And so he did.
Prior to meeting Annie he had considered himself to be a confirmed bachelor, a man whose main attention, whose concentration, was focused on his career. It had been his dream from boyhood to be a marine biologist, and thus to follow in the footsteps of his parents, who had worked and died together in a freak accident off the coast of Mauritius.
He liked women. Of course he did. But he confined his activities to those members of the female sex sophisticated enough to understand that he simply wasn’t looking for a committed permanent relationship.
With Annie, though, his feelings had done a complete turnaround. He didn’t just want her in his bed, he wanted her permanently in his life.
They came back here with the food they had bought, and true to his promise he cooked for her, loving the way her eyes rounded with innocent delight when he spoon-fed her little tastes of what he was preparing.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ she asked him naïvely at one point.
‘Only for you,’ he returned, watching the way she had blushed, almost dizzy with the intensity of his own desire.
After dinner they went into the drawing room, where he coaxed her to talk about her hopes and her dreams in between feeding her sips of champagne and strawberries covered in rich dark chocolate.
When she had finished eating one, with tiny, delicate little bites, there was a small fleck of chocolate left on her deliciously full upper lip. Unable to resist, he leaned forward to brush it away, smoothing his thumb over her mouth and feeling his body throb deep down inside in reaction to every tiny little tremble of her mouth. When he had dropped his hands to her face, cupping it to hold her still whilst he lowered his head to kiss her, she focused on him with a wide-eyed stare mingled with longing and uncertainty.
‘It’s all right,’ he soothed her gently. ‘I’m not going to hurt you…’
Him hurt her! Now, Dominic grimaced. What a joke! But he had never dreamed then what was going to happen. She had seemed so naïve, so adorably sweet and loving.
He had taken her to bed for the first time a month after they had met, coaxing her to shed her inhibitions along with her clothes, but in the end he had been the one who had come closest to losing total control, unable to hold back what he was feeling as he touched her, unable to stop himself from smothering the delicate soft-fleshed curves of her body with hungry, passionate kisses.
Six weeks after he had first met her they were married, and two weeks after that she had left him.
He had been totally honest with her from the start about the fact that he was due to take up his new job in the Gulf within a few weeks, and he had told her too, when he had finally persuaded her to marry him, that there was no way he could possibly take her with him.
‘So…so how long will you be gone for?’ she asked him bravely.
‘Well, my contract is for three years. But,’ he hurried on quickly when he saw her expression, ‘I do get plenty of leave. For instance I will be home over Christmas for a month, and then again in the summer for two. After all, you’ve got your degree to get and the time will soon pass.’
‘Are you really sure you want to marry me?’ she asked him.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ he responded, not realising then that she was the one with the doubts.
‘Are you really, really sure you want to marry me?’ she pressed him urgently, on another occasion, and again he didn’t recognise the cue she was giving him, didn’t understand that she wanted him to ask if she really wanted to marry him.
Instead he told her firmly, ‘Of course I am. I love you.’
‘But we’re so different,’ she continued.
‘Yes,’ he agreed teasingly. ‘You’re a woman and I’m a man.’
‘No, you know what I mean,’ she insisted, flushing a little as she told him, ‘At the home they taught us that it’s the person you are that matters, and I know that that’s true, but other people still do judge and our backgrounds are so very different—I…I don’t even know who my parents were, and—’
He stopped her then, insisting, ‘None of that matters.’
‘Yes, it does,’ she contradicted him. ‘Your friends…your lifestyle…’
‘You will be my life from now on, Annie,’ he overruled her.
‘You say that, but you’re not going to be here,’ Annie reminded him bleakly.
‘I have to go. You know that,’ Dominic told her, his voice slightly harsh with his own awareness of how much he was going to miss her.
‘Yes,’ she agreed quietly, and Dominic cursed himself inwardly, firstly for being responsible for her pain and secondly for his own selfishness.
He had, after all, known right from the start of his own unbreakable commitment to his Middle Eastern contract.
He tried to console her. ‘It won’t be so bad. I know it’s going to be difficult for both of us, but other couples manage to survive such separations.’
‘Yes,’ Annie agreed, even more bleakly, before adding huskily, ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m destined always to be alone.’
&nbs
p; ‘You aren’t going to be alone,’ Dominic instantly insisted, but her eyes remained shadowed.
‘Perhaps it’s easier not to have such strong feelings, not to love someone too much,’ she whispered to him sadly later on.
Had it been then that she had started to distance herself from him? But she had seemed so happy when they had married, so much in love with him. Or had he, unforgivably, somehow assumed that his ten years’ seniority over her had given him the right to know what was best for her?
The intervening years had changed him, he was forced to concede, as had the emotional pain he had suffered. And, whilst he knew he could never understand how Annie had been able to walk out on him without any kind of explanation, the bitterness he had originally felt had changed to a more rational acceptance. But a part of him still needed to have answers to the question she had left in his life.
His thoughts switched back to the past. Annie had married him. There had been formalities that had had to be dealt with, of course—authorities to be notified of their marriage, that kind of thing, and even the rings he had bought for her had had to be sent away to be altered because her fingers were so delicate and narrow.
He had carried her up to bed the first night of their marriage and he had made love to her with the windows flung wide open so that they could hear the soft whisper of the night and the river.
Their loving had been so intense that she had cried out, a sharp, high keening sound of female pleasure which had echoed on the stillness of the night. And for a heartbeat of time, or so it had seemed to Dominic, time itself had seemed to stand still, as though in awed recognition of the intensity of their love.
Afterwards she had cried, and his own eyes had been damp with emotion as well. But the closer it had got to the date for his departure, the more sad-eyed and withdrawn she had become, and mingled with his own agony at the thought of leaving her had been his guilt at the knowledge that he was responsible for her pain, that he had been the one to persuade her into marriage. And then had come the night when they had had their first and fateful argument.