Marriage Make-Up

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…

‘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…

Pregnant…a baby…Sam’s baby. She was the luckiest, luckiest girl in the whole wide world.

Suddenly she’d felt ravenously hungry. Sardines…sardines on toast; that was what she wanted—yes, and then an enormous sticky bar of chocolate fudge.

She would, of course, have to start eating very carefully. She had the baby to think of now, she’d warned herself sternly, but for now…for today she could afford to be a little self-indulgent…just as she probably had been when this baby had been conceived. She’d given a small chuckle. When the doctor had asked her if she had any idea when conception had taken place she had furrowed her forehead and frowned.

‘When did you last have sex?’ he had asked her patiently.

‘This morning,’ she had answered promptly, and had then flushed a brilliant shade of pink as she’d realised what he was getting at.

‘Er…I’m not sure. It could have been…I missed my first period three weeks ago…’

She had been taking the pill, but she had been so busy that for two consecutive nights she had forgotten to take it. This baby was obviously meant to be…just like the way she and Sam had met—just like their love. Oh, God, she’d been so happy…so very, very happy…

‘I mean that it’s impossible for you to be pregnant—at least not with my child,’ Sam told her now, harshly.

Abbie looked at him in mute disbelief. Where her face had originally been flushed with excitement and happiness it was now bone-white. Sam’s, on the other hand, bore the tell-tale signs of male anger in the dark colour staining his cheekbones and the clenched tightness of his jaw.

‘What do you mean, not with your child? Is this some kind of joke?’ Abbie whispered in confusion.

She didn’t know what Sam meant; she couldn’t understand what he was saying. How could her baby, their baby, not be his? Of course it was his—theirs. What on earth was he trying to do to her? If this was his idea of some kind of teasing game…

Anxiously she searched his face, but there was no sign of any good humour or amusement in it. Just the opposite.

‘A joke? My God, I wish it was,’ Sam told her harshly. ‘You cannot be carrying my child, Abbie, because I cannot give you a child. I’ve had a vasectomy.’

‘You’ve what? You can’t have done. Not without telling me. Not without…’

‘I had it done several years ago, when I was in India with VSO. I was working in a small village; a young man I met there, a young man of my own age, the son of the head man, who had taken me under his wing, told me that he intended to have a vasectomy. I was shocked at first, wondering how on earth he could contemplate such a thing, but then he took me on a tour of Bombay and pointed out to me the number of children who had been abandoned because their parents could not afford to feed them. He told me the basic economics of what happened in a world when there were too many mouths to feed, when the land itself could not support them.

‘“What is best?” he asked me. “That I prevent conception now or that I wait until my children are one, four…seven, and watch them die slowly of malnutrition?”

‘What he said, what he showed me, shocked me, made me realise that to father a child when there were already so many, many children in the world in need was an act of selfishness which would simply push those children even further down the poverty scale.

‘I decided to have a vasectomy myself.’

Abbie stared at him.

‘You’re lying,’ she told him flatly.

‘No,’ Sam denied. ‘You are the one who is doing that, Abbie, when you claim that you are carrying my child.’

Abbie licked her lips nervously. She couldn’t believe this was happening. How could it be happening? How could she possibly be carrying Sam’s child in her womb when he…? Tears filled her eyes, a mixture of anguish, anger and panic exploding inside her.

‘You must have known I would want children, and yet you married me without telling me that you couldn’t give me any. Why? Why…?’

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I was so much in love with you…wanted you so desperately that the thought of children or anything else other than our love simply never occurred to me? And for your information I did not know you would want children. I thought you possibly shared my feelings about the world not being able to support the children it already has. It hasn’t ever been something we’ve discussed.’

‘Because there hasn’t been any time…any need. But you must have known…must have realised…’

‘Why?’ Sam demanded more harshly. ‘Because it’s what everybody does…what everyone wants?’

‘You lied to me…you deceived me,’ Abbie wept.

The look he gave her was full of bitter contempt.

‘And you haven’t done the same to me? Tell me something, Abbie,’ he demanded savagely. ‘How long exactly was it after I had had you that you went crawling into his bed? A month, a week…less…?’

‘What…what do you mean? I haven’t…’ Abbie protested hotly, her face flushing as she realised what he was saying.

How dared he accuse her of sleeping with someone else? How dared he accuse her of anything?

‘Oh, come on; don’t play the innocent. It’s hardly an appropriate role for you now, is it? You might have fancied passing yourself off to me and the rest of the world as an innocent young madonna, but what you actually are is little better than a whore, passing off her bastard child on someone else—or, rather, trying to. Unfortunately for you it’s just not going to work.

‘It’s his, I imagine? Dear, wonderful Lloyd? I saw him driving away the other evening just before I got home. Does he know you’re carrying his child yet? Does he…?’

‘I’m not carrying Lloyd’s child,’ Abbie denied, shocked. What was Sam trying to imply? She and Lloyd had never been lovers. The very thought of having a sexual relationship with him filled her with the same kind of horror she would have felt had he actually been her brother. She and Lloyd were close, yes, but not in any sexual way. Lloyd had simply called round to see her to talk to her about some problems he was having with his university course.

He had stayed longer than he had intended and had then had to dash off without waiting to say hello to Sam.

That Sam or anyone else should even remotely consider that she and Lloyd would have an affair and that, even worse, she would try to foist his child off on her husband was so totally and utterly ridiculous an idea that she instantly, once again, wondered if Sam was trying to play some kind of bizarre joke on her.

He did like to tease her occasionally, she knew, because—or so he said—he loved watching the pink colour flood her face when he did. But so far he had certainly shown no inclination to play the kind of elaborate and cruel practical joke on her which would give rise to his denial of their child. To do so would have been totally out of character for him, she was sure. But then she had not really known him so very long, had she? And, like her assumption that they would have children together, she had taken his gentleness and lack of any cruel or malicious streak on trust.

But surely she would have known, sensed, guessed if…

But she hadn’t known that he had had a vasectomy, had she? And, if he hadn’t thought it necessary to pass such a vital fact about himself on to her, what other vital information might he also be concealing?

‘Y-you can’t possibly believe that Lloyd and I are anything other than friends,’ she stammered chokily. ‘I’ve told you…’

‘Why not? Someone has to be the father of this child you thought you’d pass off as mine…’

‘But you’re the only man I’ve ever slept with…the only man I’ve ever loved,’ she could have added. But for some reason she held the words back. To talk of love in the present circumstances would be not just acutely painful but almost an act of sacrilege.

‘I know how hot in bed you are—after all, I’ve had more than enough proof of it,’ he added cruelly. ‘But if I wasn’t satisfying you you should have said—’

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