Marriage Make-Up & an Heir to Bind Them

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I wish I could,’ Sam responded thickly. ‘I wish to God I could.’

  And then, before she could stop him, he was drawing her closer to him, kissing first one and then the other of her captive hands, and then each damp eyelid which she had squeezed shut defensively against both her own threatening tears and the sight of Sam so intimately close to her.

  It was his fault that all this was happening to her, his fault that she no longer seemed to be in full control of her life, his fault that her emotions were being stirred and aroused as they hadn’t been in years—his fault that right now, instead of stiffening her body against him and thoroughly and completely rejecting him, she was actually snuggling closer to him, her mouth softening in aching longing beneath the warm caress of his.

  Her hands were free now as he encircled her in his arms, drawing her so close to him that she was virtually sitting in his lap, body to body with him, and her hands, the hands she should have used to push him away, instead reached out to hold him.

  ‘We shouldn’t be doing this…’

  She heard herself say the words and knew as easily as Sam quite obviously did that they were nothing more than a trite sop to convention, lacking any real meaning or vehemence. That was all being expressed via her body language, the body language that had her leaning into Sam’s body, her hands somehow or other having made their way up under his shirt to cling to the solid, hard-packed muscles of his back, whilst she tipped back her head in feminine enticement to the growing urgency of his mouth and he caressed the soft skin of her throat.

  Already Abbie could feel her body responding to him, welcoming him, wanting him, its needs far too turbulently strong and demanding for her mind to control or suppress.

  The knowledge of how much she wanted him shocked her into silence, unable to resist or protest as Sam slowly started to unfasten the buttons on her dress, lingeringly kissing every inch of flesh he exposed.

  Why was she behaving so recklessly, so…so dangerously? Surely only a woman in love could behave like this, a woman motivated and driven by love?

  Love. Abbie felt the shudder of self-knowledge start right down in her toes and work its way through her whole body, as electrifying and jaggedly painful as the fiercest of forked lightning, jerking her body in a visible spasm of rejection, making her cry out a harshly guttural denial and causing Sam to lift his hand to cup her face, his thumb-tip stroking lovingly against her skin as he asked roughly, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  What was wrong?

  Abbie closed her eyes against the hot wash of her self-betraying tears. Everything was wrong. How could it not be when she was so incapable of correctly analysing a situation, a man’s touch, that she mistook what could only be unemotional physical desire for loving tenderness? When she was so incapable of honestly facing up to and recognising her own feelings that it had taken her until now, until this, to truly understand that the anger, the hatred, the loathing of Sam which she had nurtured for so many years had simply been a sham, feelings she had forced herself to believe she felt as a form of self-protection.

  She didn’t hate Sam, she acknowledged despairingly, she loved him. But he didn’t love her. Even if her foolish heart and her even more foolish mind wanted to believe that he did.

  ‘Abbie, please don’t cry, my love. I can’t bear to see your tears…I can’t bear seeing you hurt…’

  She could hear Sam’s words, feel his gentle touch on her face as he brushed away her tears, but she felt too numb with shock, too caught up in the pain of self-discovery, to really register what he was saying, what he was doing—until she felt his mouth cover her own.

  It was gentle at first, but then quickened with such urgency, such hungry desire and need for her that all her good intentions were swept away by the knowledge of how much she loved and wanted him in return, and how precious and fleeting this bittersweet intimacy with him could only be, so that before she could stop herself she was returning the urgency of his kiss, a woman now, not a girl, her body knowing the pleasure he could give it, knowing the pleasure she could give him.

  Later, she would acknowledge that it might have been Sam who unfastened the rest of her dress, but she was certainly the one who shrugged herself free of it, baring her naked, swollen breasts to the warmth of the fire and the even greater heat of Sam’s smouldering visual caress of her gleaming skin and dark rose nipples.

