“You’re a cool one,” Dominic said.

“Walking back into my life…crawling into my bed just as though the last five years have never happened.”

Annie felt as though a huge weight was crushing down inside her.

“Please,” she croaked. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you think I understood when you walked out on me…on our marriage?”

Their marriage…!

“We can’t be married,” she whispered painfully. “I don’t know you….”

“Now I have heard everything. Tell me, Annie, do you make a habit of going to bed with men you don’t know? Is that another part of your personality I never knew existed? Just like your propensity for disappearing without explanation?”

Twice now he had mentioned her walking out on him…disappearing. What kind of relationship must they have had for her to do that?

“I can’t stay here. I have to go,” she began unsteadily.

“No way! Not until you’ve told me why you did it, Annie. Why you walked out on me.”

Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

About the Author

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Back in the Marriage Bed
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

ANNIE paused halfway up the stairs of her pretty Victorian cottage, a softly tantalising smile curling her mouth in secret appreciation, a dreamy, distant look hazing the normal clarity of her widely spaced intelligent grey eyes. She had had the dream again last night, the one that featured ‘him’. And this time, last night, he had been even more deliciously real than ever before. So real, in fact…

As her cheeks pinkened betrayingly and her eyelashes modestly swept down to conceal the expression her eyes might inadvertently betray, Annie could feel the sharp thrill of remembered pleasure running hotly through her body. Last night when he had held her, touched her…A fierce shiver openly tensed her body and a little guiltily she hurried the rest of the way upstairs.

She only had an hour to get ready before leaving to collect Helena and her husband. The three of them were going out for a special celebratory meal, and by rights it was that she ought to be thinking about, not some impossibly wonderful and totally unreal man she had created out of her own imagination, her own dreams…her own need…

Her frown deepened a little. For a woman of twenty-three without a man in her life, without a lover in her life, the sheer intensity of the sensuality of the periodic dreams she had about the fantasy male she had mentally labelled her perfect lover, her soul mate and other half, were becoming increasingly explicit. A sign of her loveless, manless state, or an indication of the power of her imagination? Annie didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that since she had first started dreaming about him none of the real men she had met had had the power to compare with him, nor to touch her emotions.

She was looking forward to the evening ahead. Helena was not, after all, just her closest friend and a substitute mother figure to her; she was also the woman, the surgeon, who was responsible for saving her life. No, Annie corrected herself quickly, what Helena was responsible for in many ways was giving her life, giving it back to her after others, less determined, less compassionate, less seeing, had said that…

Tensely Annie swallowed. Even now, nearly five years after the event, after the accident which had so nearly cost her her life, the mere thought of how close she had come to death had the power to strike an icy chill of terror right through her.

Perhaps illogically, the fact that she had no memory, either of the events leading up to the accident itself nor the weeks when she had been in a coma, made her fear of how easily she might not have survived all the more intense.

As she pushed at her bedroom door the slight awkwardness of her arm, which was the sole physical legacy she now had left of the accident, showed itself in the way she had to open it. Her arm had been so badly crushed, so badly damaged, that the senior registrar on duty when she had been rushed into the accident unit had been on the point of having her prepared for an amputation when Helena, who had only dropped in at the hospital to see another patient, had happened to walk through the unit and had been called over by him for a second opinion.

As the hospital’s senior microsurgeon Helena had immediately taken charge, deciding it might be possible to save Annie’s arm.

Her face had been the first one Annie had seen when she had first regained consciousness, but it hadn’t been for many, many weeks after that that she had learned, not from Helena herself but from one of the nurses, how lucky she was that Helena had chanced to be in the hospital when she had been brought in.

It had been Helena who had spent hour after hour at her bedside talking to her whilst she lay in a coma, dragging her with the strength of her will and her love back to the world of the living, and Annie knew that she would never, never cease to revere and love her for all that she had done.

‘You aren’t the only one who has gained,’ Helena often teased her gently. ‘You have no idea how much higher my professional stock has grown since it’s become publicly known that my personal surgical procedure saved your arm. Your arm is worth more than its weight in gold to me, Annie…’ And then her face would soften as she’d add, far more tenderly, ‘And you, my dear, are more special to me than I can find the words to say. The daughter I never thought I would have…’

Both of them had cried a little the first time Helena had made this loving claim, the moment and the words especially meaningful to them both. Helena, the highly qualified and skilled surgeon who had lost her own womb and her chances of motherhood at a very young age, and Annie, the girl who had been abandoned as a baby and then grown up in a children’s home, always treated well but never loved in that special one-to-one way she had so often yearned for.

Two years ago, when Helena had finally accepted the proposal of marriage from her long-term partner Bob Lever, Annie had been more pleased for both of them than she had been able to find the words to say.

Previously Helena had always refused to marry Bob, claiming that one day he might meet a woman who could give him the children she couldn’t and that when that day came she wanted him to feel free to go to her, and it had taken the combined efforts of both Annie and Bob to persuade her to think differently.

In the end it had been Annie’s gentle reminder that since Helena had unofficially adopted her as her ‘daughter’ she no longer had any reason for refusing Bob’s proposals.

‘Very well. I give in,’ Helena had laughed, waiting until they had finished toasting her acceptance of Bob’s proposal before adding, tongue in cheek to Annie, ‘Of course, you know what this means, don’t you? As your “mother”, and at my time of life, Annie, I shall soon be urging you to find yourself a mate and produce some grandchildren for me.’

It had been after that, and relaxed by the excellence of the Christmas dinner she and Helena had cooked together and the wine that had accompanied it, that Annie had been able to tell Helena the extraordinary intensity of the dreams she had been having.

‘When did they first start?’ Helena had questioned her, immediately very professional.

‘I’m not sure…I think I must have been having them for a while before I actually knew I was,’ Annie had told her, shaking her head and laughing at her own confusing statement.

‘You see, when I did start to realise I was having them they seemed so familiar, as though he had been a part of my life for always…It was as though somehow…I…I knew him…’ She had stopped speaking to frown and shake her head as she tried to grapple for the right words to describe the extraordinary complexity of the feelings within her dreams, to convey to her friend the reality of the man who featured in them.

