Bought With His Name Page 13

  'Have you ever thought of becoming a librarian?' Genista suggested, when Lucy was bemoaning the lack of opportunities for people with an arts degree. 'And it needn't be merely library work, although that in itself is a very good career. Television and radio stations often need re­searchers; if your qualifications are good enough you could get a super job.'

  It was something which Lucy had obviously not thought of previously, and by the time they had exhausted the subject it was later than Genista had realised.

  She tried to soak away some of her tension in a hot bath, secure in the knowledge that Luke was hardly likely to leave his companion at ten-thirty to come rushing back to his unwanted wife!

  She scented the water generously with her favourite bath oil and lay back, trying to force her tense muscles to relax.

  Afterwards she wrapped herself in a huge fluffy peach towel and started to dry her hair.

  The bedroom she shared with Luke was obvi­ously the master bedroom.

  In addition to the bedroom itself, there was a bathroom, luxuriously equipped and tiled with toning sanitary ware in shades of coffee and brown. The bath was huge, and set into the floor—more than adequate for two people, Genista had re­flected, before she realised the direction her unwary thoughts were taking.

  Off the bedroom was a dressing room lined with fitted wardrobes, all mirror-fronted. Luke had in­dicated that she was to make use of them, and she had hung her few clothes in one small corner. She would need to make a trip to London to collect the rest of her things. Luke had barely given her time on their brief call on the way back from Cumbria. She also wanted to collect her car.

  Her hair lay over her shoulders in a cascade of russet silk. The bedroom was decorated in shades of toning peach and coffee; neither too masculine nor fluffily feminine. Genista loved the pure cotton sheets and beautiful handmade bedspread. The sheets felt blissfully cool as she slid beneath them. She heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike eleven as she closed her eyes.

  Genista opened her eyes. The bedroom was all in darkness, and at first she couldn't place the sound that had woken her. Outside she heard an owl and shivered, shrinking back against the pil­lows as a shadow detached itself from the wall.

  'Luke!'

  'Who did you think it was?' he drawled unkindly. 'Bob? or Trevor Lawson?'

  She had no defence against him in this mood. He stood silhouetted by the window, his body powerfully lithe in the hip hugging cream pants, his shirt unfastened, as he started to remove it.

  'Aren't you going to ask me if I enjoyed my evening?'

  His goading touched a painful nerve. She sat up in bed, unaware of the purity of her features in the moonlight, her hair spread round her like a soft cloak.

  'I didn't realise wifely concern was supposed to be part of our bargain. What do you want me to do? Ask how much you enjoyed making love to another woman? Marriage to me was an expensive price to pay for satisfying your lust, Luke, especi­ally now that you no longer want me.'

  'What makes you think that?' His tone was softly jeering. 'And as for being satisfied . . .'

  Her heart seemed to have lodged in the back of her throat. She made a small sound of protest, muffled beneath the hands which lifted her from the bed, removing her thin cotton covering to reveal every slender contour of her quivering flesh.

  'Some appetites are fed by starvation,' Luke said slowly, his eyes beginning a slow inspection of the moonlit flesh beneath his hands. 'And others thrive on feeding.'

  Meaning, no doubt, that his desire for her was in no way diminished by having spent the last few hours in someone else's arms, Genista thought, trying to quell her growing feeling of nausea. She wouldn't let him make love to her merely to satisfy a need!

  She started to tell him so, fear silencing her as she saw savage hunger in his eyes. Perhaps his evening had not been as successful as she had imagined. Perhaps his girl-friend had deliberately led him on, teasing and enticing but withholding herself, and she was merely being used as a vehicle to slake his thirst for someone else. She thought she had experienced every pain it was possible for a human being to experience, but now she knew that this was not so. The thought that Luke was contemplating making love for her purely for physical release brought an agony that made her feel physically ill.

  'I'm tired, Luke . . .' She couldn't bring herself to look at him as she uttered the lie, but she hoped it would have the desired effect and that he would release her. His thumbs were stroking the inner flesh of her wrists seductively, and she wanted nothing so much as to melt passionately against him, feeling him stir with the same primitive force which was already weakening her resistance.

