Bombarded by sensation, Bethany arched back and the rasp of his mouth suckling on her nipple became unbearably exquisite. She curled her fingers into his thick, dark hair, steering him towards her other breast. She literally felt as if she couldn’t get enough of him. When he raised his head to ask her whether it was safe, whether it was all right, she found herself nodding and telling him
not to stop
.
He made a running commentary on her body, on its changes, and the low velvety words were as erotic as his hands running along her. She was panting as he licked his way along her stomach and then his tongue was in her, flicking and squirming until she was bucking under the exquisite
torment. He had teased her like this before, bringing her to the brink and then waiting for her to subside, but now there was no lull in his hunger and, before she could pull back, he had taken her over the edge. Wave upon wave of pleasure sent convulsive shudders through her body and, when she finally stilled, he heaved himself over her and grinned.
‘Felt good?’
Bethany said something that emerged as a breathy whimper, which made him grin some more.
‘We shouldn’t have done that,’ she said weakly.
‘Why are you using the past tense?’
There was no way that he was going to let her gather her thoughts. She had already done way too much thinking as far as he was concerned. He silenced her with his mouth, kissing her with lingering thoroughness.
‘You’re very sexy, pregnant,’ he whispered.
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You are to me.’ He parted her thighs with his hand, taking time to feel the moisture between her legs that was an indication of how aroused she was. ‘We men are simple creatures,’ he murmured, teasing her with his erection, which had her moving against him so that his hard shaft rubbed against her sensitised clitoris. ‘Evidence of our virility can’t help but prove satisfying. Call it a weird macho thing.’ Never before had he felt so liberated as he thrust into her, gently at first, then deeper and harder as their rhythm picked up speed. From the very first time they had made love, their bodies had been extraordinarily attuned and nothing had been lost in the months between the last time they had been together. They moved as one. Maybe that was why making love to her had always been such an amazing experience.
Spent from a climax that ranked right up there as one of
the best experiences of his life, Cristiano rolled onto his back, content that things had been sorted between them.
‘That was a mistake.’
Her words, crashing through his good mood, took a few seconds to register, then he turned to her, half thinking that he might not have heard her correctly.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We shouldn’t have made love. And now I’m going to have a shower and I’m going to freeze to death in the process because the central heating’s gone off.’ She made as if to slip out of the bed and the restraining hand that reached out to circle her wrist was as quick as a whip, dragging her back to him.
‘Not so fast,’ Cristiano grated. ‘You’re not ducking out of this conversation. What the hell do you mean by
we shouldn’t have made love
? I didn’t hear you complaining five minutes ago.’
‘I’m not saying that I’m not attracted to you,’ Bethany whispered, not daring to look him in the face. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything.’
‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Don’t pretend to know me better than I know myself!’ she said fiercely, deeply ashamed at the ease with which she had fallen back into his arms. When a clear head had been needed, she had abandoned hers and leapt right back on to the emotional roller coaster ride, as if she hadn’t been battered enough by it.
‘But I
do
know you better than you know yourself,’ Cristiano purred with lethal assurance. ‘I know, for instance, that you haven’t got a clue how to handle this situation.’
‘How dare you?’
‘Because I need to do the thinking for both of us,’ he told her calmly. ‘And spare me another of your hissy fits. I’ve
listened to everything you’ve had to say and now you’re going to lie back and listen to the voice of reason and common sense.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘Well, start believing it. And I’ll keep it simple. You’re pregnant and, whether you like it or not, I’m not about to disappear on an extended trip to anywhere. I’m not going to be conveniently vanishing to Afghanistan to set up a medical centre. I won’t be revisiting Central Africa to see how that non-existent community centre’s doing. Nor will I become the callous ex-lover who thinks nothing of leaving his pregnant fiancée for months on end to cope on her own, giving her a handy excuse for the relationship to fizzle out because who can be expected to stay with a complete bastard? Face up to those facts and then we might be getting somewhere.’
