His Suitable Bride

by Cathy Williams/Abby Green/Kate Walker

  ‘We were lovers a long time ago. But, no, she’s not my mistress.’

  ‘Oh … well, goodnight, then.’ Rowan fled before her mouth could get her into any more trouble. Even so a curious fizzing sensation filled her veins. Upstairs, she took off her shoes and checked in on Zac. He was sleeping peacefully. She straightened the covers over him, pressed a kiss to his forehead and went to her own room.

  When Isandro walked into Zac’s room a while later he could smell Rowan’s scent lingering on the air—barely there, but he could smell it. He could see that she’d already tucked Zac in properly. He sat down heavily in a chair in the corner of the room and looked moodily into space for a long time.

  An hour after trying to get to sleep Rowan still lay tossing and turning. Images, memories, emotions—all were swirling through her head. And most vivid of them all an image of Isandro. Tantalising and torturing her. The air in the room seemed oppressive, and she noticed that her French doors were closed. She heard another roll of thunder. She craved air, a breeze—something. So she got up and went to open them.

  The air outside was dense, warm and unbearably heavy, redolent with the imminent storm which still hadn’t hit. Rowan stepped out and looked up. Almost unbelievably drops of rain started to fall, as if they had been waiting for her cue. She stretched out a hand as they fell, heavier and heavier. Within seconds it was a torrential downpour, and jagged lightning lit up the sky.

  Rowan stepped out farther, the rain drenching her in seconds. She didn’t care. The moment was magical, the kind of thing she’d dreamed of over her long and hard recent months. She went down the steps and stood in her nightdress, her face tipped up to the menacing black clouds as the rain teemed down over her, plastering her hair to her head. She felt as if she were being cleansed. An intense joy filled her.

  She had survived an unspeakable nightmare and she was with her son. Despite the pain of knowing Isandro wanted a divorce, she could ask for no greater happiness than that. Lifting her arms, she welcomed the rain like a benediction.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Rowan dropped her arms feeling instantly silly and whirled around, her heart thumping heavily. She could barely see Isandro through the driving rain, although she could sense his tension, his irritation. He stepped closer. She could see that he was dressed in nothing but brief boxers. Rain was running in rivulets down his chest. He was already as soaked as she was.

  ‘I … I’m standing in the rain,’ she answered lamely.

  ‘I can see that.’

  He could also see that her short nightdress clung to her body like a second skin and had become translucent. His eyes dropped. He couldn’t help himself. The outline of her body was clearly shaped, from her waist to her hips, down long, long legs. The dark shadow of promise between them was a tantalising invitation. The drenched material moulded to her breasts, still high and firm, their tips hard. Desire beat through his blood, hot and insistent.

  ‘Sandro …

  He looked up. ‘What did you call me?’

  There was a look on her face, a yearning look that slammed into him. He’d seen that look before. His eyes were drawn to where her chest was rising and falling rapidly. He couldn’t hear the rain any more. All he could hear was the beating of his heart. The beating of his pulse.

  ‘I said Sandro.’

  Isandro shook his head. He had to break out of this spell. ‘No one calls me that.’

  ‘I did,’ she said simply.

  A pain gripped him inside, and he was reminded of his instinctive move to comfort her earlier. ‘Rowan … go back to bed.’

  She moved a step closer, but not to move past him.

  Feeling a surge of intense irritation, Isandro closed the distance and took her by the shoulders. ‘Dammit, woman, what’s wrong with you?’

  Rowan was being guided by a stronger force than she could resist. It went beyond mere desire, although that was there too, burning her up so that she couldn’t even feel the rain. She put her hands on his waist and felt him stiffen. She prayed it wasn’t in rejection.

  ‘Sandro … please …’

  ‘Sandro, please what?’ He knew he shouldn’t even be engaging in dialogue, should just walk away. But there was something about her, something … different. Earnest. He felt he’d never met this woman before—or he had … but in the past, when he had believed—

  ‘I want you.’

