Blackmailing the Society Bride

He had turned her round and was practically frog-marching her up the stairs, Lucy recognised wrathfully. She tried to pull away from him, and to her chagrin overbalanced on her spindly heels.

‘Right—that’s it,’ Marcus announced, swinging her up into his arms before she could stop him as he climbed the last couple of stairs.

With her face buried against his shoulder, and her hand splayed out across his shirt, perfectly able to feel the crisp male hair beneath it, Lucy felt as though she had suddenly become a sort of sexual Lucy in Wonderland, fallen into a magical fantasy world.

Still carrying her, Marcus strode down the landing and in true Hollywood hero fashion pushed open a bedroom floor with one highly polished shoe. How typical of Marcus that he would wear such traditional-looking shoes, Lucy acknowledged, whilst her stomach muscles cramped in pleasure at the exciting discovery that said shoes looked rather bigger than those worn by her unmourned ex-husband. They must be at least a size eleven, maybe even larger…

The room they were in was obviously a guest room, pristinely neat and decorated in a rather old-fashioned and very unadventurous mix of traditional chintz and heavy inherited family furniture.

Not that Lucy had very much inclination to study the furniture—not when Marcus was sliding her down his body in such a delicious and delirium-inducing way. Sliding her down his body and trying to step back from her, she recognised. But she wasn’t going to let him.

The shock of her own thoughts was a powerful adrenaline surge, filling her with a determination that was turning her into someone she hardly recognised. Someone who was demanding to know why she should not have what she wanted; why she should not do as others did and simply take what she wanted. Why she should not for once in her life simply put herself and her own needs first.

She had never experienced anything so alluringly tempting, so wonderfully empowering, so overwhelming irresistible. Why should she try to resist it? Why shouldn’t she seize this opportunity? Why shouldn’t she allow herself to seduce Marcus into taking her to bed? Why shouldn’t she do what other women did all the time instead of denying herself what she so desperately wanted? Why should she always be the one to go without? Why shouldn’t she allow herself this one night?

And tomorrow? When she had to face Marcus’s anger and rejection?

But this wasn’t tomorrow. It was today. It was here and now. She was already dealing with Marcus’s rejection and had been for years. Why shouldn’t she sweeten it with the kind of memories that would burn within the shrine of her most secret places for ever?

‘Marcus…Marcus…’ she whispered fiercely against his lips, and she lifted her mouth to his, wriggling as close to him as she could, oblivious to the fact that her movements had caused the press-studs fastening her fragile silk dress to pop open until she felt the unwanted presence of its small cap sleeves halfway down her arms.

The unwanted intrusion of her dress and its unfamiliarly draped sleeves was easily dealt with. She simply dropped her arms and let it slide down to the floor, to pool round her feet, then stepped out of it. Thus freed, she lifted her arms and wrapped them tightly round Marcus’s neck, standing in only one shoe, a thin silk camisole and matching fluted-legged brief French knickers. Ridiculously, perhaps, one of the first things she had done after Nick’s betrayal and their subsequent divorce was to go inside the Agent Provocateur shop she walked past most days on her way to her office and treat herself to the kind of underwear that every sensual woman had a right to enjoy—even if her husband had labelled her as sexless.

Marcus was trying to say something to her, she realised, as she rubbed her nose against the bare flesh of his throat with open sensual pleasure, breathing in the scent of him. And she could feel his fingers biting into the soft skin of her upper arms, too. But she was too lost in the sheer wonder of the moment, and what was happening, to pay any attention to what he might be trying to say. Why speak, after all, when they could be doing this? Lucy decided giddily in adrenaline- and love-fuelled need, as she created around herself the familiar fantasy that had comforted her Marcus-deprived body for so long. The fantasy in which Marcus just could not resist her and didn’t even want to. Poor Marcus. He was probably dreadfully uncomfortable in all those clothes—that tie, that buttoned-up shirt—surely it behoved her to aid him with their removal?

She tried for the tie first, her tongue-tip pressed firmly against her teeth as she worked at the knot with eager fingers.