‘Okay. So maybe you don’t
have
to disappear. I’m willing for you to have some involvement…’
‘Oh, now, that’s remarkably generous of you,’ Cristiano told her with biting sarcasm. ‘Do you suggest I travel over here once a month to see how things are coming along?’
‘It’s not that difficult. The air and road links are very efficient.’
‘Not efficient enough. I live in London and London is where you will be, like it or loathe it.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and sighed in sheer frustration. What was her problem? Why was she so intent on fighting him every inch of the way when he had risen to the occasion in such a superb fashion?
‘Do you think you can win me over by trying to force my hand, Cristiano?’
‘
Trying to force your hand?
I offered you marriage and you turned me down, even though it is the only reasonable solution
and a pretty good one from where I’m standing. It isn’t as though we aren’t attracted to one another. We are. You can say what you want about it being a mistake that we made love but we were only doing what two people do when they want one another.’
‘And, as far as you’re concerned, good sex and a sense of duty is enough for a marriage?’ She dispelled the lump in her throat and snapped her hand out of his grip. ‘So if you had, say, accidentally got another woman pregnant, would your solution have been the same? A marriage of convenience for the sake of the baby?’
‘That’s a hypothetical question and I’m not into answering hypothetical questions.’ But it lodged somewhere in his brain and, although he was not accustomed to ever going down the road of self-indulgent, pointless introspection, he was a little shaken to realise he harboured doubts about whether in similar circumstances he would have committed to marriage with any of the women he had dated in the past, however fine their credentials had been. Maybe it was because none of them had ever been so challenging, maybe it was because this relationship had not had time to run its natural course. He decided that nothing was to be gained from thinking about it. They were in a unique situation, end of story. ‘You attack me for asking you to marry me. Have you stopped to think that the child would benefit from having both parents? I come from an extremely conventional family. I had the benefit of both a mother and a father on the scene. I find it inconceivable for you to blithely assume that the absence of one parent is a good thing.’
‘I never said that it was a
good thing
. You’re putting words into my mouth…’
‘I’m putting sensible ideas into your head…’
Bethany found herself thinking about what it might have
been like to have grown up without her dad and she resented the fact that he was trying to imply that she was selfish. Selfish for wanting a life that didn’t involve her being married to a man who neither liked nor respected her, a man who saw her as an obligation that had to be taken on. He casually accepted that the sex was good, and maybe he saw that as a kind of temporary bonus, and maybe, if she wasn’t in love with him, she could have gone along with the proposition. But she
did
love him and to trade herself in as a suitable business deal so that his traditionalism could be satisfied would be like opening a wound and pouring salt in.
‘It’s not sensible to sign away your life for the sake of convention. Two unhappy people don’t add up to a healthy environment for a child. Yes, two parents on the scene is ideal, but two
happy
parents.’
‘We were both pretty happy ten minutes ago,’ Cristiano pointed out, ‘and I’m pretty sure that, given half a chance, we could both be pretty happy again.’
‘No, we could
have sex
again! Which isn’t going to happen, by the way. It was a moment of madness and…’
‘…we had many of those when we were in Barbados, if I recall. All things come with a price.’
‘And I’m willing for us to be…friends…’ Lying in bed with him, telling him that she was willing to be
friends
, after they had made love, almost brought on a fit of hysterical laughter. ‘I’m willing for you to have…whatever input you need to satisfy your conscience…’
Cristiano gritted his teeth but didn’t say a word. Her emotional, highly feminine thinking did nothing for him. They had been presented with a problem. He had the solution to it and he didn’t see why she couldn’t accept it without digging her heels in and stubbornly putting forward a list of arguments that made no sense. And what was with the
friendship
talk? The fact that she was as physically attracted to him as he was to her made a nonsense of that.
Bethany waited for him to try and demolish her suggestion, but he didn’t and she continued hesitantly, ‘I mean…we shouldn’t deny ourselves a chance of happiness with someone else…’ She made a valiant effort to try and imagine someone else with whom she could be happy but she couldn’t get past Cristiano’s forceful, darkly handsome face.
