oving but she didn’t register that fact. Her eyes were all over his body as she pushed back his robe from his shoulders, and it fell free of him. She wanted to absorb every tiny detail of him into herself…she wanted to see…to touch…to know, with every sense she possessed, everything about him. The desire to do so was a feverish urgency inside her, a racing tide of heat that flooded her body and blotted out everything else. She was panting slightly, drawing in short husky breaths.
Her fingers locked in his hair and slid down to his shoulders, her nails making deep imprints in his skin as the pressure of his mouth against her breasts bent her backwards until she felt her spine would crack.
Her body was aching for more than the delicate caress of his fingers. It seemed possessed by a raging frustration; wanting the deep thrust of him within her. Her mouth found the smooth flesh of his shoulder and bit deeply into the salt-flecked skin, her hands stroking feverishly downward, seeking and finding the hard core of maleness that throbbed maddeningly against her.
James groaned against her breast, releasing the quivering tip he had been suckling. His hands linked behind her back and round her rib cage slowly lowering her on to the bed, and Jenna acquiesced mindlessly content to let him do what he willed with her just so long as it ended in his possession of her body.
He was kneeling between her parted thighs, his hands still on her waist. Impotently Jenna stretched her arms out to him but could not reach. He bent over her, kissing her slowly, shuddering deeply as her hands stroked his skin, feverishly exploring the ridged arch of his ribs, the soft line of body hair that narrowed and then widened where it met his maleness. His body throbbed madly where she touched him, his mouth hardening on hers, and then he was pushing her slightly away from him, his hands running smoothly down over her body, stopping when they reached the top of her thighs, sliding beneath her to stroke and then lift her body. Desire, molten hot and sweet roared through her.
Jenna closed her eyes, aching for him to complete their union, shocked into one stunned gasp of denial when she felt his mouth against the most intimate part of her, his tongue stroking, circling, pressing against her until she was convulsed by a wild trembling that made her cry out, caught between anguish and ecstasy, so that when James started to move slowly up over her body, kissing and caressing her, she felt she could hardly bear the exquisite torment of his touch and yet knew she would die if it was withdrawn.
She needed no encouragement to accept his body within her own, eagerly asking for it, openly demanding it, sighing in obvious pleasure at the first tormentingly slow thrust of it, and then matching the powerful surge of his body all the way; loving each demanding thrusting masculine movement until the pleasure built to such a pitch that there was no room even to experience the sensations convulsing her, only to live them.
The climax was explosively shattering, James’s mouth on her own absorbing her cries of pleasure, and then sobbing against her throat his own delirious release.
They both lay still, too exhausted to move. Gradually, reality swung back into focus. Jenna was aware of her skin prickling with sweat, her body aching with a delicious lethargy, her mind vacant and empty, or at least it was until James propped his head up on one hand and said lazily.
‘Can I look forward to being greeted like that every morning?’
All her earlier ambivalent feelings came sweeping back, bringing with them a return of her earlier self-disgust, this time heightened by the knowledge that at no point in their love-making just now had James forced a single thing on her. She had wanted him to make love to her. Acute nausea gripped her. Pushing herself away from James she spat harshly, ‘Keep away from me, I hate you.’
For a moment he looked angry and then he mocked, ‘I see you hate me, but you love my body…my love-making, is that it?’
Jenna went scarlet, unable to hide her humiliation from him.
‘I’ll never forgive you for that,’ she told him furiously as she slid off the bed and grabbed his discarded robe. ‘I never, ever, want you to touch me again.’
All at once his expression hardened. He reached for her and grabbed her wrist before she could move.
‘Now, just a minute, Jenna,’ he told her softly. ‘Last night, this morning, okay I could have understood your being annoyed with me…but what we did just now was completely mutual…I don’t know what it is in that head of yours that makes you so ashamed of enjoying sex, and unless you tell me I won’t know. But what I do know is that whether you’re prepared to admit it or not, you enjoyed what we just did together. Now you’re telling me that you don’t want me to touch you again. Lady, I’ve got news for you,’ he told her on a deepening voice, ‘you’ve just picked up a mighty sharp two-edged sword, and you’d better be careful you aren’t the one that gets cut up on it. And I’ll tell you one other thing. No man likes being put down the way you’ve just put me down, Jenna. It’s just as humiliating for a man to be treated as a sex object instead of a human being—maybe even more so. So far from me pressing my unwanted attentions on you, my dear wife, you’re going to have to be the one to do the asking in future, and my bet is that whatever you think right now, you will. You’re a very passionate woman, Jenna. Too passionate to live your life as a celibate.’
‘Maybe so.’ The truth of what he was saying stung, scouring her pride, hurting her so painfully that she just had to hurt back. ‘But I’ll see you in hell before I ever ask you to be my lover, James.’
He laughed mirthlessly. ‘You think so? After what we just experienced?’
It came to her then…blindingly…powerfully…just how she could get her own back and silence him.
‘Ah, but you see,’ she smiled sweetly. ‘That wasn’t you I was making love with…’
‘No…’ His mouth curled derisively. ‘My body tells me a different story. Who in hell was it then?’
‘Your ancestor,’ Jenna told him with sweet complacency. She stared dreamily into space and said softly, ‘I dreamed he was my lover the first night I saw his portrait. If I close my eyes and wish hard enough, James, it’s easy to think that you’re him.’
She heard the sound he made in his throat and saw the sick whiteness of his face with a savage sense of satisfaction. Let him see how he liked being humiliated and mocked. Firmly she pushed away the sense of guilt filling her. What she had said wasn’t entirely true. She had dreamed of the man in the portrait, of course…but that dream had contained James too…and if she was truthful with herself she wasn’t quite sure which one of them it was she had desired as her lover. Certainly, the man in her dreams had possessed many of James’s characteristics. James deserved to be hurt she told herself, ruthlessly, silencing her thoughts…He deserved it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘I’M leaving now, Jenna, I’ll be back late Thursday.’
Without a word, Jenna nodded coolly, refusing to so much as lift her head from the accounts she was working on as James lingered for a moment by the study door.
Only when she was sure he had gone did she release a shaky pent-up breath. How much longer could she continue with her present way of life and keep up the rigid self-control she was imposing on herself?
It was two months now since they had returned from their honeymoon. Their honeymoon! Even now she shuddered at the travesty of what their stay in the Caribbean had been. Even now the knowledge of how insultingly easy James had found it to make good his boast that she would beg him to make love to her, scorched her with humiliation, burning a self-contempt so deep into her soul that she felt she would never be free of it.
When she thought about those weeks in the Caribbean—which she did as seldom as possible—she could still recall them in such vivid detail that they seemed more real than the life she was at present living.
For four days she had avoided James, glad of the work that kept him away from her side, and then on the fifth he had found her when she was sunbathing by the privacy of their pool. He had touched her skin briefly as he sat down beside her, and that had been all it took to bring to life within her a clamouring need that refused to be contained.