Marriage Make-Up

‘What are you so nervous about?’ Sam was asking her now.

‘I’m not nervous,’ Abbie denied untruthfully.

‘Oh, yes, you are,’ he told her softly. ‘You always talk about the weather when you’re nervous…’

‘No, I do not,’ Abbie protested, and then she looked at him and her heart melted, along with her nerves and her last-minute doubts about what she was doing.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Sam told her gently, the laughter disappearing from his eyes to be replaced by an emotion that made her head pound dizzily. ‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do…’

‘But I do want to,’ Abbie told him, and then blushed hotly and tried valiantly to hold his eyes as he looked straight into hers, praying that he wouldn’t further tease her by demanding, You want to what? He didn’t, but the look he was giving her was far more toe-curlingly explicit than any words could ever have been.

She still couldn’t quite believe that he wanted her so much…that he was, as he’d told her himself, falling dangerously and completely in love with her.

Once during the journey, when she turned to look at him, her eyes widening as she saw the way his hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel, he told her huskily, begged, ‘Please don’t keep on looking at me like that. If you do I’m going to have to stop the car and take you in my arms and kiss the hell out of you, and once I start to do that…’

Abbie could feel her whole body, her face, starting to burn with the heat of what she was feeling. She could sense, see how dangerously close to losing control he was, and along with her instinctive sense of awe and virginal fear she also experienced a sharp thrill of feminine power and pleasure in the knowledge that she could have such an effect on him.

‘The first time we make love I want it to be perfect for you, on a bed heaped high with the softest down and feather pillows, in a room that smells of roses and summer. I want to watch the sunlight on your body, high up in a turret, somewhere where we can be completely alone, just us and the sounds of nature and the living, breathing universe around us reaching us through narrow-latticed paned windows.

‘Way, way below us there’ll be a river, wide and slow-moving, the water soft and clear, and in the pool that it forms we’ll swim together under a moonlit sky, and then we’ll make love again on the grassy bank, still warm from the day’s sunshine.

‘The moonlight will turn your body to lissom silver. I’ll follow its path with my hands and my lips. Your body will welcome mine with a sweet mixture of semi-pagan innocence and knowing that is in all women, a gift, but most especially in yours. Your skin will feel as cool as silk and only the hunting owl and the night sky will hear us when we cry out the unbearable ecstasy of our mutual need.’

‘Stop it…stop it…’ Abbie whispered shakily. Her whole body was on fire with arousal and desire for him, and she had a mad urgent impulse to beg him to stop the car and make love to her there and then.

There was a tight, aching need deep within her body, a pulsing that brought a hot flush of colour to her skin. How much further was the hotel he was taking her to? How much longer before…?

‘Are you hungry? Would you like to stop somewhere for a drink and something to eat?’ Sam asked her ten minutes later.

The prosaic question after the sensual seduction of his earlier words caught Abbie off guard. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Surely he knew, must know, that the only sustenance she needed was him; the only appetite she had was for him.

Such wild and wanton thoughts were still unfamiliar enough to her to make her catch her breath and shyly avoid looking directly at him.

The road they were on had started to climb now; the countryside around them was changing. They were, Abbie recognised, driving through the Welsh borders, a wild, almost pagan part of the countryside she had secretly always thought incredibly romantic.

Here in this land once called the Welsh Marches, which still bore the visible scars of its medieval history in its ancient castles, it wasn’t hard to mentally picture the armoured knights who had once patrolled these borders, to imagine one could still hear the faint clash of steel upon steel, the mingled cries of the injured and the victorious, to imagine as one drove past the derelict and sightless arrow slits of the castles that one had almost caught a glimpse of a pale, feminine wimpoled face watching anxiously from above.

‘This is one of those places where the past feels very, very close, isn’t it?’ Sam’s quiet comment, so closely echoing her own thoughts, made her shiveringly aware of how easily he could attune himself to her, of how much they seemed to share above and beyond the urgency of their sexual desire for one another.

She was still too young to fall in love helplessly and for ever, to commit herself to one man, one relationship for life and beyond, but she suspected that that was exactly what was going to happen to her.

It was not too late for her to change her mind, to call a halt to what was happening, she comforted herself; there was still time.

‘Almost there now,’ Sam told her.

The hotel was a fairy tale thing set in an almost magically perfect wooded valley, a cream stone, early Edwardian folly mansion designed as perfectly and as irresistibly as a Walt Disney castle straight out of Sleeping Beauty. A breathtaking jewel of a building, with its pale cream turrets and lichen-green tiled and scalloped roofs, set against a stunning backdrop of gently sloping protective hillsides clothed in softer green trees, surrounded by immaculately cared for lawns and flowerbeds dropping away to the river which ran through the bottom of the valley.

They had had to drive across a bridge over it to get to the main gates of the hotel and then up a sweeping cream stone drive. The hotel itself was hidden from view until the very last minute, Abbie’s only sightings of it the tantalising glimpses she had caught of it as the road into the valley had spiralled down from the surrounding hills.

