Page 26 of Wife for a Day

But each moment that she stayed the yearning, the need that had been barely under control all this time was growing stronger. Already it was gnawing at her deep inside, making her feel the slight distance between them—a couple of metres at most—as a vast, yawning chasm. So easy to cross and yet so totally impossible to bridge.

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

Did she? She couldn’t think, and anyway rationality had no part to play in all this. She was all sensitivity, all feeling, suffused with hunger. Wanting his touch, the power of his arms around her. Fearful of his possession and yet needing the profound intimacy of that moment as intensely as she needed to breathe, to feel her heart beat, the blood pulsing in her veins.

‘I think perhaps I should just leave.’

He actually turned towards the door.

‘No!’

It was wrenched from her, impossible to hold back.

Rationally she would have said that to have him leave was what she wanted most. But she had already accepted that rationality had nothing to do with what she was feeling. It was as if her mind was formed like an iceberg. The top part might be capable of logical, sensible thoughts, but underneath it was a huge, uncontrollable mass, made up of emotional drives and purely instinctive needs.

‘No meaning, No, don’t go? Or, No, my attentions are not wanted?’

‘I…’

It was as if everything she was feeling had gathered in a knot at the top of her throat, threatening to choke her. She couldn’t get any words past the blockage, but she had to speak. She didn’t want him to know. She felt that she would die if he walked out of the door.

‘I…’

In desperation she brought her hands up before her face in a frightened, defensive gesture.

‘Lily…’

Striding forward, Ronan caught her hands in both of his, pulling them down with an ease that made a nonsense of her faint attempt at struggle. The face he revealed to his searching gaze was pale and strained, her golden eyes wide and brilliant.

‘If it helps, I don’t like feeling this way any more than you do,’ he declared harshly. ‘But there’s nothing we can do about it. This force is there, Lily, whether we like it or not. It flashes between us whenever we’re together, and it has the power of a storm, of a whirlwind that knocks us off our feet. It would be madness to deny it or try to contain it. That would only make it feed on itself and grow beyond all imagining.’

‘I—know.’

Hadn’t she tried to deny it to herself, only to find that with each breath she took it rooted deeper into her soul, the hunger growing by as much again with each second she spent in Ronan’s company? But her need was fuelled by feeling, by the love she had for him. His need was the physical passion without emotion he had admitted to her earlier.

‘But what can we do?’

‘We can stop fighting it, my lovely Lily. Give in to what we’re feeling, what we know is inevitable. We can indulge it, let it ravage us, and pray, pray like hell, that in time it will burn itself out.’

He moved closer, one arm sliding round her waist and drawing her close up against him so that she could feel the heated force of the desire that drove him, an untamed wildness hidden beneath the outwardly civilised clothing.

‘We can do this…’ Burning lips pressed against her cheek, sliding down the smooth curve of her jaw. ‘And this…’ His tongue tantalised the delicate skin of her ear lobe. ‘Is this what you want?’

Her heart was thudding so violently that she could hear the sound of her own blood pounding like thunder in her ears. Her whole body was on fire, the flare of need building from a small flame to a raging inferno in the space of a heartbeat. The only response she could make was an inarticulate sound that might have been a cry of surrender.

‘Let me show you…’

His mouth was perilously close to hers now, but still he held back the kiss she longed for, torturing her with his deliberate pause. Those deep indigo eyes watched her with calculating intensity as she moaned a hungry protest.

‘Lily, I promised… I said a simple yes or no would suffice but I have to hear the word. I have to know what your answer is. You have to tell me—do you want this or…?’

But Lily could take no more. The inferno of need was raging out of control and she felt sure she would die if he didn’t kiss her soon.

‘Yes!’ she breathed on a low, swooning sound. But then, suddenly afraid he hadn’t heard, she repeated the word louder and with a desperate emphasis. ‘Yes. The answer’s yes—oh, yes!’

CHAPTER TEN

THEY never made it up the stairs.

The need was too intense, the hunger out of control. Their mouths clashed, hands clung, bodies coiled around each other. It was more like a battle than actual lovemaking.

