'Thank you for telling me how you feel,' she said at length, and Harriet looked at her strangely for a moment before she nodded abruptly and walked out of the house to where she had parked her car.
Cara braced herself to face Vince alone, and she opened the door of the living-room to find him standing in front of the stone fireplace. He had been staring broodingly into the empty grate, but he looked up when she entered and fixed his cold eyes dispassionately on her person.
'More champagne?' he asked abruptly, gesturing towards the bottle which was still quite full, but she shook her head.
'No, thank you.'
'Harriet has left.'
'Yes, I know.' She bit down hard on her lip to steady it. 'I met her in the hall just as she was leaving, and she explained.'
His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. 'What did she explain?'
This was not the moment to confront him with what she had overheard. It was all still too puzzling to comprehend fully, and she doubted also whether she would hear the complete truth from Vince. He seemed to imagine that her father had done something terrible and, not knowing what it was, she was not in a position to defend her father. She would have to be patient if she was to learn the truth, because Vince Steiner was not a man to be questioned, and she would have to wait until he was in a tolerant mood.
'Harriet doesn't approve of our marriage,' she said instead, and he snorted disparagingly.
'Being a doctor has made her soft in the head.'
'Being a doctor has probably made her more aware of human frailties,' she contradicted, and a look of scorn flashed across his face.
'What she doesn't realise, Cara, is that there are some things which cannot be left unpunished,' he said through clenched teeth, and his remark would have been totally confusing if she had not heard the conversation between him and his sister. He snapped on a light when the darkness of dusk settled in the room, and when a white-coated servant appeared silently at the door, he said abruptly: 'Let's go and have dinner.'
They sat facing each other across the extremities of an oval table. Neither of them spoke unless they were forced to, and they went from the consommé through to the sweet without Cara actually knowing what she had eaten, or whether she had eaten at all. She still had that hollow feeling at the pit of her stomach when their coffee was served in the living-room, and although she avoided looking directly at Vince, she was aware of his presence with every fibre of her tense, quivering being. He was watching her, and she knew it. His eyes followed every movement she made like a predatory animal observing its prey, and her frantic mind wondered if he was trying to decide on the right moment to pounce, but he made no such attempt while they drank their coffee.
He lit a cigarette and stretched himself out in his chair. He looked so perfectly calm and relaxed that she hated him for the way she felt. The clock on the mantelshelf struck the hour, jarring her nerves, and she was surprised to see that it was only eight o'clock. The tensions of the day had piled up inside her to leave her exhausted, and there was nothing she longed for more than to put her head down somewhere to sleep away the fears which had haunted her the past twenty-four hours.
'You're not very talkative, are you,' Vince broke the silence between them, and the sound of his deep-throated voice brushed gratingly across the ends of her raw nerves. 'You have hardly said a word since we sat down to dinner.'
'I wasn't aware that you wanted to make conversation,' she excused herself coolly.
'It seems I've married a phenomenon,' he remarked scathingly. 'A woman who doesn't tire a man out with her senseless chatter is quite rare.'
She felt inexplicably hurt, and she put down her cup to clasp her hands tightly in her lap. 'Your sarcasm is uncalled for.'
'You misunderstand, Cara,' he mocked her, and his narrowed, sometimes lazy eyes slid from hers to where the silk of her dress clung softly to the curve of her breasts. 'I was complimenting you.'
'Really?' she said icily, trying to ignore that hated sensation that she had been touched physically by his eyes as they roamed over her body, and his soft, throaty laughter made her suspect that he was aware of every spark of feeling he aroused in her.
'I can sense that you want to start an argument, my dear, and I refuse to argue with you on our wedding night.'
Wedding night! The words conjured up in her mind those passionately tender moments which a bride would spend in the arms of the man she loved, but for Cara her wedding night was simply a nightmare yet to come. She shut her mind to those thoughts, but she could not shut out the anger which had risen at the thought of what she would be denied.
