CHAPTER THREE
WAS SHE HER mother’s daughter after all?
Despair swept through Leah. As an adult, she looked at her mum’s choices of unsuitable lovers—men who had been selfish and sometimes brutal—and wondered how Tori could have been so weak, following her heart and letting her actions be dictated by her sexual desires.
Leah had always been proud of her own common sense, but now she understood what her mum had meant about falling crazily. Not in love but in lust. Want, need.
She had never felt those things until she’d met Marco.
But she was about to marry James.
Why had she thought that marrying for security and safety would guarantee happiness?
Leah buried her face in her hands as she realised she had been fooling herself. Passion and desire were important elements in a loving relationship, but she didn’t even know if she and James were sexually compatible. She bit her lip as she remembered how he had spurned her tentative advance earlier, when she’d invited him to her room.
She must make love with James tonight!
The realisation struck Leah like a thunderbolt. She could not make a solemn promise to spend the rest of her life with him while the huge question of whether they desired each other remained unanswered.
She was not by nature an impulsive person, but she didn’t wait to consider more carefully if she was doing the right thing and tore out of her room before her nerve failed.
James’s room was in the old part of the house. Leah had only been there once before, when she’d gone to look for him after he’d been late meeting her to go and play tennis. The butler had escorted her along a maze of passageways, but now she’d have to try to find the way on her own.
The lamps along the landings were dimmed at night, and twice she took a wrong turn. But she remembered that there had been a large Grecian urn on a table next to the door of James’s room.
Leah halted in the corridor and wiped her damp palms down her chemise. Tension cramped in the pit of her stomach and she took a deep breath and tried to relax. This was the right thing to do, she assured herself. Once she had made love with James it would put an end to her doubts about their relationship and she was sure that her fascination with Marco would disappear.
Leah stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, shutting off the chink of light from the passageway. The darkness was impenetrable, but as her eyes adjusted she could make out a four-poster bed. Her heart was beating painfully hard. She hadn’t expected to feel nervous about having sex for the first time—surely it was way overdue, she thought wryly. But what other reason could there be for her reluctance to put into practice what she had come here to do? Why did every thud of her heart urge her to retreat back to her room? James was the right man for her, she told herself.
Maybe if she told herself enough times she would be convinced.
She stiffened when she heard the mattress creak. ‘Are you awake?’ she whispered.
The muffled response could have been a snore or a sleepy grunt of surprise. Leah resolutely ignored the clamour of doubts in her head and climbed onto the bed.
‘I know you must be surprised that I’ve come to your room, but I want you to make love to me.’
She crawled along the mattress and almost lost her nerve when her hands skimmed over hard thighs. She felt the outline of powerful muscles through the sheet. Moving higher, she discovered hip bones and a taut abdomen.
She leaned forward, bracing herself with her hands on either side of his head, so that her breasts were pressed against his chest. His face was shadowed, but Leah was glad of the concealing darkness as she bent her head and sought his mouth. She brushed her lips across his and instantly it felt as though a bolt of electricity had zapped right down to her toes.
Relief swept through her. There had been no need for her to doubt that sexual chemistry existed between them. Every nerve-ending in her body tingled with anticipation.
‘Kiss me, please.’ She whispered the words into his mouth.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second before he obeyed.
Leah’s heart slammed against her ribs when he moved his lips over hers—gently at first, and then with an increasing passion that made her tremble with needs she did not fully understand, which evoked an ache low in her pelvis.
He was heat and fire and she melted, stretching her body out on top of his. Strong arms curved around her, trapping her against his powerful physique as he pushed his tongue inside her mouth. Leah had never experienced such an intensity of passion before. Her heart sang and her spirit soared as she matched him kiss for kiss, and he made a rough sound that was muffled against her lips.
The sheet was a barrier between their bodies. She gave a moan of frustration that turned into a sigh of pleasure when he pushed his hand between them and spread his fingers possessively over one breast. Her nipple peaked and thrust against the lacy barrier of her chemise.
Everything was going to be all right. The flood of warmth between Leah’s legs was proof that she was ready to give herself completely and exclusively to him.
‘I want to have sex with you,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I don’t want to be a virgin for a moment longer.’
‘A virgin? Madre di Dio!’
Before she knew what was happening Leah found herself lifted by strong hands and dumped unceremoniously on the mattress. The bedside lamp was switched on and she blinked in the sudden bright light.
‘You!’ Incomprehension turned to shock, horror and finally toe-curling mortification as she stared at Marco. ‘Where’s J-James?’ she stammered. ‘Why are you sleeping in his room?’
‘This is my bedroom. James’s room is directly above mine on the third floor.’ Marco leaned back against the headboard and narrowed his eyes on Leah’s hot face.
She silently cursed her fair skin. But far worse than her tendency to blush easily were her navigational skills.
‘Oh, God!’
This had to be the most humiliating moment of her life.
‘Seriously? You’re a virgin?’
