Marriage In Peril

He flinched when her hand landed on the indent of his waist, then stiffened when it began to slide around further. Abruptly he rolled onto his back, his head twisting on the pillow to face her.

By this time the palm of Brooke’s hand was resting provocatively on his stomach, and her heart was racing. With fear of what she’d find, she wondered? Or fear of what he’d do if she dared touch him down there?

‘I thought you were asleep,’ he said, his voice as cool as his skin.

‘I was.’ She could just make out his face. The moon was out and the curtains which covered the bedroom windows were light and filmy, letting in enough light to see by once your eyes had adjusted.

Leo was looking at her rather oddly, his eyes narrowed and wary.

‘I tried to be quiet,’ he said, a measure of defensiveness in his voice.

‘Why?’

‘Mamma told me you’d had a bad migraine all day. She said she’d given you some pills.’

‘Yes. She did. She’s very kind, your mum.’

‘True.’

There was a moment’s awkward silence when Leo said nothing further and Brooke’s courage began to fail her. Her hand lay still on his stomach while her heart thudded away.

‘You’re very late, Leo…’

‘Yes. I know. I’m sorry, but Lorenzo’s left a damned awful mess behind him. I’m trying to have everything sorted out before we leave on Friday. I haven’t finished yet, either. I wasn’t as productive today as I would have liked to be. Too many interruptions. So I might have to work late tomorrow night as well.’

‘I see,’ Brooke said, and another awkward silence fell between them.

‘It’s not like you to have a migraine, Brooke,’ Leo said at last. ‘I wonder what brought it on?’

Thinking of you in love with Francesca all these years, she wanted to throw at him. Thinking of you in bed with her all afternoon and half the night.

Such thoughts renewed her bitter resolve to see the lie of the land, once and for all.

‘I feel much better now,’ she murmured, and slid her hand back and forth across his stomach.

He sucked in sharply.

‘So I see,’ he bit out.

When he made no move to stop her, Brooke’s hand changed direction. A little shakily, it began to travel downwards, till it encountered then encircled her intended target.

Shock held her fingers still for a few moments. For never had Leo felt so limp, or less interested in her touch!

As Brooke had already found out this afternoon, it was one thing to think something, another to find hard evidence of its truth, even when that evidence wasn’t hard, but soft. Crushingly, cruelly soft!

Waves of emotion swept through her. Dismay. Devastation. Despair! How could he betray her this way? Deceive her? Destroy her!

And how could Francesca? The bitch! And so soon after her husband’s death!

Eventually, surprisingly, the wish to kill them both was sublimated by the mad desire to make Leo respond, to show him that she—his wife—knew him better than any other woman, knew what he liked, could give him pleasure unequalled elsewhere. Francesca couldn’t possibly do for him what Brooke knew she could.

Finally, her frozen fingers began to move once more.

His groan sounded like a protest, but she stubbornly ignored it, using her acquired knowledge of his body to arouse him. After all, hadn’t Leo tutored her personally in what he liked during the first few weeks of their relationship, spending long evenings and even longer nights in extending her sexual education, showing her at the same time that her previous lovers had been total ignoramuses?

All they’d wanted were quickies.

But his flesh was depressingly slow to respond, its lack-lustre performance very telling. Her normally responsive and very virile husband must have been making love all day to be like this!

Brooke refused to give up. He would respond, she vowed with an icy resolve, her heart hardening against any distracting or distressing emotions.

‘This isn’t like you, Leo,’ she murmured, all the while caressing him intimately.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ he muttered through obviously gritted teeth. ‘I’ve just had a very long, very cold shower.’

In truth, his skin was cold. But she didn’t believe his lengthy shower had anything to do with consideration for her.

‘Then maybe you need a little extra help,’ she said, and, sliding down his body, boldly took the evidence of his recent betrayal between her lips.

This wasn’t something Brooke ever did off her own bat. Only at Leo’s behest. Even then, it wasn’t something he asked for much nowadays. In fact she couldn’t remember the last time. Probably last summer, here, in this very room. But in the past it had unfailingly aroused him, no matter how many times he’d already made love to her.

It aroused him now, his flesh swelling quickly. Brooke was merciless, her only aim to make him so excited that he would lose control. She wanted to seduce him so totally that he would forget everything else…and everyone else. Especially Francesca.

At the back of her mind Brooke knew she was acting out of sheer desperation, but she couldn’t stop for the life of her. One part of her was almost horrified by what she was doing. Another part remained coldly detached, driving her on to do everything she could think of. And more. Her hands joined her lips in the fray, finding all sorts of erotic areas to torment and tantalise. She was more adventurous than she’d ever been before.

Dimly, she heard him moan, felt his own fingers splay shakily into her hair. When they tightened, she thought for one awful moment he was going to drag her away, make her stop.

But he didn’t.

He muttered something in Italian at one stage, his voice low and shaking.

She stopped momentarily to glance up at him. His handsome face was etched clearly in the moonlight, his hooded eyes almost shut, his mouth grimacing.

‘Do you want me to stop?’ she purred.

When a violent shudder shook his head from side to side, she smiled an amazingly cool smile, dipped her head, and continued.

His breath began coming in raw, panting gasps. He was erect now, all right. More than he’d ever been, his flesh almost cruelly stretched. And straining.

A wave of dark triumph flooded Brooke, bringing its own brand of excitement and satisfaction. For at that moment Leo was hers, totally. He had no will of his own. No ability to think, let alone stop her.

Or so she’d thought.

Brooke was so caught up in her own dizzying sense of power that she didn’t notice Leo’s hands abandon her hair. When they slid under her arms and pulled her up off him, her cry of shock and frustration was very real.

Ignoring her protest, Leo pushed the satin nightie up to her waist, grasped her buttocks in an iron grip and lifted her till she was kneeling high above him. Before she knew it, his titanic erection was between her thighs and she was being forcibly drawn downwards onto it.

Her lips gasped wide at the swiftness of this turnaround, plus the stunning pleasure as her husband slid, hard and huge, into her. She hadn’t realised till that moment how turned on she was.