'It was a ghastly wedding,' the words were torn from her before she could prevent them, and she cursed herself when she saw him eyeing her with speculative mockery.
'Would you have preferred something more spectacular in a church?'
'No, I wouldn't have, and you know it!' she retorted angrily. 'Our marriage is a farce, and if it had taken place in a church I would have been forced to make vows before God which I know very well I shan't be keeping.'
'You're tense and overwrought, Cara,' he smiled, but his eyes were like cold bits of steel raking her. 'I suggest you go up to bed, and I'll have a whisky before I do the same.'
Cara could think of nothing else at that moment except that it would be a relief to get away from him, and she fled from the living-room without waiting for a second invitation.
She was panting when she reached the bedroom, and only then did his words hit home to her. He had said that he would have a whisky before he went to bed. Which bed? The one across the passage in the single room, or this one? Oh, God, she had to stop torturing herself in this way! It was all so unnecessary… wasn't it?
Cara took a leisurely bath in an attempt to relax, but the tension in her muscles did not ease entirely, and she was still considerably tense when she stepped out of the bath and dried herself. The nightgown she pulled on was one her mother had given her for her twenty-fourth birthday a month ago, and when she returned to the bedroom she pulled the tortoise-shell comb from her hair to release it from its confining coil. It cascaded down on to her shoulders, heavy and lustrous, and she brushed it vigorously until it was a glossy, silky mass about her face. She flicked her hair back over her shoulders and reached for her jar of night cream, but at that moment there was a knock on the door that made her leap across the room to where she had left her robe on the bed.
The door opened before she could enquire who it was, and she barely had time to clutch the robe like a shield against her body before she found herself facing Vince across the room. He must have downed his whisky in haste, and the dampness of his hair indicated that he had showered in the bathroom across the passage. A brown towelling robe reached down to above his knees, displaying muscled calves. He had nothing on his feet, and when she raised her glance she found herself looking into steel-grey eyes which were observing her with equal intensity. Panic rose within her, but she forced herself to remain outwardly calm.
'What do you want?' she asked when he closed the door and approached her, and still she would not believe what was now becoming the obvious, glaring truth.
Vince thrust his hands into the pockets of his robe, and he paused barely a pace away from her to survey her with a sardonic gleam in his eyes. He was so tall that she had to tilt her head several inches to look up at him, and a frightened pulse was beginning to drum wildly at the base of her throat.
'What do I want?' he repeated her query with a derisive smile. 'Now is that a question for a wife to ask her husband on their wedding night?'
CHAPTER THREE
The moment Cara had dreaded most was no longer something she could cast aside in her thoughts. She had known deep down that Vince was not going to spare her, but she had foolishly imagined that a spark of humanity lurked somewhere behind that harsh, unrelenting exterior. She realised now, of course, that he did not possess one humane particle in his entire body. Or was his threatening attitude part of that revenge he ha
d spoken of to Harriet?
Cara felt more than threatened; she felt terrified. The only light she had switched on in the room was the one on the bedside cupboard, and quite suddenly the room seemed to be filled with sinister shadows that made her shiver.
'You don't—you can't really mean to—to—'
'To what, Cara?' Vince demanded when she faltered helplessly, and the harshness in his voice sent a renewed shiver of fear racing through her. 'Say it!'
He knew exactly what she had intended to say, but it was obvious that hearing her put her fears into words would afford him a satanic pleasure, and Cara was too afraid at that moment to deny him that enjoyment.
'You can't mean to—to make love to me?' her voice cracked nervously on those revealing words.
'You may rest assured, Cara, that love will not enter into our relationship.' He looked for a moment as if he had been chiselled out of pure granite, and the only thing alive about him seemed to be his eyes. They glittered with a strange fire as they flicked over her smooth shoulders which were bare except for the narrow lacy straps of her nightgown, and her knuckles whitened as her hands tightened defensively on the robe she clutched against her. 'What I intend doing tonight is to take possession of the security your father has given me in lieu of his loan,' he added with cold deliberation.
