The Three-Year Itch

‘So I heard,’ she said, her soft voice full of mock reproach. ‘And since I rang twenty-four hours ago I shall want a detailed itinerary of your movements to cover every last second of that time.’ She had been teasing, expecting him to respond in kind, with lurid details of an impossible night of debauchery and an offer to demonstrate … Instead he raked his long fingers distractedly through his hair.

‘I had to go away for a couple of days. I’ve only just got back.’

‘Oh?’ It was odd, she thought, flinging herself into his arms in the frenetic excitement of the arrivals hall at the airport had always seemed the most natural thing in the world, but here, in their own home, the atmosphere was more constrained, with the answering machine droning on the background and Grey poised on the edge of the desk, pen still in his hand. ‘And what exotic paradise have you been gadding off to the minute I turn my back?’ she asked.

For the space of a moment, no more, his eyes blanked. ‘Manchester,’ he said. ‘A case conference.’ If it hadn’t been so ridiculous, Abbie would have sworn he’d said the first thing that came into his head, but she had no time to think about it before he dropped the pen and closed the space between them, gathering her into his arms. ‘Lord, but I’ve missed you,’ he said.

She couldn’t answer, couldn’t tell him how much she had missed him, because her mouth was entirely occupied with a long and hungry kiss that scorched her in a way that the Karachi sun had quite failed to do. When finally he lifted his head, his warm brown eyes were creased into a smile. ‘Welcome home, Mrs Lockwood.’

‘Now that,’ she said huskily, ‘is what I call a welcome.’ Abbie lifted her hands to his face, smoothed out the lines that fanned about his eyes with the tips of her fingers. ‘You look tired. I suppose you’ve been working all the hours in the day, and half the night as well, while I’ve been away?’

‘It helps to pass the time,’ he agreed. ‘But you’re absolutely right. I am tired. So tired, in fact, that I think I shall have to go to bed. Immediately.’ Abbie squealed as he swiftly bent and caught her behind the knees, swinging her up into his arms. ‘And I’m going to have to insist you come with me. You know how very badly I sleep when I’m on my own.’

‘Idiot!’ she exclaimed, laughing. ‘Put me down this minute. I’ve been travelling all day, and if I don’t have a shower …’

‘A shower?’ Grey came to a sudden halt. Then his mouth curved into a slow smile that was so much more dangerous than his swift grin. ‘Now that is a good idea.’

‘No, Grey!’ she warned him.

He took no notice of her protest, or her ineffectual struggles to free herself from his arms, but headed straight into the bathroom and, stopping only to kick off his shoes, stepped with her into the shower stall.

‘No!’ Her voice rose to a shriek as the jet of water hit them both. Then he was kissing her hungrily as the water ran over their faces, pulling her close as the water drenched her T-shirt, pouring in warm rivulets between her breasts and across the aching desire of her abdomen. Then she gave a whispered, ‘Oh, yes,’ as he eased her T-shirt over her head, unfastened her bra and tossed them into a dripping pile upon the bathroom floor.

His lips tormented hers as he hooked his finger under the waistband of her jeans, flicking open the button as with shaking fingers she reached up and began to unfasten his shirt. Then he slipped his hands inside her jeans and over her buttocks, easing them down her legs.

She was almost melting with desire by the time he turned her round and began slowly to stroke shower gel across her shoulders and down her back. A long, delicious quiver of pleasure escaped her lips and he laughed softly. ‘I thought you said no,’ he murmured, his tongue tracing a delicate little line along the curve of her ear as his hands slid round to cradle her breasts and draw her back against him.

‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to stop,’ she sighed, lying back against him, relishing the intense pleasure of his wet skin against hers, the touch of his hands stroking the soap over her body. She had dreamed of this in the sterile emptiness of her hotel room five thousand miles away and had determined that, no matter what the temptation, how good the story, she had accepted her last foreign assignment.

