Scarlet Lady (3 page)

Her long neck arched as she gracefully raised her arms and rested them lightly on his shoulders, which relaxed an inch, and she realised he'd been tensing, waiting for her decision. Hug me, she pleaded with her eyes.

But his arms remained at his sides, his fists clenched in anger. 'Do it. For me.'

Ginny's heart fluttered at the stark request. Knowing Leo as she did, it was obvious that he was too proud to beg. All he could do was issue orders. It made her soften with loving empathy, because he couldn't let go and neither could she. However much they had loved one another, there had always been a thin barrier between them, built by their childhood years of repression. And neither of them had ever dared to let their feelings fly.

But he had to understand what her life would be like without a career. 'Modelling is all I've ever known,' she whispered. The alternative horrified her, made her sick to the stomach, which was churning even now at the thought of abandoning her individuality and dedicating herself to the Brandon family's needs and expectations.

'I ask you again. Will you stop? It's killing you, Ginny,' he said gravely. 'I married a woman with more flesh on her bones. A woman who had time to dance in the moonlight on the daisy lawn.'

It had been the night of their engagement. She remembered that occasion with a deep ache in her heart. 'Oh, Leo!' she breathed helplessly. 'It can be like that again—' She stopped, overwhelmed, tears forming in her soft eyes.

At last, he reached for her. His arms came around her and she sank weakly against his beautiful body with a groan of relief. The magic was still there, she thought, resting her head on his shoulder, her mouth nuzzling his throat above the soft collar of his casual blue shirt.

'Can it, I wonder?' he murmured against her scalp.

The warmth of his words washed over her silky white- blonde hair and sent shivers down her back. The sensuality between them burned into her, tightening the skin on her body and melding them together. It had been so long. Months. Suddenly she needed him, needed the hard, physical release of sex.

'I know it can,' she whispered, kissing his throat. And she pressed her palm against his heart, giving a shudder of delight when she found that its beat was bumping erratically against her hand.

'When I married you,' he growled, breathing harshly into her ear, 'you were full of hopes for the future. Don't deny that we planned children—'

'That was before your family told me what obligations there were for the heir of Castlestowe! And...' She stifled a whimper of hunger. Leo's hand was slipping slowly down her slender back towards her hip. 'I—I didn't know my career would take off so ferociously!' she mumbled, trying to concentrate on her explanation. 'I had no idea I'd be jetting around the world.

'I feel tired of it all now,' she admitted. He didn't know what she'd been through. Perhaps if she told him... 'Shortly before the trial,' she said, lifting her heart- shaped face up to his, 'I did sixteen shows in six days—'

'You didn't have to.' He wasn't looking at her. His eyes were hooded again but she thought that they were fixed on her cleavage, visible above the V of her jacket. The cleavage was almost her signature. Unusual in a top model, she had breasts. And the designers always provided her with clothes that featured them.

Leo had loved that once. He'd feasted his eyes on her photographs and reached for her with a possessive triumph because she was there, beside him, and she was his wife. Who belonged to nobody but him. A shiver ran through her body when she remembered how he'd growled one night after making love to her, 'I'll kill any man who takes you from me!'

She watched him lick his lips and warmth flooded her loins. A feeling of devastating relief came with it because they would, could,
must
make up—now, before the dreaded tea with Arabella.

'If I'd pulled out of the shows, I would have gone mad, just sitting at home and thinking of the trial while you were up at Castlestowe,' she said in a low and husky voice. 'And everyone would have thought I was hiding because I was guilty and ashamed. I had to brazen it out, don't you see? OK, it wasn't easy. It half wrecked me. I had early make-up calls and fittings every one of those days. There were twenty-five TV crews backstage at Dior for starters. But...'

Leo's firm hands pushed her back a little. 'But?' he asked with a frown.

'It was exciting—is exciting,' she admitted. 'My adrenaline runs when I'm working. Besides, I don't have a choice any more. I have to work if I'm to pay the legal costs. Being a wife and mother is a vocation,' she said gently. 'I want children, yes, but... not if it means living in remote Scotland with no neighbours for miles and miles. That's what you want, isn't it? Maybe when I'm older and I'm ready to settle down—'

'I feel so angry, Ginny.'

