Marriage Make-Up

‘I’m twenty-six years old, and not inexperienced sexually, but when it comes to love…when it comes to love I’m as virginal as you, my sweet. Does that put you off me?’

Abbie’s shining eyes gave him his answer.

‘God, don’t look at me like that,’ he groaned. ‘Not now. Not yet…I’d planned a walk through the gardens—the hotel is famous for them—afternoon tea on the lawn, a lazy, relaxing evening together, dinner with champagne, and—’

Abbie tugged impatiently on his sleeve and lifted her mouth to his.

‘Kiss me, Sam,’ she begged him huskily. ‘Please, please, please kiss me.’

Ten minutes later, lying on the bed, her clothes—their clothes—strewn haphazardly all around them, Abbie watched anxiously as Sam studied her naked body. This was the first time he had seen her without all her clothes, and she had to fight an instinctive urge to wrap her arms around her breasts and roll over onto her stomach.

He was naked too, even if he had had to abandon his whispered instructions to her to remove his clothes and finish the task himself.

His body thrilled and excited her, and awed her slightly as well, reminding her that at twenty-six Sam wasn’t a boy but a man.

She had seen Lloyd in his swimming trunks on countless numbers of occasions over the years, had seen his body develop from that of a gangling boy into that of a well-muscled nineteen-year-old, but he didn’t look like Sam. No way did he look like Sam, whose shoulders were broad and whose stomach was flatter, whose body hair was…

Abbie could feel the heat rising through her body as she acknowledged what that soft covering of dark hair was doing to her insides. She wanted to reach out and touch it with her fingertips, to stroke it, to bury her face in it and breathe in its scent, to lick and kiss the skin it covered and, if she could actually be daring enough, to let her hand and her lips wander down along that straight dark path to its final destination. She wondered if Sam would be pleased or shocked by her wantonness, her desire to touch and taste the pure male essence of him.

But right now it was Sam who was looking at her, studying her, touching her, she realised, and a pulse jumped frantically in her throat as his fingertips pushed the long straight swathe of her hair out of the way and then traced the delicate shape of her collarbone.

To her chagrin she could see as well as feel that her nipples were already peaking, aching, her breasts, normally quite small and soft, suddenly much, much harder and fuller.

Did Sam like them? she wondered. Did he think they were too small, her nipples too little-girlie, all pink and tender, still those of a virginal girl rather than a woman? He was not without sexual experience, he had said, and…

She tensed a little as Sam’s hand cupped her breast, her head lifting so that she could look uncertainly into his eyes.

‘They feel perfect,’ he told her, his voice thick and slurred like melted honey, answering the question she had not yet asked.

‘They are perfect,’ he added even more throatily as he bent his head and gently kissed the hot, tight nipple sheltered by his hand, and then kissed it again, much less gently, much, much less gently, but oh, oh, so pleasurably, Abbie acknowledged as he slowly drew the taut point into his mouth and then sucked on it slowly, rubbing it with his tongue, making her feel…making her want.

Whimpering softly, she pressed closer to him, wanting him to repeat the caress, wanting to feel again that hot surge of pleasure his suckling had given her, which had arched right from the centre of her breast to her stomach, her womb, her thighs and that special, secret place she had tentatively explored in the early years of her sexual awakening, intrigued by and yet fearful of her dimly sensed awareness of its capacity for pleasure.

Instinctively she reached out to hold Sam’s head against her breast, gasping in fresh excitement as she felt him stroking her stomach, his touch nerve-wrenching—tantalising, causing her to hold her breath and wonder if she dared reach out and urge his hand a little lower, or if—And then he moved slightly, one arm beneath her to lift her, the other brushing accidentally against the soft baby-fine blonde hairs that covered her sex.

Immediately she tensed, her body made rigid by the hot shaft of pleasure that jolted through her. She felt Sam freeze and knew that he was looking at her. When she raised her eyes to look at him she saw him shudder, his whole body heaving as he took a deep breath and demanded thickly, ‘Already…You want me already?’

She didn’t have to answer. His hand, his fingertips deft and yet oh, so tormentingly gentle were touching her, opening the outer lips of her sex, stroking her, feeling the warm wetness of her body’s welcome and the eager way she pressed herself against his hand, mutely imploring him to touch her more intimately, to ease the ache that he himself had aroused within her with the rhythmic caress her body so urgently desired.

When he didn’t she could actually feel herself starting to grind her teeth. His hand still covered her sex protectively but that wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was…

She gave a small protesting moan of denial when he released her, reaching behind her for one of the pillows, easing it under her hips.

‘This will make it easier, better,’ he told her softly. His hands were shaking, she noticed, and the most sensitive part of his body was now stiffly erect. The sight of it made her want to reach out and run her fingers lovingly over its taut-skinned surface. The sight of it, of him, gave her a delicious, dangerous thrill of pleasure.