It would be a wrench. She loved her job. She was a good photo-journalist and knew the feature on tug-of-love children that she was putting together needed the on-the-spot reality of her Karachi trip. The desperate hunt, the endless knocking on the doors, an officialdom that seemed not to care about a woman deprived of her child, the photographs that would show the anguish when she had finally found her daughter, only to have her snatched from her grasp and bundled away once more, would make a heartbreakingly compelling story.

But no more. Every time she went away it seemed that her marriage suffered just a little. Nothing that she could put her finger on. Tiny irritations. But things happened to them while they were apart that they seemed unable to share. She came back impatient at complaints about a leaky washing machine or some other domestic drama when she had spent a week with refugees or the victims of some terrible natural catastrophe. But Grey was the senior partner in a prestigious law firm. He didn’t have time to deal with the minor domestic trivialities of life. He had once joked that they could do with someone else—a job-share wife to take care of the details while she was away.

‘I think I’d rather have a job-share husband,’ she had returned, easily enough, joining in with his laughter, but the warning had not been lost on her.

Grey Lockwood was the kind of man who turned women’s heads. And, like most men, he only had to look helpless and they flocked to mother him. Except that mothering wasn’t all they had in mind. She worked very hard to ensure that her absences were as painless as possible, but some things couldn’t be foreseen. How long would it be before some sympathetic secretary noticed the vulnerable chink in their marriage and began to lever it apart with personal services that extended beyond the use of her washing machine? Certain as she was that he loved her, she knew Grey was not made of wood. He was a warm, flesh-and-blood man—full of life, full of love. And she loved him as much as life itself.

She turned eagerly in his arms and began to soap him, spreading her hands across his broad shoulders, slipping the tips of her fingers through the coarse dark hair that spread across his chest and arrowed down across his flat belly until she heard him gasp.

‘I don’t know about you, Grey,’ she said, tipping her head back to look at him from beneath the heavy lids of her fine grey eyes, ‘but I think I’m clean enough.’

He said nothing, simply flipped the shower switch, pulled a towel from the rack to wrap about her shoulders, then, sweeping her up into his arms, he stepped out of the shower stall and carried her to bed.

The first time after she had been away was always special. A slow rediscovery of one another, a reaffirmation of their love. But now Grey seemed seized by an almost desperate urgency to know her, to reclaim her as his. Even as he followed her down onto the bed she saw something in his face, some savage, primeval need that excited her even as a quiver of apprehension rippled through her.

‘Grey?’ Her almost tentative query was brushed aside as he reared above her, his knee parting her legs, the dominant male driven by the desire to plant his seed.

She cried out as her breath was driven from her, her hands seizing the muscle-packed flesh of his shoulders, her nails digging in as he took her on a roller-coaster ride of meteoric intensity—a ride which she began as a passenger but then, as the pace, almost the fury of his driving passion set alight a hitherto unsuspected chord of wanton sensuality deep within her, she rose to him, matching his ardour thrust for thrust until they came crashing back to earth, satiated, exhausted, drenched with sweat.

As he rolled away from her and lay staring at the ceiling a long shuddering sigh escaped him. ‘You’ve been away too long, Abbie.’ Then he turned to her. ‘Did I hurt you?’

She shook her head. ‘Surprised me a little, that’s all.’ She touched the score-marks her nails had riven in his shoulders in the heat of passion. ‘But I like surprises.’ And she reached forward to lay her lips against the slick salty warmth of his skin, sighing contentedly as he gathered her into his arms.

Tomorrow she would ache a little, but it would be a good feeling and she would carry it with her as a secret knowledge, a constant reminder of the fact that she was desired, loved.

Abbie was the first to wake, the weight of Grey’s arm across her waist disturbing her as she moved. For a moment she remained perfectly still, soaking in the pleasure of having his face buried against her shoulder, the pleasure of being home. Going away had its miseries, but without separation there would never be these blissful reunions. She lay quietly, her face inches from his, reminding herself of every feature, every tiny line that life had bestowed upon him, very gently touching an old childhood scar above his brow.

