He wanted her, he told her, as he suckled her nipples. He wanted her. His mouth brushed her midriff, her stomach, his tongue circling her navel.
Helplessly, she clung to him, her nails digging into his flesh, stifling the frantic moans of arousal clogging her throat by burying her mouth against him.
He tasted of soap and salt, his skin clean from his shower and yet musky with the scent of his arousal. He groaned when she touched him, smoothing her hand down over his back. His buttocks were flat and hard, the skin slightly paler than the rest of his body where it obviously hadn’t been exposed to the sun.
She experienced an unfamiliar erotic urge to trace that demarcation line, to follow it round to the front of his body.
She trembled wildly, molten with pleasure as his hand slid between her legs.
She had wanted him there for so long, touching her like that with sure, knowing fingers that seemed to know all the secrets of her sex and to take pleasure in exploring them.
He reached up to pull her down against him, smoothing the hair back off her face, his own miraculously softened by what they were sharing. She could see desire and need in his eyes, feel it in the response he was making no attempt to conceal from her.
He wanted her to
see and know how much he wanted her, she recognised.
Already her body was responding helplessly to his touch, making her arch up eagerly against his hand.
‘I warned you it would be like this between us, didn’t I?’ he groaned as he kissed her. ‘I warned you that it would get out of control… That I would get out of control,’ he added thickly, as she was unable to resist the temptation to reach out and touch him, to caress him as intimately as he was her.
She wanted the taste of him in her mouth, she recognised achingly, the feel of him in her body; she wanted to wrap herself around him and never let him go, to abandon herself completely to him, to be so completely and utterly at one with him that nothing could ever drive them apart.
‘Livvy, Livvy…’ She felt him shudder as she started to press quick, aching kisses along his body, but when he realised what she was going to do he took hold of her and told her thickly, ‘No, no… That pleasure has to be mine.’
And in the end it was his mouth that caressed her with intimate, lingering skill, that caressed and coaxed and finally gave shockingly intense release to her wanton body.
She cried out to him as it happened, clung to him, weeping without knowing why she was doing so.
Later, he made love to her again, filling her with the powerful and longed-for surge of his body within hers.
This time, the release was slower, deeper, and carried with it, for her, an awareness of what this coming together of their bodies was really about, of what lay beyond the immediacy of their physical pleasure, of what this joining of their two physical selves had the power to create.
She wanted him, she recognised, deep within her, was driven to accomplish the satisfaction of that atavistic need not just because of the physical pleasure it gave her.
Nature knew that the closer man’s life-force was to its goal, the less distance it had to travel, the higher the chance was of it performing its task, and it was for this reason surely that it had implanted in her the need to urge and incite him to bury himself so deeply within her.
A child…Richard’s child; as the waves of pleasure broke inside her, Livvy shivered in feminine awe. That heat she could feel inside her, that ache within her womb…were they just the aftermath of pleasure or were they the beginnings of a new life?
* * *
She fell asleep in Richard’s arms, waking up in the darkness some time later, alone and cold.
Shivering, she slid out of the bed. What on earth had she done, and where was Richard? She opened the bedroom door and walked on to the landing, stopping as she heard his voice.
He was on the telephone to someone. She was just about to turn away, not wanting to eavesdrop, when she heard him saying quietly, ‘Look, George, it’s all right… Everything’s going to be all right…’
George…he was speaking to George…George, who could not make time to speak to his wife…George who apparently was too busy and too far away to contact. But not too busy or too far away to ring Richard, apparently.
She was just about to go downstairs and demand indignantly that he let her speak to George when he added, ‘I’ve told you, there’s no need to worry about her any more; I’ll deal with her. In fact it will be a pleasure,’ she heard him saying grimly. ‘I know exactly what to do to get rid of her.’
Livvy froze; she felt as though the blood had suddenly drained from her body. She started to shake with sick awareness of what she had done.
There was no doubt Richard must be talking about her…that it was her he intended to ‘get rid of’. And tonight she had walked right into his trap.
She had to get away from here, she recognised sickly. No matter what she had promised Gale, she couldn’t stay now. Not when she knew the humiliation that lay in wait for her. All the time he was touching her, caressing her, loving her, in reality he…
Loving her… She shivered violently. Was that really what she had thought? And after all that he had already said to her.