by Lynne Graham
Chrissy spun round. ‘I l-like it!’ she said defiantly, aware of what he was trying to do. He wanted to destroy all the physical evidence of the marriage that had taken place.
He crossed the width of carpet separating them and, before she could even guess his intention, he hooked a powerful hand into the fragile fabric and ripped it down the front. Chrissy was shocked rigid. Wide-eyed, she linked her arms over the thrust of her exposed breasts.
‘If you don’t take it off, I’ll rip it off,’ Blaze drawled lethally.
Trembling, she stood there as he uncrossed her arms, slid the ruined remnants of the dress from her shoulders, and let it fall to her feet. She was literally afraid to move. Then she started to back away in the direction of the bedroom for the clothes he had mentioned. A lean hand yanked her back. ‘Why bother? I like the view the way it is.’
Her face crimsoned. Blaze’s eyes were incandescent blue again. She had the sinking feeling that the more flesh he saw, the more angry he would become. He slid a deft hand to her narrow back and released her bra, trailing it off, casting it aside. Covering her breasts, she leapt away from him and fled into the bedroom, certain that there had to be a lock on the bathroom door.
She didn’t make it. Blaze barred her passage. He was frightening her, really frightening her. She backed away from him, intimidated by the sheer height and breadth of him.
‘Cut the comedy act,’ he advised, slinging his jacket and tie aside on a chair. ‘You don’t have a modest bone in your lying, cheating little body. And it’s my bet that you’re as much of a whore as your sister…after all, you have the same groupie tendencies. But you’re much cleverer, aren’t you?’ Diamond-hard blue eyes glittered over her in a brutally male sexual assessment. ‘You were damned careful not to get into my bed before we made it to the church. There’s a name for women like you, and it isn’t a very pleasant one…’
Chrissy was shattered by his character-reading. Clearly, he believed nothing that she had told him. Once a liar, always a liar, she reminded herself painfully. He no longer trusted her. He believed she had been playing the tease quite deliberately to fuel his interest. Her stomach twisted sickly. ‘I’m not l-like that!’
‘No?’ An ebony brow elevated in grim, mocking disbelief. He strode out to the lounge and reappeared with a champagne bucket and two glasses. Expertly, he opened the bottle and filled the glasses without spilling a drop. ‘So,’ he murmured silkily, ‘tell me again about how we made love on the floor… Refresh my memory.’
The invitation not unnaturally silenced her.
‘I didn’t take my clothes off…is that right?’ Blaze prompted in a tone as soft as black velvet. ‘And I believe you said it didn’t last very long. A rather unnecessary detail, that, wasn’t it?’
Chrissy stared at him like an animal in a trap. ‘You know now that it n-never happened!’
‘Do I? You see, I’m having this inexplicable problem in separating the facts from the fiction. Are you telling me that I never actually laid a finger upon you?’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed in a driven rush, eager for any excuse to explain and keep him at a distance.
‘Really? So I didn’t cruelly satisfy my lust on your nubile teenage body and then tell you to get out?’
She bowed her head in embarrassment. ‘All…all you did was kiss me and then you p-pushed me away,’ she admitted. ‘You accused me of…of th-throwing myself at you and then you said th-things about Elaine. You absolutely h-humiliated me; you were unbelievably cruel…’
‘Savaged all those tender teenage feelings, did I?’
‘I d-didn’t throw myself at you!’ Even in the midst of a far more serious crisis, that accusation still rankled.
‘So, I’ve never actually had you.’ A smile of breathtaking insolence skimmed his wide, sensual mouth. ‘That should add a little spice to a weekend in which I intend to have you every which way I can…and I should warn you, your imagination is at the starting stakes in comparison with mine!’
Chrissy’s tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lips. He couldn’t mean that. Only if the marriage was unconsummated could he apply for an annulment, and the very last thing he would want to do in these circumstances was deprive himself of that escape clause.
‘You’re wrong,’ he drawled as if she had spoken her thoughts out loud. ‘I don’t care what this weekend costs me.’
