Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  The kiss made what little remained of her thought processes swoon. It seemed to draw out her very essence, heart and soul, taking them into his possession until she felt that she would be nothing without him, unable to function, unable even to exist on her own. She was floating, drifting, with no sense of direction or thought.

  ‘So you’ll stay,’ Andreas murmured, his voice low and sensual, rich with total confidence, total conviction that he was going to get his way.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was nothing else that she could say but even as she spoke Becca had the terrible feeling of water, deep, dark and cold, closing over her head, drowning her. But there was no hope of turning back.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, soft and low. ‘Yes, I’ll stay.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘SO HOW long, exactly, did you foresee this “being sensible” to last?’

  Andreas stretched lazily in the sunshine, noting with satisfaction that the rawness of torn muscles, the ache of bruising, was easing more with each day. If only he could say the same about the blank space where part of his memory should be. That and the burn of frustration that nagged at him all day, every day, simply because Becca was around.

  At least the last few days had given his body a chance to heal physically. He would never admit it but the accident had taken more out of him than he liked, so spending time showing Becca around the island, taking her to his favourite restaurant, walking along the shore, had filled in the days of convalescence and stopped him climbing the walls with boredom.

  Becca stirred her head against the cushions of the sun lounger next to him and opened those blue-green eyes in a look of such sleepy sensuality that it had his body hardening and aching in a moment, straining against the black stretch fabric of the swimming shorts that were all he wore. She was dressed all in white today in a loose sleeveless top and cotton trousers that were cut off short, revealing her slender calves and ankles.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked and in spite of her attempt to look relaxed he could hear the note of constraint in her voice that was always there when he moved the conversation away from the ordinary, everyday subjects they talked about.

  Just what was it she was so uptight about? Was there something she was hiding? Something she didn’t want him to know? It gave him the most disturbing feeling that the one person in the world he felt really comfortable with—someone he knew he had shared the missing part of his life with—might be deliberately holding something back from him.

  ‘I feel fine! Never better!’ he snapped, the edgy feeling getting the better of him, and he watched the change in her eyes, the way that the warm sensuality died, turning instead to a careful, defensive distance. Silently he cursed himself for his over-hasty reaction.

  ‘And the doctor said you were OK at your check-up this morning?’

  ‘You mean he didn’t give you a full report? After all, your role as my nurse seems to be the only one you’re interested in fulfilling.’

  ‘I thought you’d done away with that idea? To tell you the truth …’ Becca pulled herself up against the wooden back of the lounger so that she was sitting upright and looking him straight in the face ‘…I’m not at all sure what you want from me.’

  ‘You know only too well what I want.’

  Andreas made no attempt to disguise the blatantly sexual double meaning behind his words.

  ‘How I want you—where I want you.’

  There was that wary flicker in her eyes again. A momentary glance into his face and then away, fast, to stare out at the horizon. She affected an intense interest in the ocean that lapped lazily against the shore beyond the sunlit terrace.

  ‘I thought we—agreed to take that slowly.’

  ‘We agreed to be sensible. It’s not the same thing.’

  ‘To me it is. For one thing, I have no idea whether you have anyone else in your life—and you can’t promise that you don’t,’ she pointed out.

  ‘But if we’re a couple …’

  ‘I’ve been in England a long time…’ Becca hedged.

  So that was it. They’d been apart, and she wasn’t sure she could trust him. That he could understand.

  ‘There isn’t anyone else in my life.’

  ‘And you can swear to that, can you?’

  ‘Well, for one thing I think she’d have turned up by now if there was someone. She’d have heard of my accident. And for another, then Leander would have told me if I was married or anything stupid like that.’

  Now what had he said to make her mouth tighten as if against something she’d thought better of saying? And her eyes had moved to the swimming pool, studying the water there as if she had never seen anything like it before.

  ‘And I doubt if Medora is going to sit back and watch me make a fool of myself over you if she knows I was committed to anyone else.’

  ‘So that’s what you think you’re doing, is it?’ Becca’s tone was tart. ‘Making a fool of yourself?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Irritation at the way she wouldn’t look at him, as much as at her tone, roughened the edges of the words. ‘I don’t know if I’ve behaved—or felt—this way before.’

  He couldn’t have felt this way before, he’d decided that already. If he’d ever felt this heat of desire for a woman, the sort of burning hunger that made his days impossible to get through without being with her, seeing her, touching her, and turned his nights into sweat-drenched, sleep-deprived endurance tests, then surely he would remember that?

  And how could he wipe away the memory of the brief moments of restless sleep that he’d finally managed? Sleep in which his dreams were so vivid, so hot, so passionately erotic that they were almost unendurable. And yet waking to find that they had only been a dream had left him gasping for breath and struggling to regain any trace of his lost control.

  He couldn’t have forgotten those feelings. Not if he had ever experienced anything like them for anyone else before.

  ‘And I believe that in England you have some saying about kettles and pans…’

  ‘Pots,’ Becca corrected automatically, still using that stiff little voice that scraped over his nerves. ‘Pot calling the kettle black—so what has that got to do with me?’