Now, though, as she headed for her wardrobe to remove the new dress she and Helena had bought especially for this occasion the previous month, she caught sight of her reflection and gave another small smile. She had been so lucky that her face hadn’t been damaged at all in the accident. Small and heart-shaped, it still looked pretty much as it did in the few photographs she had of her childhood. Her hair was still the same blonde colour—an inheritance from her unknown parent, along with the elegance of her bone structure. Maturity, and the much stronger sense of self she had developed, meant that she no longer agonised over who and what her parents had been. It was enough that they had given the most precious gift there was—the gift of life itself.

All she knew of the accident was what she had been told, what had been said during the court case, which had resulted in the driver who had knocked her down on the pedestrian crossing she had been halfway over being convicted of dangerous driving and his insurance company being compelled to make a very large payment to her indeed.

Annie knew there were those who thought enviously that a weakened right arm and being out of action for almost a year were only minor inconveniences to have to put up with. Certainly the driver’s insurance company’s legal team had thought so, and Annie was the first to agree that because of the accident she had gained enormously—not because of the insurance company pay-out but because it had brought Helena and Bob into her life.

As the lawyers for the insurance company had been quick to point out, her injuries had not prevented her from going on to complete the degree course she had been just about to start when the accident happened, nor had it precluded her from obtaining a job. Indeed, for many people, the fact that she was only able to work part-time at the moment, job-sharing with another girl, would be a plus point and not a minus one.

Oh, yes, the lawyers for the defence had been very, very persuasive, but the evidence had been damning. There had been five witnesses who had each seen the way the car had been driven across the pedestrian crossing and straight into Annie. The driver had been drinking—a stress-related problem which he now had under control, according to his defence.

Annie sighed. There had even been a tearful appearance by his wife, who’d said that without her husband’s income, without his ability to earn a living, if he lost his licence for too long a period, the lives of her and her three small children would be made very hard indeed.

Annie’s tender heart had ached for them, and still often did, but, as Helena had told her robustly, she was not the one who was responsible for their plight.

Even so, she was glad that the driver of the car had been from out of town and that there was no chance that she was likely to bump into him locally—or his family.

It seemed odd to her now to think that she had not lived the whole of her life here in this small, sleepy cathedral city, with its history, its castle, its small university and its river—the river which had once, many, many years ago, been the major source of its wealth and position. Now, though, the boats that used the pretty marina were strictly pleasure craft; the merchant vessels which had once brought their exotic wares to the port belonged to another era altogether.

Annie couldn’t remember just why she had chosen to apply to Wryminster’s university for a place, nor when she had arrived in the city. She had clearly not had time to make any friends or to confide her dreams or ambitions to them. The accident had happened just before the week of the new term—her first week, her first term—and the only address the authorities had been able to find on Annie had been that of the children’s home where she had grown up.

According to what Helena had been able to find out she had been a quite clever child, and something of a loner. It had been Helena who had taken her home when at last the hospital had discharged her. Helena who had mothered her, cared for her, loved her. And Helena, too, who had encouraged her in her need to become properly independent, she and Bob helping Annie to find her perfect little home not too far from their own house.

As she slipped the new outfit she and Helena had bought together from its protective wrapper Annie expelled a small shaky breath. She had come so far to reach this day, had had to come so far…The outfit was a soft icy blue, a perfect foil for her skin tone and her eyes. She had fallen in love with it the minute she had seen it, although it had taken a lot of persuasion and coaxing from Helena before she had finally given in and bought it.

In soft fine wool crêpe the trousers showed off the slender length of her legs and the narrow delicacy of her hips whilst the almost full-length coat added a breathtakingly stylish elegance to the ensemble. Beneath the coat there was a pretty embroidered top to add a final touch of glamour.

‘I won’t get my money’s worth out of it,’ Annie had predicted, shaking her head as she’d paid for it. ‘I don’t go anywhere I can wear something so expensive.’

‘Well, perhaps you ought to start,’ Helena had smiled. ‘Sayad would do anything to get you to agree to a date.’

Sayad was a very, very dishy anaesthetist who had recently joined the hospital staff, and he had made a bee line for Annie the moment he had seen her.

‘He’s nice,’ she had responded, quickly shaking her head. ‘But…’

But not her dream man. Oh, no—nowhere even near her dream man. Where Sayad was merry and open-faced her dream lover was dark-browed and almost brooding; a man where Sayad was still in some ways, despite his age, part boy. Without knowing how she knew, she knew that her dream lover would have an air of authority and masterfulness, an aura of such strong maleness that Sayad could never in any way really compare with him.

Despite her reservations about the cost of her new outfit, she had given way in the end because tonight was a special celebration: her close friends Bob and Helena’s wedding anniversary and Bob’s birthday.

At Helena’s insistence, following the successful conclusion of the long drawn-out legal battle she had endured before winning substantial damages for her injury, she was taking a few months’ sabbatical from her job. Earlier in the week she had said her temporary goodbyes to her colleagues at the multinational petrochemical company, Petrofiche, whose head offices were situated in what had originally been a very large country house several miles outside the city, over a happy girlie lunch.

For this evening’s meal she had booked a table at the area’s most prestigious restaurant on the river, insisting that on this occasion she was going to treat Helena and Bob, and that she would pick them up in her newly acquired and rather swish Mercedes car.

The car had been a real step forward for Annie. She hadn’t been able to drive when she had had her accident, and for a long time afterwards she had remained terrified of even being near a car never mind driving one. But eventually she had forced herself to overcome her fears and she had successfully taken her test. The weakness in her arm meant that she felt much more comfortable driving an automatic car than a manual, and so, aided and abetted by Helena and Bob, she had finally given in and allowed herself the luxury of her new smart car.

It didn’t take her long to get ready; she preferred to use the minimum of make-up and, as Helena often told her enviously, she was lucky enough to have naturally good skin. If her mouth was a little too full for her own liking, well, she had learned how to tone down its sizzling second glance male appeal with pastel-toned lipsticks. Her hair, silky and straight, she always wore long and simply styled, setting off her delicate bone structure.

