A Little Revenge Omnibus (22 page)

Happily Anna snuggled even closer. She wasn’t quite asleep and the temptation to press a soft, delicate kiss against the muzzy warmth of his chest proved irresistible, and so too did the temptation to stroke her fingers through the soft mat of body hair tangled there.

‘Just like a teddy bear,’ she marvelled softly under her breath, and then frowned. The words held a familiar echo, a vague ethereal recollection, but the harder she tried to grasp it, the fainter it became. Her agitation had woken Ward, though; she could feel his fingers tensing on her upper arm.

‘Oh, Ward, you feel so good,’ she whispered happily to him. ‘Kiss me,’ she begged him huskily.

Abruptly Ward became fully awake. What on earth was Anna doing in bed with him?

‘Anna...’ he began, but Anna had grown impatient of waiting for him to obey her command and she was already pressing her soft mouth against his, her lips warm and tender, clinging to his as her tonguetip traced their shape.

‘Oh, Ward, I can’t believe this is real,’ she told him ecstatically. ‘I’m just so lucky.’

He could feel her breasts pressing against his bare chest, her nipples provocatively hard. To his own horror Ward felt his hand lifting to cup one of them and caress it. Beneath her breath Anna gave a small, sucked-in sigh of pleasure and Ward felt her body start to arch against his own. Shockingly she was as naked as he was himself, her only covering the soft, silky triangle of body hair which right now was pressed tormentingly against his body. She was still kissing him, holding his face in her hands to keep him still as she pressed eager little kisses against his mouth.

Oh, God, he wasn’t going to be able to stand much more of this; his body was already...

Ward gave an anguished groan as Anna, plainly aware of his arousal, moved her own body with simple directness to accommodate it.

That was it... It was no good, no use trying to pretend that he didn’t want her, no use either trying to control that wanting when she was doing everything she could to encourage it. Ward almost cried out aloud as he felt her lift her hips so that she could press herself even more closely against him.

‘Ward...’ she whispered against his mouth.

Helplessly Ward felt himself succumb.

She felt too tiny, too fragile, to roll underneath him. He was afraid he might hurt her, so instead he moved the other way, lifting her with him so that she was lying on top of his body, their mouths still locked eagerly together.

Unable to stop himself, Ward ran his hands down the length of her body, cupping the delicious mounds of her buttocks, pressing her even deeper into his own flesh.

Anna moved wildly against him.

This was heaven, wonderful, unbelievable; her whole body was sighing with pleasure and love. Ward’s hands swept round the front of her body and cupped her breasts.

They felt so heavy, taut with their need to be kissed and caressed. Almost as though he knew how she felt Ward urged her towards him, licking the swollen areolae that surrounded them, first one and then the other until Anna was wild with pleasure, trembling from head to foot, lost in the ecstasy of what she was feeling.

‘Oh, yes, Ward, do that...do that,’ she encouraged him throatily as he started to kiss each nipple, the sensation radiating through her body like nothing she could ever remember experiencing, but of course she must have experienced it before.

He could feel her stomach muscles tensing, locking, her pelvis lifting, and a sensation that came from lower, deeper within it, starting to grow and pulse out a rhythm that she instinctively began to respond to, her whole body moving against Ward’s in time to it.

Ward knew he had totally lost control. There he was, forty-two years old, and for the first time in his life he knew what it was to experience total abandonment and compelling, urgent desire. He wanted to possess Anna, absorb her completely into himself, devour her. Lost in the sensation that suckling on her nipples was giving him, he heard her cry out as his teeth accidentally grated against her sensitive flesh. Cursing himself, he stopped immediately, but as he started to release her Anna held him where he was.

‘No. Don’t stop,’ she told him passionately. When Ward looked into them her eyes weren’t grey any more but blue—the richest, hottest blue he had ever seen in his life. He groaned and reached out for her, cupping her face and drawing her down against him so that he could kiss her mouth.

Whilst he was doing so Anna moved eagerly against him and did what she had been aching to do ever since she had looked down the hospital ward and seen him walking towards her. As he felt her gentle fingers taking hold of him Ward closed his eyes. A small sob of sharp pleasure clogged his throat. He knew he should draw away, stop her, but he also knew that there was no way he was going to. There was something so unbearably erotic about having her guide his body into her own, something so heart-rockingly sweet about the absorbed expression on her face as she did so that his will-power just melted. She felt so good—hot, wet, her flesh surrounding his.

Anna gave a small moan of exquisite pleasure. It felt so good having Ward inside her. She moved experimentally against him and then caught her breath as he responded to her tentative movement. Wide-eyed, she focused on him, watching as he reached out and took hold of her, his hands just below her waist. Now it was his turn to take control, to set the pace of their lovemaking, to move her to the rhythm of his desire, and Anna couldn’t believe how much she loved him doing so, how much she revelled in the fiercely sweet pangs of pleasure she could feel with each movement of his body inside her. Slow at first, slow and careful, and then harder and deeper and then deeper still, until...