They were both breathing in a heavy rhythm. Her breasts rose and fell against his hard, lean chest. Grim- faced, he detached one hand and slid it between them, undoing the lowest pearl button.

Maybe this is the way, she thought hazily. They'd get close, be united again. Another button slid free. Control was slipping from her grasp. The need and the hunger for Leo—to share his body, to be comforted by its closeness—was overriding everything else.

'Give me a little time to earn the money for the costs,' she croaked as his hand brushed her naked skin beneath the jacket. Desire filled his face. Desire for her. With Leo, she could face anything. Debt, relentless, grinding hours of work, public shame—anything. 'I'll be less preoccupied from now on. It was only the terrible pressure of the trial that caused the problems between us," she said, not too convincingly. 'Now that's over—'

'You'll be working twice as hard to keep bankruptcy at bay.' Leo appeared to be engrossed in the tantalisingly slow process of working the last cluster of pearls through the buttonhole. The jacket swung free, exposing the swell of her breasts. Leo's lips parted and he whispered in a slow breath of anticipation. 'Beautiful. I'd forgotten how beautiful.'

'Leo!' she breathed, filled with joy.

He reached out with a questing finger to stroke each half-hidden curve. She threw her head back and moaned, suspended in delight. It was a long time since she'd been touched. Her appetite had been suppressed and now it seemed insatiable.

'Ginny!' he muttered, his voice shaking with a barely controlled passion. It might have been anger or desire or despair. She couldn't tell. And she didn't care. All she wanted was to be held in his arms.

S
LOWLY
Leo reached out to draw the jacket from her shoulders. He held its soft folds halfway down her arms so that it acted like a strait-jacket. His avid eyes devoured her high, trembling breasts and suddenly she flinched, distressed by the mixture of anger and lust in the way he studied her.

'Love me,' Ginny begged.

'You want me to be your slave, like the others,' he said brutally.

'No! Don't do this to me, please, Leo—'

He let the jacket slip to the ground. She made to cover her nakedness with her hands, too stunned to think of running away. And there was something compelling about the way he looked at her, something that caught in her guts and twisted and speared her with an undeniable need. Her lashes lifted and she begged him for love with her huge tawny eyes.

'You want pity?' he muttered. 'Or are you acting as I've seen you act before, putting on a wistful face to dazzle your public? Hiding your real feelings...'

'No,' she whispered, shaking her head. It was heavy. Her whole body felt lethargic and languid. But he wanted sex, and anger drove him, not affection. 'You know I find it hard to let go, that it takes me a while before...'

She gasped. His arm had drawn her to him. Deliberately he moved her body against his, lightly, tantalisingly, with the finesse of a master with years of experience. The softness of his shirt brushed her nipples and he groaned, giving them a delicate squeeze between his finger and thumb. Just enough to sharpen her hunger, to send needles of desire bursting into each breast. She heard herself moan, felt her pelvis contract and hated herself for being so easily controlled.

'What are you?' murmured Leo. 'Who are you? Witch or angel? A false, heartless woman with an ego larger than Napoleon's, or perhaps—'

'I'm no angel. But I'm innocent,' she protested, reeling under the torment of his fingers. Her breasts felt tight and hot, the flesh glowing for him. Beneath her frantic hands, his shirt moved over his satin skin and she had to force herself not to rip the buttons open and lay her mouth on his breast. Now she had to keep her head and defend herself all over again. To her husband. Or lose him for ever.

Taking a deep breath, she said jerkily, 'I—I warned you when we married that the media would tell 1-lies about me and...'

She lost the thread of her sentence. Her head turned from side to side in pleasure as Leo forced his thigh between her long, silk-clad legs and she couldn't resist making a small, squirming movement because it might help to hold her need till she'd explained. And then, she thought hazily, they could make love freely, without hate and suspicion.

'Oh, Leo!' she whispered, knowing what he was going to do.

His hands were sliding down her hips. They reached the edge of her skirt and slowly, watching her, his velvety gaze flicking from her softly parted lips to her drowsy eyes, he wriggled it up till it was around her waist. Now there was only silk between her hot hunger and his linen- clad knee.