  She sounded so English, so controlled, so sensible that it set his teeth on edge and made him determined to shake her out of that mood. He wanted back the Becca he had seen under the prim and proper exterior on the day of her arrival. The sensual Becca, the hotly responsive Becca. The Becca whose soft, full mouth had felt so wonderful, tasted so delicious under his. Whose firm, high breasts had fitted so perfectly into his hands, the tight nipples pushing against the palms. The Becca who would have been in his bed there and then if she hadn’t had ridiculous, apprehensive, sensible second thoughts.

  ‘You say you don’t know if there’s anyone else in my life but I could say the same about you.’

  ‘About me?’

  That edgy look was back, making him think even more of words like guilt and concealment—and lies.

  ‘Are you a free agent? Is there anyone else in your life?’ he pressed.

  ‘Oh…’

  For a second she looked blank, and then he noticed that her white teeth were digging into the soft fullness of her lower lip, worrying at the soft skin that only moments before he had been imagining kissing.

  ‘Becca?’ Suspicion darkened his voice on the question.

  Was this what she wasn’t telling him? Was the reason she wanted to be ‘sensible’ because there was another man in her world? Someone she didn’t want to tell him about?

  ‘Is there—?’

  ‘No!’ she said firmly and hastily—too firmly, too hastily so that instead of putting his mind at rest it put him more on edge than ever. ‘No—there’s no one.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  That brought her head round, dark hair flying, chin coming up defiantly as she met his assessing stare head-on.

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’ she declared. ‘There is n
o man in my life but you!’

  It was what he most wanted to hear, so why did he sense something like the crawl of small, icy feet down his spine in spite of the heat?

  ‘Good,’ he said, reaching out to touch a hand to her cheek and hold her there, sea-coloured eyes locked with black. ‘Just make sure it stays that way. I have exclusive rights to my women. You’re mine and only mine …’

  Under the touch of his fingers her face jerked just once as if in rejection of his comment. Her eyes opened wide and that determined little chin lifted even higher.

  ‘You don’t have any rights to me—not yet.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Andreas agreed, a slow, appreciative smile curling his mouth. She was gorgeous when she was like this—wonderfully sexy with the mutinous spark that lit those fantastic eyes, the wash of colour that flooded her cheeks. ‘I know—we’re taking this slowly … being sensible.’

  He drawled out the word deliberately, putting every ounce of contempt he could into each syllable.

  ‘But not for long. I could make you forget about that need for caution you think is so important.’

  Another jerk of her chin, a lift of her smoothly arched brows, challenging the truth of his assertion, making his smile widen ever more.

  ‘You know I could,’ he murmured softly, leaning even closer so that his mouth was just inches away from the soft, rebellious pout of her lips. ‘It would only take a minute. Not even that.’

  She had frozen now, nothing moving but her eyes as they watched him warily, waiting to see what he would do next.

  ‘All I’d have to do is to lean forward, just the tiniest little bit …’

  He suited the action to the words, only just catching the tiny faint sound of her swiftly indrawn breath as he did so. Her eyes widened just a little bit more but she stayed where she was, though the pink tip of her tongue slid out and slicked over her lower lip in an uneasy, betraying gesture.

  The movement and the slight film of moisture it left on her mouth was a temptation that Andreas couldn’t resist. He’d waited too long for the taste of her mouth on his all over again. He wanted it again and he wanted it now.

  Reaching up a hand, he curled it round the back of her head, fingers sliding into the silky dark hair, cupping the fine bones of her skull as he drew her near to him and took her mouth. Her lips were as soft and delicious as they had been before and she yielded to him with a soft murmur that made his senses give a hard, painful kick in response.

  To hell with being sensible. This was what he wanted. What he needed. Her mouth opened under his and with a sense of triumph he moved in closer.

  And felt the faint, unmistakable shiver that ran through her body as she fought for control. It was there and gone again in the space of a heartbeat but he had felt it and recognised it for what it was.

  He could kiss her out of it, he knew that. It wouldn’t take much; she would be his if he only insisted, pressed a little more. But it was the fact that she had reacted in that way, that she still felt that restraint she talked about that stopped him dead in his tracks. She was still determined to keep him at arm’s length for her own personal reasons. And that realisation destroyed the sensual mood completely.

  With a savagely muttered curse in his own language he wrenched his mouth away from hers, pulling his head back to stare down into her dark, shocked eyes.

  ‘Andreas …’ Becca began and the shake on the sound of his name was the last straw.

  Swearing brutally, he tore himself away from her, taking several swift, strong and almost blind strides across the tiled surround of the pool and diving head first into the cool water, plunging way down into the clear blue depths, driving himself as hard and as far as he could.

  Becca watched him go through eyes that were blurred with sudden tears. She knew what had made him react like this, the tiny shudder of panic she hadn’t been able to control, but that didn’t mean that she understood quite what state of mind had influenced him. Was it fury—cold-blooded anger at the way that she was still determined to hold on to the idea of being sensible? Or was it an attempt to cool himself off literally?

