In Want of a Wife? (18 page)

‘Your sisters presumably all come from the same planet as you, but they’re really not all that different from a lot of the women I’ve met in the course of my life—pretty, well groomed, wardrobes bursting with high-heeled shoes and small, black dresses.’

‘What are you saying here?’ Lizzy looked at him narrowly and tried to squash the heady feeling of delight his words gave her, because she knew that nothing he had said was intended to insult. He had looked below the surface and found things inside her that made her unique. Every optimistic cell in her body screamed for her to analyse that and come up with something promising.

‘I’m saying that you break the mould.’ He gave her a long, lazy smile. ‘Like hearing that, do you? Are you going to return the compliment?’

‘You break the mould for me, too,’ Lizzy told him carefully. She wriggled as his hand swept along her thigh and rested on her waist while his fingers idly stroked her sensitised skin. ‘But you know that. I mean, you’re accustomed to luxury; you’ve had a life where money was never a problem.’

‘That’s the compliment?’ His voice was light but it really wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

‘Well …’ She stared at her fingers which were splayed across his chest and marvelled at the latent strength she could feel against them. ‘It’s the whole novelty thing.’

Louis frowned. ‘The whole novelty thing? ‘

‘You’re my novelty, too. You’re nothing at all like any of the other guys I’ve ever been out with.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. I think we’ve covered this before.’ Louis discovered that he had no interest in hearing about any of the other guys she’d been out with. In fact, he actively sought to discourage any such conversation.

‘Okay. So …’ She sat up, dragged the duvet to cover her and looked down at him. Gently he positioned her folded arms away from her breasts so that he could see her pink nipples peeping out at him.

‘So …?’ he murmured, already turning on for her again, and with such urgency that he couldn’t possibly continue gazing at that brief glimpse of her breasts and had to reluctantly raise his eyes to hers. He lay back, folded his hands behind his head and looked at her. She looked loved-up. Her cheeks were rosy and her lips had the bee-stung look of a woman who’s been thoroughly kissed. And, he thought with immense satisfaction, was going to be thoroughly kissed again. And again.

‘So,’ Lizzy continued in her best pragmatic voice. She had gone past the point of backing out of what they had. There was no room to start making excuses about being caught unawares, or making a mistake, and she didn’t want to do either of those things. She loved him and she wanted him, and she was going to take what was on offer even if the odds against it lasting longer than a few months were high. She wasn’t going to run from the prospect of a broken heart, because nursing a broken heart in the aftermath of what he gave her would be worth it. But neither was she going to turn herself into some kind of sex slave, with him calling the shots while she obeyed, doe-eyed and helpless. She might well be helpless, but she wasn’t going to let him see that side of her. No way.

‘So I think we should approach this in a businesslike way,’ she carried on, clutching to this notion like a drowning man to a lifebelt.

‘You’re sounding like a teacher.’

‘I
am
a teacher.’

‘Not in the bedroom. When we’re in the bedroom, consider our roles reversed. You get to play pupil. I like the thought of you responding to my every command.’

‘I was saying …’ Lizzy’s voice was wobbly as she fought to get the conversation back on more stable ground. ‘Point one, we’ve admitted that there’s some sort of weird chemical reaction between us.’

‘There you go with the teaching metaphors again.’

‘And we
should
be able to fight it, because it doesn’t make any sense. But point two, we’re each other’s novelty. So let’s agree that we give this thing of ours a time limit. Say a couple of months? Get it out of our systems and then we can part company. How does that sound?’

‘How does that
sound?’
Louis had never heard anything so outrageous in all his life. If mentally he had applied very similar guidelines to the relationships he had had in the past, he failed to make the connection now. He was frankly incensed that she would choose to destroy the ambience by dragging prosaic, unimportant and irrelevant technicalities into the equation.

And, more than that, he didn’t like the thought of a time limit being put on what they had. Not at all.

For the first time in his life, he felt the pull to say the unthinkable, at least the unthinkable for the place he was in right now with his life. He wanted to submerge himself in this relationship and see where it went.