Once on, the new outfit looked even better than Annie had remembered. She had finally, this last year, with the court case at long last behind her, started to put on a little extra weight and it suited her.

Giving her bedroom a proud appraisal, she walked over to the door. Her small Victorian cottage, bought out of the award the court had given her, had been very run-down when she had found it, and she had lived surrounded by builders’ rubble and very often the builders themselves whilst it was being restored and renovated, determinedly refusing Helena and Bob’s pleas for her to move back in with them until the work was finished. She had wanted to be on the spot, to prove her maturity and her independence and, most of all, to prove to herself that she was capable of managing on her own.

The large double bed which dominated the room couldn’t help but catch her eye. Even now she wasn’t quite sure why she had bought it, why she had so instinctively and automatically picked it out of all the beds in the showroom, heading for it almost like someone on autopilot, or someone who was sleepwalking.

All she had known was that it was the bed she had to have.

‘Well, it will certainly suit the house,’ had been Helena’s comment when she had taken her to see it, and she had admired its reproduction Victorian styling.

In her dreams she and her dream lover were always in this bed, although in her dreams…Guiltily Annie reminded herself that she was going to be late picking up her friends if she didn’t make a move.

Her face slightly more pink than it had been, she headed downstairs.

‘Goodness, this place looks busy this evening,’ Helena commented as Annie carefully reversed her car into the single parking space left in the restaurant’s car park.

‘Yes, they did say when I originally booked the table that they were expecting a busy evening. Apparently Petrofiche are having a dinner for their new consultant marine biologist.’

‘Oh, yes, I heard they’d found someone to take Professor Salter’s place. They’ve headhunted him from one of the Gulf States, or so I’ve heard. He’s extremely highly qualified and relatively young—in his thirties. It seems he’s actually worked for Petrofiche in the past.’

‘Mmm…It’s odd to think of a marine biologist working for the petrochemical industry,’ Bob cut in.

Helena gave him a wifely smile and then exchanged a conspiratorial look with Annie as she teased him,

‘I suppose you think of marine biologists as people who make underwater films of sharks and coral reefs…’

‘No, of course I don’t,’ Bob denied, but his sheepish look gave him away.

‘These days all the large multi-nationals are keen to ensure that their customers see them as greener than green and very environmentally aware,’ Annie told them both. ‘And because of the effect any kind of oil seepage has on the world’s seas and oceans, and their life forms, for companies like Petrofiche it makes good sense to use the services of such experts.’

They were out of the car now and heading towards the restaurant. Originally a private house, it had been very successfully converted to an exclusive restaurant, complete with a conservatory area and a stunningly beautiful garden which ran down to the river. As they walked past the wrought-iron gates that led to the private garden they could see inside it, where skilful lighting illuminated several of the specimen trees as well as the courtyard area and its decorative statues.

The restaurant was owned and run by a husband and wife team in their late thirties, and as she recognised them Liz Rainford gave them a warm, welcoming smile.

‘I’ve kept you your favourite table,’ she whispered to them as she signalled to a waiter to take them through to the dining room.

Liz was on the committee of a local charity that Annie helped out, by volunteering for fund raising duties when she could, and Liz was aware of the history of Annie’s accident and her relationship with Helena and Bob.

‘I know tonight’s a special night for all of you.’ She smiled.

Their favourite table was one that was tucked quite discreetly in a corner by one of the windows, through which one could see down the length of the garden and beyond it to the river, and as their waiter settled them in their chairs and produced their menus with a theatrical flourish Annie gave a small sigh of pleasure.

Sometimes she felt almost as though she had been reborn on that morning five years ago when she had opened her eyes in her hospital bed to see Helena looking back at her. Although now she could remember her childhood and her teenage years, they were somehow in soft focus and slightly unreal, their edges blurred, so that occasionally it was hard for her to remember that those years, those memories, actually did belong to her.

It was the effect of the huge trauma her mind and body had experienced, Helena was quick to say, to comfort her when she worried about it; her mind’s way of protecting her.

The restaurant was full, with the doors to the conservatory closed to protect the privacy of the party from Petrofiche dining inside it. The girls in the office had been talking about the new consultant when Annie had been at work earlier in the week.

‘He’s got his own business and Petrofiche is just one of his clients,’ Beverley Smith, one of the senior personal assistants, had told them importantly. ‘He’ll only be coming in here a couple of days a week when he isn’t out in the field.’

‘Mmm…I wonder if he needs a PA. I certainly wouldn’t mind a couple of trips to the Barrier Reef,’ one of the other girls had remarked enviously.

‘The Barrier Reef!’ another had scoffed. ‘More like Alaska. That’s the current hot-spot for marine biologists.’

Annie had listened to their good-natured bantering with a small smile.

Although she was regularly invited out on dates by male members of the staff she never accepted. Helena had warned her gently that she was in danger of allowing her dream lover to blind her to the reality of real live potential mates, but Annie was quietly aware that there was more to her reluctance to accept dates than merely a romantic figment of her own idealistic dreams.

It was almost as though, in some way, something deep within her told her that it would be wrong for her to start seeing someone. Quite why she should think this she was at a loss to know, and, indeed, her feelings were so nebulous, so inexplicable, that she felt too foolish to even confide them to Helena. All she did know was that for some reason it was necessary for her to wait…but to wait for what? For whom? She had no idea. She just knew it was something she had to do!

CHAPTER TWO

‘OH, WE didn’t order champagne,’ Annie began as the waiter suddenly appeared with a bottle and three glasses, and then stopped as she saw the look of smiling complicity Helena and Bob were exchanging.

‘This was supposed to be my treat,’ she reproached them as the waiter filled their champagne flutes.

‘Yes, I know, but it is our celebration,’ Bob reminded her fondly.

Annie agreed quietly, her eyes large and dark with the emotional intensity of her thoughts, tears just beginning to film them as she turned to Helena and told her huskily, ‘If it hadn’t been for you…’ She stopped, unable to go on, and the three of them sat in silence as they each shared the others’ emotions.

