PENNY JORDAN - To Love, Honour & Betray

Even then, her priority had been the security of the family she so much wanted to have, the children she so much wanted to bear.

‘How can you say you love me?’ she had raged at him when she found out what had happened. ‘How can you claim that you love me when you’ve slept with someone else?’

He had tried to explain, make her understand, tell her that it had been a mistake … an accident almost, but she had refused to believe him, refused virtually to listen.

He had always known that beneath her outer softness and apparent vulnerability, she had unsuspected strength, but he had never imagined that that strength could be turned against him. He had tried to get her to change her mind, but she had refused to listen, and in the end he had had to accept the fact that their marriage was over, that her pride would not allow her to understand or forgive what he had done.

In the first couple of years after the divorce, he had done what all men in his position did, trying to disperse the pain and sense of loss in the arms and beds of other women.

It hadn’t worked, but then he hadn’t really expected it to, and at least being single and determined to stay free of any new emotional entanglements had meant that he was able during the lean years of the economic crisis to concentrate all his time and attention on his business. It had come through the recession relatively unscathed and they were, in fact, now rather unexpectedly very much to the forefront of their field.

Like Claudia, he had met and known about Tara’s involvement with Ryland but like her he had been caught off guard by Tara’s announcement that she and Ryland planned to marry.

An hour later, still unable to sleep, Garth looked at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Two-fifteen a.m. He could try Claudia again and he was sorely tempted to do so, but if she still hadn’t returned home, if she was still perhaps with Luke Palliser, he knew he didn’t want to know.

It was ten years now since they had separated and while Claudia wasn’t and never had been the type of woman to want a merely sexual relationship, nor to publicly flaunt an emotional one, she was very much a woman whom men automatically found attractive and wanted to get closer to—wanted to protect, if that wasn’t too politically incorrect and chauvinistic a thing to profess.

During their marriage, he had seen the admiring looks other men had given her and the envious ones they had sent him too often not to know that if Claudia was still on her own it was because that was her choice.

‘Get involved with someone else … marry again? No, never,’ she had told him quietly when he made the mistake of venting his bitterness on her shortly after their divorce had been finalised. ‘I loved you , Garth,’ she had told him. ‘I loved you and I trusted you, I believed in you … in us, but you betrayed me.’ With quiet, dignified sorrow, she had gone on to ask, ‘If I can’t trust you, what man can I trust?’ Answering her own question, she had added, ‘I can’t and I don’t intend to try.’

‘You mean you don’t want to try, just as you don’t want to try to understand, to accept,’ Garth had returned hotly, still half-unable to believe that she had gone through with it and that they were actually divorced. ‘You’ve got all the emotional commitment you want, Claudia, all the emotional commitment you can give. You’ve got Tara. I wonder what would have happened if during the early days of our marriage we’d discovered that I couldn’t father children. How strong would your adherence to our marriage and your marriage vows have been then?’

He had told himself in the bitterness of his loss that the pain he had seen burning in her eyes as she listened quietly to his angry outburst—a pain he had caused—was justified and that so were his accusations.

‘You’re not divorcing me because I’ve slept with someone else,’ he had told her angrily during one of their pre-separation quarrels. ‘You’re doing it because I’m simply surplus to requirements, because you don’t want me any more, because all you want, the only one you want is Tara.’

‘That’s not true,’ Claudia had denied vehemently.

‘Isn’t it?’ he had challenged her. ‘How come, then, that we haven’t had sex since Christmas, three months before you found out—’

‘I tried,’ Claudia had parried defensively, ‘but you were away so much, working late so often—’

‘And sex is something we can only have late at night in the dark? What happened to Sunday morning, Saturday afternoon, rainy evenings …?’

‘Tara was younger then. Now she’s older, she might—’

‘She might what? Realise that her parents have a natural, normal, loving sexual relationship? Only they don’t … didn’t … did we, Claudia? There’s nothing natural about the kind of sex we have these days, nothing warm or loving, not with you lying there practically willing me to get it over and done with.’

‘You’re wrong. It isn’t …’ Claudia had begun and then stopped.

Of course it hadn’t been the lack of sex in their marriage that had infuriated and hurt him, Garth admitted to himself now. It had been his fear that he was losing Claudia’s love, that she no longer needed or wanted him, that she and Tara formed their own perfect charm circle in which there was no place for him. That he was in his wife’s life, if not his daughter’s, superfluous to requirements.

But he had been wrong to accuse Claudia as he had done then of being sexually cold and unloving. When they had first been lovers, first been married, she had thrilled and touched him with her gentle sensuality, her total and complete giving of herself to him and to their mutual desire.

