'Because I was terrified that as soon as you guessed I love you, you would lose interest in me,' she explained. 'I could never forget that you'd said, at the very beginning, that you found your life ran more smoothly without the continual presence of a woman in it.'
'I must have meant it at the time, I got my come-uppance when you left me. Every day seemed as long as a year. As for the nights…'
'For me, too. I couldn't—'
She broke off with a gasp as he bent his head to her breast and, between his hot lips, she felt the caress of his tongue. Her fingers delved in his hair, not to tug his head away but to signal her unresisting pleasure. A low moan escaped her as thrilling waves coursed through her body.
When he lifted his head, smiling at her look of undisguised rapturous abandonment, she thought it was time she displayed a little aggression. With both hands on his chest, she pushed him to make him lie back. Then she leaned over him and, her parted lips light on his mouth, licked his lips with the tip of her tongue.
His reaction was very satisfactory. A shudder convulsed his tall frame, and he clamped her against him and kissed her with a frenzied urgency which she thought could only conclude with another swift, fierce possession.
But she ought to have known that Ash's command of himself was too strong and sure not to make this ecstatic reunion a very special memory. At one stage of their wild love game he pulled her astride his lean flanks while he took the gold chain from her waist with hands which he managed to steady while they dealt with the intricate fastening.
Then he placed his palms on her hips, and she felt his long lean brown fingers pressing her satiny flesh while his narrowed eyes scanned the rest of her from this new perspective.
How she would have hated it once, kneeling over him in the lamplight while he slowed the pace of their game, his hands taking gentle pleasure in the softness of her buttocks and thighs compared with his own. His skin had a smooth pleasant feel, but it covered muscle and bone, with none of her yielding contours.
She stretched her arms high and tossed back her long, sun-streaked hair, looking down at him through her lashes. Only faint smudged traces remained of the russet patterns. The Kanga was a crumpled swathe of colour against the whiteness of the sheet, its purpose served.
She had dared and won, and she wished she had dared much sooner.
For here, in this lamplit room, on the tumbled bed, was at last the ultimate joy which would bring to perfection a future more rich in fulfilment than any of her girlhood dreams.
A husband. A home. One child, and probably others. A project to share in a setting of idyllic beauty. At last she had it all together.
'Oh, Ash . . . how I love you,' she breathed, as she bent her breasts to his chest and her lips to his mouth.
In the end it was he who looked down on her, as he had many times in the past, and with no less total a mastery of her enraptured senses. But this time she stayed in his arms for the rest of the night; and woke with her head on his pillow, and the sun streaming through the screens, and her love still asleep.