  'Tired? Can't you think of a better excuse than that?'

  'All right then, I don't want you,' Genista lied desperately. 'I hate you touching me, Luke. I wish you'd go away and leave me alone . . .'

  'Oh, I shall,' he said softly through gritted teeth, 'but not until I've made you beg and plead for me to stay with you, Genista. Before tonight's over that cool, frosty little voice of yours will be sobbing my name, ragged with passion—A passion I already know you can experience.'

  His own voice had taken on a deeper timbre which found an answering chord deep inside her. She longed to refute his words, but her tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of her mouth, pre­venting speech whilst an intense longing pulsated within her. In the moon-shadowed room she could see Luke's dark outline; the tanned flesh of his chest, rising lightly with his breathing, the lean tautness of his hips, the powerful muscles of his thighs, roughened with their light covering of dark hair beneath his cream pants. He came towards her and she retreated instinctively, until she was pressing herself back against the bed, her body tensing as she waited for him to touch her. His hands either side of her head on the pillow im­prisoned her, his lean body only inches away, as he lowered his head and touched her lips almost experimentally.

  She tried to avoid the caress, twisting her head frantically away, but each time she did so her cheek brushed the hard warmth of his hands, while her own were held rigidly at her sides for fear they might inadvertently come into contact with Luke's body.

  His lips moved from her mouth to her cheek.

  She turned away desperately, realising her mistake when her lips immediately came into contact with Luke's. He made no attempt to hurry the kiss, taking his time, forcing her lips to part for him, and still he made no other attempt to touch her. She tensed in anticipation of the sensual demand implicit in the intimacy of his kiss, but it never came, instead just when all her own yearning desire rose up inside her to overcome the barriers of her self-control, her lips were released, their hunger unappeased, the briefly tantalising kisses pressed lightly on her face no compensation for the abrupt cessation of the drugging pressure of his mouth on hers.

  Genista endured the torment as long as she could, willing herself not to humiliate herself any further by allowing him to see how much he had already aroused her. If she just forced herself to endure his deliberate arousal a little while longer he was sure to grow bored with the game and re­lease her. But she was soon forced to confess that his control was the greater, as minute succeeded long, agonising minute and every part of her body was urging her to bury her fingers in the. thick dark hair growing low on the nape of his neck, and unashamedly hold his mouth against hers to com­plete that kiss he had broken off so cruelly.

  Her body ached for his touch. She had to close her eyes against the sudden intruding recollection of his tanned fingers cupping the creamy softness of her breast, stroking it into urgent fullness, before moving downwards, coaxing from her unawakened body the responses which had eventually driven her into his arms in a frenzy of need.

  It wouldn't be that way this time, she told her­self. She mustn't allow it to be that way, but as his breath warmed her throat and her body traitor­ously remembered all she had willed it to forget, a soft, husky sound broke past her closed lips.

  She stilled the soft whimper immediately, but not bef
ore Luke had heard it.

  'It's not quite as easy as you thought, is it, Genista?' he taunted softly. 'It's hard to be high and mighty when your body is crying out for satis­faction, isn't it? Well, now you know how I felt. Did you think I enjoyed it?' he demanded savagely, 'Do you think any man enjoys wanting a woman the way I wanted you?'

  'Wanting without loving is ... degrading!' Genista flung at him, close to tears.

  'Do you think I don't know that? But that doesn't mean it isn't possible, so come down off your cloud and acknowledge that you're a human being, just like any other.'

  She told herself that he just wanted to humiliate her; just wanted some sort of warped revenge be­cause he resented having wanted her, but when he pinned her wildly thrashing hands behind her back and let his lips wander at will over the pale silkiness of her body, she was soon far beyond caring. His lightest touch seemed to ignite fires she had never dreamed could burn; reveal a sensuality she had never known she possessed, and while her mind writhed in humiliated agony at the punishment he was deliberately inflicting her body responded with an intensity which seemed to feed his deep hunger.

