Her skin was pure peaches and cream, so perfect, it fascinated. Her hair, long and finely spun, had been twisted in a knot on top of her head today, but the severity of the style could not dim the thousand and one different shades of reds and golds running through it. It shimmered in the overhead lights. Hers was a rich and golden beauty, made more enchanting by the pure oval of her softly featured face. Her eyes were blue—the shade of blue that could blaze purple with passion or icy grey with anger. Her nose was small and straight—with just the slightest tendency to look haughty when she lifted her chin a certain defiant way. And her mouth...he studied her mouth, lifted slightly at the corners at the moment by some rueful thought she was considering—that mouth had to be the most sensually evocative mouth he had ever seen. The fact that he knew it felt and tasted even more exciting than it looked did not ease the slow burn at present taking place low in his gut.
She was wearing purple, a colour that had always suited her. It was nothing but a simple off-the-peg cotton jersey dress, but it did wonderful things for her figure, hugging the curving shape of her body from neck to hip to just above the curve of her slender knees, leaving little work left to the imagination. And long, slender legs he knew from experience did not stop until they reached her waist brought her onwards towards him with an inbuilt sensual grace which put a smouldering glint in his hooded eyes.
Marnie saw the gleam as she made eye-to-eye contact with the darkly handsome and dangerously charismatic Guy Frabosa.
Sired by an Italian father to a French mother, brought up from the age of ten in England, then having spent most of his adult life frequenting most of the major countries in the world, Guy should have considered himself very cosmopolitan, yet he considered himself Italian to the very last drop of blood in his veins. And perhaps he was right to do so, since it was the Italian side of his breeding that burned through him like a warning beacon to any woman receptive to sheer male virility.
Of course, he, in his conceit, did pander to it, using the liquid smoothness of his Italian accent as one of his most effective weapons, refusing stubbornly to allow it to give way to his superb grasp of the English language, so the ‘r’s rolled off his tongue like purrs, sexy enough to make any woman quiver.
He was tall, powerfully built yet surprisingly lithe with it. A figure to hang fine clothes on, good quality hand-made clothes with a cut to suit the man—exclusive. His Latin black hair had given way to silver at the temples but that only added to his attraction rather than diminished it. For a thirty-nine-year-old man who had lived every single one of those years to its fullest potential, Guy still packed a fair punch in the solar plexus. He was one of those lucky men who improved with the years—like fine wine, he matured instead of ageing. Eyes of a dark, dark brown were generally lazily sensual, but could, if he wanted them to, harden to cold black pebbles which could freeze out the most tenacious foe. His nose was long and thin—not slim, thin, with a tendency to flare at the nostrils. Arrogant, and, like the rock-hard set of his chin, a direct warning to the ruthless streak in his character. Whereas his mouth by contrast was truly sensual, a very expressive tool he used to convey his moods, thin and tight when angry, sardonically twisted when mildly amused, a wide and attractive frame to perfect white teeth when touched into full-blown laughter, and soft, full and passionate when sexually aroused.
Then there was that other mouth, the one he saved for Marnie alone. The one he was wearing right at this moment as he watched her approach him through the mill of commuter bodies.
It was the half-soft, half-twisted, half-smiling mouth that said he didn’t really know how to feel about her, and really never had.
That, Marnie thought as she carefully doused down her own inevitable response to this first glimpse of him—that deep and all-consuming inner recognition of her body’s perfect master—was and always had been her most powerful weapon over Guy: his inability to decide just where she fitted into his life. He had once thought he’d done it, fitted her neatly into the box marked ‘wife’, of the forbearing and dutiful kind. Blindly besotted, safely caught and netted—only to find out, when he tried testing the springs of his trap, that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
She reached him, waited calmly for his dark eyes to make their slow and lazy climb of her body from soft purple suede shoes to the scoop-necked top of her simple dress. Then they lifted to wryly take in the proud tilt to her chin, her mouth, heart-shaped and slightly mocking, along the straight line of her small nose until at last clashing with the full and striking blueness of her eyes.
The muscles around her stomach quivered. Standing this close to him, it was impossible not to respond to the raw beauty of Guy’s face.
‘Marnie,’ he murmured.
‘Hello, Guy,’ she quietly replied, smiling a little, because even though she hated him she loved him, if it was possible to feel the two emotions at the same time.
He knew it too, which put that look of rueful irony in his eyes as he took another step to close the gap between them. Guy was Italian enough to express a greeting with a kiss on both cheeks, and Marnie had long since given up trying to deter him. So she stood calmly waiting for the embrace with no thought of drawing back.
His hands lifted to gently curve the lightly padded bones at her shoulders, and he leaned forward, brushing his mouth across one softly perfumed cheek then the other. Then, just as she was about to take that vital step back so that she could smile at him with studied indifference, he outmanoeuvred her, holding her firmly in front of him, eyes flashing wickedly just before his mouth came to cover hers in a hot and hungry kiss which took no account of how public he was being, or how blithely he had overstepped the invisible line she had drawn between them four years ago.
It took several long, turbulent seconds for her to realise just what he was doing, but by then it was too late; shock had already sent her arching into the familiar hardness of his body, and her mouth—parting on a gasp of surprise—was suddenly consumed by the feel and taste of him, remembering, and she quivered, the sheer horror of what was happening sending her eyes wide to stare in mute protest into the flashing triumph in his. Then his dark lashes were lowering sensually over his eyes, and he was giving himself up to the sheer pleasure of the kiss, drawing her even closer to him, forcing her to acknowledge the damning evidence of her own response when her breasts swelled and hardened, aroused by the crushing pressure of his chest.
‘You have no idea how much I needed that,’ he murmured with heavy satisfaction when at last he allowed their mouths to separate.
She jerked angrily away from him, dazed by the unexpected onslaught, and dizzy with the sight and sound and smell of him. She was trembling all over, and guilty heat ran up her cheeks. Guy had not affected her like this for years.
OK, she reasoned with herself as she struggled to pull herself together. So the bitterness she used to feel towards him had slowly faded, but she had never expected this—this swamp of feeling to overtake her! She slid a shaking hand across her mouth in a useless attempt to wipe away the lingering throb of his kiss, glancing up at him through her lashes with dark, angry eyes. ‘God, Guy,’ she whispered huskily. ‘Sometimes you behave like a—’
‘I do hope, cara,’ he interrupted lazily, ‘that you are not about to deny your own response to that kiss.’ He quirked an eyebrow at her, daring her with the taunting mockery in his gaze to do just that. ‘Nor mine to you,’ he added silkily. ‘For, while you bow your head in that oh, so demure way and make believe you are too fastidious to enjoy a kiss from me, you are also glaring in the general direction where your own twin proofs still peak in recognition of their master... You really should wear more concealing undergarments, Marnie, my love, if you do not wish to be so—exposed, as they say.’
‘God, I hate you!’
‘I know,’ he drawled, unrepentant.
‘Does it give you some kind of perverted kick to embarrass me this way?’
‘Oh, it gives me all kinds of kicks to see you knocked off balance now and then.’ The