nestled in his brain and grew.
She was lovely. She made him smile. If he could take her back with him to the US… Turn her into his real happy ever after…
She wouldn’t leave Harry.
She could bring him, too.
They’d never desert this farm.
He could put a farm manager in, he thought. Keep it safe for them. For their future.
What the hell was he thinking?
Nothing, he decided fiercely, or nothing that made sense. He’d decided early that he was a loner. What had changed now?
Peta had changed. Peta had changed him.
He watched her float on, desperate to join her but forcing himself to stay. Forcing himself to be sensible. By the time she emerged from the water he almost had himself convinced that his thoughts were a nonsense.
She came up the beach towards him, smiling, shaking her head with the water from the curls forming a glistening arc around her head. The dogs went flying down the beach to meet her and then wheeled away to chase gulls, to chase their tails, to simply soak up the warmth of the gathering dusk. Marcus sat back on the sand and watched Peta towel her hair, smile down at him, simply…simply be.
This was a sensation he’d never experienced before. For the last half hour he’d sat and done nothing, simply let the night soak into him. The place. The time.
Peta.
‘You’re lovely,’ he said softly and his words hung in the night with a promise of something that was as yet undisclosed.
She stopped towelling and stared down at him. She’d giggle, he thought, or disclaim. Or arch her brows… He’d seen it all.
Instead she smiled, a gentle smile that was almost sympathetic.
‘You’re not bad yourself.’
‘Gee, thanks.’ It was inane but it was all he could manage. He swung himself to his feet and took her towel. ‘Let me do that?’
She pulled away, ducking under the towel and backing.
‘You don’t want to.’
‘Towel your hair? I do. Very much.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Her smile had died. ‘The up close and personal bit isn’t going to work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Neither of us are in a position to take it further.’
‘We have two weeks…’
Wrong thing to say. Her face shuttered and the barriers went up. He could see it.
‘Keep to your own end of the veranda, Marcus,’ she told him. ‘Or maybe it’d be better if you went back to Aunt Hattie’s.’
‘No!’ Keep it light, he told himself desperately. Keep it light. ‘Anything but that. Please don’t condemn me to drown in pink.’
‘Then don’t touch me.’
‘Why don’t you want to be touched?’
‘Who said I didn’t want to be touched?’
‘I assumed…’
‘You assume all over the place,’ she said crossly. ‘You assume and assume and assume. I needed to accept your very generous offer to marry me and save my farm but that doesn’t make me inclined to see you as Mr Wonderful for the rest of my life.’
‘I didn’t-’
‘Want to be Mr Wonderful? No. Of course you didn’t. You don’t want to be up on a pedestal, and I don’t want to keep you there. But when you come down…’ She took a deep breath. ‘You see, the problem is that when you come down from your pedestal, Marcus, then I see you just as a person. Or, not just as a person. As Marcus. Marc. Someone who’s as needful as me. Someone who’s even more lonely. And who’s lovely and generous and who smiles and makes me feel crinkly inside and… Marcus, no, I didn’t mean… I don’t mean…’
He didn’t get to hear what she didn’t mean. How could he? Standing there with her hair dripping and her green eyes luminous and her face earnest, she was so obviously trying, trying to sort it in her mind, to tell the truth, and he’d have to be inhuman not to react.
She was so lovely. She gazed up at him and he reached forward and took her hands in his and their eyes locked and held.
Afterwards he couldn’t remember who had moved first. Whether she’d stood on tiptoe and tilted her chin so her face met his, or if it had been he who’d drawn her into him and who’d cupped her face and tilted those lips…
No matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered but that her body was being drawn into his and all he could feel was the warmth of her, the feel, the softness of the curves of her body against him. Dear heaven. The way her still damp body curved into his, her breasts moulding to his chest, her body melting, her lips tasting of sea and salt and warmth and desire and…
Peta.
He didn’t know whether he said the word. Whether he said her name. He couldn’t. How could he kiss and speak at the same time?
But it was as if he shouted it. It was as if his whole being was an exultant cry. Peta!
She was his. His! His hands held her, linking around the small of her back, tugging her closer, loving her, wanting her.
Loving her.
The world stopped right there. Or maybe it started. It was as if his heart had stopped and then started afresh, anew, and he was someone else. The wonder. The joy.
He’d never known he could feel like this. All his life… The barrenness of his childhood. The awfulness of his time in the army. The knowledge that he could never let anyone close. That people disappeared all the time. The dreadful time in the Gulf, learning for the first time about friendship only to have it blasted to bits before his eyes. The years of business where all that mattered was money; where employees were people you treated with consideration because that way they worked best but you never, ever got involved…
He was involved now. He was involved right up to his heart.
And this woman was his wife. His wife! What miracle was this?
The kiss deepened. She was surrendering to him. Her lips had parted and he was plundering her mouth, taking the kiss deep, deeper…
Dear heaven, he wanted her. Her wanted her more than life itself. More than he’d ever dreamed he could want a woman.
‘Peta…’
The kiss lasted for ever. The waves rolled in and out; the dogs wheeled back to them, vaguely worried at their immobility but fast bored. They wheeled away again. All except Ted-dog, who lay at his mistress’s feet and softly whined, as if in warning.
She was heeding no warning. She’d given herself up to this moment, to the taste of him, to the feel of him. To the sensation he was feeling and that he knew she must feel, too. Here was her man and here was his woman. Man and woman. One.
It had to end. Somehow it had to end. The dusk was turning to night. The next move had to come and it had to come from him.
He pulled back somehow, and he stared down into her face. She looked up at him, her eyes confused, tender, but there was still that wonderful smile. The laughter that had been there the first time he’d seen her. The laughter that caught and held…
‘It seems… Peta, it seems that indeed you are my wife,’ he said in a voice he hardly recognised. ‘My wife.’
Her smile faded. ‘What do you mean by that? “Indeed you are my wife…”’
‘We made vows.’
