by Lynne Graham
‘I’m prepared to offer you an annulment,’ she proffered in a rush, like a woman trying to bargain with an executioner at the last ditch.
‘This is very sudden, isn’t it?’ Alex mocked. ‘No.’
‘I’m offering you your freedom back—’
‘Are you offering me Nicky as well?’
An icy hand clutched at her heartstrings. ‘No!’
‘Stalemate,’ Alex said succinctly.
But, had she agreed to go and leave Nicky behind, he would have agreed to an annulment. Dear God, that was what he really wanted. This was what he had planned from the beginning and, blind idiot that she was, she had walked right into it! It had not occurred to her that Alex’s offensive might be demanding his marital rights. But Alex had somehow guessed what would disturb and distress her most and Alex was prepared to play that card and utterly humiliate her in the hope that sooner or later she would take flight, leaving Nicky in his sole custody.
‘I didn’t know Damon was married!’ she told him afresh.
‘Your performance to that effect was certainly convincing,’ Alex conceded flatly. ‘But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re married.’
‘We don’t have to stay married,’ she protested tautly.
Alex strode into the bathroom without responding. He wasn’t listening to her.
Sarah flopped back against the pillows like a rag doll and crammed a hand against her convulsing mouth and bit back a sob of very real fear. The mere prospect of Alex enforcing sexual intimacy as a weapon appalled her. The thought of him looking at her naked, seeing all her deficiencies, touching her with cold, humiliating hands while doubtless having to fantasise about some other woman just to keep him aroused...it terrified and tortured her.
She listened to the water beating down on the tiles in the shower and cringed. She knew she didn’t have beautiful eyes or sensational legs and she also knew what he didn’t know but would soon find out. What you saw wasn’t what you got. Her sole claim to vanity was a padded bra, just so that she wasn’t too noticeably flat, certainly not to draw further attention to that particular part of her body.
She felt the mattress give with his weight and curled up into a tighter, even more inaccessible ball.
A finger ran down her exposed backbone and she shuddered. ‘When I said that a bomb wouldn’t deflate my ego, I’m beginning to think I was deluding myself,’ Alex remarked without expression.
‘Please...please don’t touch me. I can’t give up Nicky but I’ll do absolutely anything else. I’ll stay out of your way...you’ll never see me...you can have all the women you want!’ she told him wildly.
‘I want you,’ Alex breathed with sudden rawness, hauling her bodily back into the hard heat of his long, powerful length with an easy strength that sent her nervous tension into overdrive.
‘You cheat! You agreed to a marriage in name only!’ Sarah gasped strickenly, furious that she had abandoned her pride to beg him to leave her alone and that that selfsame plea had failed to wring an ounce of compassion from him.
Alex twisted her round and pressed her flat, forcing her into glancing and unwelcome contact with gleaming golden eyes that challenged. ‘When did I agree?’
Trembling, she stared wordlessly up at him, the reality of that omission on his part only now registering with her.
‘I would never have agreed to that particular term,’ Alex spelt out very quietly. ‘Indeed, were it not for your physical appeal, I would not have agreed to the marriage at all. Had I found you unattractive, had I not been able to imagine taking you to my bed, it would have been insanity to agree. Some day I want children of my own... Did you really believe that I would allow you to deprive me of that right as well?’
Sarah hadn’t thought of that. Breathing rapidly, she looked up at him, gripped by a sinking sense of inevitability. He had accused her of tunnel vision. Guilty as charged.
‘If this marriage lasts it will last on my terms, not on yours,’ Alex delivered, his broad brown shoulders blocking out the light as he lowered his dark head.
Galvanised back into motion, Sarah registered his intention and made a desperate attempt to snake free of him. But Alex seemingly was prepared for evasive action and one powerful hand meshed into her hair, holding her fast. Her eyes huge, her face taut and pale, she looked up at him like a trapped animal, her heartbeat hitting the Richter scale.
His thumb massaged the curve of her jawbone almost soothingly. ‘Relax.’
Was he joking?