She had been a virgin when they met but had kept that fact from him, so totally ardent and responsive in his arms the first time they had made love that it was not until he had felt the unexpected resistance and tightness of her inexperienced body that he had realised the truth.

That, if anything, had made him love her even more than he did already, setting the seal on what to him had been her absolute and total perfection, not because no other man had known her so intimately but because she had loved him enough to give herself to him so totally and completely.

He glanced again at his alarm clock. No, he couldn’t ring her now. He would have to wait until the morning.

He could well imagine how she had reacted to Tara’s news and how she must be feeling. And how much it would have hurt her pride to have to get in touch with him.

‘Easy peasy,’ Tara had said, and he had heard the pride in her voice as she laughed off Ry’s aunt’s inquisition into her family background.

Easy peasy. If only that were the truth.

Estelle opened her eyes, the luminous numbers on her clock radio showing that it was quarter to three. Frowning, she wondered sleepily what had woken her and then she heard it—the soft creak of a door opening within her apartment.

She knew who it was, of course. Only one person besides herself had a key to her home and she was sitting up in bed waiting for him when he turned the handle of the door and walked in, soft-footed as a mountain cat, feral eyes gleaming in the half-light as he brought into the room with him the raw, pulsing intensity of his sexually driven persona and with it the scent of sex that clung to his skin—another woman’s sex, Estelle acknowledged as she felt the familiar excitement leap and crackle between them like an unseen charge of electricity.

It had always been like this with him, right from that first time when she had still been a child and he had been the older stepbrother. She had adored him from the start. She was his, he had told her. She would always be his.

‘Open your legs,’ she heard him demanding softly as he approached her bed.

Smiling luxuriously, she did so. The girl or girls whom he had had earlier had plainly not satisfied him, but she was not surprised, and although he might at times like to torment her by denying it and denying her, she was as essential to him as he was to her.

As she lay there on the bed, she could feel the anticipation and urgency pulsing through her; just watching him watching her was all it took. He had started to undress, but his gaze never moved from her open legs, not even when he dropped his trousers and she couldn’t stop herself from giving a small, sharp moan at the sight of his erect penis.

The myth that you could tell the size of a man’s sexual equipment from the size of his feet and hands was in Blade’s case just that—a myth. Short and stocky, he had almost femininely small hands and feet, but his sex …

A sharp thrill of sexual energy trembled through her as she studied it. Thick, much thicker than that of any other man she had known, hard, too, and so voracious in its appetite for the deep plunging thrusting she loved. Indeed, loved so much that sometimes even when she couldn’t satisfy it or him, she knew that no other man could ever make her feel the way Blade did.

‘Mmm, that feels good,’ Blade told her, his voice a soft, lulling coo of warmth. He stroked her with expert fingers, kneeling between her parted legs. ‘So wet, so warm … so hungry, so … empty …’

Estelle wriggled in mute ecstasy as he inserted his fingers into her—just enough to make her aware of their presence, to make her feel tight and hot and achingly eager for the thick, hot shaft of flesh he was starting to rub with his free hand.

Estelle thrust her hips up, trying to draw his fingers deeper inside her, but he kept on teasing her by withdrawing them each time she surged upwards, leaving her empty and aching, her frustration turning her earlier smile to an angry glower as she tried and failed to trap his fingers inside her.

Laughing at her, he stroked the hard length of his penis, holding her off as she tried to reach for him and then forcing her hands away as she made to satisfy her frustrated need by herself. He pinned down one of her arms with his knee and held the other in a painful grip, laughing tauntingly down at her, his thick red lips drawn back against his teeth so that he did look almost dangerously vulpine as he reached out and thrust into her with his fingers again, telling her softly, ‘That’s right, babe, go ahead and fuck yourself on my fingers,’ laughing when he heard the small explosive sound she made and demanding, ‘What is it you want? More …? How much more …? This much?’

She ought to have been prepared for it. After all, he had done it to her before, yet the sharp, thrilling bite of pain he was causing her made her cry out and brought as he had known it would the first frantic convulsions of her orgasm. But he didn’t let her have it, removing his hand from her body and taunting her excitedly as she reached for his erection.

‘Oh, no, not yet, you can’t have it yet. First you’ve got to stroke him a little … suck him, show him how much you want him,’ he mocked as her hand and then her mouth closed hungrily over his body and she started to rock herself rhythmically to and fro, her eyes closed as she did so, still sucking deeply on him.

He waited until he was almost ready to come before removing himself from her mouth and thrusting deeply and urgently into the eagerly open wetness of her body, automatically reaching out for a pillow to hold over her mouth to silence her screams of pleasure as she climaxed, even though the days were now long gone when he had to prevent their parents from hearing the noise she made.

Estelle had never had a flatmate because she liked her privacy, and one of the earliest lessons she had learned was to distrust her own sex.