‘Bend your knees,’ Sam instructed her, showing her what he meant as he knelt between her open thighs, knelt between them and then, before she realised what he intended to do, bent his head and gently rubbed his face against her soft down.

The sensation of his tongue moving caressingly over her caused a scream to rise involuntarily in her throat. Automatically, Abbie tried to clamp down on it, but in the end she had to give voice to her sexual arousal and pleasure as Sam continued delicately to love the most intimate heart of her body, moving closer and closer to the tiny nub of flesh which was already pulsing and aching so tormentingly. She needed to feel him deep inside her, moving within her, slowly at first and then…

‘Sam—Sam,’ she protested chokily. ‘I can’t…I don’t…Please…now…I…I want you. I want you inside me…very deep inside me. Now, now…now. I want you there now…always and for ever. I want—’

Abbie gasped as the rhythmic chant of her desire was suddenly cut off by the pressure of Sam’s mouth against her own, his tongue flicking in and out of her lips as his hands held her, guided her, gentled the frantic movements of her body as she arched her back to meet and welcome the carefully protective invasion of his body.

It was just as she had wanted it to be, slow and sweet. A long, languorous pleasure, with her body drunk and dazed with sensual delight, her senses awash, flooded with the feel and heat of him so that even the tightness of his fit within her was somehow an extra small physical pleasure as she urged him deeper and deeper within her, finding from somewhere the knowledge to wrap herself around him and hold him, to move with him.

She climaxed before him, crying out in shocked pleasure and then later crying in earnest in his arms as the full emotional impact of what had happened overwhelmed her.

They spent almost the entire weekend making love, both in their room and, as he had whispered to her in the car on the way there, in the moonlight on a grassy bank beside the river.

By the end of the weekend they both knew there was no going back, that their love for one another was more powerful than anything they had ever experienced before. Too powerful for them to ignore or control.

‘I didn’t want it to be like this,’ Sam told her. ‘You’re so young…too young…’

‘We could just be lovers, and—’ Abbie began, but he interrupted her immediately.

‘No…’ he said harshly, and then, more softly, ‘That isn’t what I want; you know that, Abbie. This isn’t just about sex. It’s about…It’s about finding the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. It’s about loving you so intensely that I want to keep you here with me and never let you out of my sight. Falling in love with each other like this might not be what we planned, but…’

‘Take me back to bed,’ she whispered coaxingly, her voice shivering with desire. ‘We’ve still got time before we have to leave…’

They were married three months later, in spite of her parents’ pleas to her to wait and Lloyd’s dogmatic assertion that she was a fool to tie herself down so young.

Lloyd and Sam did not like one another. Lloyd felt that Sam was rushing her into marriage and Sam, rather to Abbie’s secret feminine delight and amusement, was intensely jealous of Lloyd, seemed unable to believe that there had never been anything other than the mildest boy-and-girl affection between them.

‘You say that now, but he loves you and you must have felt something for him, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone out with him for so long.’

‘We’re friends, that’s all,’ Abbie told him lovingly. But she could see that he wasn’t entirely convinced.

Four months after they had first met they were married, and two months after that Abbie discovered that she was pregnant.

A few months of happiness—a happiness so intense that she had foolishly believed that nothing could ever damage or destroy it. But she had been wrong, and the pain she had suffered because of that misjudgement had been far, far more intense than the pleasure that had gone before it.

It had left her scarred and damaged, unable to take the risk of ever trusting another man, and hating her ex-husband with a hatred that still burned just as strongly in her today as it had done on that day all those years ago, when he had stared at her across the kitchen of the pretty house he had bought them close to the university and told her harshly, ‘You’re pregnant? But you can’t be. It’s impossible.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘IMPOSSIBLE…wh-what do you mean?’ Abbie had stammered, her face white with shock and disbelief. She had been so thrilled when the doctor had confirmed what she had secretly already suspected to be true—that she had conceived Sam’s child.

They hadn’t talked about having a family as yet, but of course she had believed that ultimately they would have children.

If her timing was right, she would at least just about be able to get through her finals before the baby’s birth. She had chuckled out loud as she’d left the doctor’s surgery, her face bright with love and joy as she’d hugged the pleasure of her news to herself.

She couldn’t wait to tell Sam. He would be a wonderful father. She could see him now, his large hands cradling their child.

She hoped it would be a boy…at least this first one. They could turn the small fourth bedroom into a nursery. All right, so maybe she wouldn’t take up the career she had originally planned, but Sam earned more than enough to support both of them. All of them, she’d amended, and at least she would have her degree.

Whilst the baby—the babies—were young, she wanted to be at home with them, but later, even though by then she would be positively ancient, close on thirty, she could, if she wanted, embark on a career—just so long as it wasn’t something that conflicted with her family life, her husband, their children. They would always come first.

She’d been so happy she could have burst. She’d wanted to go to Sam right then and tell him their wonderful news, but he would have been right in the middle of a lecture, and besides…she’d wanted to have him to herself when…