Or if he loved her at all…

‘Maybe our getting married is not such a good idea,’ she said quietly. ‘We did rush into it a bit.’

He was around the bed and taking her in his arms before she could say boo. But his hard, hungry kisses left her cold. Shane stopped after a while and held her at arm’s length. This time his expression was full of apology and remorse.

‘You’re angry with me,’ he said. ‘And you’ve every right to be. I was being bloody selfish. Of course you have to go. Of course. It’s just that I’m going to miss you terribly, sweetheart.’ He released her arms to cup her chin and lift her mouth for him to kiss again. Softly this time. And sweetly.

Marina had to admit to a moment of melting. These new sexual responses of hers could be very disarming. And perhaps not always in her best interests, came the astonishing realisation.

‘I’m really going to miss this beautiful mouth of yours,’ Shane murmured. ‘There again, everything about you is so beautiful. Your eyes. Your skin. Your hair. Your breasts.’ His hands lifted to stroke them through her shirt and she was dismayed at the way they responded, as though they weren’t connected with her brain.

‘I’ve always wanted you, Marina,’ he insisted, with a thickened quality to his voice. ‘From the first moment I saw you. But your mother warned me right from the start that I could look, but not touch. Her little princess was not for the likes of me.’

Marina was not really surprised by this news. Her mother had been a very contradictory person. British-born and bred, she’d apparently defied her wealthy, upper-crust parents to run off to Australia with a colonial stablehand. She’d been told never to darken their doorstep again. Which she hadn’t.

Her bitterness over their attitude had been such that she’d never spoken of her English ancestors to her daughter, and had forbidden Marina to ever seek them out.

One would have thought she’d bring up Marina to despise this kind of snobbery and hypocrisy. And she had, in a way. But at the same time, perversely, she’d tried to turn her only daughter into a right little madam, with all the associated refinements and manners. Marina had been given ballet lessons, piano lessons and speech and drama lessons, not to mention the obligatory riding and dressage lessons.

It hadn’t really worked. Marina might look an elegant twenty-five-year-old lady on the surface, and she could hold her own in any company, but she was still Australian through and through—with a stubborn streak a mile long, an instinctive irreverence for authority and a pragmatic no-nonsense attitude to life.

She was also a chip off the old block when it came to defying parents, because when she’d gone to England on a backpacking holiday a couple of years previously she had tried to look up the maternal side of her family—her mother’s maiden name being on her birth certificate—only to find that there were more Binghams in England than you could poke a stick at.

Without more information to narrow the field, or money to hire an investigator, finding the right Binghams would have been like looking for a needle in a haystack. Since she had never been all that curious about the English side to her family—they sounded horrible snobs to her—she’d given up the search without another qualm.

Shane’s comment reminded her that she would be in England again soon. And this time she did have some money. Her mother’s estate had been larger than she’d envisaged. It seemed she’d been a very astute businesswoman over the years. Now that Marina could not hurt her mother with a more in-depth search, she might just see if she could find her grandparents, plus any possible aunts, uncles and cousins.

And maybe she wouldn’t.

They’d never searched for her, had they? Why should she care a whit for them? They’d probably only upset her by not wanting to have anything to do with her.

No, she would abandon that idea entirely. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

‘I never thought you’d look twice at me,’ Shane was saying, ‘with your private school education and your looks. But you did, didn’t you, princess? And now…now you’re mine.’ He bent to back his claim with a long and very intimate kiss. It did set her heart a-thudding, but it was not what she wanted at that moment. All she wanted was to be left alone. Her head was absolutely whirling.

‘Come back as quickly as you can,’ he urged. ‘Don’t stay over there a moment longer than necessary.’

Marina didn’t know what to say. She felt very confused. A couple of weeks ago she had not been able to wait to marry Shane. Now, suddenly, those heady feelings of being madly in love seemed to have disappeared and her thoughts were very disturbing.

Surely Shane could not be just marrying her for the horses. Surely he loved her. And surely she loved him back. Hadn’t she quivered under his touch only last night? Hadn’t she cried out with pleasure?