A Price Worth Paying?

by Trish Morey

And she’d gone to Alesander for help.

  How could she ever face Felipe again?

  ‘Simone!’

  Oh God, she thought as his voice rang out again, closer this time. Not him. Anyone but him. She tried to disappear into the tangle of vines but in a blue and yellow sundress she was too easy to spot.

  ‘Simone!’ he said. ‘At last.’

  She turned her back to him, swiping at her tear-streaked face with her hands.

  ‘Simone, Felipe said he’d upset you.’

  ‘Go away,’ she said without turning around.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just leave me alone.’

  He took no notice. He came up behind her and put a hand to her shoulder. A touch she’d become so used to. A touch that had warmed her in places she daren’t confess. A touch that now left her cold. ‘Simone, what’s going on?’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she cried, spinning around and shoving away his hand. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again!’

  ‘What the hell is going on? What’s happened to make you this way?’

  ‘What do you think is wrong? Why didn’t you tell me the whole story?’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Your potted history of the troubles between the Esquivels and the Otxoas.’

  He frowned. ‘What about it? What am I supposed to have missed?’

  ‘The bit you so conveniently left out. The bit about the Esquivels vowing to drive the Otxoas from their land!’

  He shrugged his shoulders, his hands palm up in the air. ‘What about it? I didn’t think it was important.’

  ‘What about it? Are you kidding me? Do you think I would have ever married you if I had known that your agenda the entire time was to run Felipe—to run us—off our land?’

  ‘Dios! This marriage was all your idea. Don’t you forget that. You were the one who came up with it. You were the one who so desperately needed it!’

  ‘And you were the one who insisted on the land being part of the deal! Because you knew, didn’t you? You knew all along that your family wanted us off. And because you saw a way of getting rid of my family from this land for ever!’

  ‘Listen to yourself! Do you really think I care about something that happened more than a hundred years ago? Do you honestly believe I set out with the intention of banishing the Otxoas from their land?’

  ‘What am I supposed to think, when the land is the one thing you expressly demanded? And now my grandfather thinks I’ve saved this family from some kind of curse and all I know is that I’ve made it happen. I’ve brought it down upon us. How do you think I feel about that? How do you think I feel?’

  She broke down, her knees collapsing beneath her, sending her limp and sagging into the ground.

  His hands caught her at her shoulders, pulling her up, pulling her towards him. ‘What do you care about the land anyway? You’re going home. You said yourself you don’t belong here.’

  She pushed with all her might against him. ‘And that makes it okay? That’s your defence?’ She lashed at him with her fists, pounding at his unyielding chest, but he did not let her go and so she punched harder. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  He held her at arm’s length and still she managed to lash out at him. He grabbed her wrists, locking them within the iron circle of his own and pulled her in close. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

  ‘You knew,’ she said, angling her face and her accusations higher. ‘You knew all the time about the land and the curse. That land means everything to him and now you’ve taken it.’

  His dark eyes gleamed dangerously down at her, his hot breath fanning her face, the cords on his neck standing out in rigid lines. ‘And you made a deal, remember! You were the one who turned up on my doorstep begging.’

  Fruitlessly she wrenched against the prison of his hands. ‘But you knew! All the time you knew!’

  ‘So what? The damned curse means nothing to me!’

  ‘But it does to him!’ She was so rigid she felt she might snap. She glared up at him. ‘It does to him and I hate you for what you’ve done!’

  He growled and shook his head slowly from side to side, his dark eyes like magnets, their pull insistent and strong. ‘Oh no, you don’t. You don’t hate me at all.’

  His slow words and his rich accent stroked her like a slow velvet hand, and she felt the first unmistakable frisson of fear.

  And the first unmistakable frisson of excitement.

  No! That would be to let him win. She tugged desperately at her wrists. ‘Let me go.’

  He tugged her back so she ended up even closer to the hard wall of his chest, his mouth turned up at the corners, his eyes never deviating from hers, and she knew what he intended and there was no way …

  ‘Let me go!’

  He stepped closer. She stepped back. He took another step and this time her step was more of a stumble, until she found the old support she’d been clinging to before against her back. She’d welcomed it for its solidity then. Now she cursed it for preventing her escape, leaving her sandwiched between it and him.

  He let her hands go then, to frame her face in his hands, his fingers deep in her hair, and she reached back, clinging to the support, keeping her hungry fingers away from him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her heart beating too fast, too frantically, already knowing the answer.

  So that when his mouth crashed down on hers it came as no surprise. His vehemence did. There was no remaining unaffected—his hot mouth and tongue seemed to want to plunder her very soul.

  What had he done to her? she wondered as his tongue licked like a trail of flames across her throat. What had he reduced her to?

  Feelings, the answer came back, as she gave herself up into his kiss and gave him back all he was offering her.

  Feelings.

  He had awoken her to feeling and she was a slave to it. Slave to him.

  Her hands abandoned the support behind her. She was pulling at his clothes as fast as he was pulling at hers. The zip of her dress was undone, the tail of his shirt was tugged free. Her breasts exposed to his mouth, his chest was bared to her seeking fingers.