  And she certainly needed no encouragement to arch her back and offer their sensual enticement to his eager hands and lips as she silently, and then not so silently, urged him to stroke and suckle at her eagerly sensitive nipples. Her fingers rhythmically kneaded the hard bones of his skull, burrowing into the thick darkness of his hair as she held him against her breast and whispered huskily disjointed phrases of pleasure and desire.

  At some point she must have told him that she wanted his body to be as physically accessible to her as hers was to him, although she had no recollection of doing so, because he paused in the midst of kissing her and then, with his mouth still on hers, started to unfasten his shirt with one hand, the other still cupping the side of her face, his fingers stroking her skin as though he was unable to bear the thought of not touching her.

  One of the things which had both shocked and excited her when she and Sam had first become lovers had been the way he refused to either close his eyes or allow her to close hers, insisting that they maintain eye contact with one another. He didn’t want them to shut themselves away from one another behind closed eyelids, he had told her then, and now, as though her body was still responding to him as it had done all those years ago, she found it impossible to keep her eyes closed, impossible not to look at him, so that as she saw him tugging impatiently at his shirt buttons on the periphery of her vision she could feel her face, her whole body starting to flood with heat as she registered his impatience.

  In the end she had to help him. It was either that or risk him ripping the buttons free and ruining his shirt, she told herself in extenuation of her own illogical behaviour. But then she had been the one to whisper that she wanted to see him, to touch him, to feel his skin next to her own, she admitted, her face flushing even more hotly as Sam reminded her throatily of just what she had said, placing his palm against hers, twining his fingers with hers as he carried her hand to his body and placed it over his heat.

  This couldn’t be happening, Abbie denied dizzily, not to her and not with Sam, and not like this. This was the stuff of the most sensual and romantic fantasies—every woman’s dream come true. To be touched, held, caressed, to be slowly and deliciously made love to by a man, the man, who only had to so much as look at her in that certain way to make her whole body melt.

  No wonder, in the years they had been apart, she had never delved too deeply into just why she had found it so impossible to be sexually responsive to any other man. Her body had known the truth even if her mind had ignored and denied it.

  Quickly she broke their kiss, no longer able to sustain the intimacy of their shared eye contact, afraid that Sam might read in her eyes what she now knew was written across and deep, deep into her heart.

  As she caressed the smooth, damp column of his throat with her lips she knew it wasn’t just passion that was making her heart thud so frantically.

  She heard Sam groan as she licked the sweat from the hollow at the base of his throat. He groaned even more harshly when she teasingly circled his nipple with the tip of her finger and then very gently licked and then sucked first one and then the other.

  ‘Now you know what it feels like when you do it to me,’ she told him boldly, watching the muscles in his throat grow rigid and the sweat streak his already damp skin.

  ‘What about you?’ Sam challenged her thickly. ‘Do you know how it feels when you touch me? How I feel? How you make me feel, the things you make me want to do?’

  Whilst she watched him, dizzily aware of the high-octane sensual excitement he was deliberately building inside her, knowing that what he was saying to her was
as sexually exciting for her as it obviously was for him, he took hold of her, removing her clothes completely, and then, before she could stop him, he bent his head and gently kissed the soft curve of her stomach.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,’ Abbie heard him telling her huskily. ‘I wish to God I had, Abbie. I wish to God things had been different, that I hadn’t rejected you and Cathy.’

  His voice had thickened betrayingly, and as he leaned his face against her stomach Abbie could feel her skin growing damp, and then he lifted his head and looked at her, showing her the visible signs of his emotion and remorse. The tears he was too much of a man to want to conceal from her.

  Abbie’s heart suddenly ached with answering emotion. Instinctively she reached out and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

  ‘You had what you believed were good reasons for not believing me,’ she heard herself saying, and recognised, on a sudden surge of shock, that she genuinely meant it, that for the first time it was possible for her not just to admit but to genuinely appreciate why he had refused to believe that Cathy was his child.