It was Bob who broke the emotional intensity of the moment, picking up his glass and lifting it, announcing in a firm voice, ‘To you, Annie…’

‘Yes, my love. To you,’ Helena joined in the toast.

As she looked at Annie’s flushed face Helena marvelled at the recuperative powers of the human body and its capacity for endurance. Looking at Annie, it was hard to equate the healthy young woman she was now with the comatose, badly injured accident victim she had seen lying inert on the hospital trolley as she’d hurried through the Accident and Emergency unit.

Later, whilst they were waiting for their pudding course, Annie excused herself to the other two.

‘I’m just going to the loo,’ she announced, getting up and walking towards the cloakrooms in the foyer. She was just about to walk past the entrance to the conservatory when the door opened and a party of four men came out. Two of them Annie recognised as executives from the company she worked for, the third she didn’t know, and the fourth…

Her heart gave a stunned leap inside her chest wall, shock rooting her to the floor where she stood as she stared open-mouthed at the fourth member of the quartet in total disbelief.

It was him! He…The man…From her dreams…So exactly identical to him that she could only stand and stare in silent shock. Her dream lover come to life! But how could that be possible when he was only a figment of her own imagination, a creature she had conjured up within her own mind? No, it wasn’t possible. She must be imagining it…hallucinating…She had drunk too much champagne she decided dizzily.

Quickly she closed her eyes and counted to ten, and then she opened them. He was still there, and what was more he was looking at her. She felt as though her blood was quite literally draining from her veins, leaving her empty, her body cold and in danger. Panic filled her. She tried to move and couldn’t. She tried to speak but no sound emerged from her paralysed throat…A hideous, horrible sensation of fear invaded her. She wanted to move. She wanted to speak. But she couldn’t. With horrible certainty Annie knew that she was going to faint.

When she came round she was in Liz’s private quarters and Bob and Helena were hovering anxiously over her.

‘Darling, what is it…what happened?’ Helena was asking her worriedly as she chafed her hand. Helen’s fingers were on her pulse, Annie recognised shakily, and she could see the professional beginning to take over from the concerned friend. Determinedly she forced herself to sit up.

‘I’m all right,’ she insisted. ‘I just felt faint, that’s all,’ she whispered, still too much in shock to be able to tell Helena what had actually happened.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised to Liz as she ignored Helena’s protests and swung her feet to the floor, gritting her teeth against her giddiness as she made herself stand up. ‘I don’t really have much of a head for vintage champagne,’ she excused herself, giving the other woman a brief smile.

Of course there was no question of either Helena or Bob allowing her to drive home, nor of her being allowed to return home on her own. Instead she was put to bed in the bedroom which had been hers whilst she was recuperating, with Helena fussing round her and announcing that she felt it might be a good idea if she were to have a full check-up.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Annie insisted. ‘I just had a bit of a shock, that’s all.’

‘A shock? What kind of shock?’ Helena demanded anxiously.

‘I…I thought I saw someone I…’ Annie paused and shook her head, her mouth dry as she told her, ‘I must have made a mistake, imagined it. I know, because it just isn’t possible that…’

‘Who was it? Who did you think you saw, Annie?’ Helena probed.

‘It…it wasn’t anyone. It was…just…just a mistake,’ Annie repeated stubbornly, but as she reached for the cup of tea Bob had brought her she started to tremble so violently that she had to put it down again.

Covering her face with her hands she admitted shakily, ‘Oh, Helena…it was so…so surreal. I don’t…I saw him…the man…from my dreams…He was…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘I know that I can’t have done, that he just doesn’t exist, but…’

‘You’re getting yourself all worked up,’ Helena told her firmly. ‘I’ll give you something to help you relax and go to sleep, and then in the morning we can talk about it properly.’

As she lay back against the pillows Annie gave her a small weak smile. She knew that her friend was right, of course.

Several minutes later Helena, who had left the room, came back with a glass of water and two tablets for her to take. She watched with maternal tenderness as Annie dutifully swallowed them down.

‘I’m sorry if I spoiled your evening,’ she whispered drowsily to Helena as the tablets started to work.

Now that she was beginning to feel calmer she couldn’t understand why she had overreacted so foolishly, just because of some minor and no doubt imagined similarity between the man she had seen in the restaurant and her own fantasy lover. And anyway, now that she really thought about it, there was no way her dream lover would ever have looked at her the way the man in the restaurant had, with that look of implacable cold hostility in his dense, darkly blue eyes, that blanked-out look of icy contempt and banked-down anger.

Wearily Annie felt her eyes starting to close, and ten minutes later, when Helena quietly shut the bedroom door behind herself, Annie was deeply and completely asleep.

‘I suspect that the emotion of the evening and the memories it stirred up are the root cause of what happened,’ Helena announced to her husband Bob as she went back downstairs to join him.

‘Mmm…There’s no way the man she saw could be someone she knew, is there?’ Bob asked her curiously.

‘Well, it is a possibility I suppose,’ Helena agreed. ‘After all, as you know, there are still some missing pieces from her memory. She can remember arriving here in Wryminster, but she can’t remember when she arrived. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone who was involved with her to the extent they would have had to be involved with her to be responsible for dreams of the intensity of those that Annie has been having could ever be cold-hearted enough, uncaring enough, not to get in touch after the accident. After all, it was reported in the local papers.’

‘No, it does seem improbable,’ Bob agreed.

Upstairs in her sleep Annie started to smile, her body quivering with a mixture of nervousness and excitement.

‘God, but you feel so good…Will you let me look at you as well as hold you, little Annie? I want to so much…’

Annie tensed a little as the warm, knowing male hands began to gently undress her, nervous at first, her heart thumping anxiously, but then, as pleasure and excitement took over from her initial apprehension, her tension started to fade, her body beginning to relax as she started to respond to the soft verbal praise of her lover whilst he, oh, so slowly and carefully, laid her body bare to his gaze, peeling back the protective layers of her clothing, freeing her flesh to the warmth of his hands, their warmth, like their strength, a benediction as well as a nerve-thrilling wonderful new sensation.