‘Lucy!’

‘Mmm?’ She had worn a tie at school, as part of her uniform, so surely unknotting this one…?

‘Lucy…’ Marcus’s hands covered her own. Lucy looked up at him and gave him an approving smile. Obviously he shared her own eagerness for him to be rid of his clothes and wanted to help her. She intended to say as much to him, but suddenly she became distracted as she looked at his mouth, and then she couldn’t look away again.

‘Marcus.’ She whispered his name in dizzy delight as she looked at it and longed for it, touching her own tongue to her lips as her eyes darkened with the heat of her own hunger for him.

Reaching up, she pressed her mouth tenderly against his. His lips felt firm and strong, his flesh sensuously distracting and hunger-inducing as she breathed tiny kisses against it, little nibbles that grew bolder as each taste fuelled her need for more. Marcus’s hands left her arms and gripped her waist.

It was nice to be held so tightly, she acknowledged, but it would be even nicer if he were to touch her breast. So much easier, surely, for her to simply take his hand and place it against the warm swell of her own flesh beneath the thin silk of her cami and hold it there whilst her tongue darted excitedly against the closed line of his mouth, begging for entrance to the pleasures that lay beyond them…

‘Lucy!’

What was Marcus doing? He couldn’t be pushing her away. Frantically she reached out to him, then lost her balance and started to fall backwards onto the bed behind her.

Immediately Marcus made a grab for her, but it was too late, and somehow or other she was lying on the bed, with Marcus on top of her. The full weight of his body was pressing her down into the mattress and it felt so good. In fact it felt, he felt like heaven…like everything good she had ever experienced in the whole of her life, only ten times more than that. She exhaled in delighted bliss and wrapped her arms tightly round his neck, pressing her mouth against his, her lips parted invitingly.

She heard Marcus make a thick muffled sound. Surely not a groan? And then his hands were in her hair, his fingers hard and warm against her scalp as he held her head in sensual imprisonment and his mouth moved on hers.

Had she imagined she knew what a kiss was? She had known nothing—less than nothing, Lucy admitted, as the emotional champagne bubbles of delight and disbelief exploded inside her and raced along her veins into every part of her body. Most especially to those bits of her body that were particularly receptive to the kind of pleasure Marcus was giving her. Even her toes were curling, in a silent exclamation of thrilled awe.

So this was what it felt like to be truly aroused by and responsive to a man. No wonder in times gone by mothers of impressionable daughters had guarded them so ferociously. Already she was hooked on what Marcus was giving her; already she wanted and needed more. His tongue-tip teased the sensitivity of her lips with small, almost whip-like tormenting caresses before suddenly hardening and thrusting deep into her mouth, not just once but repeatedly, until her whole body was shuddering in rhythmic response to those thrusts.

Dizzily Lucy reflected that she’d asked for one miracle but had actually got two! Was that how it worked with this miracle thing? Once you had tuned in to miracles, so to speak, did they just keep on coming? Little miracles popping up here, there and everywhere?

‘Oh, I do so hope there will be more,’ she whispered ecstatically as Marcus released her mouth.

‘What?’ he demanded, looking down at her, all blazing impatience and irritation and lethal male desire.

‘More,’ she repeated sweetly, giving him a beatific smile. ‘I would like more, Marcus. Much more,’ she emphasised.

‘You want more?’ he repeated.

Why was he looking at her like that? As though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing? As though the hard pulse of his erection didn’t exist?

Lucy wasn’t going to let herself be dragged out of her fantasy.

‘Oh, yes,’ she agreed. Now that he had kissed her, and she had tasted him, her body was so fixated on him that it would probably mount an all-out rebellion if it was denied him now. She wanted him and she was going to have him, she decided firmly. She deserved to have him.

‘It’s been such a long time, you see,’ she told him. And it had. Such a very, very long time since she had first looked at him and wanted him. And now here was her very own personal miracle, making it possible for her to have him. So of course she wanted more of them—and of him, too. But right now she didn’t have time to explain all of that to him because right now…right now she had far more important and exciting things she wanted to do.