  ‘No reason could ever have been good enough to make me doubt or question you,’ she heard him telling her gruffly. ‘I should have trusted you… believed you…’

  ‘You’d had a vasectomy,’ Abbie reminded him. ‘As far as you were concerned it was impossible for me to have conceived your child…’

  ‘You say that as though you mean it,’ Sam told her sombrely. ‘I can’t ask you for forgiveness, Abbie—how can you ever forgive me when I can’t forgive myself? And forgiveness can’t wipe out all the years of pain that lie between us, can it? I’m a human being, and flawed. But, like everyone else, I want to be accepted…loved with my imperfections, not in spite of them.

  ‘But we shouldn’t be discussing this now. In fact we shouldn’t be doing any talking whatsoever now,’ he told her, his voice changing, slowing and thickening as he bent his head and kissed her stomach again. But this time his mouth was moving lower, and despite her cerebral desire to stop him, to tell him that there was no point, no future in what they were doing, her body was already responding to what he was doing to it.

  She could feel herself starting to tremble as her self-control wavered and faltered, swept out of the way by the sweet sensuality of his mouth’s increasingly intimate seduction of her, as though his mouth knew as it rediscovered her, recognising all the tiny involuntary signs that told it how much what it was doing, pleasured her, how much it was making her want him. Familiarity did not always breed contempt, Abbie recognised dizzily as a torrent of aching need swamped her. Sometimes it ignited a fire that burned so hotly, so intensely, that it threatened…

  She gave a small anguished gasp of unendurable ecstasy as Sam’s mouth fastened gently over the most sensitive part of her.

  She had no awareness, no recognition, of calling out his name, of begging him, pleading with him to fill her with his body and to go on filling her until they were both complete and sated, but she knew she must have done so from the response he made to her.

  All she did know was that the second time her body exploded into the convulsive rhythm of her orgasm Sam shared that release with her. Shared it and praised her for it, lavishing kisses and tender words of appreciation on her, stroking her skin, holding her close to his body, wrapping her tightly against him long, long after the climax of their shared pleasure had subsided.

  It was only when she was on the verge of falling asleep in his arms that he finally moved, whispering softly to her, ‘If I stay here much longer, we’re both going to fall asleep, and the last thing we need now is to be found by our daughter again tomorrow morning—especially—’

  Abbie stared at him in distress, interrupting him.

  ‘You’re leaving? But…’ Quickly she bit her lip. What had she been expecting? That he would stay again? That they would go upstairs together, sleep together, just as though the last twenty-odd years had never happened—just as though they were, in fact, still married…still a couple?

  ‘You want me to stay?’ Sam questioned her.

  Abbie shook her head. The last thing she needed right now was for him to guess how she felt. It was obvious that so far as he was concerned all he felt for her was a very male and unemotional kind of physical desire, a residue of lust from the past, no doubt. Whereas she…

  ‘No. No, of course not. I was just…’

  Quickly she turned away from him and started to pull on her clothes, suddenly feeling cold and self-conscious. But the outer chill of her exposed skin was nothing when compared with the inner iciness tightening its grip on her newly exposed and vulnerable heart.

  Sam, too, was getting dressed, and as he stood up he turned to look at her and said hesitantly, ‘You know, Abbie, it might not be such a bad idea of Cathy’s…our getting married again. If only…’

  ‘Why? Because it would look better on the wedding invitations?’ Abbie asked him as she fiercely blinked away the tears of her pain.

  ‘Is that the only reason you can think of?’ he asked her quickly.

  ‘Well, it would certainly make life a lot easier for Cathy, and for Stuart’s mother,’ Abbie told him jerkily. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not as selfless as you, Sam. For me to ever marry again I would have to know that I loved and was loved in return, so deeply and so completely that nothing, no one—’ She stopped, unable to go on.

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, Abbie,’ Sam told her grimly. ‘Don’t worry, I get the message. You’d never want to marry me again because you couldn’t trust me not to let you down again. Right?