  His name rose sobbingly to her lips, cried wren-chingly through mingled pleasure and pain, and although she glimpsed satisfaction in his eyes as he raised his head to acknowledge his victory, the hard pressure of his hands was not withdrawn, the tor­ment continuing until she could bear her self-imposed restraints no longer and her fingers trembled in anguish against his skin, their mutual-passion blazing up into an inferno which carried them both over the edge of the earth to a place where nothing mattered but the dousing of its flames.

  'Please, Luke!' Genista murmured weakly at one point when the withholding of his ultimate posses­sion was an agony she could no longer endure.

  Salty tears poured down her cheeks, her pride was in tatters, but she no longer cared. All she wanted was the pleasure of Luke's complete pos­session. His skin tasted of salt and sweat, and she touched it with a hunger which she could no longer hide, shaking with the depth of her need, pleading mutely for the final act which would turn them from two separate human beings into one complete entity. His arms slid round her, holding her against him, his breathing harshly ragged. She could feel the hard pressure of his desire, and melted on a soundless moan beneath the fierce pressure of a kiss which drove back the final barriers, as at last he answered the unspoken plea of her body.

  She knew with some inner instinct she had not known she possessed that for him this was the first time he had fully possessed her without holding back, and tinging her despair that she had given way so easily to the seduction of her senses was triumph that for a few brief seconds at least he had wanted her every bit as desperately as she had wanted him.

  Later, when she was on the verge of sleep, he leaned over her, cupping her face, so that he could watch her eyes.

  'Never tell me again that you don't want me,' he told her cruelly. 'Please, Luke. . .' The savage mimicry of her pleas to him made her blench. 'Perhaps I should have recorded it, just to remind myself of what you're like when you're a woman. I could have played it to Bob, and let him know what he's missing.'

  Nothing had changed, Genista thought, as the tears rolled silently down her cheeks, and she had been a fool to think it might just be because they had shared a few ecstatic seconds of pleasure. For her, what she had given to Luke had been given with love, but he had taken with revenge and lust, and that was something she must always re­member.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  She was alone again when she woke up, so much so that she might have doubted that the elemental lovemaking of the previous evening had ever taken place had it not been for the faint bruises on her arms, and the memory of how her body had re­sponded with pagan abandon to Luke's mastery.

  She and Lucy went to London after an early lunch. Lucy was enchanted with the teenage fashions in the shops, and Genista watched her indulgently, knowing that despite her outer care­free air inwardly her thoughts were on her parents.

  They had afternoon tea at Fortnum's—a treat which very much appealed, if Lucy's wide-eyed appreciation was anything to go by—and after­wards they went back to Genista's apartment.

  'You did get married in a rush, didn't you?' Lucy commented as Genista opened her wardrobe door.

  'What a gorgeous fur!' she exclaimed enviously, spotting Genista's fox jacket. 'I wouldn't have left that behind.'

  'I don't normally have much use for it in June,' Genista told her dryly. Seeing her winter clothes hanging in the cupboard reminded her painfully that by winter she could very well be back in this apartment—alone. Only she knew how close she had come last night to breathing her love—only she knew that she had betrayed it. Every kiss, every caress had been an open admission of her feelings, but Luke did not know it. No doubt he was accus­tomed to women who treated sex in much the same way as a man—as an appetite to be indulged and then forgotten, whereas for her the act of love had been a culmination of all that she felt for him.

  The cream cake she had consumed at Fortnum's at Lucy's instigation sat rather heavily on her sto­mach. She had felt queasy on waking again as well, she remembered uneasily—then a sudden horrified dread almost toppled her into the nearest chair.

  'Are you all right, Genista?' Lucy questioned worriedly. 'You don't look well at all.'

  'Oh, it's nothing,' Genista was quick to reassure her. 'I just felt a little bit queasy—that cream cake, I think.'

