When he finally stood beside her, hands braced on his hips, indigo eyes blazing incandescent with anger, it took all of Lily’s mental strength not to shrink back against the windscreen. Instead she forced herself to face him with what she hoped was a look of cool defiance.
‘You’re not making this easy for me!’ he declared through tightly clenched teeth.
‘I don’t want to make it easy! I plan on making it as difficult as possible for you to leave me, because I—’
‘Are you really so desperate that you’d beg me to stay when it must be painfully clear that it’s the last thing on God’s earth I want to do? That I obviously can’t stand the sight of you.’
‘But last night…’
‘Last night was last night. It was an appalling mistake—a mental aberration—and one I most definitely do not intend to let happen again.’
‘It didn’t feel like that to me!’
But then what experience did she have to go on? She had only had one other brief, unsatisfactory love affair, which had been more a relationship of the mind than any great physical passion. Kristian’s lovemaking had been comfortable, uninspired, and totally unexciting when compared to the fires Ronan could light inside her. Fires that she had never suspected could exist, whose sheer, elemental force had rocked her world, making her feel that she had lost her grip on everything she had formerly believed herself to be.
In Ronan’s arms she became another woman entirely. A wild, wanton, primitive creature, who met his passion with a hunger that matched and occasionally even outstripped it.
‘You wanted it every bit as much as I did!’ she flung at him. ‘You—’
‘Women aren’t the only ones who can fake it,’ Ronan shot back callously, making her thoughts reel with the cruelty of the gibe.
‘Oh, now I know you’re lying! There was nothing fake about last night—about any of it!’
If she believed that then he would have destroyed everything. All her precious memories of her wedding night. The night she had believed marked the beginning of the most wonderful part of her existence. The night she now feared would be the only experience she would ever have of married life.
She hadn’t even known about the house. That had been a surprise Ronan had sprung on her at the very last moment. When she had left the reception and got into the car with him, she had believed that they were heading for the airport and a plane ride to the honeymoon destination he had kept a closely guarded secret from her.
But, ‘There’s been a change of plan,’ he had told her as the last of the waving, cheering guests had disappeared from view. ‘Our plane doesn’t leave until three tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Tomorrow!’
Automatically, Lily had glanced back towards the hotel they had just left, thinking of the way, only half an hour before, she had been giggling excitedly with Hannah as they’d tried to guess just where in the world Ronan planned on taking her.
‘But where will we spend tonight?’
‘You leave that to me.’ A small, enigmatic smile had curled the corners of Ronan’s wide mouth. ‘I have everything under control. Just put yourself entirely in my hands and see what happens.’
Now, looking back at that moment, hearing those words again with the benefit of hindsight, Lily found that they made her shiver in spite of the warmth of the sun. Something about the way Ronan had spoken brought a sense of nausea to the pit of her stomach.
But last night, worn out by the excitement of the day, decidedly tiddly on champagne, and even more intoxicated by the thought of actually being Mrs Ronan Guerin, she had felt no such premonition of danger. Instead, she had wriggled sensuously in her seat, almost purring like a small, contented cat.
‘I can’t wait to put myself in your hands,’ she’d murmured, giving the words a distinctly lascivious intonation as she ran her hand up his arm, stroking from square shoulder to strong wrist and back again. ‘And I’m dying to get my hands on certain parts of you.’
This time she let her fingers slide down his jacket until they reached the strong line of his thighs. There, she walked them along the hard muscle that was stretched taut as his foot rested on the car’s pedal, moving slowly and deliberately inwards, smiling as she saw it bunch in instinctive reaction.
‘Behave yourself, witch!’ Ronan reproved laughingly. ‘You’ll have us off the road if you don’t stop that nonsense—Lily!’ This time the warning was more serious as she ignored his protest.
‘I don’t want to behave!’ Lily pouted with mock petulance. ‘I’ve had to behave myself for the last eight weeks, and it’s been intensely frustrating.’
‘And whose idea was that? As I recall, you were the one who insisted on waiting until our wedding day.’
‘And you agreed! But it is our wedding day now, so we don’t have to wait any longer. We’re legally married so I can do what I want. And I want to do this…’
Emboldened by the excitement that was building up inside her, she slid her fingers provocatively in between his thighs, her teasing smile growing wider as she heard his breath hiss sharply inwards in uncontrolled response.
‘Lily! Be a good girl, please.’
‘Oh, I’ll be good.’ The huskiness of her voice gave the words a very different meaning from the one he had used. ‘I’ll be very good. I plan to be the best you’ve ever known. So, wherever we’re going, why don’t you put your foot down? I want to get there just as fast as we possibly can.’
‘Your wish is my command.’
Ronan had suited action to the words, ramming the accelerator pedal almost to the floor, and the car had sped along the road out of town, heading for the countryside.
The unexpected warmth of the day had turned into an uncomfortably close evening by the time he steered the powerful vehicle off the narrow lane and up a winding, steep drive, coming to a halt before the impressive building at the top of it.
‘Wow!’ Lily could only stare in amazed admiration.
Built in a stone that had been mellowed by the passage of years, the house had an elegant porch supported on Grecian-style pillars and mullioned windows that reflected the glow of the setting sun. Over half of the front was covered in luxuriant ivy that extended over the roof of the large Victorian-style conservatory attached to one side. On the other side was a formal rose garden and at the back, seen through an archway, was the promise of an even more spacious garden, richly lawned.
‘What a gorgeous place! Whose is it?’
‘Yours—and mine.’
‘Ours!’ Lily was too stunned to notice the definite break between Ronan’s words. ‘But how?’
‘I bought it. Isn’t that how one usually acquires a house?’
‘Of course I know that!’ Lily aimed a playful punch at his arm. ‘When did you…?’
‘I