Leo's jaw tightened when he looked down at the length of her exposed legs. Black Lacroix stockings topped with" a deep band of Calais lace. Dove-grey satin briefs. 'Hell!' he growled thickly. 'How could any man not be tempted by you?'

'I—I freeze them off,' she rasped, incapable of breathing steadily.

'Irresistible,' he said, smouldering grey eyes and brutally tentative fingers hypnotised by the gap above her stocking-tops.

Her pelvis pushed forward a little in demand before she could stop the movement and he smiled in triumph. Ginny closed her eyes in despair because he still didn't believe that she had been faithful to him. His mouth brushed hers, making her tremble. His palms rotated on her nipples, warm, merciless, till they thrust in shameful dark peaks, elongating painfully, begging for the moistness of his mouth.

Panting, driven crazy, she abandoned all restraint and began to unpick his buttons, feverishly fumbling with them as if she were drunk. 'Make love to me,' she said urgently, lifting her beautiful, flawless face.

Leo's mouth hovered a millimetre above hers. 'You are the most desirable woman in the world,' he husked. 'Envied by millions, coveted by millions.' Something dark came into his expression. 'However, for the time being,' he whispered into her parted lips, their breath mingling, 'you can consider yourself exclusively mine.'

She wanted to be exclusively his for hours. Leo prided himself on long, sensual lovemaking sessions. Unconsciously, she gave a luxurious stretch of her body. 'Yes,' she moaned. 'Yes, please, Leo.'

'I've wanted to make love to you since the moment you walked in. I'm more than ready.' He took her hand and placed it on his groin. She groaned to feel him so hard, to feel the leap of heat against her trembling fingers.

'Leo,' she whispered. 'Make love to me properly. Long and slow. As you used to. Please, darling. Please.'

Desperate to persuade him, she stood on tiptoe and slid her hands to his head, pressing it down and kissing him with all her heart and soul. With a wriggle of her hips, she gyrated on the thigh that was thrust between her legs and moved her breasts across his chest—partly to assuage her own demands and partly to entice him to indulge in hours of pleasure with her.

'Witch!' he growled throatily. His hands ran down her body possessively. 'I don't know whether to hate you or despise you or—'

'Love me,' she whispered, twining her fingers in his hair. 'Please, Leo. Love me.'

With a muttered groan that came from deep inside him, he bore her down to the polished wood floor as if he could no longer bear to hold back, stretching her arms over her head and covering her with his hard body. She felt his mouth on hers, fierce and uncompromising, angry, perhaps, because he wanted her so badly when he thought that she was worthless as a wife. And at the back of her mind she prayed that their lovemaking
would
bring them close, that the anger would subside and they could start to unravel the tangled threads of their unstitched marriage.

The onslaught of his mouth, teeth, tongue and hands and her frantic attempts to ease her despair with physical energy alone caused them to tumble and roll across the floor, her back sliding on the slippery wood, and Ginny became swamped in a whirl of sensation—the feel of silkwood and the smell of polish on her naked back, the pressure of Leo's muscular arms around her and the wonderful sweetness of his mouth, tugging gently at her breast.

Lost in deep passion and an uncontrollable hunger, grabbing, clutching, kissing, they slid into a table. Something crashed to the floor—a lamp, an ornament; she wasn't sure what—but Leo ignored everything, intent on possessing her, sweetly caressing every inch of her body as if to drive away any memory she might have of other men.

Equally driven, she gave up trying to undo his buttons and pulled the edges of his shirt with both hands, burying her face in his chest. She wanted him naked, to feel his body against hers, because only then would she dare to believe that they could shut out the threat from all outsiders and prove to one another that they were still in love.

He was as helpless, as frantic as she. Finally his naked body met hers and she let out a long, loud groan of relief. At last he was inside her, stroking her with a fiercely restrained gentleness. Overjoyed, she forced her eyes to flutter open, her lush mouth smiling with pleasure. Ginny arched her body in demand. 'Love me.'

Her mouth teased his, urging it to soften into a sensual curve. And because she wanted him to desire her more than ever and to remember this moment for a long, long time she used all the arts she'd ever learnt from him, writhing sinuously, clutching his buttocks and thus increasing his unbearably slow and deliberate thrust.