‘Ward. Ward...’ Anna sobbed his name as she reached her climax and felt the release of Ward’s body within hers, the hot, powerful surge of it leaving her dizzy with feminine smugness and satisfaction. Exhausted, she leaned her head on his chest and closed her eyes in mute happiness as she felt his arms close around her.

* * *

W
HAT
ON
EARTH
had he done? Ward berated himself furiously as he automatically responded to Anna’s unexpressed need and drew her down against him, holding her in his arms. What had happened to his will-power, his self-control, that same self-control that had enabled him, with very little prior difficulty, to refuse to give in to the temptation of satisfying his sexuality? He had lost count of the number of times in the past he had turned away from the opportunity to have a brief fling or even begin a new relationship. The scars left by his marriage had disillusioned him too much for him to want to risk a second failure. His pride and his idealistic moral code meant that he had never been tempted to indulge in sex for its own sake...

And yet here he was, his body relaxed and at peace, still washed by the soft echoes of the pleasure the woman sleeping beside him had given him. And, even worse, that pleasure had aroused the kind of emotional response in him that he knew to be ironically farcical. He actually felt protective of her, tender towards her; he actually wanted to hold her, to go on feeling the slender warmth of her body next to his own.

How could he, when he disliked and despised her, when everything he knew about her dictated that she was the last woman he could ever possibly love?

It was virtually impossible that her amnesia could have been faked, the nurse had told him, and she had obviously meant it, but Ward wasn’t suffering from amnesia and he knew perfectly well that alongside the animosity that had crackled between them the first time they had met there had also been a very dangerous surge of mutual physical attraction. He also suspected that it was that which had led to Anna believing that they already shared a relationship, a past—and a bed...

However, that still did not explain how the woman he knew as a fraud and a cheat could suddenly be metamorphosed into someone so tender, so giving, so open and loving that she had literally taken his breath away.

No one had ever said the things to him that she had said, shown him so openly that he was desired and loved.

Loved!

His heartbeat stilled, and then started up again with heavy, potent, leaden strokes.

His body tensed.

What on earth was he going to do?

CHAPTER FIVE

‘G
OOD
MORNING
.’

Ward struggled to sit up, pushing his hand through his hair as the events of the previous night came flooding back.

‘I’ve been awake for ages,’ Anna told him, sitting up too, her face alight with love and happiness as she reached over to kiss him.

Ward groaned as the duvet slipped down, revealing the soft globes of her breasts. His fingers itched to pull it up again and cover her nakedness but Anna seemed to have no such inhibitions, pressing herself lovingly against him in a way that was so totally devoid of any manufactured kind of provocation or deliberate intent that Ward was helpless to prevent his body’s response to her.

‘You should have woken me,’ Ward told her tersely, returning her kiss as perfunctorily as he could before saying, ‘I’ll go down and make us both some tea. How are you feeling, by the way?’ he asked her. What was it the consultant had said he had to watch out for? Headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, nausea...

‘Wonderful,’ Anna told him softly, making no attempt to hide the smile curling her mouth. ‘Totally, absolutely wonderful... Let’s leave the tea for a while,’ she added meaningfully, closing the distance he had put between them, her eyes suddenly shadowing a little as she confessed, ‘All this between us feels so new to me, Ward. I...I still can’t quite believe that it’s really...that I’ve been lucky enough to have met you. I know I must have told you all of this before, but after Ralph’s death I felt so, so afraid that I...I didn’t want to let anyone else into my life in case...in case...’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘The pain and shock of losing Ralph like that was...’ She frowned. ‘I felt so guilty as well. He was so young...alive one minute and then the next gone, and it seemed to me that it was safer not to let myself love anyone else ever again.

‘He’d only taken the boat out on an impulse. Normally I’d have gone with him, even though I never really liked sailing that much. You can’t grow up in Cornwall, though, and not know how to sail, or how important it is to respect the sea,’ she added in a shaky voice. ‘The coastguard said he must have been hit by a freak wave. He was an experienced sailor, cautious and not the sort of person who ever took any kind of risk.

‘We were going to have dinner with his parents that night. I waited and waited and...’

She stopped, unable to go on, and Ward frowned. He had known from his enquiries that she had been widowed young and by a sailing accident, but he had assumed that her husband’s death had been a result of some drunken revelry on the part of a group of young idiots. Now it seemed he had been wrong. The picture Anna had just painted for him was a very different one indeed, and there was no mistaking the emotion in her voice when she talked about her young husband.

‘I don’t know how I met you or why I changed my mind. I’ve always been so protective of my...my emotions...’ She gave him a small smile. ‘I can’t pretend that I don’t know exactly why, as a lover, you were able to turn over my decision to stay single...’

