Australia: In Bed with Her Groom: Mischief and Marriage / A Marriage Betrayed / Bride of His Choice

A flood of embarrassment swept a tide of heat up her neck. She couldn’t meet Harry’s eyes. What had William been telling him? Or worse, proposing to him? Did he think she was to be had as easily as Rodney Bixell’s mother?

Harry, characteristically, took William’s declaration in his stride. ‘Thank you for your vote, William,’ he said with superb aplomb. ‘I don’t think you need worry about Gordon Payne.’

William looked up, eyes glistening with hope and something suspiciously like hero-worship. ‘You mean you’ll fight him for Mum?’

‘A duel to the death,’ he promised, blithely uncaring that William was taking a personal and not a professional slant on this totally misdirecting piece of gallantry.

Ashley found her voice. ‘That’s enough!’ she snapped, her eyes flashing a fury of pride between the two of them. ‘I will not have either of you arrange my life for me.’

‘It’s my life, too,’ William pointed out with irrefutable logic.

‘Go upstairs this instant, William,’ Ashley commanded, losing patience with him. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

She thrust the bunch of carnations at Harry. ‘You finagled these. You deal with them. And after you’ve done that, I want to see you in my office.’

Having seized control out of threatening mayhem and impressed her displeasure on both of them, Ashley strode into the private sanctum where she had always ruled the roost. She slammed the door behind her to drive home the fact that she was the boss here. Her own boss. Those who lived under her roof had better toe her line.

Which was all very well, but as Ashley paced around her office in a ferment of passionate conviction about her own autonomy, an insidious little voice in her mind persisted in questioning what her line was. It was utter hypocrisy to deny that her own desires ran parallel to her son’s feelings as to Harry’s role in their lives. How, in all honesty, could she reprimand her son for virtually giving her the go-ahead to take what she had been dreaming about most of the day?

But Harry shouldn’t have encouraged him to believe there was a chance of him becoming his uncle, going so far as to suggest he would fight any other man for the position. It was wrong, without conscience.

Unless he meant it.

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_8f26c93a-749d-555d-9f9d-bd4baa57c4ba)

HARRY STEPPED INTO the office and closed the door quietly behind him. His demeanour was completely unruffled. To Ashley’s intense relief he wasn’t smiling. Nor was there any amusement twinkling in his brilliant blue eyes. She was so churned up, any trace of a humourous response from him might have triggered a burst of angry frustration.

She realised, after a few fraught seconds, that the tension in the room wasn’t entirely hers. His relaxed air was a cloak, another act of self-discipline. She felt the same sense of connection she had felt yesterday, stronger now with their knowledge of each other, pulsing with the need to broaden it, deepen it.

Goose flesh shivered over her skin. Her heart skipped to a faster beat. She faced him defensively across the desk, yet there was no defence in objects or space. His eyes held hers with searching intensity, with indomitable determination, and she stared back, caught in a thrall of desire that would not be repressed, despite the doubts that plundered her mind of any peace.

‘Why did you do it?’ she asked. ‘It wasn’t fair to involve William with our…with—’ She couldn’t find appropriate words.

‘He is naturally involved,’ Harry answered quietly. ‘He is not separate from you, Ashley.’

‘But you let him think…’ She gestured helplessly.

‘That I want to be your lover?’ he finished for her.

She nodded, her throat too constricted to speak.

‘I do,’ he said simply. ‘Why should I pretend other-wise?’

She struggled with his apparently open honesty. ‘Last night—’ she forced the words out ‘—you spoke of your love for Pen.’

‘She was a very meaningful part of my life. I will not deny or hide what I felt for her. But as you yourself pointed out to me, Ashley, that’s in the past. You and I occupy the present.’

It was precisely the argument she had comforted herself with last night, but she knew there were other considerations—their backgrounds, the countries they inhabited, the lives they lived…so much to separate them, even if these feelings could be trusted.

‘What of the future?’ she asked, struggling to decipher what was right, whether to seize the moment or give more weight to consequences.

‘Who can foretell the future? At this moment I want you. More than any woman I’ve wanted in years.’

She wanted him, too. More than any man she had ever met. She couldn’t deny it. Nor could she hide it from the blue eyes relentlessly boring into hers, revealing their own naked desire, compelling an unmitigated response from her. Yet how could she give it? How, when there were so many uncertainties plaguing her?

She had a responsibility to herself and to William to make the right decisions, the best decisions. How could she recklessly turn a blind eye to consequences and take what she wanted at this moment, for this moment, simply because she wanted it? She was used to weighing everything, wary of inviting any possible disaster. But if she rejected this…

Harry moved, impelled to take the decision from her, sweep aside her painful uncertainty with action. He knew he was behaving recklessly, gambling that it would all turn out right somehow, but he didn’t care. He had to do it, had to know, had to feel. He’d been gambling with death for years and come out alive, if one could call it life.

He hadn’t realised how dull everything had become until he had met this woman. She had awakened him, and he couldn’t let go of this new exhilarating vibrancy, couldn’t let her turn him away, as she might if he didn’t act. She had the strength of will to do it if she decided against him. Time was his enemy. Every second that passed was his enemy.