‘Blaze, I tried to tell you the t-truth before Elaine appeared!’ she argued in desperation. ‘I would have told you l-last night if you’d come back! You were never meant to know about that lie… It was for Elaine’s benefit. She was planning to have a t-termination because she was convinced that she had a future with you. I couldn’t let that happen, not when I knew that you were only after revenge!’
‘Very impressive. You lie so convincingly.’ He awarded her a slow handclap of sardonic applause. ‘Little Miss Martyr, in fact…with not a single self-seeking motive of her own in mind—’
‘What m-motive could I have?’ she demanded weakly. ‘I couldn’t hope to conceal Rosie’s parentage from you indefinitely—’
‘No? With the money I have, I’m quite sure that as my wife you would have contrived to find someone somewhere to forge a suitable birth certificate, naming you as her mother. That would have been all you needed to do. I was unlikely to demand blood tests after the wedding!’
His clipped, icy delivery rang with the cool of complete conviction. Numbly shaking her head, Chrissy looked at him in appalled silence. He thought she had used Rosie to trap him into marriage.
‘And I’d never have known…’
‘I’d never h-have done that to you!’ she muttered strickenly.
‘You’re preaching to the converted, sweetheart.’ Blaze drained his glass of champagne and studied her with seething intensity, his mouth narrowed to a hard line. ‘You’re a cheap, calculating little opportunist, and the one thing I am not interested in is the sound of your voice.’
Setting down the glass, he closed the gap between them and she started to breathe fast, reacting to the danger flares in the atmosphere. ‘No,’ she said with a shiver of fear. ‘N-no…’
‘It’s called paying the piper, Chrissy, and you are going to pay and keep on paying until I get bored with the lack of variety in the entertainment,’ he swore.
Lean, terrifyingly strong fingers forced her arms away from her breasts. ‘This shrinking, almost virginal modesty is being heavily overplayed,’ he censured with hard amusement. ‘You’re no innocent and I am randy as hell.’
His intent gaze lingered on the pouting breasts he had uncovered and a deep flush carmined her skin, scorching tears lashing her lowered eyelids. ‘You c-can’t!’ she suddenly burst out.
‘Rosie may not be mine,’ he bit out with whiplash resonance, ‘but you are!’
‘Blaze, please…’ she pleaded, terrified of the idea of him making love to her in the mood he was in.
‘All mine…to do exactly as I want with.’ He swept her up and dropped her down on the bed without warning. Before she could move out of reach, he had peeled off her briefs and tights with one deft tug.
He followed her down on to the mattress in one lithe movement. ‘No need to be coy now, sweetheart,’ he murmured, pinning her flat and staring down at her. ‘You have really beautiful breasts…and no doubt I’m not the first man to tell you that!’
Turmoil in her distressed eyes, Chrissy looked up at him, her throat convulsing. His dark head angled down and he ran the tip of his tongue tauntingly across the panting upswell of her breasts on his path to a rosy nipple. She went rigid, fighting the jerk of instant sensation with all her might.
‘It won’t work… You’re just as desperate for this as I am,’ Blaze told her harshly.
She flinched, shut her eyes tightly, determined to behave like a block of wood, and then maybe he would leave her alone. But she trembled when he shaped her breasts with his hands, shivered when he teased her with his tongue and his teeth, and dug both hands into the bed
ding to prevent herself making a shameless grab for him when he invaded her mouth with devastating expertise.
‘Don’t,’ she gasped against that assault, for she knew he was powered by contempt and a desire to humiliate her and to respond to such a calculated onslaught would be an inexcusable self-betrayal.
She could feel her breasts swelling almost painfully beneath his palms, her heart racing to a mad, accelerated peak, outside her control. And she knew that he had already won, because her hunger for him was surging through her in great waves of abandonment. Everything that had gone before fell into limbo. His mouth was back on her breasts and tortured gasps escaped her as he stroked and circled and tormented the hard, puckered nubs he had already roused to unbearable sensitivity.
The rough, curling hair on his chest scratched her satin-smooth stomach and she arched and ached all in one involuntary movement beneath him, her thighs trembling with the raw depth of her arousal.
