of his hard hot flesh beneath her uncertain fingers was both alien and yet somehow in some way already known, as though in her dreams she had touched him like this a thousand plus times before. Each touch, each discovery, each sound of pleasure wrenched from Ash’s locked throat felt like a marker put in place on a territory that she had been destined to call her own.
Growing braver, she leaned over and brushed her lips against the taut plain of Ash’s flat muscular stomach, hot wilful pleasure possessing her when the slide of his hand into her hair and the raw gasp her touch drew from him told her that despite his stillness his body ached as much as her own.
A few more kisses, scattered daringly against the hair-roughened tautness of his thigh, a tentative caress of the hot tension of his erection, an awareness of the damp heat and the ache between her own thighs, and the coil of need within her had become a full-blown ravening demand.
Inside her head, images formed: the temptation to straddle Ash where he lay and let her body demand the upward thrust of his body into her own and the satisfaction it yearned for, a relentless unceasing hunger that grew with every breath she took.
How long before his self-control broke—how many seconds, how many heartbeats. How much could one man bear and not give in to such an intensity of need? Like a dam breaking, Ash felt his self-control give way. Reaching for Sophia he pulled her down against him, kissing her throat, her jaw, her mouth, taking the sobbed breath of pleasure she exhaled as he covered her breasts with his hands, kneading their soft warmth, letting his thumbs and fingertips mimic the intimate movement of his tongue within the soft damp heat of her mouth,
When he made to lift her on top of him she moved eagerly, almost knowingly, to his guidance, one fierce tremor of her body and the flash of desire in her eyes her response to his removal of her briefs. Her sex was open and naked to his gaze and his touch and it was impossible for Ash to withstand the temptation to caress its soft inviting warmth, his touch drawing a wild shudder of pleasure from Sophia married to a sweetly agonised cry of female longing. The need to pull her down on top of him and pleasure her aroused flesh with his lips and his tongue had Ash sliding his hands along her thighs before he could stop himself, his hunger for the intimate taste of her overwhelming him, as much as Sophia’s moan of shocked delight overwhelmed her.
How could she endure such pleasure? How could her body hold back the tide of longing that swept her or the convulsive tremors of preorgasmic sensitivity it unleashed? A fine dew of aching arousal bathed her skin. Her nails raked Ash’s skin as he lowered her onto his body, a small mewling sound escaping her lips in her exquisite agony of relief as her muscles welcomed the full hard thrust of him within their embrace, her body rising and falling in concert with his as passion gripped them both.
Without thinking about what he was doing as they lay together in the aftermath of their shared ecstasy, Ash instinctively ran his hand down Sophia’s still-damp back, and let it come to rest on the curve of her hip. It was only a small gesture, a natural one, he suspected, for a man who had just shared so much pleasure with his partner, and who wanted to draw that partner closer for the intimacy that came after such intensely satisfying sex, but it was not one with which he was familiar, not one he had ever been tempted to indulge in ever before. Abruptly he withdrew his hand and moved back from her. Moved back but did not leave the bed. They were husband and wife; he was not a machine, and he was certainly not without respect for Sophia or her role in his life. She had just given herself to their marriage, to their commitment to each other to create the next generation, not just with her natural sensuality but also with generosity. He owed her something at least for that.
And that was why he was staying? For Sophia’s sake? For the sake of their marriage, for the sake of the duty they had both agreed they would share. For them he would stay, but he would not allow himself the emotional pleasure of drawing her back into his arms to hold her there whilst her heartbeat stilled and he breathed in the warm Sophia-scent of her skin. No, he would not allow himself that, because he did not deserve it.
It was over, and despite the—to her, at least—intense intimacy and closeness of what they had just shared, Ash was already withdrawing from her, still sharing her bed but not touching her, not showing her any tenderness, not saying a word about what to her had been an experience of true unimaginable wonder and delight. And he had wanted what had happened between them; he had wanted it badly. She might not be experienced but no woman could misunderstand the messages his body had given to hers.
To hers?
The sharp sound of Sophia’s indrawn breath with its raw note of pain had Ash frowning, his voice harsh as he demanded, ‘What’s wrong?’ Their lovemaking had been intense and passionate and she had given herself fiercely over to it; if he had accidentally caused her discomfort, that was the last thing he had wanted to happen.
‘Do you really need to ask?’ Sophia challenged him. ‘It wasn’t me you took to bed tonight, was it, Ash? It was Nasreen. That’s my fault for wearing her clothes. I don’t know why I did that. It was wrong. I know you still love her.’
Sophia thought he would do something like that? She thought that he could have the kind of powerful, all-consuming sex they had just had and want anyone but her in his arms? Something—a force, a need, a tidal wave of something he could not suppress—rose up inside him.
‘No,’ he told her. ‘I do not still love Nasreen.’
He paused as though his words had somehow caused a seismic movement within himself over which he had no control, and which had now set in motion an unstoppable force within him—a shift in the weight of his burden and its pressure on the dam behind which he had sealed it away. Like an unstoppable landslide it plunged down on that dam, smashing it apart, tearing at its foundations, words he had never expected to hear himself utter in the privacy of his own thoughts, never mind to anyone else, bursting past its barriers in an unchecked torrent, dragged from the depths by the sheer force of the reaction Sophia’s accusation had aroused within him.
‘The truth is that I never loved Nasreen.’
Shock, disbelief, confusion—Sophia felt them all, but on some deeper level and with the new maturity the short weeks of their marriage had brought her, she could hear the starkness of the truth in Ash’s voice. Those words were dragged from him against his wish or control, the first time she had ever seen any break in that control when it came to his silence on the subject of his first wife. The first time he had allowed her to see what lay behind that silence, and what she could see was a man in torment.
Now that he had started to speak, to his own shock Ash discovered that he couldn’t stop, the words tumbling from him one after the other, as though desperate to finally be heard.
‘I should have loved her. It was my duty to love her.’ His voice was raw with the burden of past pain. ‘It was my duty to make our marriage as filled with love for each other as my great-grandparents’ marriage was. As a boy growing up, orphaned, with only my nurse’s stories of that love to show me what adult love could be, I believed that it was enough for me merely to want to love my chosen bride. I was both naive and arrogant. I made promises to myself for our marriage that I was unable to keep. Over the course of our wedding celebrations when I looked at my bride, despite her undoubted beauty, despite the fact that our marriage was one arranged for us with our best interests at heart, when I listened to her, when I saw how different our goals in life were, when I dismissed her as shallow and empty-headed, selfish and greedy, unkind to those who served her, and not worthy of the great love I had promised myself I would have for her, I showed that I was the one who was not worthy, not worthy of my duty, not worthy of the gift of love shared by my great-grandparents.’
The words were pouring from him with an uncontrollable force now, increasingly desperate to escape and be heard, desperate to escape his desire to have them silenced, as though a part of him had yearned for this escape, this stripping down of himself to the bare bones at the root of his angry contempt for himself, so that his failings could finally be seen in the clear light of day. As though somehow he had been waiting for this moment and this one woman to lay bare his dreadful weakness and shame, because only she would understand, because only she …
‘I should never have married her.’