Leah felt the heat on her face spread down her neck and across the upper slopes of her breasts so very revealed by the skimpy chemise. ‘It’s none of your business,’ she choked.
‘It would have been very much my business if you had seduced me into having sex with you.’
The hint of laughter in Marco’s voice was unexpected. She hadn’t known that he was capable of laughter, so grim and forbidding as he was. But the fact that she was the source of his amusement made Leah want to slap the mocking grin off his face.
‘I wasn’t trying to seduce you. I thought you were James. It was dark and I couldn’t see you,’ she said tautly when Marco raised one eyebrow. ‘I went to the wrong room by mistake.’ She jerked at the strap of her chemise which had slipped off her shoulder, pulling it back into place. ‘I feel a complete idiot. Why didn’t you stop me?’
‘Cara, when I am woken by a woman begging me to have sex with her I rarely refuse.’
‘It happens to you a lot, does it?’ she snapped.
For some reason, the thought of Marco taking his pleasure with other women who were far more beautiful and sexually experienced than her evoked a sensation like a sharp knife shoved between Leah’s ribs.
He wouldn’t take his pleasure selfishly; he would give the utmost pleasure to his lovers. She had no idea how she was so certain of that, but her pulse accelerated when she looked at him and found he was studying her with eyes that gleamed bright and sharp, as if he could see inside her head.
‘I enjoy sex as much as every other red-blooded male,’ he said, folding his arms behind his head and drawing Leah’s attention to the bunched muscles in his shoulders. Her gaze dropped to his broad chest, covered with crisp, dark hair that arrowed down his flat abdomen and disappeared beneath the sheet. It occurred to her that he might
be naked, and her breath became trapped in her lungs.
‘You must have guessed that I’d come to the wrong room and I believed you were James,’ she muttered.
‘No, cara, I assumed it was me you wanted to have sex with.’
If her face burned any hotter she would combust. ‘Why would I want to sleep with you when I’m about to marry your brother?’
‘A good question,’ Marco murmured with a hint of laughter in his voice again. ‘Perhaps James doesn’t excite you? That must be the case if you haven’t allowed him to take you to bed yet.’
‘It was a mutual agreement to wait until we were married,’ Leah said stiffly.
‘If you were my fiancée you would not want to wait—and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you.’
The lazy amusement in Marco’s tone had disappeared. He sat up straighter, so that the sheet slipped down dangerously low, and stared at her with an intensity that made her feel dizzy and weak—and, worse, tempted her to lean forward and cover his hard, sexy mouth with hers.
She knew the beauty of his kiss now. A little shiver ran through her as she remembered how his lips had moved over hers with bold assurance and devastating sensuality.
She should go. Now. Get out of his room and be thankful that he had stopped her before it was too late. But the common sense that she prided herself for possessing seemed to be taking a holiday.
She tilted her chin belligerently. ‘I did not beg you for sex.’
‘Yes, you did. And what’s more you knew it was me you were kissing.’
Marco gave her a sardonic look as she shook her head wildly, so that her curls flew like red sparks around her shoulders.
‘You might be a virgin, but you must have kissed James. You know what his mouth feels like beneath yours. You know his taste. And now you know mine,’ he said harshly.
His words hovered in the air, challenging her to deny them. Leah had thought he was a terrible man and now she knew just how lethal he was. If she lived to be one hundred she knew she would still see his face in her dreams. The perfection of his sculpted features, the darkness of his unshaved jaw, the tragedy of the scar that for some inexplicable reason made her want to weep.
‘I believed I was kissing James.’
It was the truth, she insisted to herself. But her conscience reminded her that the kisses she’d shared with James had never blown her mind or made her tremble with desire the way she’d trembled when Marco had clamped her against his body and she’d felt the hard ridge of his arousal through the thin sheet.
It wasn’t fair to compare the two men, she thought desperately. If she and James had become lovers before he had brought her to Nancarrow Hall she would not have developed a silly schoolgirl crush on his half-brother.
She waited for Marco to say something, but his silence filled the room and the oxygen was sucked from her lungs when he pinned her with his brooding stare. His eyes roamed over her, and to her horror she felt her nipples harden so that they pushed against the sheer lace cups of her chemise.
Galvanised by the molten gleam in his gaze, Leah scrambled across the mattress. ‘I’m going to find James.’
Her conscience would not allow her to marry him tomorrow after the way she had responded to Marco tonight. Leah knew it was only fair that she admitted to James her reservations about their relationship.
‘I made a genuine mistake when I came to your room,’ she told Marco. ‘I’d be grateful if you would forget that anything happened.’
‘Nothing of any consequence did happen. Trust me, if it had you would be begging to remain in my bed for the rest of the night,’ he said lazily.
His arrogance took Leah’s breath away, but before she could slide off the bed his hand shot out and he caught hold of her arm. This time when he spoke his voice was low and unexpectedly fierce.
‘Take my advice and go back to your room. Don’t visit James tonight.’
‘I’ve already told you that I don’t want your advice.’ She jerked free from his grasp and ran over to the door.
