by Lynne Graham
‘You actually ate dinner at home last night,’ Sarah agreed sarcastically.
His savage cheekbones clenched, an arc of colour highlighting his shimmering eyes. ‘I expect you to make the same effort,’ he delivered, ignoring the ungenerous stab.
‘Not on your terms,’ Sarah returned, her injured pride simmering towards boiling-point.
‘On my terms or not at all.’
Sarah stared blindly back at him, knowing she could not survive those terms. He was finally telling her why she was now expected to share his bed on a permanent basis. Dear God, how could any mere woman live with such an honour? Alex Terzakis had made an unbelievably magnificent gesture, a sacrifice of immense magnitude: he was willing to accept Sarah as his wife. I really have arrived, she told herself sarcastically, but there was this terrible pain in among the anger and the wounded pride and she couldn’t understand the pain.
‘I can’t accept your terms,’ she whispered finally.
His terms would break her. Instinct told her that. To share his bed and rejoice in his passion without love or respect or even fidelity would demean her. Nor would having his children ease that humiliation. Her bitterness and resentment would inevitably triumph and there would be no happiness for either of them in such an arrangement.
‘If you don’t, I’ll divorce you...’
Shattered, Sarah looked back at him. Alex stared back, not a muscle moving on his darkly handsome face, his impassive dark eyes reading her sudden pallor.
‘And I will ensure that Nicky stays with me.’
Appalled, Sarah rose shakily upright. ‘You can’t do that!’
‘As you once said to me, money talks,’ Alex drawled with dark satire. ‘And, in the light of the pre-nuptial contract you signed, I’m sure you recall that if the marriage breaks down for whatever reason you’ll be lucky to get your train fare home!’
Her legs wouldn’t hold her up any longer. Slowly she sank down again, simply gaping at him in horror. She had never dreamt that Alex could be this cruel, was quite unprepared for such ruthless tactics being employed against her. He attacked on her weakest flank without remorse. He knew how much she loved Nicky. He was using a sledge-hammer on a nut. Surely her presence in his bed could not be this important to him? She remembered that he had said that he wanted children. Was that why? In a frantic surge of feverish mental activity, she saw a way out.
‘If you want children we could use IVF.’
Alex looked back at her blankly.
Hesitantly, the words tumbling out of her, she rushed to explain the marvels of technology and the complete lack of necessity for any actual physical contact.
Alex stood there, frozen to the spot, apparently thrown violently by the suggestion that he could father his future family without ever laying a hand on his wife.
Abruptly, a lean brown hand lifted to silence her. Narrowed dark eyes welded to hers, Alex breathed, ‘Are you trying to tell me that I must approach a laboratory to get you pregnant?’
Sarah reddened but pressed on, her sole ambition to show him that they need not participate in sexual intimacy simply to produce a child. She marvelled that Alex appeared so ignorant of such processes. ‘That way we could abide by the original terms of our marriage,’ she pointed out breathlessly.
All of a sudden she registered that it was not ignorance that had silenced Alex but a kind of unholy and incredulous fascination backed by rather daunting signs of gathering rage. A dark tide of blood had flushed his golden features, a tiny muscle tugging relentlessly at the corner of his eloquent mouth. ‘You have to be out of your mind to suggest such a thing to me!’ he told her rawly.
‘Alex...if we could for once move away from this macho conditioning of yours and talk about this sensibly, you might see that it is actually a very sane solution to the problem.’
Alex strode forward and pulled her up out of her seat with two powerful hands. ‘My children are not going to be conceived in a test tube and that has nothing to do with my “macho conditioning”,’ he spelt out ferociously. ‘When you first opened the subject, I thought you were joking, I could not credit that you could be serious.’
Sarah made no pointless attempt to escape. One lesson she had learnt. Alex was considerably stronger than she was. She stood there, icily composed on the surface, a teeming mass of growing agitation underneath. ‘I do not want to sleep with you,’ she stated. ‘That is a sacrifice I am not prepared to make—’
‘You bitch...’ After a startled moment, Alex let loose in Greek, his fluent English letting him down as he stared down at her in savage fury, as white beneath his dark tan as though she had struck him.
‘I don’t know why you should take that personally, Alex,’ she said tremulously. ‘It’s not as though we have feelings for each other like other married people—’
‘I have some very powerful feelings for you!’ One dark hand clenched round her forearm, Alex trailed her over to the door. The pilot of his helicopter was hovering in readiness. He broke into speech about the lateness of the hour.
‘I will catch a later flight,’ Alex bit out.
