‘So what is it, Rosie?’ he asked softly after a moment or two. ‘Why don’t you know how you feel? Why aren’t you letting yourself know how you feel? It’s all to do with your ex-husband. What the hell did he do to you?’
She bit her lip hard. She couldn’t think clearly any more. She wished she could make some sense of how she felt but she couldn’t pin down any logic. Her emotions had taken over her reason
and paralysed her judgement. How could she make Kingsley understand where she was coming from when she didn’t understand herself? But she had to try; after all he’d said she owed him that at least. She sucked in a gasp of air. ‘Miles…Miles wasn’t normal,’ she said shakily.
There was silence. Then very gently he said, ‘In what way wasn’t he normal?’
‘I…he…’ Her voice faltered. ‘I…need to explain from the beginning. I met him the first year at university and I thought he was wonderful. He was handsome, funny, everything a girl could wish for. I suppose he swept me off my feet. His family were well off and he was the only boy at university with a sports car, that sort of thing. This makes me sound so shallow,’ she added shakily.
‘No, just a normal eighteen-year-old away from everything she knows and in love for the first time,’ he said softly.
She looked at him, stunned by his understanding.
‘And?’ He pressured her very gently to continue.
‘And he wanted me. I…I hadn’t slept with anyone before and I think he found that a challenge.’
Kingsley looked at the beautiful face with its silky veil of chestnut hair and his stomach contracted. Whatever this guy had done, hanging was too good for him.
‘Anyway, we…we got married because I…’ she forced herself to sit up straighter, aware she had been slumping ‘…because I didn’t think it was right to go to bed otherwise. Up until then he’d been fun and charming but…he changed. Almost overnight. He—’ she shut her eyes tightly, unable to look at him ‘—became violent. Over the slightest thing. But only when we were alone. Everyone else thought he was the perfect husband, and I was young and I thought it was all my fault so I tried to humour him. Looking back, I think that made him even more of a bully.’