by Lynne Graham
“I’m not living with Athene again!” she snapped in dismay.
An expression of icy derision tautened his strong, dark face. “Why would I take you there to live? You are no longer a teenager.”
Her head bent in comprehension. “You told her,” she muttered sickly.
“I told no one. But your sister…she was not so quiet. There were rumours,” he admitted tautly. “Unsubstantiated, but damaging.”
She refused to believe that Vickie had talked. But evidently word had somehow got out. Dear God, how humiliating that must have been for Alex! Lion of industry, betrayed by teenage wife.
“Naturally we will have our own home again,” he stressed drily. “When we first married, I rather innocently believed that you would be happier living with my family and free of the responsibilities of entertaining. I didn’t realise that my mother disliked you. It’s not always easy to see fault in someone close.”
“I did tell you.”
“Yes, I know you did, but until I witnessed her barely restrained pleasure at the failure of our marriage, I didn’t appreciate that you hadn’t been exaggerating.”
It was an admission of blame Alex would not have made four years ago, and it mollified her jangling emotions to some degree. She swallowed. “She…your family will be shocked by our remarriage.”
“I am head of my family,” he said with hauteur. “I will expect you and them to behave with civility and breeding when you meet again. I am answerable to nobody in my private life.”
He bent down, swept up the coat he had stripped from her and extended it to her. “It’s almost five. You will need time to dress for the party.”
She dug her arms stiffly into the sleeves, and was extraordinarily tempted to lean back into the strong, protective heat of him and weep for what she had done in the past and Alex’s inability to accept it. “You know…that night…” her tongue slid out to moisten her lips “…Vickie’s…”
His hands suddenly rested heavily on her tense shoulders.
“That man…we didn’t make love,” she whispered jerkily. “I know that. I don’t remember much, but I know that.”
Alex was intimidatingly silent, and then his breath escaped in a hiss. “It would be wiser if you didn’t mention that night again.”
She whirled round. But his embittered eyes made her bite back words of heated disagreement. Either he did not believe her, or she had surmised his feelings correctly. That she had got into the situation at all was sufficient for Alex.
“The car will be waiting for you,” he prompted her departure shortly. “I will see you later.”
The apartment had barely changed. It was all as she remembered, but for a couple of new paintings and a change of décor in the drawing-room. Umberto, Alex’s manservant, might have seen her only the day before. He betrayed neither welcome nor surprise as he politely showed her through to one of the guest-rooms. He opened the wardrobe to display the selection of clothes hanging there. Matching accessories sat on the shelves, and several lingerie boxes reposed untouched on the bed. Alex’s efficiency surprised her not at all. For Alex, such gestures were easy. He simply had to lift a phone.
She attempted again to phone her sister, who now lived in a flat in Chiswick which she had bought the previous year. This time, Vickie was home.
“Where the hell are you?” her sister demanded with unexpected shrillness. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours!”
“I’m in London, in Alex’s apartment.”
“You mean it’s true? It can’t be, you can’t be going back to him!” she argued. “You’ve got to be out of your mind after what he did to you!”
Kerry sighed. “Vickie, I…”
“I’ll come over.”
“No, don’t.” Kerry went on to explain about the party.
“I’ve got to see you!” Vickie flared. “You don’t understand…oh, God…” Her voice trailed away.
Her sister’s almost hysterical response to the news that she was returning to Alex surprised Kerry. Vickie very rarely lost control. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” she promised. “Before I go home again.”
Vickie gave a curious laugh. “OK. I’ll stay home for you. Nothing earthshaking is likely to happen between tonight and tomorrow.”
Kerry came off the phone and went to examine the shimmering blue dress which Alex had mentioned. The light caught its glistening, iridescent folds. It was the sort of blatantly alluring gown which Alex would once have frowned upon. Pain snaked within her treacherously. Alex didn’t look on her as an innocent any more.