‘Let go of me,’ Sarah spat on the way up the stairs. ‘What the heck do you think you’re doing?’
Out of sight of the hall, she attempted to jerk free of his bruising grasp. ‘Stop it!’ she burst out hotly.
His hand tightened and a fuse blew inside Sarah. Her other hand flew up as she stopped, intending to fetch him a wallop that would flatten him. Alex parried that furious hand and reacted by clamping his hands to her waist instead and hoisting her into a fireman’s lift.
‘You swine!’ she screeched. ‘Put me down this minute!’
He put her down on his bed and came down so fast on top of her that she had no time to react. ‘You’re my wife and I want to make love to you,’ he spelt out fiercely.
‘Be assured that if anything happens it will be rape!’ Sarah spat up at him.
Pinning her flat, Alex undid the sash on the dressing-gown, peeled it wide.
‘I’ll never forgive you if you do this,’ she swore strickenly. She collided with glinting golden eyes and something twisted in pleasurable pain in the pit of her stomach. Shakily she gasped in oxygen under the shattering onslaught of that all-pervasive stare. Naked panic filled her to overflowing.
‘No, it’s yourself you won’t forgive,’ Alex murmured softly, intently, scanning the myriad expressions skimming her triangular face. ‘All that stands between us is your pride and your need to be in control. And in my bed you are out of control.’
Appalled by his insight, Sarah shot a look of loathing up at him. ‘I hate you, Alex.’
He tugged the dressing-gown down her arms. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said in a velvety purr. ‘I think you want me so much it terrifies you.’
‘Naturally you would like to think that—’
‘Know it, not think it,’ Alex countered, shrugging out of his jacket and pitching it carelessly aside, yanking at his tie with a not quite steady hand. ‘You excite the hell out of me. You really can’t expect me not to know that it’s mutual—’
‘It is not mutual!’ Her teeth ground together.
‘Our wedding night was unforgettably erotic,’ Alex savoured, peeling off his shirt. ‘I’ve thought of little else for two endless weeks. In fact I only have to think about what being inside you felt like and I—’
Crimson-cheeked, Sarah snapped, ‘Shut up!’
Alex smiled with lethal amusement, all temper banished by lust, she assumed, and his superior position. ‘And the wonder of finding a woman of your age so innocent and shy had a charm and an appeal I never thought to experience. Why were you still a virgin?’
‘I stayed away from macho pigs like you!’
‘Maybe on some level you knew I was in your future,’ Alex drawled with unashamed conceit.
‘If I’d known,’ Sarah practically shrieked at him, ‘I’d have come into your office with a shotgun!’
‘And I find that even more attractive,’ Alex delivere
d with mocking amusement. ‘All of my adult life, your sex have gone to extraordinary lengths to please me. I’ve been chased, flattered and encouraged by every woman I ever wanted since I was fifteen.’
‘You conceited toad!’ Sarah launched at him.
‘Then you came along and for the very first time I was challenged and, believe me, I was very challenged keeping my hands off you until our wedding night. I didn’t want you to bolt. That’s why I didn’t come near you during the weeks before our marriage.’
Sarah was in such a rage, she was almost incoherent. ‘You conniving, cunning, sneaky—!’
Alex laughed softly, spontaneously, and pressed a warning forefinger to the fullness of her lower lip, silencing her. ‘I lay in my bed at night thinking about what it would be like to have you under me and it surpassed my every expectation. That fiery spirit which makes you so damned mouthy, that stubborn streak a mile wide which makes you persist even when you haven’t a hope in hell of winning...when that translates into passion, you’re every fantasy I’ve ever had in my bed!’
His satisfaction was obvious. Her small hands balled into fists. ‘Alex, get off me!’ she shouted.
Alex slid down the zip on his trousers with a flourish and grinned at her, suddenly startlingly younger in his raw amusement than she had ever seen him. The phone started ringing. Alex bent back and lifted the receiver without releasing her limbs from his weight.
‘No more calls,’ he said and dropped it back again.
‘I want you to let me go,’ Sarah framed, putting every atom of authority she could muster into the demand.
‘So it took me a couple of weeks to settle down into the idea of being married,’ Alex murmured huskily, a bare brown shoulder shifting in an infinitesimal shrug, dark golden eyes resting on her hungrily, ‘a couple of weeks to come to terms with the fact that I had a wife who makes the perfect mistress...a little mental adjustment and here I am. Why sulk?’
Sarah was speechless. It was like trying to argue with a maze that kept on increasing in complexity, losing her at every turn. ‘Here I am’, he said with such staggering self-assurance, as if she could not fail to be grateful to win such a prize.