Her heart was pumping ice into her veins with every thudding beat, and she started to shake uncontrollably. 'To take a woman in cold blood is the most despicable thing a man could do, and I would never have believed that you could stoop so low, but I should have known you would act in this loathsome way.'
He smiled as she imagined the devil might smile in a moment of triumph and, when he raised his hands to caress her bare shoulders, it felt as if the fires of hell were licking against her skin. 'You may insult me as much as you wish, but it will not alter the situation.'
'Please be reasonable,' she pleaded, injecting a forced calmness into her voice which she prayed would deter him, but when she would have moved away from him his hands tightened on her shoulders in a bone-crushing grip. 'I consider that I have been most reasonable, and you can't say that I left you in any doubt as to what I wanted,' he announced harshly and, as a drowning man might see his past life unfold before him, Cara saw her fate in Vince's glittering eyes seconds before he jerked the robe from her hands and flung it across the room.
She stood between him and the light, and his eyes burned down the length of her as he surveyed her body through the revealing material. Hot with embarrassment she tried to pull away from him, but his arm snaked about her waist to crush her softness against his hard length. His free hand wound itself into her hair, and forced her head back until it felt as if her neck would snap. She struggled against him, her clenched fists beating against his chest, but there was no escape from the brute strength of his arms, and his soft, throaty laughter mocked her puny efforts as he lowered his head to claim her lips.
Her head was spinning, and a wave of helplessness surged through her that brought on a faintness, but she fought against the darkness that threatened to envelop her. His mouth was clamped on hers with a force that parted her lips, and the shiver of unwanted emotion that raced through her made her renew her attempt to escape from him. Using her hands as leverage, she tried desperately to push him away from her, but his robe had parted in the struggle, and her hands encountered the roughness of chest hair and warm skin. Her touch aroused his desire, and she could feel it in the tautness of his body against hers, and fear made her fight like a wildcat lashing out for survival.
Vince's hand tightened painfully in her hair, making her cry out, and his mouth left hers to rake fire along her throat and across her shoulder.
'For pity's sake… please… let me go!' Her voice was halting and choked with terror, but the only answer she received was the decisive snap of those fragile straps across her shoulders, and the flimsy garment slithered down her shivering body.
He laughed down into her flaming face as he lifted her in his hard arms and carried her towards the bed, and she fought against him, legs and arms flailing, but her blows made no impact on him. She was almost flung on to the bed, and she tried to roll away from him towards the other side, but he held her down effortlessly with one hand while with the other he removed his robe.
Cara's breath was rasping in her throat, and she was staring a little wildly at his magnificent physique with the wide shoulders tapering down to lean hips. His naked maleness was almost too overwhelming to cope with at that precise moment, and she fought like a demon when he finally pinned her body to the bed with the weight of his own. The heat of his flesh against her own did something to her that she refused to acknowledge, and sheer terror began to dictate her words and her actions.
'You're a cold-blooded, callous, sadistic beast!' she screamed, her nails raking across his shoulders and drawing blood on the muscled flesh.
He drew back momentarily in pain and hissed, 'You will pay for that!'
That was no idle threat, Cara discovered, and she paid for her actions in a most diabolical and unexpected way. One hand was sufficient to pin her arms above her head, and his heavy thigh was flung across hers to imprison her while his free hand indulged in a sensual exploration of her body. Her mind rejected what he was doing to her, but her body responded with a will of its own, and in that way she paid more dearly than if he had struck her physically. She had imagined that the touch of his hands on her body would make her shudder with revulsion, but instead his trailing fingers were kindling a fire in her which she was incapable of dousing. His hand cupped the swell of her breast, his thumb moving back and forth across the hardened peak, and she could not suppress the moan of pleasure that burst from her lips when his warm, moist mouth followed suit.