He knew that this was her first real experience of a man’s love, her first time, and he had told her, reassured her, that the choice, the decision was to be hers, that he would, if she asked him to do so, stop and allow her to change her mind. But she didn’t want to change her mind, nor did she want him to stop. She wanted…

She gave a small gasp of delight as his touch set fire to her desires, igniting all the passion she had somehow known she was capable of feeling but which hitherto had been locked up inside her, hidden away in a secret place to which only he had the key.

She loved him so much…wanted him so much…What had been unthinkable with anyone else was not just ‘thinkable’ with him, but desirable…must-haveable…Her whole body shook with the force of what she was feeling…with her longing for him…her love for him. He only had to look at her and she melted.

Just the way he said her name was a form of poetry greater than even the greatest love sonnets. Just the way he looked at her more beautiful than any love song ever sung. The way he made her feel was so intense it was scary…He thrilled her, excited her, made her want to laugh and cry at the same time, filled her with such happiness that it made her feel afraid. He made her feel almost immortal, and yet, at the same time, he filled her with such a sense of her fragile vulnerability, her own frightening dependence on him and his love, that she was consumed with terror at the thought of losing him.

He stroked her breasts, watching her as she quivered in instant response, her eyes darkening, her lips parting.

‘Has anyone ever told you that you have the sexiest mouth in the whole world?’ he asked her softly, rimming it with his fingertip and smiling as she made an instinctive movement to catch hold of it.

‘Not like that,’ he whispered to her. ‘Like this…’ And then he slid his fingertip into her mouth, coaxing her to fasten her lips around it and slowly suck on it.

In her dream Annie moaned out loud in shocked delight, her body moving restlessly as it sought the intimacy of its lover’s embrace.

The evening sun slanted through the wide windows. Beyond them, if she opened her eyes, Annie knew she would see the purple haze of the distant hills, and if she stood close to them she could look down on the mellow wash of the river. Even at this distance she could hear its soft rhythmic whisper, almost feel the insidious pull of its tide, just as she could feel the urgent tug of the female tide within her own body. She drew a sharp breath as she felt the male hunger in the hands that caressed her.

‘Tell me now if you want me to stop,’ he was whispering huskily, insistently, to her. ‘Tell me now, Annie, otherwise it will be too late.’

But she knew she would say nothing, that she wanted him too much, loved him too much, even though the things he was doing to her, with her, were a world away from her own childish experience, limited to a few fumbled kisses.

‘I’m much, much too old for you,’ he had already told her, but somehow, instead of putting her off, his bold confession had only heightened and intensified her desire for him, imbuing him with a magical, almost mystical worldliness, a male knowledge and awareness that galvanised her body into excited little shivers.

And now it was nearly here, the moment of supreme revelation, the moment when…

Annie gave a sharp, piercing cry and she suddenly woke up, her body drenched in perspiration, her mind racing. As she sat up in her bed she covered her face with trembling hands.

Her dream had been so strong, so real, and the man in it, her dream lover, had been so—so scarily alive.

Shakily she tried to draw a calming breath of air into her lungs, and then she closed her eyes, reliving the moment when she had traced with her lips the shape of the tiny scar she had seen on her lover’s temple, the same scar in exactly the same spot that the man in the restaurant had had. How many times had she dreamed of that scar and not really known it?

She didn’t know. She only knew that a small fierce stillness had gripped him as she touched it. It was as familiar to her as her own reflection. But how could that be? What was happening to her? Was she experiencing some kind of sixth sense, some kind of special awareness, some kind of inexplicable glimpse into the future? Were they perhaps fated to meet, and was this—these dreams—fate’s way of warning her of what was to come, of what was to be? Her whole body started to tremble.

She had been so very close to death, and, although she was extremely loath to acknowledge it, never mind discuss it openly, had experienced the sensation she had read avidly and secretly about that was reportedly so common to people who shared her near-death experience: that feeling of rushing towards a wonderful welcoming place, being propelled through darkness into an indescribable sense of awesome light, then that sudden awareness of being turned back, pulled back, that voice that was not actually a voice announcing that it was not yet her time.

Had that experience somehow or other, illogical and implausible though it might sound, given her the ability to sense, to feel, to experience a special, wonderful event in her life that had yet to take place?

Had the secret yearning she had carried all her life, to share it with someone who loved her, affected her to such an extent that she was already living in her dreams what she had yet to live in reality? Was her dream lover, in fact, not so much a figment of her imagination as a very factual and real figure from her future?

Impossible, implausible…Yes, maybe, but then there were many mysteries that defied logical explanation and analysis.

The fear she had felt earlier in the evening, the sense of shock and panic, had given way to an excitement that was almost euphoric. Her dream lover wasn’t just a dream. He was real. He was…Ecstatically Annie closed her eyes, hugging her thoughts, her love, to her heart just as tightly as she yearned for him to hug and hold her.

It was a long time before she finally got back to sleep, and when she did finally succumb her exalted state had convinced her that the evening’s meeting with the real-life physical embodiment of her dream man had been an act of fate for which her dreams had been preparing her.

‘Annie, how are you feeling this morning, my love?’

A little groggily Annie focused on Helena as she walked into the bedroom carrying a fragrant mug of coffee.

‘I’m not sure,’ Annie admitted. ‘Those pills you gave me really knocked me out.

‘Helena,’ she demanded, her voice changing as she sat up in her bed and looked at her friend and mentor with fixed determination. ‘Helena, do you believe in…fate?’ she asked solemnly.

‘I’m not sure just what you mean,’ Helena responded cautiously.

‘The man—the one I saw in the restaurant last night,’ Annie told her in a low voice. ‘At first I thought I must be imagining it, that he couldn’t possibly be the same man I’ve been dreaming about…But then, last night, I dreamed about him again, and I knew…’

She took a deep breath and told Helena huskily, ‘I think that we must have been destined to meet somehow, Helena, and that he and I…’ She paused and shook her head, responding to her friend’s silence with a wry, ‘Oh, I know how far-fetched this must sound, but what other explanation can there be? I don’t pretend to know why I should have dreamed about him or why I should feel as though I already know him. I just do. Please don’t tell me that you think I’m being silly,’ she pleaded.