‘It…It’s…’ She looked at Sam as he brought the car to a halt in the discreetly concealed car park to the rear of the hotel, which had obviously at some stage been a private home.

As she glanced towards the delicate turrets Abbie remembered how he had described making love to her. Then she had thought he was simply using his imagination. Now…

‘I heard about it from one of the senior lecturers,’ she heard him telling her quietly, answering her still unspoken question. ‘He brought his wife here to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary.

‘It was originally built by a very wealthy heiress as a secret hideaway where she could meet her lover. She came from a titled family connected to royalty and was destined for an arranged marriage. Her lover came from a different social circle. They would never have been allowed to marry, but every summer, from the year she married to the year he died, she came here to spend time with him.

‘When he died she shut the house up, unable to endure it without him; she left it as a gift to his family.’

‘How awful,’ Abbie protested. ‘To love someone like that all of your life and yet never be able to be truly together, to share. But always to have to keep your love a secret…’ She shivered suddenly.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Sam asked her in concern.

‘Nothing,’ she fibbed. How could she tell him that the story he had told her had cast a cold little shadow over her own happiness, that she felt that somehow the place, beautiful though it was, was haunted by the unhappiness of a woman forced to hide her love and publicly deny it? It was as though somehow her unhappiness threatened to taint Abbie’s own joy…as though her blossoming love would be spoilt and endangered.

Her thoughts were ridiculous, she told herself fiercely, especially when Sam had gone to so much trouble to make this, their first time together, as special and memorable as possible.

‘Would I be correct in guessing that you’ve booked us a tower room?’ she quizzed him, striving to throw off her sense of sadness and unease by smiling brightly at him.

‘Now, why, I wonder, should you think that?’ he teased her back as he removed their luggage from the boot of the car and then locked it.

It wasn’t just a room he had booked for them, Abbie discovered ten minutes later, it was an entire suite with, she noticed, wide-eyed, not one but two bedrooms.

When she looked questioningly at him after the porter had left them, he explained quietly, ‘I didn’t want you to feel pressured in any way.’

‘I don’t,’ Abbie told him equally gravely, her earlier mood forgotten now as her excitement at being with him filled her and her body started to react familiarly to his proximity to her.

‘I want us to be lovers, Sam,’ she told him shakily. ‘I want it more than…I want you more than I ever imagined I could want any man. I want you so much that it hurts…here,’ she told him breathlessly, hesitantly touching her body just above the small swell of her pubic bone. ‘Here, where—’

She gave a small, half-protesting gasp as the rest of what she had been about to say was smothered by the fierce pressure of Sam’s kiss.

Abbie felt herself start to tremble and then shudder in shocked delight as her body responded to his passion. She clung to his shoulders, her eyes glazed and her face flushed with the intensity of her own equally strong desire.

Sam lifted his mouth from hers to look down into her eyes, his hand cupping her face, his touch blissfully cool against her hot skin. Her senses were preternaturally attuned to him, and she could almost hear the rapid thud of his heart as well as see the swift rise and fall of his chest. She could feel the heat coming off his body, although, unlike hers, it was not so obviously nor hectically flushed, just a tell-tale burn of colour along his cheekbones coupled with the warm, musky smell of his arousal.

Did her own skin, her own body, smell equally sexually stimulating to him? she wondered dizzily. Did he breathe in the scent her desire had created and ache to press his lips, his open mouth, to her throat, her breast, her belly…her thighs?

A small sound, half protest, half ecstasy, caught in her throat, causing Sam to stroke her face tenderly and shush her, saying softly, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I promise there’s nothing for you to fear. I’ll try not to go too fast…too—’

‘I’m not afraid,’ Abbie interrupted him, her body shaking as much as her voice. ‘At least not of you…’ Her eyes darkened, her mouth trembling slightly as she went on huskily, ‘I’m afraid of what I feel, Sam, of how I feel. How much…how intensely. I’m afraid of being out of my own control and losing myself in what I feel…of wanting you so much…’

‘I know, I know,’ Sam groaned, wrapping her in his arms, her head against his chest as he rocked her gently. ‘I feel the same way, and more. I’m afraid of not being able to give you the pleasure I want to give you, of not being able to hold back, of becoming so aroused that I can’t hold back…’

‘Do you wish that I wasn’t a virgin?’ Abbie asked him shakily. She felt him move as he cupped her face again and looked down at her.

‘What on earth makes you think that?’ he demanded huskily. ‘Do you know how much I love the fact that you’ve chosen me to be your first lover? Even though I’m half terrified of disappointing you. Selfishly, I like knowing that you’re not comparing me to someone else, wishing perhaps that I was someone else.’

He checked the protest she was about to make and told her warningly, ‘I’m a man, Abbie, with all that that implies—possessive, even jealous sometimes, wanting my woman to be mine exclusively. I know—I know that once you are mine I will never, ever want another man to touch you…love you. Once you are mine…