She dined in solitary state. It brought back unwelcome memories of too many other meals eaten alone with one eye to the clock. But this time she was not awaiting Alex with the feverish and resentful impatience of a teenager in love. She was afraid, terrifyingly afraid of the insanity that had taken hold of her in Alex’s arms, proving his point that she was ruled by her own physical responses. She had lied to herself all this time in telling herself that she hated him. It was her own self she hated for betraying him. In time, anyone could come to hate the reminder of a wrong. That was what Alex had become to her; an agonising reminder of that night and her own demeaning frailty.
She heard the thud of the front door while she was dressing. The gown was more daring than anything she had ever worn. The swell of her breasts rose seductively above the fitting fabric which hugged from beneath her arms to her hips. The colour was breathtaking against her hair. Picking up the toning bag and the high-collared jacket, she could linger in the bedroom no longer.
Alex entered the drawing-room a few minutes behind her. His eyes swept in rampant appraisal over her. “Take the jacket off. I want to see you.”
“No. Won’t we be late?” she said breathlessly. But she took it off to prevent Alex performing the task for her, and stood there feeling like a slave on the block.
Dark colour had risen to his hard cheekbones. He made no effort to hide his masculine appreciation.
“You really have grown up.”
The blaze of his sensual scrutiny made her shrug hastily back into the concealment of the jacket. He bit out a soft, grating laugh. “Surely not so shy? You’re almost twenty-four now.”
She was still a case of arrested development. She didn’t date. She had never taken another man to her bed. She had spent all this time suppressing an essential part of her womanhood, and presumed that that was why Alex’s hand on hers, even briefly, could send a shock of electrifying awareness through her. Frustration. That was all it was, and Alex was tormentingly familiar. She only had to look at him to recall the hard thrust of his all male body on hers, the feel of his satin damp skin beneath her caressing fingertips. Her complexion burnt up hotly, her pulses quickening. In bed there had never been distance between them. But there had been several women in Alex’s arms since she had last rested there. Accepting that cruel reality cooled her fluttering senses.
Despite the divorce, Kerry had never learnt to stop thinking of Alex as her husband. He had taken his revenge in full the first time she lifted a newspaper and saw a photo of him in a New York nightclub with a glamorous socialite clinging to him. She had been sick with jealousy, but she had not been entitled to the emotion. They had been divorced by then.
The party was a glittering crush which contained not a single familiar face. Alex kept one arm round her the whole time. They were the centre of attention, and Alex seemed content to be on display. When a well-known gossip columnist approached them, he smilingly announced their marital plans.
“What have you been doing since your divorce?” she asked Kerry bluntly. “You disappeared right off the social scene.”
Kerry tipped more champagne down her dry throat, an ignominious desire to giggle attacking her as Alex smoothly stepped in to speak for her, as he had done on several other occasions throughout the evening.
“My wife was living in the country.”
“Selling plates,” Kerry added brightly. “Atoning for my…” She coll
ided involuntarily with Alex’s dark eyes, and inwardly she collapsed like a pricked balloon. He made some witty remark, smoothing over her crazy outburst, and she studied the carpet, feeling like a child about to be put in the corner. Really, an ex-wife who had painted the town red would have been an intolerable threat to Alex’s idea of what was decent. Without even trying, she had done what would have pleased most, she acknowledged bitterly. She had lived like a nun.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Alex growled as the woman moved away. “And don’t drink any more. You’ve had enough. I’m surprised you can even touch alcohol after…”
A chill ran over her flesh and doused the rebellion incited by an entire evening spent firmly beneath Alex’s thumb.
His chiselled mouth compressed. “I should not have said that,” he drawled curtly. “I apologise.”
It was an apology of glacial and grudging proportions. Ahead of her stretched a lifetime of them. Her infidelity was as fresh as yesterday to Alex, and it always would be.
“You’re never going to trust me again, are you?” she muttered sickly.
