staying single.’ He nodded slowly and dropped his gaze to their hands on the table. ‘You’re bleeding.’
They both stared at the little bloom of blood on her fingertip and knew what was supposed to happen next. There wasn’t a convenient box of tissues on hand to blot it, and no one interrupted them with a well-timed knock on the door. Gabe’s warm hand closed over hers, and Marla’s breath hitched in her throat. He lifted it to his lips and sucked her fingertip gently. He didn’t take his eyes off hers and for a few seconds Marla felt as if he could see right inside her head, see just how much she wanted him to carry on. She’d been right all along. He was a vampire, and he’d glamoured her into submission. This was not her fault.
Jesus, his mouth was hot. And wet. And way, way too sexy to pull away. Up until that moment in her life, Marla had no idea about the secret vein that ran directly from her fingertip to her clitoris. But as Gabe circled his tongue slowly around her to seal the wound, each little suck on her finger fired off an answering volt of electricity between her legs. She closed her eyes, afraid he’d be able to see it there. Or did he know already? Marla squirmed in her seat, too turned on to get her breath properly. Or to care. On an erotic scale of one to ten, it was an eleven. Twenty. To infinity and beyond. The knuckles of her hand bumped against his jaw, rough stubble against soft skin. She suddenly wanted to know exactly how good that stubble would feel against her skin in much more private places. Her inner thighs, for instance. She almost cried out in protest when he slid her finger from his mouth and placed a whisper kiss on her palm, a barely-there trail of his tongue against the vulnerable pulse point inside her wrist. She never wanted to open her eyes again.
But if she had, she’d have seen a very dejected Rupert turn and slope away from the window, where he’d just spent the most crushing five minutes of his entire life.
Chapter Fourteen
It was just after nine in the morning on the first Tuesday in May, and Emily lay curled in the crook of Tom’s shoulder and relished the decadent pleasure of a long and lazy extended bank holiday. Around them everyone else had gone back to work this morning, but they’d planned otherwise and closed the curtains against the world. She fuzzily contemplated getting up to make coffee as the hairs on Tom’s chest tickled her closer to wakefulness. He traced sleepy circles low on the hollow of her back with his thumb, halfway towards soothing her to sleep and halfway towards turning her on.
She wriggled closer, and he slid his hand between her legs to settle the question.
This was who they were.
Emily and Tom. Tom and Emily.
The coffee could wait.
Half an hour later and fully awake, she slipped out of the warm circle of Tom’s arms and padded downstairs to make coffee. She scooped up the newspaper and letters from the mat as she passed and dropped them on the kitchen table. The last couple of weeks had been amazing, like a second honeymoon. Except for one thing. One painfully huge, enormous elephant in the room.
Dan.
What had happened on her birthday had been a long time coming, an inevitable consequence of the Chinese-water-torture style erosion of their marriage. She had hit rock bottom, and Dan had been her soft landing. A soft landing that she’d paid a daily penance for ever since with the ever-present weight of guilt on her shoulders. She could, of course, tell Tom. But who would she really be doing it for? Did he have a right to know, or was it better to shoulder the guilt and spare him the pain? She’d turned the question over in her mind all day, every day, and each night she’d tussled with it in her dreams.
She skim read the doom and gloom headlines as she waited for the kettle to boil, and her eyes were pulled back again to the date. May 2nd. May 2nd? How had her head become so full of other stuff that she’d managed to stop watching the calendar more closely than a death row inmate? She grabbed her trying-to-conceive diary from the kitchen shelf and fumbled through the pages with shaky fingers. April 2nd, day one