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‘I’m relaxed,’ she whispered against his mouth, insinuating her leg further between his. ‘I’m not drunk, I know what I’m doing…’
‘It’s night, your biorhythms are low, your emotional defences are down…and you’re missing the people you love,’ he said raggedly, pulling his reluctant mouth away from her kiss. ‘The feel-good bit is just an illusion—it won’t last the dawn. Yo
u don’t really want sex, you want love, and you don’t really want me to love you; you just want to be close to someone—anyone—who can fill the emptiness for a while. Don’t think I’m not tempted,’ he grunted, jerking his hardening body away from her sinuously stroking hips. ‘But I won’t be used as an emotional substitute—not ever again. I’ve been used like that once before, and it was sheer hell…’
He shuddered, drawing her hands together, binding them in an attitude of prayer as he pressed them to his lips. ‘I want you to trust me, not resent me for taking advantage of your vulnerability.’
Rachel shook her head fiercely. ‘You wouldn’t be taking advantage. Do you think I don’t know the difference between seduction and force? I know what it’s like to be truly forced.’ She spoke feverishly in her effort to convince. ‘That’s how Bethany was conceived. I was raped by a drunk—the father of a boy I’d started dating. At first I was too scared and too ashamed to tell anyone, and then I found I was pregnant.
‘It turned out that he’d raped other girls, too, even younger than me, and there was a court case during which he died. I was glad! I hated him for what he did, and it took me a long time to learn to trust men again. It also made me very selective about with whom I chose to be sexual.’ She swayed against him. ‘So if you’re my choice then I must trust you…’
‘Oh, no—oh, God, Rachel…’ Matt’s eyes were smouldering coals in a face which was suddenly ash-grey. ‘I never imagined—I’m so sorry…’ His voice was racked with a deep torment that seemed to go beyond empathy.
‘I had Bethany,’ she said, as if it explained her survival, and in many ways it did. ‘What goes wrong in our lives doesn’t always turn out to be all for the worst.’ Desire made her impatient. ‘Anyway, what does it matter why we want each other tonight?’
‘It matters.’ He looked painfully shaken, the barrier of his will breached by her honesty, but not broken. ‘I can’t do this casually. I—Leigh was the first woman I ever loved.’
‘I know that—’
‘No, you don’t know. No one really knows how it was with Leigh!’ He turned away to pace the room, punching his words out in jagged phrases. ‘I had—I was extremely…introverted and awkward around girls as a teenager, but she lived just up the road from us and was kind to me whenever our paths crossed. From the age of seventeen I was wildly in love with her. At least, I thought it was in the cause of love I was keeping myself chaste and true, but now I wonder whether it was just infatuation, intensified by the fact that she encouraged my emotional attachment but kept me physically at arm’s length. Then I introduced her to my cousin, and she fell for him like a ton of bricks.’
‘Neville?’ The spiky relationship between the two men was suddenly explained.
His head jerked in assent. ‘Even when I knew they were sleeping together I was still tied up in knots about her. I stayed faithful to her on the strength of our friendship, in the hope that one day she’d realise that it was me she actually loved. Neville didn’t have a good track record with women. Whenever they had a row she’d run to cry on my shoulder, and I’d beg her to give him up and marry me—’
‘And one day she said yes,’ supplied Rachel tentatively, wondering where these raw revelations were leading.
‘Oh, yes, she married me—in a fit of despair and pregnant with Neville’s baby.’ He ran a hand through his hair, his voice sounding unutterably weary. ‘Leigh was a nurse—she’d tested positive for HIV after a needle-stick accident, and when Neville found out he couldn’t handle it and dumped her. He was terrified of the idea of being infected, or being stuck with a partner with full-blown AIDS, and when she told him she was pregnant he told her to have an abortion. So Leigh finally took me up on my offer. I was young and arrogant enough to think myself her gallant saviour, but she never stopped loving Neville long enough to try and build any sort of real life with me. She was so traumatised by the way she’d lost him she took on his attitude as a kind of self-punishing obsession.’
The long muscles of his arms rippled as he bunched his fists at the memory. ‘She went ahead with an abortion without telling me and then decided that I was far too good for her and that she had no right to my love. She’d always been emotionally delicate, but she became an obsessive-compulsive, constantly cleaning the house and herself, afraid that she was going to accidentally contaminate somebody else. Her HIV status never changed, but she was convinced she was tainted, unworthy of being happy. She was a nurse, and intellectually she knew that HIV isn’t the sentence of doom it once was, but she still couldn’t exercise any control over her fears without the help of tranquillisers. Do you know what she wrote in her suicide note? That sometimes just to live is an act of courage, and that hers had all dwindled away…’
‘Oh, Matt…’ Rachel’s throat ached to find the words to ease his pain. When she had researched his background she had read the initial news report of Leigh Riordan’s death, which had included a reference to Leigh being Matt’s ‘childhood sweetheart’ and a wedding photo of a slender and fine-boned bride, wearing a gamine smile and looking ethereally young in her fairytale gown. At her side twenty-year-old Matt had appeared touchingly grave in comparison.
‘I was only ever a substitute to Leigh, and obviously a poor one at that,’ he continued choppily. ‘She certainly found no solace in my arms, because she wouldn’t let me touch her for most of our marriage, let alone ever make love to her—no matter what precautions I offered to take…’
She had been bracing herself for him to admit that he was also HIV positive, and now Rachel sucked in a sharp breath. ‘You mean…?’
He stopped his pacing and stared directly into her stunned eyes. ‘I mean that our marriage was never consummated.’
‘I—I see…’
‘I don’t think you do. One way or another—through love, loyalty, or guilt over her death—Leigh has kept me celibate since the tender age of seventeen.’ He paused as her hazel eyes widened even more, her lips parting in disbelief. ‘The very, very tender age…’ he drawled significantly.
Rachel felt hot and cold and dizzy, all at the same time. ‘I—what exactly are you saying?’
He rubbed his bare chest with slow, distracting strokes. ‘Exactly? That far from being the accomplished lover my behaviour so far may have encouraged you to believe, my practical sexual experience is virtually nil. I’ve never been anyone’s lover.’
Rachel tore her attention away from his chest and took an involuntary step back, crossing her arms across her breasts to hug herself in thunderstruck confusion. ‘But I…you—’
‘Don’t worry.’ He interrupted her babble with a wry smile that made her even more flustered. ‘Virginity isn’t catching.’
Virginity? His? This lean, sexy, hard-bodied man she had been fantasising so lustily about was still a virgin? Colour poured into Rachel’s face as she felt her body react helplessly to the notion, her nipples peaking against her shielding arms and darting thrills radiating through her lower extremities.
‘Shouldn’t I be the one blushing?’ he asked, and indeed there was high colour streaking along his cheekbones as he watched her struggle with the arousing concept of his innocence.
‘I had no idea…’ she murmured inanely.
‘I do try and keep that kind of information out of the public domain,’ was his dry reply. ‘Virginity is not something for which a mature man is traditionally admired. My enemies would have a field-day with their jokes.’