‘Leah.’
His husky accent turned her name into a caress. She paused with her hand on the doorknob and turned to face him, knowing it was a mistake—another mistake.
Marco shoved a hand through his thick hair. He was still sprawled on the bed, propped up on one elbow—indolent and far too sexy for his own good. He was a disaster waiting to happen, but he wouldn’t be her disaster.
Leah thought again of all the men her mother had given her heart to, only to have her romantic dreams shattered time and time again. ‘I’m not listening to you.’ She clung to the doorknob as though it was a lifeline.
‘You will be making a mistake if you marry James. Come here and let me prove it to you.’
For one terrible, shameful second she was tempted. ‘You have no right to say such things,’ she said huskily. ‘Where is your loyalty to your brother?’
‘Perhaps you should discuss loyalty with James.’
‘What do you mean?’
Marco swore and raked his fingers through his hair again, as if he needed an outlet for his restless energy. ‘It is not for me to comment on your relationship with your fiancé,’ he said gruffly.
‘Then don’t.’ Leah tore her gaze from his and opened the door. ‘I’m going to see James and nothing you say will stop me.’
A flight of stairs at the end of the corridor led to the third floor. Leah tore along the hallway and saw a Grecian urn on a table—a replica of the one outside Marco’s room on the landing below. Light filtered beneath the door of James’s bedroom and she guessed that he was still awake.
She knocked, but she was too agitated to wait for a response and flung the door open. ‘We need to talk... Oh!’
Her words died on her lips and she stared in stunned disbelief at Davina the wedding planner, in bed with James.
‘Leah! What the blazes are you doing here?’ James demanded, while his companion dragged the sheet over her naked breasts.
‘I’d like to ask Davina the same question,’ Leah said, frozen in the doorway, too shocked to be able to think clearly. Her legs felt wobbly and she clutched the doorframe for support. ‘I don’t understand.’
But the situation was humiliatingly clear. James had rejected her because he’d planned to spend the night with Davina.
‘I thought you loved me,’ she whispered, feeling more of a fool than she had ever felt in her life.
James blew out a breath. ‘The truth is that I was never in love with you, Leah.’
* * *
Marco shoved his hair off his brow with a hand that remarkably—for a man who never, ever allowed himself to be affected by a woman—was not entirely steady. He should have stopped Leah. But not from crawling all over him while she pleaded with him to make love to her.
His mouth dried at the memory of her nubile body stretched out on top of him.
He had been half asleep, and for a heart-stopping moment he’d thought that the erotic fantasy he’d been having about Leah had come true. She’d looked incredible, in a sexy black negligee that had framed her voluptuous breasts. His blood had heated as he’d anticipated stripping her so that he could trace his lips over her silken skin. But then she had gone and ruined it when she’d said that she was a virgin.
Dio. How was that even possible? She was the most responsive woman he’d ever put his mouth on—and there had been many, Marco acknowledged. He’d had his fair share of lovers before and after his marriage—but not during it. He happened to believe that marriage was a serious commitment, which was why he intended never to do it again. One cheating, lying ex-wife was enough.
A message flashed on his phone, advising him that the movement sensor alarm on the third floor had been activated. He thought of Leah, on her way to offer herself to James. Muttering a curse, Marco slid out of bed and pulled on his robe, w
incing as the towelling brushed against his still uncomfortably hard erection.
He should have stopped her from running out of his room. All it would have taken was him tugging her back down onto the bed and kissing her until she made those little moans in the back of her throat that he’d found such a turn-on.
He could still taste her...honey and vanilla on his tongue. She’d insisted that she’d believed she was kissing James, but was that true?
He strode up the stairs and along the third floor landing, halting next to one of the ugly Grecian urns that his mother collected. Leah was standing in the open doorway to James’s room, her hands gripping the frame. Marco sensed that if she let go her legs would buckle beneath her.
‘I thought we were friends, Davina,’ she said in a choked voice.
Marco felt no surprise that the wedding planner was in his brother’s room. At the wedding rehearsal he had tried to suggest to Leah that she should postpone marriage until she’d had a chance to know James better, and this was why.
There was a sweetness about Leah that made Marco wish he could have saved her from the pain of disillusionment. But she would get over it with time, he thought. And if she had any sense she would learn that love was a lie put about by poets and dreamers.
He was about to return to his room, but Leah was speaking again, and Marco succumbed to curiosity and withdrew into an alcove in the passageway.
‘James, if you have never loved me, why did you ask me to marry you?’
‘Your inheritance,’ James muttered. ‘I owe a lot of money to some people who are likely to get nasty if I don’t repay them soon. I borrowed heavily, to invest in a business deal that promised amazing returns, but then the goldmine in Africa flooded and I lost my investment. I can’t ask my parents for help because my father advised me against the deal.’
Marco rolled his eyes. It wasn’t the first time James had sunk money into a get rich quick scheme that had failed. He’d bailed his half-brother out many times in the past and refused to do so again.
Her Wedding Night Negotiation Page 4