  If only she could believe that that was true! It seemed impossible that the dread lying at the back of her mind could turn into reality, but on the drive back to the house it kept returning, surfacing with increasing frequency despite her determined efforts to ignore it. She was being silly, she told herself more than once, and besides, surely it was far too soon ... She knew so little about these things. She counted backwards slowly, her hands clenching suddenly on the driving wheel, as she realised what the events of the last few days had made her forget. She was probably imagining things, she told herself over and over again. Emotional crises often had disturbing effects upon the body. There was nothing to worry about; no point in raising spectres. Even so, by the time she was turning into the drive she was feverishly tense, and it was left to Lucy to point out the elegant BMW parked out­side.

  'Visitors!' she exclaimed. 'Uncle Luke must be back.'

  Luke had left that morning without giving Genista any clue as to when she might expect him back, and she had wondered with a pang if he intended to see the owner of the seductively husky voice. She got out of her car shakily, her mind still on the frightening possibility that she might actually be carrying his child.

  The moment she entered the hall she was aware of an alien presence; it wasn't just the smell of Opium hanging heavily on the air, or the way the library door had been left open, it was an actual physical awareness, like goosebumps.

  'Darling, at last! I thought you were never coming!'

  She recognised the husky, feminine voice before its owner walked languidly into the hall, her lips parting on a small 'oh' of tribute to the other woman's beauty.

  She was dark-haired, tall, with the fluid elegance of a model, beautifully dressed and made up, and several years older than Genista. A huge diamond, large enough to be 'showy', glittered on her right hand, and her nails were painted a vivid dark red.

  'Oh!' She paused when she saw Genista, eyeing her disdainfully. 'The child bride, I presume. Luke really did make a mistake this time, didn't he? Where is he by the way?—he promised to meet me here at six. We're supposed to be going out to dinner.'

  Her sangfroid took Genista's breath away. Lucy was standing behind her, and as Genista turned she caught the look of bitter hatred on the girl's face.

  'What are you doing here?' she stormed furiously. 'You broke up my parents' marriage and now you want to spoil things for Genista! Well, Uncle Luke doesn't want you back. He knows exactly what you are. You might have fooled him once, but. . .'

  'That's enough, Lucy,' Genista interpo
sed gently, seeing that she was close to breaking down completely. It was as though she had known the identity of the visitor all along, and refused to ac­knowledge it. Even last night when she answered the phone the knowledge had been there. So this was Verity, the woman her husband had loved. And still did? Was that why he had made love to her with such savage intensity? Because of this woman!

  This time her nausea couldn't be quelled. She was violently sick in the cloakroom, adding further to her sense of humiliation. When she emerged, pale and shaken, Verity eyed her superciliously.

  'How very dramatic,' she murmured acidly. 'Haven't you learned yet, you silly little girl, that Luke abhors emotionalism?'

  Lucy had gone—to her room, Genista presumed. How did one entertain one's husband's ex-mistress and possibly future wife? It was not something she was ever likely to find in a book of etiquette.

  'There's no way you can keep him, you know,' Verity continued. 'Oh, I've no doubt that he doesn't want to hurt you. In fact, if you behave sensibly now you could come out of it quite pleas­antly—finance-wise.'

  'But without Luke,' Genista said, surprised at her own ability to remain so calm when inwardly she felt as though she were being torn to pieces.

  'Oh, without Luke, of course,' Verity agreed, softly. 'But then you can hardly have expected to keep him; a mere child like you.' She moved sinuously, revealing the perfect curves of her body, her expression almost felinely triumphant. 'You see, my dear, compared with me you can only be the clumsiest amateur. I'm sure we don't need to fence with one another. Luke is a deeply sexual man, and I know how to arouse, fan and appease that sexuality as no other woman ever will. It is true that I stupidly allowed a natural need for security to blind me to the truth, but fortunately I realised in time that Luke is the man for me, just as I am the only woman for him. Oh, he may have amused himself with you; enjoyed the novelty of making love to a complete novice, but you could never hope to keep him satisfied for long.'