Marriage Make-Up. Penny Jordan

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.’