  The three simple words exploded into his head. He tried to move but he couldn’t. Her hands were on him and he wanted them on him, all over him, around him, touching him, caressing him. Her hair was plastered to her head, huge drips falling onto her shoulders. And yet some self protective instinct kept him from acting on the strongest desire he’d ever felt in his life.

  ‘Rowan …’ His voice was hoarse.

  Rowan moved closer. Close enough for their bodies to touch lightly. It was as if they were both filled with attracting ions—she could feel the force of how strongly they were being pulled together. It had to be real. It couldn’t be her imagination. The electricity in the air wasn’t just coming from the sky.

  ‘Please.’

  He shook his head. But please sank in and reverberated through his aching body. He could see her eyes. The rain was stopping, water drops glistened on her skin, clung to her long lashes, and he wasn’t strong enough to try and pull back, analyse what was going on.

  With an urgent movement and a guttural moan dredged up from somewhere deep inside, Isandro put two hands around Rowan’s head, cupping it, and jammed their bodies together. Then he lifted her face and met her mouth with his.

  His kiss was passionate, and everything Rowan had ever dreamt of. She sank into his body, her arms wrapped around his lean waist, her breasts crushed to his torso. She couldn’t believe this was really happening, but the rain and the storm had added a magical, other-worldly element to everything.

  Isandro was still cradling her head, his hands around her face, not letting her move an inch as he plundered her mouth. His tongue sought hers, tangled and danced. Rowan could feel the heat rise from a pool low in her belly. She was oblivious to the wet clothes clinging to her body, could feel only the hard evidence of Isandro’s arousal against her. A fierce exulting force moved through her.

  When Isandro drew back she opened eyes that felt heavy-lidded. His were dark blue, stained with desire. Without a word he bent and caught her up against him, an arm under her legs. He turned and walked swiftly to his own room, and Rowan had a quick impression of dark colours and a huge bed before he put her down in front of him. Her legs felt weak.

  She looked up at him, acutely conscious now of her clinging wet nightdress, and suddenly awful reality wanted to intrude.

  As if Isandro read her doubt he swiftly put out a hand and tipped her face to his, shaking his head. A hard smile touched his mouth. ‘There’s no going back from here.’

  And before she knew what he was doing, he’d brought his hands to the top of her flimsy cotton nightdress and ripped it from neck to hem. Rowan gasped. He slipped the garment from her shoulders so that it fell behind her, and had pulled off his own briefs in a second.

  They stood naked, facing each other. Before, Rowan would have been cringing from her toes upwards—but now … she was gone beyond that. For any number of reasons. Not least of which was that her desire and the memory of how he could make her feel was burning through her, making a mockery of any show of embarrassment.

  She could feel raindrops from the ends of her hair falling onto her skin and shivered slightly, breaking into goose-bumps. Her breasts felt tight, aching. Her breath stalled in her throat as she watched Isandro’s eyes drop, his hand come and cup one breast. Rowan’s breath returned jerkily.

  Isandro lazily took the weight of her breast in his hand. All of Rowan’s nerve-endings were stretched and pulled, the centre of her breast screaming for his touch. He bent his head, his breath feathered, and Rowan’s eyelids fluttered closed. But then, instead of taking that s
training peak into his hot mouth, she felt his tongue come out and lick where a drop of rain had fallen on the upper slope.

  She put her hands on his wide shoulders to steady herself. Past and present were meshed. All that remained constant were the sensations and the way he was making her feel. Rowan gave herself up to it, and deep down thanked whatever God had given her a second chance.

  She opened her eyes and speared his wet hair with her hands, lifting his head and stepped right up against him. His erection was heavy, trapped between their bodies, and then she stretched up to kiss him.

  Passion gripped them, overtook them. They kissed furiously. Isandro’s hands roamed over Rowan’s back down to her buttocks, which he cupped in his two big hands. He pulled her up and into him, so that the aching jut of his arousal was right there. Rowan responded, her own hands searching, seeking to touch him all over, and then she inserted a hand between them and let her fingers close enticingly along his length.

  Isandro broke away, breathing harshly, eyes glittering. ‘Enough.’