‘What does that mean?’
‘There could be a guy out there for me, a guy who wants to marry me for who I am, and not because he’s duty bound…!’
Cristiano felt a smouldering aggression overwhelm his ability to think rationally. It was an effort to remain lying on the bed next to her, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his hands loosely linked behind his head. The thought of her with another man was beyond unacceptable. It was outrageous.
‘What sort of guy? Someone from around here?’
‘Maybe…’ Bethany tried the thought on for size. She still knew quite a few of the guys with whom she had gone to school, guys who had remained in the town or close by. They would run a mile from a woman with another man’s baby in tow, which was a depressing enough thought, but even more depressing was the certainty that she would not have looked at any of them in a million years, even if they were to give her a second glance. Why bother with minnows when there was a predatorial shark cruising in the waters? Why bother with being sensible when she knew that it only ran skin-deep?
‘It would take a saint to commit to a relationship with a woman who was pregnant with another man’s baby.’ Cristiano subdued his mounting rage to keep his voice level. ‘Especially another man who had no intention of leaving an
open field.’ Now more than ever, it seemed imperative to nail the marriage suggestion. He was not going to idly sit by and watch someone else usurp his role as father. Jealousy and possessiveness, two emotions which were anathema to him, rose up like bile in his throat but he knew, with the instincts of someone adept at reading situations and people, that trying to impose his forceful personality on her would have her running for cover. She might have rosy ideas of some gormless local lad who would tiptoe round her and pander to her every need but she was mistaken on every single count, the foremost one being that he would simply not allow that situation to happen. He had to restrain himself from pointing out what, to him, was an inescapable truth. She was headstrong, stubborn and explosively unpredictable. She would eat most men up and it was very fortunate for her that he wasn’t most men.
But she wasn’t going to listen to the voice of reason and that being the case, he would just have to adopt a different voice. Same result but a different approach. He felt smugly proud at the level of tolerance which he was—unusually—exhibiting.
‘But…’ he shrugged in the darkness and shifted away from her ‘…I’m willing to go along with the friendship card. Like it or not, we are going to be parents and I will not allow us to be parents at war. Now, I think I’m going to get some sleep.’ He settled himself further, felt the brush of her leg against his back and briefly contemplated how admirably swift his turnaround had been. From the bottom of his world dropping out, he had rapidly regrouped and seen the advantages of the institution of marriage in which he had previously harboured next to no interest.
Firstly, it would provide the ideal environment in which his child could be raised, happy and well balanced.
Secondly, it would satisfy every member of his family, not least his mother, who would greet the news with enthusiasm, of that he was one hundred per cent sure.
Thirdly, he would have her. This last seemed vitally important to him and he assumed it was because his hunting instinct had been sharpened by her refusal to have him as her husband. With a long history of women who would do anything for him, he had at last met his match in a woman who, seemingly, would put herself out to do absolutely nothing for him. Except in bed, where she lost all her control. Just thinking about that loss of control threatened to undo his calm frame of mind.
All things considered, Cristiano was feeling pretty good by the time he finally fell asleep.
He awoke to a heavy grey light which could barely manage to filter through the thick curtains, and an empty bed. He had slept like the proverbial log and felt all the better for it. Accustomed to rarely venturing out without his laptop computer, BlackBerry and generally complete access to the outside world, he realised that he was now cut off from civilisation, at least until he got back to the hotel later in the morning and, surprisingly, he was okay with the situation.
He rolled over onto his back and then heaved himself onto his elbows at the sight of Bethany framed in the doorway, fully dressed in a full skirt and another baggy sweater, this time in a different colour. He absent-mindedly wondered how she managed to make such a shapeless outfit look so tempting. He had a vivid and instant recall of the feel of her swollen breasts in his hands and the taste of her nipples on his tongue and his body responded with alacrity.