by Susan Napier
Regan sucked in a sharp breath. Laid out in his stark words the truth seemed even more ugly. ‘You have no right—’
‘I’ve been there myself,’ he said quietly. ‘I know how it feels to realise that your loyalty has been secured by a lie. You blame yourself for not seeing it from the beginning.’
‘I don’t want to talk about him.’
‘Fine. Then let’s talk about us.’
She set her untasted drink sharply down on the glass table which held the silver drinks tray. ‘There is no us!’
He set his glass beside hers and shadowed her back to the rail. ‘Tell me, why did you come to the apartment that night?’
‘Why don’t you ask your informant?’ she said bitterly.
‘What happened that night was not part of his brief,’ he said with dangerous softness. ‘But that could change with one phone call…’
She blanched. ‘My flatmate’s cousin is Cleo—she was the one who was supposed to meet you that night, but she was sick. I took her place, but I didn’t tell anyone. No one knew—not even Derek.’
‘That explains how, but not why,’ he said, his eyes narrowed intently on her face. ‘It’s so out of character with everything else I’ve found out about you.’
‘Maybe I was wild with grief,’ she said sardonically.
But he was implacable. ‘A kind of grief, perhaps. Was it anything to do with Cindy Carson visiting your flat? You never knew your husband had had a mistress, did you? Not until she confronted you.’
Regan thought that she would have preferred being interrogated about her attempt to fiddle the books to this painful emotional plunder!
‘How did you feel when you found out that he had been unfaithful to you for years?’ he goaded. ‘How did you feel when you discovered that he had chosen to have a child with her, rather than you?’
The old, volcanic rage erupted through the thin crust of her self-control. ‘How do you think I felt?’ she burst out.
His eyes flamed with deep satisfaction as he taunted, ‘Heartbroken?’
She tossed her head defiantly, the wind whipping the hair around her stinging cheeks. ‘No—heart-whole! Cured of any lingering doubt that I was a fool for having loved him at all! Sick. Angry. Furious!
‘You want to know what I was looking for that night I slept with you—I’ll tell you: Revenge!’ She gave a wild, triumphant laugh at his shaken expression. ‘I did it purely for revenge, OK? To show Michael that he wasn’t going to control me from the grave, to prove that I was as much a sexual being as his flashy mistress. He had an affair so I went out and had one, too!’
‘You slept with me to get revenge on a dead man?’
He sounded incredulous. She hoped that knocked his male ego for a six.
‘Not you. A man. Any man would have done. Being promiscuous means you’re not choosy about your sex partners.’
‘But you didn’t get any man,’ he said roughly. ‘Lucky for you, you reckless little fool, you got me…’
She put her hands on her hips, her torso tilted aggressively forward as she snarled, ‘Lucky? I’d call it ironic that I chose to have my sexual fling with a man who was as dishonourable as my late, unlamented husband!’
The insult visibly struck him to the core. ‘What in the hell do you mean by that?’ he snarled back, closing the gap between them until the heat generated by their two bodies met and mingled.
She had him on the back foot; now it was her turn to shove, and shove until he tripped over his own lies. ‘You seduced your brother’s fiancée! Don’t bother to deny it. Ryan told me that Carolyn and Chris were an item long before you came on the scene.’
He cursed rawly. ‘Ryan might be a genius but that doesn’t make him infallible.’
‘You mean it isn’t true? That Carolyn wasn’t engaged to Chris when you slept with her and got her pregnant—?’
‘Ryan couldn’t have told you that!’ he interrupted savagely.
‘No, but it’s so obvious when you look at the timing. This wedding should have been Chris and Carolyn’s, shouldn’t it?’ She had noticed that some of the early quotes Hazel had stuffed in her desk dated back further than a couple of months, but had dismissed them as examples of her hopeful anticipation. ‘You must have been the reason they had their row and broke the engagement.’
‘Must I? You don’t think that, considering what you know of my character, you might have drawn another, less obvious conclusion—one more favourable to my honour?’