‘I won’t,’ Helena promised her quietly, pausing to sit on the bed and stroke the soft tumbled hair back off Annie’s face with one hand as she placed the mug of coffee on the bedside table with the other.

Annie was so very dear to her, very precious, so much the daughter, the child she herself had never had, but she was also, in Helena’s opinion, a very vulnerable young woman. The gravity of her accident and her injuries had meant that the energy that other young women of her age would naturally give to the process of maturing had in Annie’s case had to be given to her physical recovery, recuperating her health.

It wasn’t that Annie in any way lacked intelligence—far from it. She had obtained her degree and she had a concern for the world and the people in it which made her, in many ways, older and wiser than her peers. But it was a fact that because of the length of time she had spent recovering from the accident Annie had not had the opportunity to mature as a woman, to experiment sexually, to make mistakes, errors of judgement, to indulge in all the youthful follies that people normally did on their journey through the turbulent years that led from one’s late teens to one’s mid-twenties.

Now it seemed that she preferred the fantasy of her dream lover rather than dating a real live man, that she was stubbornly determined to believe in fate rather than reality.

‘You do think I’m being silly, don’t you?’ Annie accused Helena flatly as she saw the hesitation in her friend’s eyes.

‘Not silly,’ Helena corrected quietly. ‘But perhaps…’ She stopped speaking, and then smiled ruefully at Annie before asking her gently, ‘Has it occurred to you that this man may have been so familiar to you simply because he is familiar?’

‘From my dreams, you mean?’ Annie checked, nonplussed.

‘No. Not from your dreams,’ Helena stopped, and then said quietly, ‘Annie, he may have been familiar to you because you do actually know him.’

‘Know him?’ Annie looked perplexed. ‘No, that’s impossible.’

Helena waited before reminding her softly, ‘There are still some gaps in your memory, my dear. The weeks leading up to the accident as well as the event itself, and those weeks after, when you were in a coma.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Annie’s forehead creased in a small frown of distress. ‘But I couldn’t have known him…not the way I feel about him…the way we are…If I had he would have…’ She stopped, shaking her head. ‘No. It isn’t possible,’ she told Helena immediately and positively. ‘I would have known if he…If I…If we…No,’ she reaffirmed.

‘Well, I must admit it does seem unlikely,’ Helena acknowledged slowly. ‘But I felt I ought to mention the possibility to you.’

‘I understand,’ Annie assured her, giving her a warm hug. ‘But if he had known me he would have come forward when you advertised, wouldn’t he? And besides…’ A small secret smile curled her mouth, her eyes suddenly glowing with private happiness. ‘I know that if he…if we…’ She stopped and shook her head again. ‘No. I would have known,’ she told Helena calmly. ‘I’m sorry I gave you such a shock by fainting like that last night,’ she added more prosaically. ‘I think it must have been the effect of seeing him so unexpectedly on top of the champagne.’

‘Well, it was a very emotional evening,’ Helena responded.

‘You’ve been so good to me,’ Annie told her, lovingly reaching out to cover the older woman’s hands with her own.

‘Everything I’ve given to you you’ve given me back a thousandfold, Annie,’ Helena told her lovingly. ‘And you are going to give Bob and me our grandchildren,’ Helena teased her, deliberately lightening the atmosphere before giving a small exclamation. ‘Heavens! Bob! I promised I’d help him with our packing for this conference we’re flying out to attend tomorrow. Never mind,’ she added with a naughty grin. ‘He’s so much better at it than I am!’

Annie laughed. ‘Four days in Rio de Janeiro…How wonderful.’

‘Not as wonderful as you’d think,’ Helena countered ruefully. ‘The conference goes on for three days, and when you’ve taken time out for recovering from jet lag and for being dragged all over the place by Bob to see the local ruins…’

‘Stop complaining,’ Annie teased. ‘You know you love it. When the three of us went to Rome last year I was the one who had to go back to the hotel for a rest!’

‘Yes, that was wonderful, wasn’t it?’ Helena agreed, getting up off the bed as she told Annie tenderly, ‘Don’t rush to get up. You might feel fine but your body’s still in shock.’

‘It was just a faint, Helena, that’s all,’ Annie assured her friend, but she wasn’t totally surprised when, later in the day, Helena insisted on driving her to the hospital so that she could be checked over.

‘Mothers!’ the junior house doctor wisecracked after he had given Annie the all-clear. ‘They do love to fuss.’

‘Don’t they just?’ Annie said with a grin, then blushed a little at the admiring looks the young man was giving her.

CHAPTER THREE

‘NOW, you’re sure you’re feeling all right?’ Helena checked as Annie dropped her and Bob off at the airport.

‘I’m fine. Stop fussing,’ Annie told her with a good-natured smile as she hugged them both and kissed them goodbye. ‘And to prove it I’m going to go home and make a start on that gardening I’ve been threatening to do for months.’

The garden of her small house was long and narrow, and enclosed at the back by a high brick wall which ensured her privacy but gave the garden a rather closed-in feel.

For Christmas, amongst the other gifts they had given her, Bob and Helena had given her a gardening book with some wonderful ideas plus a very generous gift voucher for a local garden centre, and Annie, who had been studying the book intently, had now come up with her own design for the garden based on the principles in the book.

The first thing she needed, she had decided, was some pretty coloured trellising to place against the walls, and so, after she had watched Bob and Helena’s plane take off, she headed back to her car and drove towards the garden centre.

Several happy and productive hours later Annie climbed back into her car again. She had chosen and ordered her trellising, and made arrangements for it to be delivered, as well as getting from the man in charge of the fencing department the telephone number of someone who would come out and fix it in place for her.

As she started her car engine Annie was humming happily to herself. It was a bright sunny day, a brisk breeze sending fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky, and on impulse, instead of taking the direct route back to her own home, Annie opted instead to head towards the river.