‘I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,’ he murmured thickly.
‘Then let go of me!’
‘I was about to say that I wouldn’t hurt you...but that might not be true.’ Dark golden eyes scanned her hungrily. ‘I’ve never made love to a virgin before but I will be as gentle as I possibly can be.’
Hot-cheeked, she thought of denying her innocence, wondered furiously how her lack of experience could be that obvious. ‘You—’
Alex rested a silencing finger against her mouth, so close now she could feel his breath on her cheek, the raw power of his all-male body resting against her. ‘You set me on fire that night at Gina’s house and you didn’t even know it. The whole time we were in that room I was visualising how it would be if I stripped that robe from you, laid you flat and possessed you as no other man ever had...’
Sarah stared up at him in horror. ‘You pervert!’
‘I was very aroused,’ Alex admitted huskily. ‘As I was in the car after the wedding... Didn’t you feel that? Can’t you tell when a man wants to rip your clothes off? Don’t you feel the excitement in the air...the vibrations? I looked at you and thought, She’s mine now and she’s woman enough—no matter what she says—to go out and make herself even more beautiful just to please me.’
Sarah was transfixed by what he was telling her, had never imagined once in her entire adult life that any man would talk to her this way. Followed by that outrageously conceited assurance that she had transformed her appearance purely to make herself more appealing for his benefit when no such madness had ever entered her mind, she was literally forced into speech. ‘Pleasing you had nothing to do with it!’
A vibrantly amused smile slashed his sun-bronzed features. ‘If you say so,’ he said, with the air of an adult humouring a child over a triviality.
The astonishing charisma of that smile briefly blanked out her every rational thought. And it was while she was struggling to comprehend how a smile could make her feel all warm and dizzy that Alex kissed her, his mouth drifting down into a natural collision with hers, gentle, seeking, shorn of any threat.
But she was merely coming to terms with that astonishing gentleness when the entire tenor of his approach changed. He gave a ragged groan of impatience, she felt his hand tighten in her hair, and then his tongue delved between her softly parted lips and she shivered, lanced by a sudden startling sensation deep in the pit of her stomach. It was a clenched tight stab of shocking excitement. The pressure of his mouth increased and then circled, teased, his tongue searching out the moist interior she had instinctively opened to him.
This wasn’t happening, a shattered voice screamed inside her confused mind. Alex cannot make me enjoy this, want this...need this. But she discovered that Alex could. She discovered that he could kiss her into breathless, panting surrender and leave her wanting things she had never dreamt she could want.
‘You like that...I knew you would,’ Alex whispered against her reddened lips, when she trembled helplessly against him and closed her eyes, feeling her body arch up as if he had programmed her response.
And he went on making expert love to her mouth, extracting her from her flimsy nightdress without her even being aware of its removal. Her hands rose of their own volition and her fingers speared into his thick black hair, loving the texture, lingering to trace his well-shaped head and finally staying to hold her to him while she moved restively, involuntarily beneath him, wanting more contact, denied it. She was in another world
, a bewitching world of sensuality, aware of her body as she had never been aware of it before, aware of her capacity for pleasure and utterly seduced by the desperate need for that same pleasure to continue.
Her breasts felt tender and swollen and, when Alex splayed a hand to her spine and pulled her closer, her taut nipples came into glancing contact with his hair-roughened chest. ‘Ah...’ she gasped under his mouth in shock. His hands swept up her narrow ribcage and cupped her breasts and she froze, dredged from pleasure to dismay. ‘No!’ she cried as he released her lips.
Alex wasn’t listening. Her eyes flew wide on the taut, intent look of him as he slid lithely down the bed, his hands still shaping her flesh. His dark head bent and he closed his mouth hungrily on one pouting pink nipple. Excitement tore through her in an electrifying surge, reducing the cry of denial on her tongue to a mumbled, indistinct moan. Her entire body jerked with renewed shock, her legs trembling, an ache stirring between her thighs that made her teeth grit together in a kind of agonised pleasure.