Acknowledging that felt as unsteady as peering over the side of a sheer precipice but, where he might usually have stepped back, he felt no inclination to do so—even if crashing over the side was the eventual consequence.

‘How does that
sound?’
he grated, every muscle in his body rigid with tension. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense in my entire life!’

‘But we’ve agreed—’

‘You’ve
reached your conclusions. Who says that I have to swallow them?’

‘You’re not a guy who commits to relationships, Louis.’ She continued hastily, ‘And we’re not suitable candidates for a relationship anyway. At least, not any kind of relationship that matters. But we’re attracted to one another.’

‘Oh yes. The
chemical
thing.’

‘So let’s just face the limitations and be sensible about this.’

‘And what if I don’t want to face the limitations?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘What if I think that this is too powerful for us to consign to a box labelled “controlled substance"?’

‘This?’ Hope flared like an explosion in her chest. The forbidden thought—that he might just have fallen in love with her despite all their differences and all the boundaries that existed between them—crept in like a thief in the night, temporarily doing away with all her caution, reason and sensible self-defence mechanisms.

‘What we have going on between us,’ he said with a sweeping, frustrated gesture. He scowled darkly at her and raked his fingers through his hair. ‘I’ve never wanted a woman as much as I want you,’ he admitted roughly. ‘You’re a first for me, and you make me behave in ways that I can’t comprehend because they make no sense.’

Lizzy’s mind was beginning to lag behind. Something about what he was saying didn’t sit quite right. It came to her that he was talking about
wanting
her. Wanting her in the way someone might want a possession. Then she thought, what was the point in throwing caution to the winds if she became all tangled up in the detail?

‘I want you, too,’ she breathed huskily.

‘Then let’s not put restraints on this. Let’s just see where it takes us.’

Sadly, Lizzy knew where it
wouldn’t
take them: up the
aisle. But she wasn’t going to refuse what was on offer. Her businesslike approach had made sense to her but, even if he had agreed, would she have been able to walk away at the end of the allotted time, had he asked her to stay on?

With a helpless whimper, she curved her body against his and slipped one leg in between his muscular thighs, nudging gently up, and laughing when he rolled her onto him so that there was no mistaking the evidence of his impressive arousal.

Her hair formed a long, unruly curtain around them and she pushed herself up so that her breasts could dangle provocatively close to his hungry mouth. She pretended to pull away, still laughing, watching as his eyes flared as he tried to catch one with his mouth. Each time her nipple brushed his lips, the ache between her legs became a little fiercer, until finally she had to succumb to the exquisite sensation of having him capture one pink nipple so that he could suckle on it.

It was a turn-on to look down at him from this angle and watch the movement of his dark head as he caressed her breasts with his mouth. For someone as controlled and as highly disciplined as he was, he made love with exuberance and a complete lack of inhibition. He might be able to guard his expressions when he wanted to, only reveal what he wanted the rest of the world to see, but naked and in bed he was a different man. Here and now, she could see the desire stamped on his face and feel it in the urgency of his touch.

She moved and, while he continued to attend to her swollen breasts, she eased him into her and then grinned as he looked up at her, his eyes dark and stormy.

‘Don’t stop,’ she whispered. She began to move against him, long, slow movements; they continued to look at one another, she revelling in seeing him at her breast, and he enjoying the sight of her flushed cheeks and her fluttering eyelids as they began building towards their peak.

He placed his hands firmly on her buttocks. He only
stopped sucking her rosy, glistening nipples when he no longer had a choice because he was going to explode.

They were damp with perspiration when Lizzy finally subsided on top of him with a sigh of bliss, as sated and as contented as the cat in full possession of the cream. His hand was the icing on the cake, gently stroking her hair, and she closed her eyes briefly and tried to imagine what it would be like if he actually loved her; if this wasn’t all about the good sex.