“I wouldn’t trust you to the foot of the street,” he agreed in a simmering undertone. “And it gives me no pleasure to tell you that. But since I believe that you are…genuinely sorry…”
“You mean, you really believe that?” Shame could not drown out anger. “You’d have been much happier if I put myself over a cliff somewhere, Alex. That’s your idea of genuinely sorry,” she whispered strickenly. “And you damned near succeeded in getting your wish. If I hadn’t been pregnant I…I…”
He had lost colour. “Don’t talk like that!” he snapped.
“No, you don’t want to hear it, do you? All about the revenge you took then.” Her tremulous voice was breaking. “How you let me crawl…I’ll never forget that, Alex, and I’ll never…forgive you either…”
He swept her out to the hall and sent a maid off for her jacket while smoothly thanking their hostess for her hospitality. She noticed the columnist covertly absorbing their departure and she reddened miserably, regretting her loss of control. But she could not for ever hang her head in remorseful silence, listening to Alex bestow pious comments. She was only human. The trouble was that Alex wasn’t. Even loving her, he had given no quarter to either of them. He had meted out punishment with a ruthlessness which still had the power to make her shiver.
“You will never forgive me…ha!” Alex vented in the suffocating atmosphere in the rear of the limousine. “You wrecked our marriage. You went out like a spoilt, over-indulged brat and got drunk and gave yourself to another man while you carried my child. Am I to apologise for not having it within me to forgive you? I knew I couldn’t. I stayed away for your safety, too. You were pregnant, you might have lost the baby. Perhaps I was hard upon you…”
Her teeth had bitten into her tongue, and the salty tang of blood had filtered into her mouth. “There is no perhaps about it. You nearly destroyed me. I loved you.”
“If you had loved me, you would never have let another man touch you, drunk or sober!” Alex ripped back at her, all cool abandoned now that they were in private. “Do not talk of love to me. You were infatuated. Once the novelty had worn off, you wanted your freedom back.”
“That’s untrue…I was unhappy, but I didn’t regret marrying you.”
“Well, believe me,” Alex breathed cruelly, “I regretted marrying you.”
Dear God, what sort of relationship were they to have in the future? Alex tearing at her continually for a past she could not wipe out, and Kerry hating him for the grain of truth in every pronouncement. It was a vicious circle.
He sighed. “I don’t wish to talk to you like this. I concede that I made mistakes too. Instead of giving way to my desire for you, I should have decided upon a long engagement, during which we could both have adapted to the differences between us. You were too young and insecure, and I was too selfish and intolerant,” he conceded tautly. “I should have bought us a home in England. You would have had your own family then, and I would not have felt the need to play both father and lover. The combination does not work, and I disliked the necessity, but I asked for the problem.”
His generosity surprised her afresh. There had been a time when Alex could not have admitted being less than perfect. But he had looked back, he had seen the distance which had forged them apart. “I did love you.” She didn’t know why it was so important that he accept that now, but it was.
Alex shot her a caustic and cynical smile. “For the last time, I do not want to hear you talk about love. It got us nowhere in the past. If it was love, it was a shallow and mawkish sentiment. All I want from you now is the outward show of wife and mother. That should not tax your ingenuity too much.”
Deeply hurt, she turned her head aside.
“Do you want a nightcap?” he asked as they entered the apartment.
She shook her head. “I’ll go to my room,” she muttered tightly. “As they say, the show’s over.”
“On the contrary…” Black-lashed golden eyes met hers in glancing challenge. “It’s only beginning.”
Kerry retreated to her room and twisted angrily out of the dress. She thrust it from her sight bitterly. Alex had dressed her as he saw her now. As a woman on offer to the highest bidder. A woman who could respond to his caresses as happily as she could respond to any other attractive man’s. A woman who was easy sexually. Easy to seduce, easy to take. Dear God, that wasn’t her! “That isn’t me,” she muttered in soundless despair to the mirror. If she had been like that there would have been a lot of other men since their divorce.