She felt the pain of his deep offence like a quiet shudder in her soul. He was truly outraged that she was calling his personal integrity into question. ‘What do you mean? What other conclusion is there?’
The muscle flickered in his clenched jaw. ‘Nothing. None. It doesn’t matter.’
She didn’t believe him. It had mattered enough to him to cause his tight-lipped control to falter. And if it mattered to him, of course it mattered to her, more than anything…
Joshua wasn’t like Michael. Michael would never have rushed into a burning building to save other people’s lives at a serious risk to his own. Michael had never faced up to his responsibilities—even in death he had evaded making any provision for his son’s future. But Joshua behaved honourably even when it was dangerous to do so, even when it was difficult, or interfered with his own pleasures.
As the boat creamed over the glittering open sea, a clear shaft of light seemed to shine down from the blue vault of heaven and illuminate the answer in her heart.
But how to break down that wall of steely self-control and make him admit it?
‘So…if you weren’t sleeping with Carolyn before the big fight, then it must have happened after. After her horrible row with Chris she came running to his big brother for comfort, and instead you took ruthless advantage of her vulnerability—is that the scenario you expect me to believe?’
He picked up his glass again and took a long swallow. ‘I don’t expect anything of you.’
Now he was lying!
‘Is it your baby—or Chris’s? Or are the dates that you both slept with her so entwined that neither of you know which one of you is the father?’
His head jerked back at her slicing scorn. ‘It’s a Wade. That’s all that’s important.’
‘And you don’t mind marrying your brother’s discards?’
He finished the drink, his knuckles white around the glass. ‘Leave it, Regan.’
She was beginning to get an even stronger inkling of the way his mind worked. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like it when the tables are turned and I’m the one asking all the intrusive questions?’ she said recklessly. ‘Maybe you three had a slightly incestuous ménage à trois going…does it turn you on to share a woman in bed with your brother?’
‘Be very—very, careful what you say next,’ he said thickly. ‘In fact, it would be an extremely good idea if you shut up altogether!’
Adrenaline raced through her veins. ‘Or what? You’ll throw me to the sharks? What price your honour then? Oh, I forgot…you don’t have any! So maybe Carolyn wasn’t a willing party in this fascinating scenario of yours at all. Maybe it wasn’t seduction on your part, but rape—’
‘I’ve never even touched her—!’ he roared, and broke off, his eyes blazing with silver wrath.
‘But you’re going to marry her all the same.’ She was breathless in horrified awe. ‘You’re going to marry a woman you don’t love, and who doesn’t love you, in order to give your brother’s baby the family name, because for some reason he’s baulking at marriage and unplanned fatherhood. What you can’t force him to do you’re going to do yourself. My God, that’s positively Gothic! Don’t you think that’s carrying your sense of honour to a ridiculous extreme—?’
She squeaked as she was snatched off her feet, dangling by her upper arms between two iron fists.
‘I told you to shut up!’
‘But you didn’t tell me what would happen if I didn’t,’ she said breathlessly, pushing her hands against his c
hest and pointing her sandalled toes in a vain attempt to touch the deck.
He began to slowly lower her towards him, the muscles in his neck and shoulders bulging with the effort. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. You wanted me to lose control. I would have taken apart a man for saying those things—’
‘But I’m a woman.’ The smouldering acknowledgement flared in his eyes and her voice went abruptly and embarrassingly husky. ‘B-besides, violence never really solves anything—’
‘The hell it doesn’t,’ he growled, and kissed her—a hot, savage clash of mouths that made her go up in flames as he hooked his arm under her knees and swung her up into his arms, carrying her from the bright sunlight through the cool luxury of the lounge and down the narrow companionway into the dim depths of his cabin.
‘You said we weren’t going to do this,’ she gasped, kicking off her shoes as he set her lightly on her feet and peeled his still buttoned shirt over his head.
He cupped her face, and drew her mouth under his.