The dimples he had seen last night reappeared briefly as she made this rueful disclosure. ‘But what does puzzle me is how I ever came to let you get close enough to me for that to happen... I’ve never... How did we meet, Ward...?’

‘The consultant said we were to let your memory return naturally,’ Ward told her.

What she had just said to him had had a far more profound effect on him emotionally than he wanted to acknowledge—a very profound effect indeed.

‘You must have loved him—Ralph—a lot,’ he heard himself say gruffly. Well, better to keep her talking about her precious Ralph and the past than to run the risk of having her question him about their relationship again, and if he got out of bed as he had originally planned she would see, realise—

It shook him that he, a man who prided himself on his hard-headed pragmatism, should be so intensely and physically affected just because a woman smiled at him and said, ‘Wonderful.’

‘Well, yes, I did,’ Anna agreed, but she was frowning slightly. ‘It all seems so far away from me now and we were so very young. Our love for each other was... We grew up together and we’d always been a pair; people expected that we would marry. Our parents were friends and, whilst no one put any pressure on us to do so, and none of our parents would have wanted us to marry someone we didn’t love, there was a sense of it being the right thing to do.

‘Please don’t misunderstand,’ she begged him. ‘We were very happy together, very content, but there was no... It wasn’t like it is with you,’ she told him huskily, lifting her glance to his as she added, ‘But then I must have told you all of this before... What about you, though? Were you...have you been married?’

‘Yes, briefly,’ Ward told her tersely, ‘but my marriage wasn’t... It was a mistake for both of us.’

‘Do you still love her?’ Anna asked him hesitantly. Ward stared at her.

‘Still love her?’ He threw back his head and gave a bitter shout of laughter.

‘No, I do not. For a long time after the divorce I think I probably hated her but, eventually, that died. If she was greedy and self-seeking, concerned only with her own wants and desires, then it was my fault for not realising it before we got married, and if she didn’t like the fact that she was married to a workaholic who didn’t have time to go out clubbing or throw his money around, then that was hers. The truth is that we both married a person who didn’t exist. I accepted that she wasn’t the woman I’d thought a long time ago.’

‘You’ve forgiven her for her part in the break-up of your marriage,’ Anna guessed wisely, ‘but I don’t think you’ve ever quite forgiven yourself.’

Ward was astounded. Her simple, direct statement was so true and yet no one else had ever recognised how he had felt, how much he blamed himself for making the wrong marriage.

‘At least we didn’t have any children.’

‘You didn’t want them?’ Anna asked.

‘She didn’t want them,’ he told her quietly.

‘Ralph and I... We were so young and at first when he died I longed passionately to have a child, and sometimes even now...’

She gave a sad smile.

‘Of course, I have my god-daughter, Beth. She lives here in Rye.’ She paused. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, you’ll know all about her, of course.’

‘Mmm...’ Ward was deliberately non-committal but his brain was starting to work overtime.

If Anna had family here in town then surely it wouldn’t be very long before they made contact with her. Then what was he going to do?

‘I do hope that she and her friend Kelly will be able to continue making a success of their shop,’ Anna continued chattily. ‘Both of them have been spending quite a lot of time away on buying trips.

‘I’ve helped out at the shop occasionally but I haven’t been able to as often as I would have liked because of my other obligations.’

Her other obligations.

Ward’s pulse quickened. Did she mean her partnership with Julian Cox? How could he question her further without arousing her suspicions?

‘Mmm... I know you have a very busy life,’ he agreed.

Anna frowned.

‘Do I? I...’ Her face suddenly crumpled. ‘Oh, Ward, I don’t know...I can’t remember.’

He could hear the panic in her voice.

‘When Mr Bannerman questioned me he said the last positive memory I had which he could date was some months ago. It was the weekend before Easter and it was my turn to do Meals on Wheels. Beth had invited me over for dinner...’ She was beginning to look and sound increasingly distressed and Ward acted instinctively, reaching out towards her, intending only to calm and reassure her, but as she had done before Anna responded by wrapping her own arms around him.

Shivering a little, she begged, ‘Oh, Ward, hold me, please... I feel so muddled... My head... My thoughts...’

‘Then don’t think,’ Ward chided her.

‘Don’t think...’ Anna had started to relax a little bit. She turned her head so that she could look into his eyes, and whispered against his mouth, ‘Don’t think...? Then what shall I do instead?’

It was a totally unnecessary question because she was already doing it—kissing him with such sweet fervour that Ward felt the back of his throat sting with raw emotion. No one had ever treated him like this, touched him like this, either physically or emotionally.

‘Mmm...you taste nice,’ Anna told him.

‘So do you,’ Ward responded gruffly. He could feel her nipples harden as they pressed against his chest. His own body was already aroused and eager.

Closing his eyes, he gave in to the swift tug of desire that ran through him like molten heat, dissolving the steel barrier of his self-control.

