going to stop.
He must have fallen asleep, and when eventually he opened his eyes again he found her sleeping, too. Rolling away, he stared up at the ceiling, but although his heart was still pounding with post-orgasmic euphoria he felt confusion slide a cold and bewildering trail across his skin.
He glanced around the room. Her wedding dress lay on the floor along with his own discarded trousers and shirt. His usually pristine bedroom looked as if someone had ransacked it and he found himself remembering the ornament breaking in the hall—a priceless piece of porcelain shattered into a hundred pieces which had crunched beneath his feet.
What was it about her which made him lose control like that? He turned his head to look at her again—a pale Venus rising from the crumpled white waves of the sheets. His gaze shifted to her belly—still flat—and his heart clenched as he thought about the reality of being a father.
The fears he’d been trying to silence now crowded darkly in his mind. What if certain traits were inherited rather than learnt? Wasn’t that one of the reasons why he’d always ruled out fatherhood as a life choice, not daring to take the risk of failing as miserably at the task as his own father had done?
She began to stir and opened her eyes and he thought how bright and clear they looked, with no hint of tears now.
‘Why do you cry?’ he asked suddenly. ‘When I make love to you?’
Ellie brushed her fringe out of her eyes, more as a stalling mechanism than anything else. His question suggested a layer of intimacy she hadn’t been expecting and that surprised her. This was supposed to be about sex, wasn’t it? That was what she thought his agenda was. The only agenda there could possibly be—no matter what her feelings for him were. If she suddenly came out and told him the reason she’d cried was because he made her feel complete, then wouldn’t he laugh, or run screaming in the opposite direction? If she told him that when he was deep inside her, it felt as if she’d been waiting her whole life for that moment, wouldn’t it come over as fanciful, or—worse—needy? If she told him she was crying for all the things she would never have from him—like his love—wouldn’t that make her seem like just another woman greedily trying to take from him something she knew he would never give?
She told him part of the truth. ‘Because you are an amazing lover.’
‘And that makes you cry?’
‘Blame my hormones.’
‘I suppose I should be flattered,’ he drawled. ‘Though, of course, that would depend on how experienced you are.’
She pushed her hair out of her eyes and narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you fishing to find out how many lovers I’ve had before you?’
‘Is it unreasonable of me to want to know?’
She sat up and looked down at his dark body outlined against the tumbled bedding. ‘I’ve had one long-term relationship before this and that’s all I’m going to say on the subject, because I think it’s distasteful to discuss it, especially at a time like this. Is that acceptable?’
‘Completely acceptable would be for there to have been no one before me.’ He smiled, but it was a smile tinged with intent rather than humour. ‘And since I intend to drive the memory of anyone else from your mind for ever, you’d better come back over here and kiss me right now.’
His hand starfished over her breast and, even though his questioning was unfair and his attitude outrageously macho, Ellie couldn’t seem to stop herself from reacting to him. She wondered what he’d say if she told him he’d banished every other man from her mind the first time he’d kissed her. Would he be surprised? Probably not. Women probably told him that kind of thing all the time.
It hadn’t been her plan to have him parting her legs again quite so soon, and certainly not to cry his name out like a kind of prayer as he entered her a second time. But she did. And afterwards she was left feeling exposed and naked in all kinds of ways, while he remained as much of an enigma as he’d always done.
She lay there wrapped in his arms and although his lips pressing against her shoulder were making his words muffled, they were still clear enough to hear.
‘I’m thinking that we ought to start sleeping together from now on—what about you?’ he said. ‘Because it would be crazy not to.’
It was a strangely emotionless conclusion to their lovemaking and Ellie didn’t know why she was so disappointed, because he was only behaving true to form. But she made sure her smile didn’t slip and show her disappointment. She kept her expression as neutral as his. He wanted to treat sex as simply another appetite to be fed, did he?
Well, then, so would she.
She lay back against the pillow and coiled her arms around his neck. ‘Absolutely crazy,’ she agreed huskily.
HER WEDDING RING no longer mocked her and neither did the closed door of Alek’s room. Because Ellie now shared that room, just as she shared the bed within and the man who slept in it.
Pulling on a tea dress, Ellie began to brush her hair. To all intents and purposes, she and Alek now had a ‘full’ marriage. Ever since the night of their wedding—when they’d broken the sexual drought—they had been enjoying the pleasures of the marital bed in a way which had surpassed her every expectation.
He could turn her on with a single smile. He could have her naked in his arms in seconds. Even when she told herself she ought to resist him—in a futile attempt to regain some control over her shattered equilibrium—she would fail time and time again.
‘But you can’t resist me, poulaki mou,’ he would murmur, as if he guessed exactly what she was trying to do. ‘You know you really want me.’
And that was the trouble. She did. She couldn’t seem to stop wanting him, no matter how much she tried to tell herself that she was getting in too deep. And if sometimes she lay looking wistfully at the ceiling after he’d made love to her, she made sure it was while Alek was asleep. She tried to stop herself from caring for him too much—and certainly to hide her feelings for him. Because that wasn’t what he wanted. This was as close to a business arrangement as a personal relationship could be.
But her life had changed in other ways, too. They started going out more as a couple, so that at times the marriage felt almost authentic. He took her to the theatre, which she loved. They watched films and ate in fancy restaurants and explored all the tiny backstreets of the city. They drove down to the south coast, to visit Luis and Carly in their amazing house which overlooked a beautiful river.
And yet, despite the increased richness of their day-to-day existence, it was difficult to get to know the real man behind the steely image, despite the external thaw between them. He could do that thoughtful stuff of massaging her feet when she was tired, but if his fingers hadn’t been made of flesh and blood she might have thought she was being administered to by some sort of robot. Sometimes it felt as if she didn’t know him any better than when that list of his likes and dislikes had been circulated to staff at The Hog before his arrival. She still wasn’t sure what motivated him, or what made him sometimes wake her in the night when he’d had a dream which had clearly been a bad one. She would turn to find his eyes open but not really seeing, his body tense—suspended between the two worlds of