‘God forgive me, I lied…’
CHAPTER NINE
REGAN smoothed her trembling hands over his bare chest, skimming her palms over his rippling shoulders and down across the silky pelt of hair to the ridged muscles of his abdomen, thrilling to her rediscovery of his masculine beauty.
Joshua broke his mouth from hers and threw his head back, closing his eyes as he licensed her hands to rove caressingly against his skin, offering himself up like a sacrificial victim to the spearing pleasure of her touch.
‘You remembered how much I liked that…’ he groaned as her fingertips slid through the tangle of curls and nudged against the flat discs of his nipples. ‘Yes…do that again…’ His muscles contracted and his chest rose, pushing against her exploring fingers as she obeyed. He shuddered, his nostrils flaring at the scent of his own arousal. ‘God, what you do to me…’
She could see it in the taut planes of his face, hear it in the harsh sound of his indrawn breath and feel it in the electric tension of his body, and it excited her unbearably to know that he was so violently responsive to her touch that even the lightest stroke could make his desire strain savagely on the leash. It had been the same that night in the apartment…his hunger for her so wonderfully intense that she had felt like the most beautiful and alluring woman in the world…the only woman who existed for him, the focus of all his dreams and the answer to all his desires.
He opened his eyes and smiled slowly at the sight of her flushed face, parted lips and smugly sensuous eyes.
‘Little tyrant, you like having me at your mercy, don’t you?’ he accused, but his deep tone was one of smoky approval. His hands stroked up her arms and spread around her back, massaging the soft cotton fabric of her top against her slender form. ‘You like knowing that you have the power to drive me beyond the bounds of common sense, of decency…’
In a twisted way she did. It satisfied a deep-seated need in her to be the primal source of his actions.
‘I’m the one who should be begging for mercy,’ she said, drawing her nails delicately across his chest. ‘I’m the one who was kidnapped by a pirate. Swept off my feet and carried down to the bowels of his ship—’
‘—to be ravished from head to toe…’ He cupped the side of her face with a scarred hand, his eyes darkening. ‘But not entirely against your will…’
The taunting accusation of rape had wounded him, even if he had swiftly realised that it had merely been intended to goad him into revealing the truth. She turned her head, pressing her lips to the crease of his strong life line. ‘Not at all against my will…’
Her husky confession made him shudder.
‘I don’t want to hurt you—’ The tormented admission was dragged from him reluctantly, a concession to the impossible situation that existed outside the universe of the closed cabin. ‘I’ve made a promise that I won’t—can’t—go back on…too much is at stake…’
She couldn’t tell him that it was too late, that the hurt was already stored up in her heart against the day that she would no longer have any place in his life. She couldn’t lay that burden on him, on top of the ones that he already bore on his broad shoulders. They both knew that what they were doing was wrong, but not as wrong as it would be tomorrow—or in a month’s time, if and when he married Carolyn. Despicable as it might be, Regan wanted to snatch one more precious memory for herself before her conscience forever denied her the expression of her forbidden love.
It had taken months for her to be wooed around to the idea that she was in love with Michael, but with Joshua there had been no gradual awakening; the knowledge had come like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky—a violent, concussive shock exploding in her consciousness and accompanied by a strong whiff of sulphur. She hadn’t been looking for love—quite the reverse—but it had stormed into her wary heart with a vengeance, and she found she could no more control the unruly emotion than she could the stars in their courses.
But, unlike her first, naive foray into love, this time the portents for a relationship were quite clearly disastrous, and she was prepared for the worst.
‘I know…’ she whispered reassuringly, loving him for his warning. ‘I know you won’t hurt me,’ she added, her hands moving to his belt to unthread the buckle, ‘because I already know what kind of lover you are…strong and virile, and incredibly generous.’
Her fingers went to his zip and he caught her wrists, using them to pull her up against him. His mouth came down on hers and he ravaged it with a forceful passion that triggered a gush of moist heat between her thighs. He angled his head, licking and nibbling at the soft, inner tissue of her mouth, drawing her tongue into his mouth and tugging on it with a rhythmic, erotic suction that made her yearn for an even more intimate intrusion into her moist interior.