He quickened his pace, closing the distance between them with ruthless intent. The blood was pounding through his veins and he knew the thrill, the primitive excitement of the hunter, the warrior going into battle. The bugle call was ringing in his head and nothing was going to stop him. He would take all before him, carry her away on a journey of discovery that he desperately wanted, that she wanted.

Yes, she did. It was burning through her, too, this need to join with him, to explore the sense of being truly alive, uninhibitedly alive, wantonly alive, awareness driven to the ultimate extreme. It was in the wild turbulence widening and darkening her eyes. It was in the faint tremor of her body as she turned to face him, watching him round the desk, coming to force the admission from her, taking the responsibility for it, changing what had been to whatever would be.

The future held no meaning for him. He would deal with it as it came. Only now mattered. And now was what he chose it to be for both of them. That was how it was, and she didn’t back away from it. Nor was she passive.

When he took her in his arms, her hands lifted to his chest, not to push him away but to touch him, and even this feather-light touch was like a hammer on his heart. He could feel a tingling heat spurting through his body, and it was imbued with the zestful joy and splendour of life, igniting the lust of the flesh to experience and savour all that bound it to this earth, to this woman who made the world bearable again, who breathed sweet air into his lungs and dazzled his mind with hope, with a promise that it wasn’t over for him.

There was more.

He gathered her closer, craving her softness, her femininity, the heart and mind of her, the soul that called to his from the same pit of loneliness he had known, the pit where the ashes of dreams resided in a greyness devoid of the beautiful colours that dreams could paint.

The need to pick up the palette and splash all the bright primary hues around both of them in wild abandonment was upon him, irresistible. Let colour fall where it would. Some of it must stick to them. No more grey. Grey was emptiness, the void waiting for a new creation, and the fever to create was too compelling to forgo.

Her hands slid to his shoulders, around his neck, and her lovely face was lifted to his, the lush curve of her lower lip tremulously inviting his plunder, and in her eyes the kindled blaze of hope, the wish, the want, the need to know, the temptation of the dream of life, to share the depths and the heights and everything in between with one who could…who would.

It was a chance, and she couldn’t resist it any more than he could.

He wrapped her more tightly to him. Willingly her soft thighs leaned into the rock steadiness of his, muscles taut with the strength of irreversible need. Her belly pressed over his loins, an enticing cushion of promise for the intimacy within. Her breasts, crested with hard beads of excitement, imprinted themselves on his chest. Her mouth opened under the pressure of his, sweet cavern of sensation, of passion released on a whirlwind of need that swirled from one to the other and fused into a tornado of feeling that swept them up in its tempestuous funnel, away from all worldly things, away from yesterday and tomorrow and the pedantic necessities of getting on with day-to-day life.

Passion feeding on passion, bodies straining to appease the long hunger, hands moving to shed the unbearable barrier of clothes, a totally consuming need to bare all to the desire burning through them, to give all, to take all on the chance that it might prove right, the chance that it would add that precious lustre of true togetherness they both sought, the silver lining beaming from behind the dark clouds, the red-orange-yellow sunburst of golden warmth, the deep calm of blue-green peace.

Their physical surroundings were irrelevant. Behind the desk in Ashley’s office they sank to the floor, she pliantly inviting, urgently welcoming, offering the cradle of her womanhood with an utter abandonment of any other care, he needing their mating with an intensity that went beyond all rational thought. Yes was the beat of his mind. Now was the beat of his body. Her was the beat of his heart.

And he plunged himself into the sweet, moist tunnel that would take him to the innermost core of this woman, reaching to the door of her soul, urging it to open with every powerful thrust of himself, wanting to find there the culmination of all he had been blindly searching for since Pen had died.

It came. He felt it begin, the exquisite flowering of ultimate giving to him, the utter yielding of self to the most intimate fusion any two people could achieve, the surrender of every particle of separateness, and it was a wild and exultant intoxicant to him. He moved faster, rushing to meet her climax with his, to share the ecstatic stream of pleasure with her, the essence of life itself mingling, melding, bonding to create the most indescribably beautiful union. He spilled the liquid warmth of his seed into the convulsing heat of her womb, and the blissful perfection of it rippled through them in waves, a wondrous rhythm of togetherness fulfilled and complete.

And they looked at each other, their eyes swimming with the glory of it, their minds dazed that it could be…and was…the possibility, the promise that neither had quite believed in, the chance taken and rewarded, the awareness of its vibrant reality pulsing through them.

She lifted a hand to his cheek, stroking it as though in awe of him or what he’d done with her, and it moved him to kiss her with a surge of tenderness that melted the last of the hard casing that had been around his heart since Pen’s death.

‘Ashley,’ he whispered, and it was a prayer of thanks for being the woman she was, for reaching so far into him that the past had fallen away and he could rejoice in the present because she was here, with him, sharing this moment of revelation, of renewal.

Harry…His name was a throb of sweet exultation in her mind and heart. She couldn’t speak it. She felt too much, and his lips were grazing over hers so softly, gently, beautifully, and he was still inside her, filling her with the wonder of all he had made her feel.

What she had known with Roger was a pale thing in comparison, leaving her totally unprepared for such an explosion of exquisite sensation, the sheer billowing glory of it seizing her body, holding it in thrall to the movement of his until that moment…that moment when she was no longer herself but him, too, an entity that belonged to both of them, yet more than either of the two, like an ecstatic star burst that she imagined must have fired the dawn of creation.