Abruptly, she was freed, and she let a stifled sound of protest flee her lips before she opened her eyes. Blaze was discarding what remained of his clothing and when he returned to her she shivered as she came into contact with his muscled thighs and then she felt the full force of his arousal, hot and smooth and hard against her. Heat pooled instantly in her pelvis.
She was making the discovery that she wanted to touch and explore him too. Her fingers laced into the hair on his broad chest, smoothed over his brown skin, tracing the taut lines of his ribcage as his breath came in increasingly audible pants. She freed her mouth to find a muscular shoulder sheathed in silky smooth skin that she caressed with her tongue, then nipped daringly with her teeth, having learnt fast from the lessons he had unwittingly given her.
He twisted his head and took her mouth again, roughly, urgently, and the most ferocious tension snaked her every muscle taut. She didn’t want to stay still…it was impossible to stay still as his hand explored between her parted thighs. She moaned low in her throat, a disturbingly animal sound, her limbs trembling, her back arching in jerky, uncontrolled movements.
‘You are so small…so tight,’ he groaned and he murmured other things, wild, arousingly intimate assurances of exactly how he was going to make her feel.
She was literally mindless with desire when he tipped her up, spreading her legs wide and high as he came down on her. Her entire body was centred on the raw ache of need eating her up. She was writhing, shaking, entirely mastered by that hunger when she felt his probing hardness surge against her and instinctively tensed.
‘Don’t…’ Blaze groaned, his hands forcing her still as he entered her degree by painful degree.
It hurt like hell and she cried out as he thrust deep into her soft sheath, rending the flimsy barrier that had sought to deny him. With a raw sound of all-male satisfaction, he took full possession.
Only then did he pause, sapphire-blue eyes bright with astonishment as he raked her pale, tense face. ‘Rosie would indeed have been a miracle… No wonder you didn’t dare let me this close,’ he breathed with uninhibited satisfaction, slumbrous and entirely unexpected amusement gleaming from his piercing gaze as he moved on her in an almost taunting reminder of his sexual supremacy.
‘Stop it!’
‘I love it,’ he murmured provocatively. ‘You lie and you cheat but basically you’re just a nice girl, who very properly saved herself for her husband. I am truly grateful for an experience I never thought to have. Relax; I’ll be gentle but I am not going to stop…’
She absolutely hated him at that instant. But a second later he found her mouth in a series of soft, tormentingly brief kisses, and the fire, doused by pain, began, incredibly, to flame again. She told herself that she couldn’t want this to continue, but her body taught her different, trembling and suddenly melting beneath his slow, careful thrusts. Her head fell back, her breathing ruptured as the pleasure began to build to unbearable extremes.
‘Shall I stop?’ Blaze whispered mockingly.
‘No…’ she gasped, on the brink of a rolling wave of ecstasy that went on and on, taking her to unbelievable heights. She could no longer fight her own emotions, her own natural instincts, and she moved with him, went leaping off that highest pinnacle of sensation in the belief that she could fly as he shuddered into climax above her.
Releasing her, he threw himself back against the pillows, leaving her feeling completely bereft as she fell back down through the cotton-wool clouds of satiation to the hard realities of life. The silence was the reality. She must have imagined that glorious feeling of bonding on a higher plane when he’d made love to her.
The mattress gave with his departure. She listened to him running a bath in the en suite. She felt like a victim who had wantonly and stupidly participated in her own downfall. In the field of sexual experience, she was a mere beginner, and his incredulous amusement had hurt. After telling her exactly what he thought of her, he had forced her into bed to play to the full the role of a bride on her wedding night. And, in doing that, he had humiliated her by effortlessly asserting his sexual dominance. She felt used and abused and bitter and miserable and thoroughly sorry for herself.
The bedding was trailed unceremoniously back before she could make a grab for it. Blaze lifted her and then paused to stare in shock at the evidence of her lost innocence plainly visible on the sheet. He went pale. ‘My God,’ he breathed. ‘I think you need a doctor… Are you supposed to bleed like—?’
It was the last straw. Flooded by raw mortification, Chrissy struck out at him with a flailing fist. ‘You sadist!’ she shrieked.