The prettily wooded countryside on the outskirts of the town was criss-crossed with narrow country lanes, confusingly so at times—especially when one descended down through the trees and lost sight of the river, as she had just done, Annie recognised as she came to an unmarked fork in the road and paused, not quite sure which road to take.

Instinctively she wanted to take the right-hand fork, even though logic told her the left must lead down towards the river. With a small mental shrug Annie gave in to instinct and then wondered just what she had done as the road she had chosen narrowed virtually to a single track, winding up a sharp steep hillside banked with hedges so thick and high it was impossible for her to gauge just where she was. And yet even though she knew she had never driven up it before Annie felt that the road was somehow familiar.

She gave a small gasp as she rounded a particularly sharp bend and saw in front of her the entrance to a large Victorian house. On the top of each brick gatepost was an odd metal sculpture. The sculptures were made from the harpoons used on the ships of the man who had built this house from the money he had made from his whaling fleet. And how had she known that? Annie wondered in bemusement as she stopped her car just inside the drive to the house and switched off the engine. She must have read it somewhere, she acknowledged. She had read avidly in the long months of her recovery, books on every subject under the sun, including some on the local history of the area.

And yet…Unsteadily she got out of her car, her heart starting to beat very fast as she walked towards the house. The rhododendrons flanking the drive obscured the sunlight, throwing out dark shadows so that when she actually stepped back into its full beam it dazzled and dizzied her, making her rock slightly on her feet and close her eyes, only to open them again as she felt something coming between her and the warmth of the sun.

‘You!’ she whispered, her whole body shivering in a mixture of shock and delight as she saw who was standing in front of her. ‘It’s you,’ she whispered a second time, her eyes glowing with bemusement and happiness as she stepped towards the man who had come out of the house to stand in front of her.

Close to and in the daylight he was so exactly the man from her dreams that the awesome nature of the impulse that had brought her here to him held Annie motionless in an invisible bubble of iridescent joy.

It was true. She had been right. There was something fateful, fated about him…about them…

Her eyes focused on him, eagerly absorbing every detail of him and mentally checking them off against her own private blueprint. His eyes were exactly the same dark dramatic blue she had dreamed of, his skin the same taut sheeny tan, his hair the same inky almost blue-black. Everything about him was just as she had dreamed—everything. Even his mouth. Especially his mouth!

His mouth. Annie shivered in sensual delight as she looked at the hard male curve of his upper lip, the sensual promise of his much fuller lower one. If she closed her eyes she would be able to recreate the sensation of it closing over her own, hungrily coaxing her lips to part whilst he caressed them, filling her with his life’s breath whilst she…

‘So you came.’

His voice reverberated through her, its tone unexpectedly harsh, even a little terse, but wholly recognisable and familiar.

The intensity of her emotions made her shudder as violent spasms of recognition racked her. She had travelled such a long way to reach this moment, this heartbeat out of infinity.

‘Yes,’ she whispered in response, her voice cracking against the dryness of her throat. ‘You…you knew that I would?’ she asked, her emotions so heightened that she felt as though she had suddenly entered an extra dimension of awareness.

Behind him she could see the open door to the house. Beyond it, she knew, lay a large hallway, with a table on which would be a bronze of the man who had originally commissioned the house, and into the stairway that curled upwards from it would be carved all manner of sea creatures, both real and mythical; leaping dolphins, graceful whales, octopuses, sea horses and mermaids.

‘I…’ His voice sounded terse and strained, as though he too was aware of the enormity of what was happening, and as she looked at him and saw the way his gaze suddenly shifted, as though he couldn’t quite meet her eyes, she was overwhelmed by a sudden flood of fiercely protective love.

Instinctively she moved towards him, her hand resting lightly on his arm as she whispered protectively, ‘It’s all right…everything’s all right. I’m here. We’re…’

Beneath her fingertips she could feel his muscles bunching, clenching, and as she looked up into his face she could see the tight white line of his mouth. Her own body registered the aftershock of what he was feeling in the rush of almost seismic shudders that jolted his body.

‘Can we…can we go inside?’ she asked him hesitantly.

The house drew her, compelling her to walk towards it. It was almost as though she knew it already, its shape, its rooms, its history, even its scent…Just as she knew him…

Now it was her turn to shudder and to tense, but she was already inside the hallway and he was right behind her, blocking out the light from the doorway.

‘I never thought this could happen,’ she told him simply as she let her dreamy-eyed gaze absorb the wonderful reality of him.

He was tall, much taller than her, but she had known that, and broad too. She already knew just how he would feel and look beneath that soft checked workshirt he was wearing, without those old faded jeans that hugged the taut strength of his thighs. There would be a small scar just inside the right thigh, a tiny indentation, the relic of a boyhood accident. She would place her lips to it and he…

She was trembling wildly now, unable to stop what she was feeling, what she was wanting. A shudder of almost orgasmic sensitivity ripped through her as she watched him. She loved him so much!

‘Can we…can we go upstairs?’ she asked him huskily, her eyes never leaving his face as she waited for his response.

It seemed a lifetime, an aeon before he replied, both his mouth and his voice oddly stiff as he eventually responded, ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Yes,’ she told him boldly. ‘Yes, it is…what I want.’ I want…I want you. I love you. She ached to tell him, but events were moving too fast to give her time to make such an emotional statement.

Instead…

She started to release his arm and turn towards the stairs, and then, impetuously, she reached up and touched his face with her fingertips, absorbing through them the longed for human warmth, the human reality of his skin, not a dream lover’s flesh any more but that of a real man, a real lover.

Although he was clean shaven she could feel the rasp of his skin where he shaved, a prickle of such intense maleness against the acute female sensitivity of her own fingertips that she almost cried out in the raw shock of it, snatching her fingers away as though they had been burned, her eyes wide and dark, almost haunted as she looked up to his.

‘You want me,’ he said rawly. But it was a statement rather than a question. Still Annie nodded her head, mute, dumb, now that the final moment, the final acknowledgement of what lay between them, of what fate had ordained for them, was actually here.