This time he knew exactly how to touch her and how to arouse her. She murmured blissfully when he kissed the side of her neck, her eyes tightly closed as she lay in his arms and encouraged him with soft, sensual little whispers of praise and love.

When it was her turn to touch him she was a little more hesitant, a little bit shy.

‘I can’t remember just what you like,’ she told him uncertainly, her eyes grave and anxious.

‘I like whatever you like, whatever you want to do,’ Ward told her gently, and as he said the words he realised just how much he meant them.

‘You might have to...to show me,’ Anna warned him shyly, but they soon discovered he did not.

Anna seemed to know instinctively just where his body was most sensitive to her touch, and his throat arched tautly like a strong bow under the gentle assault of her open-mouthed kisses. His nipples turned into small, hard-tipped channels of pleasure that galvanised his whole body as she slowly kissed and then sucked on them. Now he knew just why she had trembled and arched so ecstatically against his hands when he had caressed her like that, but when she trailed her fingertips over the flat plane of his belly and bent her head to rim a fiery circle of pleasure around his navel Ward very quickly stopped her, his breath so tortured and hoarse that she looked anxiously at him.

‘Come here,’ he begged her rawly, exclaiming as he reached for her, ‘You’re a witch, do you know that? No one has ever made me feel like you do...made me want like you do...need like you do...’ He groaned as he positioned her beneath him, shuddering wildly as he saw how eagerly and generously her body moved to accommodate him. There was such a generosity about her, such a sensuality, coupled with such a lack of wantonness that Ward was totally bemused by her.

‘If I’m a witch, then you are definitely a magician,’ Anna told him breathlessly several seconds later as her body quickened frantically to the fierce pace of his. The sex she and Ralph had shared had been pleasant, nice, but it had been nothing like this...nothing whatsoever. She had heard, of course, read, realised, but she had not known...never felt...

Oh, how could she have forgotten this? How could it have ever slipped from her memory? She was sure she would think of it and of Ward as the very last breath of life slipped from her body.

Anna had no idea she had said the words aloud at the summit of her climax until afterwards, until after she had felt the fierce, hot spurt of Ward’s satisfaction spilling sensually into her body.

‘You are the most...’ Ward began as his lips gently grazed the length of her throat. He stopped and Anna looked at him, smiling through her emotional tears.

‘I still can’t quite believe we’ve got this, Ward,’ she told him shakily. ‘I still can’t quite believe that it’s real, that we’ve got each other. It just seems so wonderful, so magical...and I feel...’ She touched her fingertips to his lips, her smile deepening as he couldn’t resist catching hold of them and sucking slowly on them.

‘I feel so blessed,’ she finally told him sincerely. ‘So very, very blessed.’

Blessed, but once she knew the truth she would feel cursed, Ward acknowledged.

She touched his jaw with her free hand.

‘Mmm...you need a shave,’ she commented.

Ward knew she was right; he could already see the slight rash his overnight stubble had caused on the fair skin of her breast.

‘Er...yes...’ Suddenly he was totally alert. ‘I...I left my stuff in my car. I’ll have to go and get it and whilst I’m up I may as well go and get a paper as well.’

‘Oh, but I thought you said you’d brought your things in last night,’ Anna objected.

‘Er...yes, I did...but not my razor...’

‘Oh, well, if you are going out for a paper, why don’t I come with you and—?’

‘No! No...’ That was the last thing Ward wanted. Getting a paper had simply been an excuse to allow him to drive over to the hotel, pay his bill and collect his things.

‘No. The consultant said you had to rest,’ he reminded Anna more gently. ‘I’ll get the paper and then we’ll have something to eat and...’

‘What day is it?’ Anna asked him, suddenly anxious.

‘Sunday,’ Ward told her promptly, glad to have her ask a question he could answer honestly.

‘Oh, so you don’t need to be at work. What is your job, Ward?’

‘I don’t have one,’ he told her. ‘At least, I sold out my business interests some time ago, and now I’ve got some consultancy work to do from time to time and my investments...’

‘Investments.’ Anna started to frown, her forehead crinkling. ‘Oh, that rings a bell. I...’

Whilst Ward held his breath she shook her head regretfully.

‘No, it’s gone...gone... Is that how we met?’ she asked him curiously. ‘Did you come to advise me on my investments?’

Ward just about managed to conceal his reaction. He advised her on investments!

‘I’m not telling you anything,’ he responded. ‘Remember...’

‘I know... The consultant said it would all come back naturally,’ Anna agreed with a sigh. ‘You go and get your paper, then. Oh, and would you bring one for me?’

Bring one for her? Which one? Naturally he was supposed to know which paper she would read.

Whoever had made that comment about deceit and tangled webs had certainly known exactly what they were talking about, Ward decided grimly as he got out of bed.