To think of Alex possessing her again with contempt and a hard desire to humiliate turned her stomach over queasily. She couldn’t let that happen. She could go back to him, live with him, take whatever he had to throw at her, but she could not let him use her body. Whatever she had done, she was still an individual with a right to self-determination.
She slipped into bed and lay there. Alex was no rapist. He wouldn’t force her to accede to his sexual demands. How could he really even want her? If she made it clear how she felt…oh, dear lord, Alex was the most Latin of men in that field. Even if he didn’t desire her, he would go through the roof if she tried to bar him from her bedroom. She would have to be more subtle than that.
The door opened and she pulled herself up against the banked-up pillows, huge green eyes wide in the lamplight. Alex shut the door again with a decisive snap. He wore only a short black robe. A tangled mat of dark hairs showed between the parted edges. “Why should I wait for what I want?” he drawled softly, unperturbed by her obvious shock at his appearance.
“You can’t…we’re not married!” Wildly disconcerted by his unashamed intent, Kerry studied him in shaken disbelief.
Alex padded calmly over to the side of the bed, his long fingers already lazily loosening the tie of the robe. “We will be,” he parried.
“Th…that’s not the point! I don’t want this!” she hurled at him wrathfully. “You can’t do this!”
He shed the robe fluidly. “ ‘Can’t’ doesn’t belong in my vocabulary, just as ‘no’ does not belong in yours.” Dark golden eyes held hers in fierce and obdurate purpose. “When I have made your body mine again, I will have obliterated other memories with my own. Capisci, cara?”
In Alex, twentieth-century female liberation had only ever received lip-service. Not an inch beneath the surface ran the hot-blooded buccaneering instincts of his seagoing forebears and the dark, domineering strength of a man who had absolute conviction in his own innate superiority over the female sex. It was the ice on the outside and the tantalising hint of the fire underneath which had first drawn her to Alex.
Dry-mouthed, in paralysis, she took in his lean, sun-darkened nudity. There was nothing shy about Alex in the bedroom. But Kerry had always possessed a girlish modesty which had in the past amused him. Something told her that there would be no such allowances made tonight.
“You can’t,” she whi
spered. “It would be wrong.”
“Wrong?” He wrenched back the duvet and got in beside her with a harsh laugh. Her skin burned hot and tight over her bones as he gathered her into his arms, making no attempt to conceal his obvious arousal from her. “No, this is not wrong,” he asserted arrogantly. “I will not be easy until I have known you again in the only fashion in which I ever knew you.”
Rage shuddering through her, she endeavoured to evade his hold. He had planned this all along, and in her innocence she had trustingly agreed to spend the night, never suspecting the depths of Alex’s determination to mortify what little self-respect she had left. “No!” she raked at him.
His hand closed on the bodice of her cotton nightdress and ripped it asunder. It was a gesture not of violence, but of sheer cool resolution. “Either submit or leave,” he challenged her ruthlessly. “I gave you the terms before you came to me today, and you are still free to change your mind.”
Her shaking hands drew together the remnants of the destroyed garment. She turned the pale curve of her cheek aside in anguish and despair. He had changed, and it wasn’t only love that he had lost in the intervening years. He appeared devoid of tenderness and compassion, too.
“And you’ll be content with submission, will you?” she muttered tremulously. “Knowing that you are humiliating me, knowing that I have no choice?”
“Yes, I will be content,” he grated, his golden gaze skimming stormily to the revealed upper curves of her breasts. “I want you. God forgive me for it, but I want you on any terms, and I do not need you to preach on the subject of my fastidiousness. I am damned if I will deny myself what you could give to a stranger.”
She shrank under the duvet with pained remembrance of what had rent both their lives asunder. He would enforce his mastery in this relationship. He would take her to prove that he was no longer sensitive to her infidelity. But in doing so, she swore, he would receive little satisfaction.
“Put the light out,” she mumbled.
“No…do you know how many women have turned into you in the dark over the years?” His savagery flailed her. “But you are no longer special to me. I will satisfy myself in that tonight.”