  Whatever his feelings were, they were wild and fierce and he was having to fight to bring them under control. That much was obvious from the way he was powering down the swimming pool, face down, black hair clinging to his skull, muscular arms and legs pushing him through the clear water at a speed that gave Becca a momentary pang of concern for any possible after-effects from the accident. The bruises from his injuries might be fading, but was it safe for him to subject himself to such a physical test?

  But even as the worry crossed her mind she saw that Andreas was already slowing his furious pace. He eased up, continued to swim for a while but at a much more sedate speed and eventually came back to the side of the pool just beside where she stood. Slicking back his soaking black hair with a powerful hand, he supported himself on strong arms as he trod water, looking up into her watchful face, dark eyes narrowed against the sun.

  ‘And now I suppose you’re going to say that, as my nurse, you can’t approve of my behaviour just now?’ he commented cynically. ‘Isn’t this your cue to tell me that it wasn’t at all sensible—?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare say anything of the sort!’ Becca flung back at him, the uncanny way that he had almost read her mind unsettling her even more. She might have been thinking it but she certainly wasn’t saying it, not knowing the reaction she would undoubtedly get.

  She just hoped that Andreas would believe that irritation was uppermost in her mind and so accept it as the explanation for the way her voice went up and down in the most embarrassing way. She had felt bad enough a moment earlier and the thought that he might recognise her response as one of purely physical awareness of the body floating lazily in the water, the tense muscles in the hard forearms, the glisten of water drops on the bronzed skin was more than she could handle right now. The drenched black hair clung so close to his scalp that it formed a severe frame for those devastating features, emphasising wide, carved cheek-bones, the long, straight nose, hard jaw and almost shockingly softly sensual mouth. Her pulse was already racing in double time, making her heart catch tight in her throat. She couldn’t take another of his sensual onslaughts on her, any more of those devastating, breath-stealing, soul-destroying kisses.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Andreas retorted drily, hauling himself up onto the side of the pool and sitting on the edge with his long legs dangling over the side, feet in the water. ‘Because you seem so determined to revert to the nursing role that I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we ought to discuss your salary.’

  ‘I don’t want that!’

  Sheer horror and the knowledge of just what she was hiding pushed the words from Becca’s mouth in an urgent rush. Scrambling down beside him so that she was on a level with him, she caught hold of his arm, looking earnestly into his face.

  ‘You don’t have to pay me! After all, I’m not doing anything to earn it …’

  Her voice trailed off in shivering embarrassment as she felt a tide of heated blood flood her face, making her cheeks burn at the thought of the other way that her words might be interpreted.

  ‘I didn’t mean … You don’t have to pay me to …’

  Oh, hell, she was making matters so much worse. Her tongue seemed to have swollen to twice its size, tangling up in her mouth so that she couldn’t get another syllable out, either to explain or to apologise. And the lazy smile that crossed that hard-boned face only made matters worse, the laughter in his eyes mocking her confusion and embarrassment.

  ‘Not pay perhaps, but I have a reputation for generosity to my mistresses.’

  My mistresses.

  If he had fired an arrow straight at her heart, piercing it brutally, it couldn’t have had a more painful effect than just hearing him speak so casually.

  My mistresses.

  That was all he thought of her as; all she would ever be; all he wanted her to be. Andreas only thought of her as someone with w
hom he wanted a sexual relationship—a mistress, nothing more. And he had said mistresses—using the plural. Which meant that he thought in terms of more than one relationship, of women who had come before her and… Her throat closed up, making it difficult to breathe… Women who would come after her.

  And since their wedding day?

  There was the burn of hot tears at the backs of her eyes as she forced herself to face an even less bearable thought. The idea that once he had rejected her, he had replaced her with someone else—maybe more than one someone else. How soon after her broken-hearted departure had he brought a new woman into the house that was supposed to have been her marital home? How quickly had he found someone new to warm his bed, fill his days?

  How many of them had there been since she had been driven away from him?

  The tears that stung at her eyes welled up even more, fighting for release. And with grim determination Becca fought them back, struggling to force them down, refusing to let them fall. But she could only manage the control she needed by gritting her teeth, refusing to blink, swallowing as hard as she could.

  ‘Becca?’

  She wished she could say something—anything to make him look away. Preferably something light and throwaway that would distract him, make him laugh, direct that too intent, too searching scrutiny somewhere else. How could she recover her composure, get back her self-possession when he was watching her as if she was some particularly fascinating specimen under a microscope? One he wanted to dissect and analyse completely.

  She knew that her cheeks were burning painfully. The struggle to fight back the tears had added to the already embarrassed colour in her skin. Mortified beyond bearing, she lifted a hand and brushed it across her face, praying that the small gesture would at least break the focus of that concentrated stare.

  ‘You’re hot,’ Andreas said quietly, the note of concern in his words almost destroying her completely. ‘And no wonder when you’re wearing too much clothing.’