She could tell the exact moment when he woke. He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. There was just the faintest change in breathing, the tiniest contraction of the muscles about his eyes. She grinned. It was an old game, this.

How long could he maintain the pretence? She began slowly to trace the outline of his face with the tip of one finger, moving slowly up the darkening shadow of his chin to his lower lip. Did it quiver slightly under the lightest teasing of her nail? She gave him the benefit of the doubt, this was not a game to be hurried. She dipped her head to trail a tiny tattoo of kisses across his throat, his chest, her tongue flickering across flat male nipples that leapt to attention.

Still he did not move, and she continued her teasing quest across the hard, flat plane of his stomach until the tell-tale stirring of his manhood could no longer be ignored. But, before she had quite registered the fact that the game was over and won, he had turned, flipping her over onto her back, his hands on her wrists, holding her arms above her head, pinning her to the bed, utterly at his mercy. ‘So, you want to play games, do you, Mrs Lockwood?’

She lowered her lashes seductively. ‘Why, sir, I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Then I’ll have to show—’ The telephone began to ring. For a moment Grey gazed down at her, then he dropped the briefest kiss on her mouth. ‘It appears that you have a reprieve.’ He released her, rolling away and rising to his feet in one smooth movement.

She didn’t want a reprieve and reached out for him. ‘Whoever it is will leave a message, Grey. Don’t go.’

‘It’ll be Robert. I should have phoned him an hour ago.’ He raised her hand absently to his lips. ‘Why don’t you go and see if you can rustle up something for supper?’

‘Well, gee, shucks, thanks, mister,’ she murmured as he disappeared in the direction of the study. It was the first time she had ever come third. To a phone call and food.

‘Grey?’ He lifted his head from his distant contemplation of the supper Abbie had thrown together from the rather sparse contents of the refrigerator. ‘Can we talk?’

‘Mmm?’ He had been distracted ever since he had talked to Robert; now he seemed to come back from a long way off, but as he looked up he caught her eye, became very still. ‘Go ahead, I’m listening.’

I want to have a baby. Your baby. It sounded so emotional, almost desperate put like that. Not a good start. But that heartfelt ‘You’ve been away too long …’ gave her the courage to press on.

‘I wondered what you thought about starting a family,’ she said.

He looked up, momentarily shaken, his eyes dark with something that might almost have been pain. Then he shook his head. ‘Leave it, Abbie. This is not a good moment.’

Whatever reaction she had expected, it certainly wasn’t that. ‘Not a good moment’? What on earth did that mean? ‘You did say we were apart too much …’ she began, trying to lift an atmosphere that had suddenly become about as light as a lead-filled balloon.

‘And a baby would fix that?’ Grey sat back in his chair, abandoning any further attempt to eat. ‘That’s a somewhat drastic solution, isn’t it?’

Drastic? The second she had opened her mouth Abbie had realised the moment was all wrong, but it shouldn’t ever be that wrong, surely? Confused, hurt, she said, ‘I … I thought we both wanted children.’

‘Eventually,’ he agreed coolly. ‘But we had an agreement, Abbie. No children until you’re ready to give them your full-time care.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Do you really think you can have it all?’ he demanded, cutting off her protest, and she saw to her astonishment that he was now genuinely angry with her. ‘Most of your friends manage it, I know, by cobbling their lives together with nannies and living from one crisis to the next. But they don’t disappear into the wide blue yonder for a couple of weeks whenever a tantalising commission is dangled in front of them.’

‘Neither do I! I never go anywhere without discussing it with you first.’

‘But you still go,’ he declared. ‘That was the deal we made. God knows I miss you when you’re away, Abbie, I’ve never made any secret of that fact—but it’s a choice we both made right at the beginning. You said you’d need five years to establish yourself in your career, then you could take a break.’