Love, Come to Me(45)

She went crimson with embarrassment, her desire fading quickly. “I didn’t meant to. It was an accident . . . oh, don’t look at me like that!”

He started to smile. “There’s nothing wrong with what you just did,” he insisted, taking her hand, his fingers tightening as she tried to pull it away.

“ Oh, please stop talking about it!”

“Not yet. I want to show you something first.”

“What?” she asked, and he couldn’t help grinning at the apprehension in her voice.

Heath drew her hand to her breast, cupping underneath it and lifting its weight upwards. Flushing red with embarrassment, Lucy tried to tug her hand free, but he would not let her. Bending his head, he used his teeth gently on her nipple.

“If I let you be shy about your own body,” he said, pausing to savor her with the tugging warmth of his mouth, “then you’re going to be shy about mine . . . and I don’t want that.” He dragged her resisting hand down her body, down the planes of her stomach and over the curling softness of her hair until she stiffened in shock. Her fingers were pressed between her own legs, against a hot dampness that was quivering slightly. “See how good you feel? That’s why I can’t get enough of you.”

Lucy pulled away from him with a muffled sound, her chest rising and falling rapidly. The back of her hand came to rest on the pillow beside her head, and she shivered as she felt the cool air against the moisture on her fingers.

“How could you?” she whispered, overcome with such a strange mixture of emotions that she could barely think.

“Nothing forbidden,” he reminded her, and as if to prove his point, he lowered his mouth to her fingers, licking them one by one.

“But you’re not . . . supposed to do things like that,” she stammered, her eyes wide.

“How do you know?” he said, his voice soft and teasing. “For all you know, all husbands may do this to their wives.”

No. Innately she knew that Daniel would never have wanted to be this intimate with her, would never have dreamed of making her do something she didn’t want to do. Daniel would have made this a romantic experience, full of dignity and tenderness, not the kind of lusty, pagan ritual her husband seemed bent on performing.

Heath froze, his smile vanishing. Only a fool couldn’t see what she was thinking about—who—she was thinking about—and it wasn’t him. How long, he wondered bleakly, was he going to be faced with the shadow of the man she had wanted for so long? “Little prude,” he said softly. “You’d rather have a cold New Englander in your bed, wouldn’t you, with his fancy manners intact . . . someone who’d lift the hem of your nightgown oh, so respectfully, and ask your permission for every move he made—”

“Don’t talk like that to me.”

“Admit it. You’d give anything if I were Daniel Collier right now. You’d sell your soul to be in bed with him instead of someone who dares to laugh at you and makes you feel instead of letting you lie there like a wax doll—”

“Yes!” she cried, angered by his sarcasm. “I wish you were him! I do!”

His handsome face darkened with a sneer. “You only want him because he doesn’t want a thing to do with you. And do you know why he doesn’t?”

His taunting was more than she could bear. She tried to jerk away from him, but he held her wrists and pinned them over her head. “Because of you,” she gasped.

He showed no reaction to her words except for the paling of his face and the faint curl to his lower lip. “Ah . . . you finally admit it.” His voice was silky, mocking. “You would prefer to blame me for everything despite what you said to the contrary the other night. How dishonest of you to accept my proposal when you felt that way. ”

“I’ve loved Daniel for years,” she said, trembling with rage. “How dare you think that a few months could change that? You don’t understand loyalty or real love . . . you think everything can be solved in bed—”

“Real love,” he repeated scornfully. “I’ll tell you the truth, Lucy, the truth about why he doesn’t want you now, and it hasn’t got a damned thing to do with me. He finally realized that you were going to be too demanding for a man like him to satisfy. You’re starving for things he could never give you—and yes, that includes several good tumbles in bed. He would never be able to satisfy all of those needs. You wanted too much from him and the only way he could think of to deal with that was to keep putting you in your place. But it became obvious to him that it wasn’t going to work—”

“I was satisfied by him,” Lucy said hoarsely. “None of that is true.”

“The hell it isn’t. Why do you think you turned to me so eagerly whenever he wasn’t there? Because you were so satisfied?”

“Because I felt sorry for you!”

“Pity? Oh. I wasn’t aware that it was pity that motivated you to respond to me that morning after Emerson’s fire.”

“You did it on purpose—you planned to seduce me so that someone would see.”

“I’m surprised you’re not accusing me of setting the fire to lure you there. It certainly is easy to blame everyone else but Lucy, isn’t it? But what if it was your fault too? What if Lucy was encouraging another man to make love to her so that Daniel would find out and become jealous?”