She looked up into his eyes and then gave in to the temptation to stroke her tongue-tip along the line of his throat. She heard him groan, felt him shudder, and then his hands were on her body, as she had so much longed for them to be, cupping her breasts whilst she tugged off his tie and her fingers worked busily to unfasten the buttons of his shirt. The pads of his thumbs were stroking her erect nipples, working the silk of her camisole against them until she moaned in helpless delight at the effect his deliberate stroking of the fine silk against her sensitive flesh was having on her.

But she got her own back. She had unfastened his shirt and was free to slide her hands inside it, palms flat against the hard muscle of his chest. She lifted her head and kissed his collarbone, stringing tiny kisses together in mute arousal. His fingers plucked erotically at one nipple whilst her own urgent movements brought the other free of her cami. She flicked her tongue-tip urgently against the small stone hardness of Marcus’s flat male nipples, tasting first one and then the other, tormenting herself with the knowledge of the pleasure that lay ahead of her when she allowed her hands and her mouth to move down over his body.

Marcus bent his head and kissed her throat. His fingertip traced the shape of her ear whilst his teeth nibbled gently on her lobe, and then his mouth caressed the flesh just behind it. A spasm of intense pleasure and longing shot through her, and she arched her back to bring her breast fully into his hand, a small, keening moan bubbling in her throat. Her toes curled, and automatically she opened her legs in eager supplication.

Against her body she could feel the erect heat and hardness of Marcus’s own arousal, whilst what he was doing to that tiny spot of flesh was practically bringing her to the point of orgasm all by itself.

His hand stroked her hip and then slid lower, finding the soft curve of her bottom beneath the wide silky leg of her fluted French knickers. Some women thought thongs were sexy, but right now Lucy felt that what she was wearing and the access to all areas they gave Marcus was far more alluring. Without any need to remove them, his hand had already moved from her bottom to the soft silky curls of hair between her legs, and his thumb was massaging slow circles against her mound before his fingers started to tease her open.

Lucy moaned and writhed and lifted her body up to his hands, then gasped as he stroked deftly into her wetness in the very same heartbeat as his lips started to caress her tight nipple.

She felt as though a magical cord was somehow stretched from her breast to her belly, and that what Marcus was doing to her was tightening it to the point where she wanted to scream with urgent longing for him to do more, to take her further, deeper.

‘Marcus, I’m going to come,’ she protested thickly. But instead of heeding her warning and removing his clothes, so that he could slide into her, he lifted his head and looked steadily at her whilst his fingers moved more purposefully over her. Over her and into her. Stroking her, teasing her, until she was so hot, and so wet, and so wanting…

‘I’m not coming until you’re inside me,’ she told him, panting out the words as she struggled to hold back her orgasm, her fingers closing over him through the fabric of his clothes and her body shuddering violently in excitement as she realised how thick and strong he actually was.

He undressed with speedy efficiency, scarcely giving her time to enjoy the pleasure of looking at his naked body. Then he undressed her as well, and then positioned himself between her welcoming, eager thighs.

‘Missionary position?’ she huffed, pulling a small face.

‘It’s all we’ve got time for if you want me inside you when we come,’ Marcus told her rawly, before bending his head to kiss her naked breasts in turn whilst he rubbed the hard hot head of his erection against her clitoris until she called out frantically to him, begging him to satisfy her.

Lucy felt her orgasm seize her in its seismic grip with his third thrust, her muscles fastening round him to hold and caress him, to draw from him the sharp, sweet juice of life itself.

She knew the moment she opened he eyes that she wasn’t in her own bed. But it was several seconds before she realised just whose bed she was in—or rather whose bedroom, since the room she was in was obviously a guest room. Marcus’s guest room. In Marcus’s Wendover Square house.

She gave a small despairing groan as the events of the previous afternoon and evening formed images inside her head—images she was forced to view without the protection of her earlier adrenaline-induced armour.