She was stripped of every thought, every feeling. The surging hunger of her own body for sensation was terrifyingly greedy. He let his tongue flick the throbbing nub and then teased her unbearably aroused flesh with his teeth while his oh, so knowing fingers played with its neglected twin and drove her even crazier. The rush of heat to her pelvis made her hips move and she cried out, moaned, gasped, flung violently out of control by the intensity of her own excitement.
His dark head lifted. Glittering golden eyes, primal in their intensity, appraised her quivering body, lingered hotly on her bared breasts and the shameless thrust of their swollen peaks, and he groaned deep in his throat with satisfaction.
‘You have beautiful breasts,’ he muttered raggedly, running a possessive hand over the small pouting mounds, devouring them with his heated gaze. ‘And you’re incredibly sensitive there...and what that does to me—Cristos!’
Glazed green eyes focused on him with the greatest of difficulty and she stayed an instinctive move to cover herself from his sight, momentarily as fascinated by his response as by her own. He meant what he said. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. In a split-second, all the years of inadequacy and embarrassment about what she saw as her major deficiency were forgotten, banished, never to be recalled. Every remaining barrier fell away. She blossomed with a heady mix of pleasure and gratitude, rejoicing for the very first time in her own femininity.
She clashed with dark golden eyes and drowned in them. Alex lowered his head as if she had pulled him to her. He muttered something not quite steady in Greek. Gold and green meshed and she opened her arms without even thinking about it, suddenly wild to hold him close.
Somewhere in the interim, all restraint had fallen away. Alex took her mouth with shuddering force and engulfed her in his hunger, his need, his demands and she went under like a novice swimmer, but she was dragged down into that sexual oblivion without fear. Her last coherent thought was that if she had died without learning what he could make her feel, she would never have lived.
He trailed a forefinger along the length of one slender, extended thigh and she shivered violently in response, the raw torment of excitement instantly reclaiming her. Every nerve-ending in her body was singing wildly and then he found her, smoothly, gently explored with knowing fingers until she was ready to scream and sob, until she couldn’t stay still unless he held her down, until her entire body was one vast screeching ache for the fulfilment only he could give.
Alex stared down endlessly into her rapt face, strangely hesitant in spite of the blazing hunger in his eyes and the pagan stamp of passion tautening his damp features. He parted her thighs, raised them and stilled. ‘I’ll hurt you,’ he muttered unsteadily.
‘I don’t care,’ she gasped, at fever pitch.
He came down on her then, took her mouth hotly, briefly and then lifted his dark head again to watch her as he entered her by slow, painful degrees. Her eyes flew wide. She was in agony and then he thrust deep into the very heart of her and the agony turned into an ecstasy of sensation so torturously intense, she almost passed out.
He began to move then, sinking his hands beneath her hips, teaching her the primal rhythm of the most mind-blowing pleasure she had ever received. He drove into her again and again, long, sure strokes of possession that threw her wildly out of control, her heartbeat crashing, her entire body centred on the explosive excitement he had generated inside her. And then, without warning, the frantic tension peaked and she was flung violently over the edge into sobbing satisfaction. She clung wildly to him, crying, ‘Alex...Alex!’ without even knowing what she was saying.
There were tears in her eyes and an almost child-like sense of wonder when he shuddered above her and reached the same plateau. In all her life she could never recall feeling so close to another human being. A bewildering tenderness filled her, a gut reaction she could not suppress.
She was in awe of the raw force of human passion, had never dreamt until she learnt for herself that anything could be that overwhelming, that impossible to deny. She had believed herself to be impervious to such physical needs, sensible and sexless, indeed a woman pretty much out of step with modern society, and in one shattering hour Alex had taught her that she had this extraordinary capacity for feeling...and she knew that she had been irrevocably changed forever by the experience.
Alex released her from his weight and rolled away. Instantly her hands fell back from him. She felt suddenly painfully shy and confused, at a loss in a situation new to her. She realised that she didn’t feel any more married than she had felt earlier and that sexual intimacy without communication was no easier to bear simply because her lover was her husband on paper.