  And his hands were at the hem of her dress, sliding the fabric up her legs, sliding down again once he’d hooked his fingers into her underwear and swept them away.

  Air brushed the sensitive folds of her flesh. Cool air against hot torrid flesh.

  ‘Alesander,’ she cried, half plea, half protest as she battled to release him, a battle made harder because he was so hard.

  ‘I know,’ he muttered against her throat, her jaw, her mouth as he helped her. ‘I know.’

  And then he lifted her and he was right there, at her entrance, and she thought her world could end and she wouldn’t care so long as he was inside her first.

  She cried out when he pulled her down onto him. She cried out when he pulled back, knowing she’d been wrong. Because she didn’t ever want her world to end. Not when her world made it possible to feel like this.

  He pounded into her, angry and insistent, and angrily, insistently she clenched her muscles and hung onto him, only to welcome him back, her need building with each desperate thrust.

  ‘Do you hate me now?’ he asked, thrusting again, his voice barely a grunt. ‘Do you still hate me?’

  Her body was alive with sensation, her senses dancing wildly along a dangerous line that any moment they might teeter off into an abyss, and there was no way she could not answer honestly.

  ‘I hate you,’ she said, but not because of Felipe or the land or a vow of revenge that was made more than a century ago, but because of what you do to me. ‘I will always hate you.’

  He answered with a thrust that threw her head crashing back against the beam. He followed it with another and then another, each one deeper than the first. Each one more desperate, more insistent. Each one building on that screaming tension building inexorably inside her.

  He won’t make me come, she told herself, knowing the assault he was capable o
f, clamping down on that eventuality with all her muscles and all her might. Knowing what was in store if she just let him. I won’t let him. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

  And so she fought and resisted and battled against the torrent of sensations he subjected her to and tried to imagine herself back in her tiny flat in Melbourne, where this man and these feelings would be just a distant memory.

  But it was too hard a task, too much to ask, with his mouth at her throat and on her lips, his hands hot on her breasts and fingers tight against her nipples and his hard cock thrusting deep inside her. It was all … impossible.

  And like a cough suppressed because you were in polite company, but that refused to be suppressed, so that when it was unleashed it was ten times greater than the original would have ever been, her release came upon her with the relentless force of a tornado, picking her up and spinning her effortlessly into its whirling spout, drawing her higher, ever higher in its never ending spiral until she came in a flash of colour and heated sensation and felt herself spat out of the tornado’s spout. She drifted down to the earth, or maybe that was just her legs as he let them down, her fight gone as she rested limply under the weight of his body against hers.

  And she hated that he could do this to her—turn argument into a storm, turn anger into passion.

  She hated him because he could reduce her to a whimpering mess of nerve endings.

  She hated him because she loved him.

  Oh God, where had that come from?

  She tried to wish the unwanted thought away. She tried to deny it. But the truth of it refused to be wished away or denied. It floated like a balloon let loose, flying high, freed of the shackles that could pull it down.

  She loved him.

  The concept was so foreign. So unexpected. And yet it explained so much of why she wanted to be with him and why at the same time she feared it so.

  She loved him because of what he could do to her and how he made her feel.

  She loved him and she hated him because at any moment he would look at her smugly and declare himself the victor of this particular encounter.

  Except not this time, it seemed. ‘Mierda!’ he cursed, and pulled himself free, pulling himself away as if she was poison. ‘You’re not on the Pill.’

  She blinked, still in recovery mode, not sure why it was an issue. ‘You know I’m not.’

  ‘I didn’t use protection.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘OH MY GOD!’ She was still reeling from her discovery. The last thing she needed was that. She put a hand to her head, recovery mode short-circuited by a panic that unfurled with a vengeance as she remembered another time, another fear that things had come unstuck, even after protection had been used.

  But this time there had been no protection. No defence.

  Oh God, was she destined to live her life making love to the wrong men, narrowly escaping disaster with one, only to hurtle headlong into catastrophe with the next?

  She’d known from the very beginning that having sex with Alesander was a bad idea. Why had he not realised the complications that could result? Had he not realised how serious they could be?

  Her panicked brain morphed to anger. ‘How could you do that?’ she cried. ‘How could you be so stupid?’

  Her answer was the thwack of the flat of his hand high above her head against the beam supporting her. ‘Did you ask me to put on a condom?’

  ‘And so it’s my fault—?’ even though she hadn’t given protection a thought, and she knew she hadn’t, but damned if she was going to accept the blame ‘—because you can’t control yourself?’

  ‘And you didn’t want it?’

  ‘Did I ask for it? Did I ever ask for sex from you, or did you simply demand it, as you always did?’

  ‘You enjoyed it. You know you did.’

  ‘That’s not the same thing and you know it.’

  He turned away from her then, his shoulders heaving, and she sensed the loss of him even as she celebrated the relief that came from the distance between them, and she wondered at the tangle of those conflicting emotions and wondered if love made sense of it all.

  Ever since that first day in his apartment it had been the same, the relentless push and pull confusing her thoughts and tangling her intentions.