‘We’re good together,’ Louis told her thickly and she made an inarticulate sound of agreement. ‘Makes no sense, but there it is. We’re good together …’ He pushed her a little, and reluctantly Lizzy rolled off him and then onto her side so that she could look at him, although making love had made her drowsy and all she wanted to do now was go to sleep. The night had been so eventful that she was vaguely surprised that it still seemed to be dark outside.

‘Okay, I get that. We’re good together—in bed. I agree.’

‘It’s not just about the sex,’ Louis muttered, his eyes sliding away from hers, and her heart gave a hopeful lift.

‘It’s not?’

‘Of course it’s not.’ For a minute there, Louis had felt a distinct lack of self-control but things were back in place now. ‘You’re clever, you’re funny; it makes a refreshing change.’

‘Oh, right. The novelty thing.’ Disappointment flooded her in a rush and she shoved it back.

Louis laughed and said something about a change being as good as a rest. But when she failed to share the humour he told her slowly and seriously, the idea coming to him out of the blue, the result of some kind of effect she had on him. ‘I’ve been thinking about the situation with your parents.’

He waited a few seconds for her to pick up on his cue, but when instead she yawned widely and squirmed underneath the duvet he laughed softly and kissed her shoulder. ‘You’re not
going to go to sleep on me for the second time this evening, are you?’

‘I’m tired. I feel as though I’ve been through the wringer today. I’ve had more on my mind in the last couple of weeks than I’ve ever had before in my life. It’s exhausting.’

‘Then you can safely consider yourself free from future exhaustion.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I told you that I would take care of everything, didn’t

I?’

‘And I told you that I was really grateful.’

‘Except, I didn’t quite take care of
everything.’

‘I can’t think what you missed off the list.’

‘Well, before you began falling asleep on me, I may have mentioned it—your parents.’

‘Are doing fine, now that you’ve persuaded them that Leigh isn’t going to become involved in some dreadful drugs-den with Freddy. In fact, when they find out about the marriage, and about your generosity in putting money behind Freddy’s venture, they’re going to be over the moon. Jobs are in short supply these days, and Leigh doesn’t always come across as the ideal applicant for a position. It was just something else that was worrying them, so thank you for that. The down side, of course, is that Maisie will be losing her playmate. She and Leigh have been like twins all their life. It’ll take some getting used to for Maisie now to have a married sister in charge of a business.’

‘Not quite what I was referring to when I mentioned the situation with your parents.’

‘No? What else is there to mention? Everything’s fallen into place, like a jigsaw puzzle when the last piece has been put in.’

‘Except for the small matter of your parents losing their house thanks to your father’s unwise investments.’

‘Ah. That. Well, on the bright side, at least there’ll be no
worry about Rose or Leigh—and, before you tell me that they’re going to target Nicholas as some kind of private-banking system, they won’t.’

‘I wasn’t going to tell you that. I was going to tell you that I’ve instructed my accountant to sort out their debt problem. They’ll be able to keep the house. I’m going to give them the money.’

Lizzy froze. ‘You’re
what?’

‘I’m going to give them the money. I didn’t mention this to you, but I had a pretty long conversation with your father about those investments he made. Yes, they were pretty stupid, but he’d run his affairs in a fairly tidy fashion up until then and I’m convinced that lessons have been learnt from this.’

‘You’ve spoken to my father and told him
what,
exactly?’

‘That I would see what I could do about recuperating some of the money he’s lost. Naturally I didn’t talk about a rescue package, but essentially I will ensure that there are no debts hanging over his head and no worries about losing the house they’ve lived in since they were first married.’

Lizzy felt cold, hot and cold in sickening waves. She pushed herself up and slipped her legs over the side of the bed and was aware of Louis moving around the bed to confront her.

With quick, shaky, frantic movements she dragged the duvet from the bed and wrapped it protectively around her nakedness.

‘What the hell is going on?’

‘There’s no way that you’re going to bail my parents out!’

‘What’s wrong with you? I thought you’d be pleased.’

Lizzy didn’t dare look at him and she wished that he would just do the decent thing and put some clothes on. Ranting at a naked Greek god lookalike was so much more difficult.