‘Alex...I think we have to talk,’ she murmured uncertainly, but forcing herself on by reminding herself how tender and considerate he had been of her inexperience.
He turned to look at her, his hooded dark eyes utterly unreadable. ‘Why?’
Whatever she had expected, it had not been that single discouraging word.
‘You’ve changed the rules as I saw them,’ she persisted, struggling against the most infuriating discomfiture as she met his eyes, instantly recalling the incredible pleasure he had given her. ‘Where does our...our marriage go from here?’
‘But we don’t have a marriage,’ Alex drawled, his sensual mouth taking on a sardonic twist as if the very idea was outrageous. ‘Not in the sense you suggest. I married you because I had no other choice. You gave me no other choice.’
At the reminder, Sarah paled.
‘I wanted Nicky and I paid the price.’
‘You said you wanted me,’ she whispered helplessly, and a second later could have bitten her tongue out for being so honest.
‘In my bed...not as my wife.’
‘You wouldn’t have got me any other way!’ she threw back, frantically attempting to conceal the fact that she was unbelievably hurt by that blunt assurance.
Alex cast her an insolent smile that told her he was remembering just how very easy it had been for him to turn her fear and denial into willing surrender. ‘You think not?’
‘I told you that I didn’t know that Damon was married...that both of them lied to me!’ Hugging the sheet protectively to her breasts, Sarah fought to explain how she had felt after Callie’s death. ‘If I had known the truth, I wouldn’t have felt as bitter and I wouldn’t have blamed you for ruining Callie’s life... Dear God, Alex, Damon told me that you had threatened to disinherit him and throw him out of the family if he married Callie! She was pregnant. Of course I blamed you, of course I hated you after the way you talked about her that day at your office—’
‘What are you trying to prove to me with these lies?’ In one fluidly impatient movement, Alex threw back the sheet and sprang out of bed. ‘If my brother were a murderer, I wouldn’t abandon him. He’s family, whatever his flaws,’ he spelt out succinctly. ‘As to disinheriting him...Damon is a very wealthy young man in his own right and I have no control
over his finances.’
‘Then he lied about that as well,’ Sarah mumbled, her attention clinging involuntarily to the long golden sweep of his back as he began to pull on his clothes. ‘All right, I admit that I shouldn’t have demanded that you marry me—’
‘I think you wanted to catch yourself a multi-millionaire and now you want to hang on to him,’ Alex said with lethal contempt. ‘There has to be some reason why the real bitch routine never got off the ground!’
‘How...how could you touch me feeling like that?’ she demanded, shocked to the core by the condemnation.
‘You’re my wife and you’ll lie down for me whenever I want,’ Alex told her with devastating simplicity. ‘That is my right. But outside that bedroom door you don’t have any rights that I don’t give you. You forced yourself on me. You have no grounds for complaint. As for your laughable assurance that you had it within your power to offer me my freedom back...I haven’t lost my freedom. I will do whatever the hell I like whenever I like and there is nothing that you can do to stop me!’
She sat like a small statue in the vast bed, pride demanding that she should not reveal how shattered she was. But every word still found its target like a thrown knife piercing her flesh. ‘I don’t want to stop you,’ she managed tightly, knowing that after what he had just told her there was no way she would ever share a bed with him again.
‘No? You mean you weren’t planning to get possessive bit by bit?’ Alex prompted with derisive disbelief. ‘Start asking me where I was going, when I was coming home, where I had been and throwing tantrums? I watched my father go through that with Vivien and no woman is ever going to manipulate me like that!’
So that had been why he’d planned to marry Elise. Evidently Elise would not have attached strings, would not have demanded fidelity, would not have sunk to asking awkward questions.
Sarah was in absolute turmoil because Alex had changed the terms of their marriage as she had understood them, plunging them into an intimacy she had been unprepared to handle. And now he was absolutely denying that that development should curtail his own freedom or in any way alter his lifestyle or their relationship. What relationship? she thought sickly, appalled by her own stupidity.