  But now there was something else to confuse her thoughts and add to the tangle in her mind.

  What if she were pregnant?

  She’d lived this nightmare once before—the overwhelming fear of being pregnant to a man who didn’t want her—the fear, the terror of thinking that she was, the utter helplessness at not knowing.

  But beyond that, the endless soul-searching at being tempted to do something she knew she could never do. She wasn’t a religious woman, her parents had brought her up with no particular belief systems that told her she should act one way or another and she had grown up believing she could do anything she wanted in the world. But, when push came to shove, she had learned that there were some places she could not go, some lines she could not cross.

  What were the chances?

  Luck had been with her that time, sending her a belated period that had been accompanied by a torrent of tears—grateful tears. As it was, she had held herself together these last few months by a tenuous thread. She could not have coped if she’d been pregnant with Damon’s child.

  And now the nightmare was happening all over again. Again the fear. Again the hoping. Again the anxious, endless wait and the anguished sleepless nights until she knew, one way or the other.

  She couldn’t be pregnant. She was leaving when this was over. She had to leave. She had to get away before he discovered the truth.

  Because falling in love with Alesander had never been part of the deal.

  ‘It was wrong of me,’ he admitted suddenly, completely blindsiding her. ‘I should never have made love to you. Not here. Not like this.’

  She channelled shock into rational thought and turned her panicked mind to calculating dates, needing to be able to hope. ‘It might be okay,’ she said, needing to believe it. ‘It’s early in my cycle. It would be unlucky.’ But then she’d been lucky last time. Did this kind of luck get balanced out? Was it her turn to be unlucky?

  He had his back to her, refusing to look at her.

  Two facts that didn’t escape her. ‘Luck does not come into it. It shouldn’t have happened!’

  She swiped up her knickers from the ground with as much dignity as she could muster, balling them in her fist, not bothering to further humiliate herself by stopping to tug them on now. ‘You’re so right,’ she said. ‘Maybe you might try remembering that next time.’

  Alesander swung around. There wouldn’t be a next time. Damn her, there shouldn’t have been a this time!

  He was a man of needs, it was true. He always had been. But never since his first wild encounter with a woman, when he’d barely been a teenager and she was a wanton who’d let his night time fantasies play out in her hot hands and hot mouth and who’d given him a gold-plated initiation to the pleasures of the flesh, had he been so unprepared and made such a mistake. He’d used up all the luck he was planning on ever needing that time.

  Because he wasn’t a teenager any more.

  There were no excuses.

  Except to blame her.

  That was the one thing he could do.

  Because she did this to him. She was the one who reduced him to his basest level and his basest needs. She was the one who drove him crazy and made him blind with lust when he needed to be thinking straight.

  ‘There can be no child!’

  ‘My God, do you actually think I want one?’

  ‘Why not? When you’re the one who stands to gain the most by prolonging this relationship.’

  ‘You think? Why the hell would I want to prolong spending time with you? No, I’m going home when this is over. A child of yours is hardly the kind of souvenir I want or need to take with me.’

  ‘And if it’s already happened? You
can’t just wish it away.’

  ‘Damn you, Alesander. And whose fault would it be if there was? I told you I didn’t want to have sex with you. I told you it was the only way to guarantee there could be no complications. But did you listen to me? No. Because Mr Can’t-Live-Without-Sex couldn’t exercise a bit of self-control.’

  ‘And you haven’t enjoyed it? You didn’t cry out in pleasure every time you came? Every time I took you there?’

  ‘And that’s relevant, because? You know damned well that I didn’t want to have sex with you. You were the one who changed the terms.’

  ‘Terms you agreed to!’

  ‘Only because you threatened to tell Felipe our marriage was a sham if I didn’t!’

  How else was he supposed to get her to agree? ‘You wanted it. You wanted me from that first time in my apartment. Do you think I couldn’t smell your need? Do you think I didn’t know then and there that you were gagging for it?’

  The crack of her palm against his cheek punctuated the argument. For a long moment he said nothing, his nostrils flaring, his eyes like dark—angry—pits. ‘You never were very good at dealing with the truth.’

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh God, the truth. What was the truth any more? She’d told so many lies she was beginning to forget where truth ended and the lies began. She’d lied to Felipe every time she saw him and pretended to be happy in her marriage. She’d lied to herself pretending that she didn’t want Alesander and then burning up with him at night. And now she was slapping a man she’d only just finished convincing herself that she loved. But there was one indisputable truth that he could not argue with. ‘If we are talking truths, then I know of one truth you cannot deny—that if we had kept to the original terms of the contract, if we had never had sex, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation now, because the chances of conceiving a baby would never have been an issue.’

  Silence reigned between them, letting in the sounds of the vineyard, the rustle of leaves in the breeze and the cry of seabirds amid the heavy weighted silence of blame and regret.

  ‘So when will you know?’

  She shook her head, dragging in air. ‘Three weeks? Most likely less.’ Hopefully less. She swallowed, a sick feeling roiling in her gut. Would he ask her to make sure? He was a man of the world. He would know there were options. At least there were in Australia …