This man was not a cold-blooded, callous, sadistic beast as she had berated him. He was an expert lover who knew exactly how to please a woman, and it was this discovery that started a rebellion in Cara. A part of her wanted to surrender to the feelings he was arousing, but a part of her also rejected it. There was no love involved, and if she allowed him access to her body it would be nothing but lust. Her mind was still rational enough to find the word abhorrent. It was wrong to feel this way about a man she did not love; it was loathsome and degrading, and her body writhed beneath him in protest.
'Stop behaving like a damn virgin!' he growled against her breast when she had freed her hands and was clawing at him in an attempt to escape.
'But I am a virgin!' she cried out in anger and growing despair, and his hands stilled its caress along her thigh as his head shot up to look down into her tear-filled eyes.
'Well, what do you know,' he mocked her ruthlessly. 'So I have indeed taken Lloyd's most prized possession.'
His sobering words dried her tears, forcing her to recall Harriet's accusation that he would use her like a pawn in this game of vengeance only to shuttle her back to her father when he had reached his goal, and the look in his eyes told her that this was exactly what she was. She was a pawn in this dirty game of revenge, and the realisation sent a stab of pain through her which she could not understand at that moment.
'I hate you, Vince Steiner!' she hissed with a ferocity which was alien to her nature. 'I hate you, do you hear!'
'Hate me as much as you want, Cara,' he laughed that triumphant laugh of the devil. 'Hate puts fire in your veins, and I prefer my women fiery rather than meek.'
'You're disgusting!' she spat out the words, but he was unperturbed by her insult.
'You're beautiful when you're angry, Cara, and I would never have believed that your skin could feel like warm silk beneath my hands,' he taunted her while his hand boldly explored the feminine contours of her body, and detoured along intimate places. 'You have fought like a tigress, but you have only succeeded in making me want you more, and before I am finished with you I'll have you purring like a kitten in my arms.'
'No!' she denied his statement vehemently, but her treacherous body was already responding to the sensual a
nd fiery arousal of his caressing fingers.
'Yes, liebchen,' he contradicated throatily, his teeth nibbling playfully at the small lobe of her ear and sending shivers of unwanted pleasure racing through her taut, quivering body. 'Sheath your claws and relax, my little kitten. It is inevitable that you will purr for me before this night is over.'
Cara resisted him in mind if not in body, and the pain of his possession wrenched a cry from her which he stifled with his mouth. She was still hating him for hurting her when the pain receded to make way for a fierce pleasure that shattered all her maidenly illusions. In the final moments she lost complete control, and she was oblivious of the fact that she clung to him as if he were a safety raft in this storm-tossed sea of emotions he had plunged her into. She felt as if he was lifting her out of herself to a realm where nothing existed beyond the exquisite tension gripping her, and she soared on towards that unknown summit until her flight culminated in a rush of explosive sensations so intensely pleasurable that she wanted to die with the sweetness of it.
'Vince!' she cried out his name as he sagged on top of her in a shuddering groan, and she hated the thought of what her raggedly revealing voice must have told him.
Their bodies were damp with perspiration, their hearts thundering in the aftermath of passion and, as sanity returned slowly and painfully, a deep sense of shame washed over Cara. She had not exactly purred as he had predicted, but she had surrendered herself willingly and, no matter how much she tried to deny it, she had enjoyed what he had done to her.
Vince eased his heavy body from hers, but when she would have leapt out of bed his hands reached for her and pulled her back into his arms.
'Liebchen,' he murmured close to her ear, burying his face in her fragrant hair, and the deep timbre of his voice was almost a caress.
'Don't call me that!' she protested sharply.
'Why not?'
'Liebchen means sweetheart, and I'm not your sweetheart!'
She turned her face into the pillow when he raised his head to look at her, but strong fingers gripped her chin, and she was forced to meet the mockery in her eyes. 'After what we have shared I should imagine I am entitled to call you liebchen, don't you think?'
The Devil's Pawn Page 4