A Passionate Affair. Elizabeth Power

Three, you need a bath, then a light supper, followed by some medication to knock you out, and a cool dark room to sleep the effects off. Agreed?’

      It sounded wonderful, but she wasn’t about to tell him she didn’t have the luxury of a bath in her tiny shower room, or that her fridge boasted nothing more than a wilting lettuce and half a carton of cottage cheese which had probably passed its sell-by date. ‘Quite.’ She nodded carefully. She wasn’t too sure her head wouldn’t fall off with any vigorous movement. ‘So if you’ll excuse me I’ll be off home.’

      ‘You don’t intend to walk, feeling like you do?’

      Not with Taylor in tow. ‘I’m going to get a taxi,’ she said tersely, his statement about Penelope a massive question mark in her mind. She needed to be somewhere quiet and think.

      ‘No need.’ He smiled sunnily. ‘My car’s parked over there. I can have you home in two jiffs.’

      ‘Taylor, how can I put this? I don’t want to ride in your car any more than I want to find you waiting for me when I come out of work.’ It wasn’t true, but he didn’t know that. She watched two young girls who couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen do a doubletake as they caught sight of him, and hated him for it. Which made her fit for the funny farm, she thought wearily.

      ‘You’ve a blinding headache and need to get home quickly. I have a car parked ten yards away.’ He tilted his head expressively. ‘Seems pretty straightforward to me.’

      Lots of things seemed straightforward to him, but it did not mean that they were. She wanted to argue, but she was too tired, too muzzy-headed, too heartsore. Suddenly it seemed a whole lot simpler just to allow him to take her home and be done with it. ‘Okay.’

      ‘Okay?’ He was surprised by the capitulation and it showed.

      ‘I can appreciate logic when it’s explained so well,’ she said with veiled sarcasm, deciding however bad she felt she wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

      However, once she was in the safe confines of the car, and the rest of the busy, whirling, hellishly loud world was shut out, the temptation to shut her aching eyes was too strong to resist. The painkillers she had taken at regular intervals during the afternoon—probably too regular, she admitted silently—were telling on her. She felt leaden-limbed and exhausted, along with slightly nauseous and dizzy.

      ‘That’s right, shut your eyes.’ Taylor’s voice was no more than a soothing rumble at her side. ‘I’ll have you home in no time.’

      She was not aware she had fallen asleep, but when she heard the murmur of voices and felt a gentle hand rousing her she looked up into Hannah’s anxious face and realised she must have been out for the count. She also realised—a touch belatedly—that the home Taylor had referred to had not been her bedsit.

      Through the pounding in her head, Marsha glanced out of the open door of the car and saw the steps leading up to Taylor’s front door. She groaned. ‘I want to go home.’

      ‘You are home.’ Taylor’s face appeared at the side of Hannah’s and it was grim. ‘And you’re not well. You were sleeping so deeply there I had to check your pulse a couple of times to make sure you were still breathing. What the hell have you been taking, anyway?’

      ‘Just aspirin. And paracetamol. Oh, and one of the researchers gave me a couple of pills she takes for migraines.’

      ‘Give me strength.’ It was terse. ‘I married a junkie.’ And then, as Hannah whispered something, she heard him say, ‘Flu, headache or whatever. She needs looking after.’

      Marsha wanted to object when he lifted her bodily out of the car, but the effort it would take wasn’t worth it. She was aware of Taylor carrying her up the stairs, and of then being placed in a comfortable bed which knocked the spots off her sofabed in the bedsit. But it was when she felt her shoes being taken off and then her jacket that she found the will to open her eyes and protest. ‘Don’t… I can do it.’

      ‘Don’t try my patience.’

      ‘Where’s Hannah?’

      ‘Fixing an omelette.’

      His hands were firm and sure, but not unkind—not until she tried to push him away, when he gave a none too gentle tap at her fingers. ‘We’re man and wife, for crying out loud. I’ve undressed you before.’

      ‘That was different.’

      ‘And how.’

      She gave up. She couldn’t argue. You had to be compos mentis to argue, and it had finally dawned on her that in her anxiety to stifle her headache and prove to all and sundry she was efficient and totally on the ball—whatever Penelope might imply—she had definitely overdone the medication.

      Naked as the day she was born, she snuggled into fresh-scented linen covers and was asleep as soon as Taylor’s hands left her body.

      How soon she was awoken again by a quiet-voiced Hannah she didn’t know, but the housekeeper gently plumped the pillows behind her after Marsha groggily sat up to take the tray the other woman was holding. ‘You eat that all up, honey.’ Once the pillows were sorted, Hannah stood back to gaze at her. ‘I daresay you haven’t eaten all day, huh?’

      ‘I had a huge lunch,’ Marsha protested weakly through the thumping in her head.

      Hannah’s three chins went down into her neck as her eyebrows rose in the universal expression of disbelief, but Marsha was not up to arguing. She stared down at an omelette done to moist fluffiness beside three thin slices of Hannah’s home-cured ham, and knew she couldn’t eat a thing.

      Hannah, apparently, was not of the same persuasion. ‘I’m staying right here till all that’s gone,’ she warned. ‘Boss’s instructions.’

      ‘I’m not a child.’ Marsha was stung into retaliation.

      ‘Sure you’re not, honey.’ A fork was placed in her hand and Hannah beamed at her.

      Marsha sighed and started to eat, surprised to find that she could clear the plate before sliding back down under the covers again. She was asleep before Hannah left the room.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      IT WAS the enormous sense of well-being which first registered the next morning as Marsha began to float from layers of soft billowy warmth. She was neither fully asleep nor fully awake, too comfortable and content to move or think. She just luxuriated in the deep tranquillity and peace her mind and body were resting in.

      She sighed softly, the caress on her skin part of her dreamlike state and no more threatening than the stroking of a butterfly’s wing. The pleasure was tantalising, teasing her senses with half-remembered stirrings which grew sweeter and more potent as she lazily embraced them.

      Her body felt fluid, with heat beginning to pulse in time with the erotic rippling over her flesh, and she moaned, her half-open lips captured in the next moment in a kiss that was teasing and tangible. Suddenly she was wide awake.

      ‘Good morning, sweet wife.’

      She stared at Taylor, the thick curtain of sleep lifted but her mind refusing to accept for the moment that he was real. And then it all came rushing back—the headache, the pills, and the drive to the house—and she realised to her consternation that the covers were rumpled to one side and she was wearing nothing at all.

      ‘You were touching me.’ She made a grab for the duvet, horrified that he had been making love to her without her knowledge. Bringing the cover up to her chin, she eyed him hotly. ‘That’s despicable.’

      He was sitting on the side of the bed and made no effort to deny the charge, merely smiling slowly as he said, ‘You taste the same, like warm honey.’

      Her heart was racing, less with anger than the pleasure his hands and mouth had called forth so effortlessly, which was still sending needles of desire into every pulse. ‘You’re the