Her glance darted over his face as nervous as that of a woodland fawn. His eyes…navy blue now, and smouldering with heat; his cheekbones…taut and hard where the flesh stretched across them, his mouth…

She felt giddy, dizzy with the force of her own longing. The silence, the tension between them stretched out like the thinnest of ice over the deepest, coldest and most dangerous water there could be, inviting only the most reckless, only the most foolhardy, to dare its danger.

‘Come here,’ he commanded her with soft force.

Immediately she did so, closing the gap between them as she moved, almost swayed into the burning inferno of his body heat, the breath driven out of her lungs in a soft, yearning gasp of delirious pleasure as his arms finally closed around her and she turned her face up to his for his kiss, her own lips so soft, swollen, parting with moist longing.

‘Oh, yes…Yes…You want me…’

She heard him etch out the sharp, stingingly sensuous words against her mouth, his voice creamy with satisfaction and male pride as his arms made a tight, imprisoning band around her and he bent her back over them, so that the cradle of her pelvis was thrust up tight against his own body.

And then his mouth finally came down on hers in a kiss that her shocked senses registered as being so raw and branding, so determined to imprint on her his stamp of possession, so intent on taking her and breaking her in the most primitive of man to woman embraces that she almost sobbed aloud in an appeal for his awareness of her vulnerability, her lack of experience, her unknowingness. And yet in some confusing way she did know, did recognise.

‘Was that good?’ she heard him asking her in a low, satisfied voice when he finally released her kiss-bitten mouth, and then, before she could answer, before she could move, he was lowering his head again, to make the same hot, mouth-biting love assault on the erect peak of her nipple, his fingers expertly pushing her clothes out of the way of one soft sweetly pink-apexed breast whilst his lips, too hungry to wait, eagerly caressed the other through the thin fabric of her bra and shirt.

For a moment Annie felt almost as though she was going to die from the shock of pleasure that sheeted through her, its intensity such that it made her catch her breath and feel as though her life itself was momentarily held in suspension. Behind her closed eyelids she could see the same brilliant whiteness she remembered from her moment of near-death: pure, burning, intense, soul-touching…like the very best kind of love itself.

Quickly she opened her eyes and focused on his downbent raven-dark head. The warm flesh of his exposed nape was a tantalising contradiction of his stance towards her and her reaction back to him, that of a man to a woman at its most sensually intense. That exposed nape was so very much that of a vulnerable boy, a child…the child they would one day have…

Immediately Annie tensed, as though somehow something had touched an exposed raw nerve within her memory. The pain, initially so intense that it had shocked her into protective immobility, was fading now, but it still had the power to frighten her.

‘What is it? Not second thoughts?’ he was asking her almost brusquely as his lips relinquished possession of her nipple and he lifted his head to look in her eyes.

In his own there was something, an expression, a darkness, that made her look away from him. Somewhere deep within her a pain, a wariness was stirring, but she quickly suppressed it. Nothing…nothing…could be allowed to spoil this special magical coming together. Nothing!

‘I…’ she began slowly, wanting to find the words to tell him how she was feeling, to ask him to help her smother the sharp needle of pain she could feel threatening her, to disarm it of its potential harm.

But instead of listening to her he shook his head and said smoothly, ‘I thought you wanted us to go to bed. You do want that, don’t you, Annie?’

Annie! He knew her name. Her heart slammed fiercely against her ribs, her whole body convulsed by the sweetly searing surge of her shock.

‘I…I want us to make love…’ she managed to tell him shakily, before adding breathlessly, so that he would know that her intuition, her knowingness, her acknowledgement of their shared fate matched his, ‘Upstairs…in the room…the room…’

‘I know which one,’ he assured her, and if her ears thought they had caught a rough, searing note of anger beneath the sensual smoothness of his low-toned voice she quickly assured herself that she had to have imagined it.

They walked upstairs together, one step at a time, her body pressed close to his, his arm around her as she leaned helplessly into him. On the half-landing she stopped, automatically gazing through the window towards the river.

‘This house was built by a whaling captain,’ she told him huskily.

‘Yes, I know,’ he agreed tersely, his arm dropping momentarily away from her.

‘I…I dream about it sometimes,’ she told him, searching carefully for the right words to tell him what she had experienced. ‘About…the room…and…and about you…’

Without saying anything else she moved back into the protection of his body, only realising that she had been holding her breath a little nervously when his arm finally rose and held her.

They had reached the top of the stairs and were standing in the doorway to the room before he said the words that made her heart turn somersaults of joy inside her body.

‘I dream of you too.’

He dreamed of her. She wasn’t alone in her belief…her recognition. Flooded with joy, she turned to him, holding his arm with her hand as she demanded, ‘You recognised me, then, the other night…in the restaurant?’

The abrupt, almost reluctant inclination of his head he gave in assent made her ache with female protectiveness. He felt embarrassed, almost afraid to reveal his vulnerability to her. Oh, how much she loved him. How wonderful it was that they had found one another.

‘It’s going to be so good,’ she told him tenderly. ‘We are going to be so good…’

Inside the room everything was just as she had dreamed. The large windows with the view of the drop down to the river and the fields and hills on the other side of it. The floor, wooden, polished, bare. The walls, bare too; the windows with their filmy ethereal curtaining. The bed…

Annie shivered as she saw it, unable to take her gaze off it as her eyes widened and focused unblinkingly on the oh, so familiar iron bedstead. Unlike hers, this, she knew immediately, was original. Very slowly and gently she reached out and touched the frame at the foot of the bed. The metal felt warm to her touch, warm and worn slightly with age. The bed was bigger than hers, much bigger, and piled high with creamy white traditional linen bedding. As she reached down and smoothed the edge of one of the covers she could almost smell the scent of lavender being released by her touch.

‘This bed…’ she began, dry-mouthed.

‘It’s a marriage bed,’ he told her quickly, and she could almost taste the bitterness in his voice. But before she could question it, turning to him, her eyes quickening with surprise, he was reaching for her, the fierceness, the immediacy of his desire surprising her. She had expected passion, intensity, and even male possessiveness, but this fierce, heated nowness he was exhibiting, this silent, hungry concentrated way in which he was reaching for her, holding her…

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.