His hands fisted in the thin, white cotton of her top, drawing the stretchy fabric tight across her breasts as he lifted his head to study the effect.
‘I like knowing that you don’t wear a bra,’ he said thickly. ‘The other night at the party I imagined I could see the shadow of your nipples against the white silk. I knew they’d be as dark as ripe cherries because they were so pointed and hard.’
‘That was because of you,’ she whispered, arching her back and tilting her head to give him a better view. ‘Because your eyes on me made me want you, even though I pretended not to notice…’
He smoothed a hand across the small mounds, cupping and shaping them. ‘They’re hard now, too.’ He found one stiff nub and fondled it gently, then more roughly as he watched her face register the sharp thrill, her eyelids sinking, her cheeks flushing, her damp mouth quivering in inarticulate pleasure.
One hand wrapped around her arched back and she clutched at his shoulders as he pushed the hem of the top up over her collarbone, framing her breasts for his admiration.
‘Look, they’re blushing…’ he said, drawing a finger up one hot, swollen rise, tracing the blue veins that showed through the tight, translucent skin.
‘I’m not surprised,’ whispered Regan shakily. ‘If you knew what I was thinking you’d be blushing, too…’
‘What are you thinking about…this?’ He replaced his finger with his hot, wet mouth, painting the entire surface of her breasts with slow, rasping strokes of his tongue, gradually narrowing his concentration to the glistening nipples. ‘I remember how much you loved me doing this,’ he said, his voice a whisper of sound against her creamy flesh, ‘how you demanded I do it over and over again…I remember how I gave you an orgasm just by pushing my thigh tight between your legs while I sucked on your dainty nipples.’
And she remembered how he had used words as cleverly as he had used his mouth and his hands. Her knees melted, and on the way down he pulled the top over her head and threw it on top of his shirt, supporting her from hand to hand as he efficiently dealt with her trim skirt.
She was embarrassed at the plainness of her unadorned white panties, but he smiled as he hooked his fingers in
to the elastic.
‘Prim little cottontail,’ he teased as he stripped them down her thighs. ‘Don’t you know how erotic the contrast is between these and your own natural G-string of sexy black lace?’ And he ruffled his fingers teasingly in the soft triangle of dark fur that the panties had concealed.
The throb of the boat’s engine beneath her feet seemed to echo the thrumming of her heart as Joshua threw off the rest of his clothes with an enchanting, almost boyish eagerness. But there was nothing boyish about him when he pulled her back into his arms.
The wide double bunk was built into one corner of the cabin on a pedestal of drawers, its smooth, satiny, dark blue cover glowing under the strip of lights concealed in the bottom row of bookshelves on the wall above the bed, but when Joshua sat down on the edge and tried to draw her down on top of him, Regan resisted.
She sank to her knees between his legs, onto the thick, soft carpet, running her hands up the strong column of his thighs, gliding her thumbs into the sensitive patches of hairless skin on either side of his groin.
When she bent her head, he stilled, his hands cupping her shoulders. ‘Regan—’
Her eyes lifted to his. ‘I want to make love to you.’ And, as his gaze moved hungrily down over her nude, submissive pose she reminded him huskily, ‘The way you did to me…’
His nostrils flared as she closed her mouth over him and proceeded to pleasure him to the brink of madness with her soft tongue and throaty little sounds of seductive enjoyment. His back stiffened, the tendons in his neck cording as he arched his throat and gritted his teeth, fighting the approaching explosion in order to increase the deliciously excruciating torment of unsatisfied desire. He plunged his hands into her hair, guiding her beautifully eager mouth, and when he could bear it no more his iron muscles knotted and convulsed, and a harsh, guttural cry of groaning completion was torn from his heaving chest.
Only then did she allow him to pull her beside him on the rumpled cover and cuddle her up to his naked length.