  ‘Oh, it’s okay. I’m all grown-up now, and I’ve had to learn some hard lessons along the way. You don’t have to explain to me that a fully mature woman has her needs and the right to satisfy them when and where she wishes, without her partner expecting her to swear undying love for him. I apologise if I let my emotions carry me away somewhat. Another good reason for not staying the night,’ he added savagely. ‘By morning I’d probably be—’

  He didn’t complete whatever it was he had been about to say, turning and heading for the door instead, pausing only to remind her, ‘For Cathy’s sake we’ve got to see this thing through, but I imagine as far as we’re both concerned the sooner she and Stuart get married and the sooner you and I can go our separate ways the better.’

  There were a dozen or more things she could have said to him, Abbie acknowledged after she had listened to the final sound of his car engine fading away. A dozen or so sharp retorts that would have reminded him that this whole stupid idea of them going along with Cathy’s misconception that they were reconciled had been his and not hers, but the shock of the harshness of their quarrel, coming so quickly after the shared intimacy of their lovemaking, caught her with all her defences down, too vulnerable to withstand the pain she was feeling, never mind fight back.

  And the worst thing of all, she admitted an hour later as she curled herself into a small, miserable ball beneath her duvet and hugged her pillow, was that if Sam were somehow miraculously to materialise here in bed beside her right now she would…she would… As the tears flowed unchecked down her face she gave vent to all her pent-up anguish and heartache with a sobbed female howl of pure misery.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ABBIE sighed. Tonight she and Sam were due to attend a dinner party given by Stuart’s mother. Abbie didn’t want to go, but she knew how Cathy would react if she tried to back out.

  She had tried to talk to Cathy about the loss of the closeness they had always shared, but it was obvious that she had still not been forgiven for what Cathy saw as her mother’s bad behaviour during her visit to see the house.

  ‘I know that you and Dad are back together again, and I realise that you must…’ Cathy had begun when Abbie had tried to talk to her about what had happened. ‘But can’t you see, Mum, that…well, that…that some things are just…inappropriate?’

  ‘She’s embarrassed and confused, and angry with herself
for feeling like that,’ Sam had announced promptly, when he had finally coaxed Abbie to admit what was bothering her. ‘The visible signs of a parent’s sexuality can be embarrassing to their teenage and adult offspring…’

  ‘Even these days?’ Abbie had protested in disbelief.

  ‘Even these days,’ Sam had told her. ‘Especially when, like Cathy, an adult offspring has not grown up accepting and seeing his or her parents’ shared physical love for one another.’

  ‘She didn’t seem embarrassed the morning she found us in bed together,’ Abbie had pointed out.

  ‘No, but then she was probably too euphoric to be aware of anything other than her delight in the fact that we were reconciled. Now it’s rather different. Don’t worry about it,’ he had advised Abbie. ‘She’ll come round once she’s had time to get used to the idea. She’s an intelligent girl and she’s bound to be aware of the ambivalence and contradiction of how she’s feeling.’

  ‘She was right, though,’ Abbie had felt bound to admit. ‘I shouldn’t have gone out like that. Not when…’

  ‘Not when what?’ Sam had interposed softly, with a look in his eyes which had made Abbie’s heart thump heavily—and not with apprehension either. No, certainly not with that. ‘Not when you have breasts perfectly made to arouse every single one of a man’s senses? Soft, warm, deliciously scented, heavenly to touch and even more heavenly to taste, to suckle—so sensual and desirable in every way that just knowing the effect they have—’

  ‘Sam, stop it,’ Abbie had protested shakily, and then wondered why it was, when they were both so extraordinarily sensually responsive to one another, when she dreaded each and every second she had to spend with him, once he was actually there, being with him came as easily and naturally as breathing. And then she remembered why they couldn’t turn the charade they were enacting into reality.

  Tonight’s dinner party was going to be particularly difficult; Anne was bound to question her about her and Sam’s plans, to ask—as she had done before—if Abbie had yet come to a decision about selling her own house, and if so would they look for somewhere here in town or move closer to the university.