  Rowan felt a moment of pure fear that he meant to bring her to this point only to reject her, but then he was carrying her over to the bed and laying her down. Relief swamped her. She watched as he reached for something in a drawer nearby and sheathed himself with protection. As she watched him, something inside her fell. It didn’t feel right to have that barrier between them, but she couldn’t speak up—not with the weight of history heavy around them. She said nothing.

  Isandro, totally oblivious to the turmoil in her head, lay beside her and ran the palm of his hand down over her breasts, their tight peaks, her belly, and down farther. She opened her legs instinctively and saw something dark cross Isandro’s face for an instant. Then it was gone again.

  He bent and licked around the aureole of her breast for a second, his hand delving in between her legs to find that moist heat. In the same instant that he finally took one turgid nipple fully into his mouth two fingers thrust into her slickness, his thumb instantly finding the sensitive swollen bud of her desire. Rowan nearly jumped off the bed. She’d never been so aroused, so sensitive.

  She moved against his hand, her eyes shut tight, the muscles in her neck corded, as Isandro suckled at her other breast. Her hips lifted in mute appeal. It wasn’t enough. She wanted him inside her, where she’d dreamt of him on her long lonely nights.

  ‘Sandro … Sandro!‘

  Isandro almost didn’t hear her with the haze of desire that was clouding his brain. She was soft and silky, fragrant, and she felt like paradise on earth. And she was as responsive as he remembered—more unbelievably responsive than any other woman he’d known. That hadn’t changed.

  She clutched at his shoulders, twisting her hips away. Her eyes were so dark they looked black. He could see her nipples, wet from his ministrations, and he became even harder in response.

  ‘No,’ she said breathily. ‘I want you inside me.’

  For a moment suspended in time they just looked at each other. And then, breaking the spell, Rowan shifted herself so that she was under him. He lay between her legs. There was no hesitation. Isandro cupped one buttock, felt its peachy firmness. Her legs opened farther and, positioning himself carefully, he entered her. He watched her head go back, the way she sucked in a deep breath as she drew him in, and his head went fuzzy. It was exactly the way she’d taken him before. And he remembered every other time as if it was yesterday, as if it was now. And it was now.

  Coming over her properly, taking his weight onto his arms, he started to thrust in and out. Rowan had released her breath and looked up as he’d withdrawn. Now she drew her legs around his waist, and Isandro couldn’t stop his moan of intense pleasure when he felt himself go even deeper. He was buried so far now …

  For a long time they rode the wave, eking out the pleasure until the very last moment. Rowan knew she couldn’t prolong it any more. She could feel tremors building, that delicious tightness taking over, building and building. Isandro’s tempo increased, sweat glistening on his skin. The raindrops were long gone—evaporated in the heat of passion—and in one second Rowan’s world erupted around her into a million stars.

  She’d hung suspended for a long moment, and now, as she fell, she was hardly aware of Isandro’s own completion. His body jerked and pulsed in the aftermath, still thrusting sporadically, still wringing out the final pleasure, until finally he lay over her, and she held him tightly within her, within her arms.

  After a long moment Isandro found the strength to move and release Rowan from him, from his weight. Pulling free of her body caused a yearning, aching feeling to surge up, and to disguise it he got up off the bed and walked into his bathroom to deal with the protection. After he’d done that, he looked at himself in the mirror of the bathroom, with the door shut firmly on the woman who lay in the bed just feet away.

  The words What the hell just happened? reverberated in his head, but it seemed almost too banal to try and articulate how he felt about what had just happened. All he knew was that one moment he’d been standing in front of her in the pouring rain, asking her what she was doing, and the next … the next she’d been under him, and he’d been sinking into her like a man in a desert starved of water who’d just found an oasis.

  He knew what had happened. She had bewitched him. She’d heard him going into his room, she must have, and had gone out there in nothing but a flimsy nightdress in the rain. And she had waited, knowing that he would have heard her door open. Knowing that he would investigate. She’d sensed his vulnerability earlier, and now she had him right where she wanted him. And he … he was completely exposed in his desire for her.