He ducked the blow and, striding into the en suite, he gently lowered her down into the soothing heat of the bath he had filled. ‘If I were a real sadist,’ he said smoothly, ‘I would be following my natural inclinations and you would still be in that bed. I wouldn’t give a damn how much I was hurting you. So don’t tempt fate. After all, out of bed, I don’t have much use for you!’
The door thudded closed and she burst into tears, stifling the sound behind her shaking hands. She had known that, but somehow, until it was unashamedly slung at her, she had been able to shelter from that most agonising truth. More than anything else in the world, she wanted him to care for her just a little, even the way he had before. Right now, she wasn’t too proud to accept that as the most she was likely to receive.
But even that was out of reach, she sensed wretchedly. She had dug her own grave with Blaze. He didn’t trust her, he didn’t like her and he certainly had no respect for her. She had lied and this was her punishment. Permitting herself the indulgence of weak tears was pathetic, she told herself. Tears would change nothing. Elaine would go home to Steve and Chrissy couldn’t even congratulate herself on that count. Blaze would have contrived that miracle all by himself and without any assistance from her.
Chapter 10
Chrissy climbed out of the car and walked into the house. Rosie charged at her and gave her an excited hug, but one second later she asked, ‘Blaze?’
‘Blaze is b-busy, pet.’ Chrissy hurriedly turned to speak to Floss.
‘It’s a crying shame you couldn’t go to Paris. Men!’ Floss grumbled. ‘As if the yard couldn’t survive without him for a week! With the builders still here, the yard is only running at half its capacity. I think you should have put your foot down—’
‘I don’t mind,’ Chrissy put in, alert to the sound of Blaze’s footsteps in the hall.
‘Oh, before I forget…I was talking to Phyllis Roper, who runs the playgroup in the village. She said they might have a place for Rosie…’
The moment that Chrissy was most dreading arrived as Rosie scrambled off her lap at speed and headed for Blaze like a homing pigeon.
As Rosie intercepted him at the foot of the stairs, he froze, his brilliant blue eyes veiled, his strikingly handsome features clenching hard as Rosie wrapped both arms round his knees, innocently demanding the welcome she had learnt to expect from him. For a split-second he looked so intensely alone that Chrissy’s throat ac
hed.
‘Blaze—Daddy,’ Rosie enunciated quite clearly, and Chrissy’s cup of poison truly overflowed.
‘It just slipped out once,’ Floss confided worriedly, ‘and ever since I said it she’s been saying it. I’m sorry.’
‘No problem,’ Blaze drawled flatly, but the look he directed at Chrissy was like a knife thudding into a target.
‘Time I was getting on… No, there’s no need to see me out,’ Floss insisted.
Chrissy had the mobility of a statue. Everything that Blaze had refused to talk about over the weekend was in that scorching blue stare of bitter condemnation. Rosie… And Rosie was not something Blaze wished to discuss. She had let him believe that Rosie was his child and, now that he was faced with Rosie again, knowing the truth, Chrissy’s damaging deception was once more laid bare.
Unexpectedly, he gave way to the toddler’s pleas and bent down and lifted her up. Certain that he couldn’t want that contact, Chrissy hurried forward. ‘Let m-me take h-her,’ she urged miserably.
‘You bitch,’ Blaze whispered. ‘You absolute bitch.’
Chrissy fell back as though she had been struck, every remaining scrap of colour evaporating from her drawn cheeks. Both arms wrapped protectively around Rosie, Blaze stared down at Chrissy with unconcealed loathing and distaste.
Dazed and sick, she swayed into the kitchen and sank down weakly at the table. How could he have made love to her when he felt like that? Were men so different in temperament? The weekend had been an exercise in humiliation, executed with ruthless cool and precision. In two days, she had not once left that suite.
He had ordered dinner to be served up there that first night. Then he had simply walked out after the meal. She didn’t know where, hadn’t had the guts to ask. She had gone to bed, and graciously he had allowed her to sleep in peace. But between breakfast the following morning and lunch forty-eight hours later when they checked out, Blaze had kept her almost continuously in the bedroom. Her pale complexion flamed at the snatches of erotic imagery indelibly printed on her memory. He was an insatiable lover.