The need to be the first to touch the heated reality of skin, to press lips against its yielding warmth, drove them to tug at the restrictions of clothing, heedless of the dangers of ripping the material that stood in their way. Lily clawed at the buttons on his shirt, wrenching them from their fastenings with a ferocity that sent more than one spinning away into the shadows at the far corners of the room. Only when her fingers actually encountered the sleek muscles sheathed in the burning satin of his skin did her actions slow, a sigh of deepest contentment escaping her.

Ronan’s teeth closed over one shoestring strap of her dress, tugging it down off her shoulder and exposing the fullness of the breast beneath.

‘No bra.’ It was a choked sound of satisfaction, one that echoed in the laughter deep in her throat.

‘Under this?’ she managed breathlessly, the question disintegrating into a moan of delight as his questing mouth found the poutingly erect nipple and closed over it, tugging softly.

‘I knew I liked this dress.’ Ronan’s voice was thick and rough, his words muffled against her skin. ‘I just didn’t realise how much.’

The other strap was dealt with in the same way as the first, while, with his arms tight around her waist, Ronan manoeuvred her towards the settee, lowering her onto the green velvet cushions as he came down beside her.

Never once lifting his mouth from the path of tormenting pleasure he was inflicting on her, he shrugged himself free of the restriction of his shirt and tossed it aside, laughing exultantly as he heard her murmur of approval.

‘This has to go.’ Strong fingers made clumsy with need tugged at the silky hem of the rose-coloured dress. ‘Much as I like it, it is definitely superfluous to requirements.’

A couple of swift tugs pulled it up and over her head, following his shirt to lie in a pool of material on the floor.

Lily was now nothing but a mass of quivering nerve-endings, her eyes half shut, her mouth open, her breath coming in ragged, uneven gasps. She grabbed at him with wild hands, holding him close so that the sensitised tips of her breasts rubbed against the soft abrasion of his body hair as she pressed greedy, demanding kisses on every part of his body she could reach. If she had wanted him, needed him before, it was as nothing to what she felt now.

That need made her bold, so that she fumbled with the leather belt around his narrow waist, sighing her contentment as she pulled it free of the buckle and moved on to the zip that fastened his trousers. With Ronan’s willing assistance she soon dispensed with his remaining items of clothing, her fingers clawing their way down his exposed spine, feeling him arch and flex beneath her demanding touch.

‘You asked for it, lady…’ he muttered on a growl of very male hunger, pulling her beneath him and inserting one strong thigh between the silky smoothness of her legs.

But somehow he found the control to hold back just a second longer, so that she felt she might almost die of frustration if he didn’t ease the burning need that centred deep in the most feminine heart of her body. She tilted her hips, curved her legs around him in an invitation as primitive and instinctive as womanhood itself, smiling to herself as she heard his groan of surrender.

With a muttered oath Ronan surged deep inside her with a speed and force that took her breath away, driving her almost over the edge in the space of a couple of fevered heartbeats. She cried his name on a sound of hot, primal pleasure, and then was lost, utterly abandoned to everything but the drive towards the ultimate fulfilment.

It was a long, long time before she came anywhere close to reality. But even when she surfaced from the heated waves of delight that had flooded through her in the aftermath of a second and then a third repeat of the ecstasies Ronan had driven her to, she tried hard to cling to the haze of sensuality that clouded her thoughts. She didn’t want to face the fact that the volcano of hunger that had erupted between them was all there was. That there was no other feeling on which to build.

It didn’t mean a thing, she told herself. One day, and probably sooner rather than later, this idyll would be over and all she would be left with was her memories. But right now she couldn’t bring herself to care. For now she had all she wanted, and she would face the reality of the future when she had to. And until that happened, for as long as she could, she would pretend that all was right with her world.

Lily rolled over in bed, yawned, stretched luxuriously, then froze into shocked immobility.

The reason for her consternation was twofold. Firstly there was the space beside her. A space that on every other morning had been filled by the warm, muscled bulk of Ronan’s long-limbed body but now was empty and smooth, already cool, with no trace of the heat that usually lingered if he’d only just got up.

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