  Desire. That was all it was.

  He straightened up. He didn’t have to feel exposed, or vulnerable. Since when was desire linked to emotion for him? Since that first night, and now tonight … Isandro brought his fist down onto the side of the sink heavily. No, it wasn’t. He could remember her breathy little please … as if she’d really meant it, as if she’d never even left, walked away. Well, she had.

  This was nothing more than what she owed him. At some point during their marriage she’d seemed to change overnight, had turned on the ice queen act. He wasn’t about to let it happen again—at least not until he’d been thoroughly satisfied. And if she thought these cute little moves were going to get her something extra from the divorce, then it would be a fine moment of revenge when she discovered it had all been in vain.

  Rowan lay on the bed. She couldn’t move. Aftershocks and little tremors were still pulsing through her body minutes later. Her muscles still clenched minutely. Isandro came out of the bathroom and she turned her head. She couldn’t read the expression on his face, but a little shiver went down her spine. She sensed something ominous in the air.

  The passion of moments before seemed to cool in seconds, and she was reminded of how wanton she’d just acted—again.

  He came and stood beside the bed, and she didn’t like what was in his eyes. She could see that he was already becoming aroused again and, despite her trepidation, she could feel herself responding. She drew her legs together, even though they wanted to open for him, and brought her arms up over her breasts, even though she felt as if she wanted to arch her back and offer them up to him again.

  Confusion and fear warred with potent, aching desire. Perhaps he expected her to go? She made a move to get off the bed, but a large warm hand caught her back and pushed her down.

  ‘Sandro …’ She was breathless already. ‘I thought … Do you want me to go?’

  In the dim light Rowan could see a muscle flex in his jaw. ‘I’ve no doubt that’s what you had in mind, but we’re not done yet.’

  ‘I—’

  But he silenced her with his mouth, bringing his whole body down beside her, trapping her with his arms, drawing a hard-muscled thigh over her legs. And she could feel his insistent erection growing, firming against her body, and knew she didn’t want to go, couldn’t go anywhere.

  Much later t
he weather had calmed outside. Without looking, Rowan knew the sky would be clear. She lay encircled in Isandro’s arms, her back against his chest. She felt sated, complete, and at peace for the first time in almost two years. She’d cried when they’d made love just a short while before, but she’d buried her head in Isandro’s shoulder and used her moans to disguise her sobs of helpless emotion. She didn’t think he’d heard them. She prayed that he hadn’t.

  As if sensing her wakefulness, Isandro shifted behind her. Rowan held her breath as she felt him pull his arms from around her and get out of the bed. She closed her eyes tight, and then she felt him come around and scoop her up into his arms. She couldn’t pretend to be asleep. The tension in her body gave her away.

  ‘What are you—?’ Her words stopped when she saw where he was going. He was striding back towards the adjoining door, and bent to expertly open it before shouldering his way through and depositing her on her own bed, over the covers and naked. Her bedside lamp was still on from earlier, and Rowan felt ridiculously exposed in the soft light.

  His eyes, cooled now after their spent passion, flickered down her body and back up, stopping suddenly at her breasts. They narrowed. Rowan felt a snake of something bad. He wasn’t looking at her with desire, it was curiosity. Isandro bent down slightly, coming closer, and Rowan cowered back. But he came down on the bed and grabbed her arms, stopping her from hiding herself. With a leaden sinking feeling she knew exactly what he was looking at—what he’d missed earlier, in the dimmer light of his own room. She closed her eyes.

  A scar, about two centimetres wide, in the middle of her chest, under her breasts.

  ‘What is that?’

  Rowan opened her eyes to see his finger come out to touch. She jerked her arm free, slapping his hand away. ‘It’s nothing. Just a scar from …’ her mind worked feverishly ‘… a brooch pin that stabbed me.’

  He looked back up to her eyes, his other hand still holding her fast. For a moment it seemed as if he was going to question her, but then he shrugged. And that was like a slap in the face. He didn’t care.