‘After all, you fought back like an Amazon warrior,’ Alex told her thickly, his dark head lowering inch by inch. ‘You ignored me, you ignored it all and the more you ignored what I was doing, the more I seethed... I discovered that the one thing I cannot stand is to be ignored.’
She didn’t know what he was talking about. He appeared to be suggesting that her avoidance of him had been part of some sly, manipulative female plot to attract him and his unquenchable ego took to that idea like a duck to water. On the brink of acidly disabusing him of that notion, her parted lips met on a shocking collision course with his.
Alex groaned against her mouth and possessed it again with renewed vigour and a force of hunger that ran a scorching blaze of heat right down to her toes and back up again. She fought the effect, concentrating her mind on the picture of herself pregnant and miserable while Alex strayed to be chased, flattered and encouraged by other women.
Tearing her swollen lips from his single-minded onslaught, she gasped, ‘I don’t want to get pregnant.’
‘No chance,’ Alex muttered in thickened agreement. ‘Not for at least a year. It might curb this...’
He teased her mouth with his tongue, mimicking a far more intimate penetration, and she quivered, every limb boneless, every nerve-ending begging for more, and, feeling that, she wanted to scream. If she had had the capability to lie there like a waxen dummy, unresponsive to his seduction, Alex would have left her alone. And she wanted Alex to leave her alone, didn’t she...?
One hand was in his silky hair, the other curved round his warm shoulder, rejoicing in the silky smoothness of his skin...and she didn’t know how either had got there. Her body appeared to be totally detached from her brain. It had broken out all on its own. And she wanted to touch him, she realised in dizzy shock, wanted so badly to be in his arms that the thought of not being there, of actually tearing herself free, physically hurt.
Rolling over, Alex shed the remainder of his clothing in a couple of fluid movements. Dark golden eyes drew her. ‘Come here,’ he urged softly and opened his arms.
The shock of even that brief separation had chilled her. She shifted across the bed so fast, she made it in record time.
Alex tugged her down on top of him and curved two lean hands to her cheekbones. ‘At last,’ he breathed, as conscious of that tiny instant of surrender as she was. ‘Don’t ever deny me again.’
She felt his power over her and her mind recoiled from that reality. It was just sex and if she really wanted to fight it she could—of course she could, a voice inside her head protested. But she trembled in his grasp, sentenced to stillness by the charismatic lure of his magnetic gaze. He held her there by sheer force of superior will.
‘Ever,’ he repeated persistently.
Utter surrender, that was what he demanded. She knew it, she hated it and yet she still did not fight him.
‘And you’ll find out just how generous a lover I can be,’ Alex completed.
Her brain had turned to mush. A long-fingered hand was skating down her arching throat into the valley between her breasts. His thumb rubbed against a painfully taut nipple and she gasped, quivered, closed her eyes tightly against the intrusion of his. He pulled her up over him and suddenly curved his mouth to that betraying peak, the silk providing a quite inadequate barrier.
Sarah moaned in a crazy mixture of shame and excitement. Impatient hands trailed down the straps, baring her breasts. She tensing, and her eyes flew open. He engulfed a thrusting pink bud with the heat of his mouth and she cried out, lashed and tormented by sensation, the image of his dark head against her breasts forever imprinted inside her head.
Alex spread her flat and she was breathing as though she had run a mile in a minute, boneless as a rag doll. He touched her, shaped her, caressed her and moved down her quivering length with his tormenting mouth and the kind of erotic expertise she was defenceless against.
He ran the tip of his tongue across her stomach and her thighs parted involuntarily, an ache that was sudden agony stirring and making her clutch at his hair with near frantic fingers. He knew where she ached and she stiffened in sudden shock as he touched her but, before she could obey an instinctive impulse to jerk away, his hands curved over her thighs, imprisoning her.
‘No...not that...’ she gasped.
But he didn’t pay any attention to that stifled plea, and a moment later she was lost, possessed by a desire so all-encompassing, she couldn’t even vocalise through it. The impossibly intimate explorations Alex was subjecting her to reduced her to a quivering, whimpering state of mindlessness quite unequalled in her slender experience.
Pleasure and the pursuit of it engulfed her in the screaming demands of her own body. She moaned, she jerked, she burned, the victim of a consuming hunger that made her nails scrape down the sheet beneath her and every part of her blaze with unbearable heat. And just when she was on the torturous edge of the fulfilment she craved Alex moved over her and drove into the honeyed welcome he had prepared for himself. Instantaneously she was thrown into a climax that threw her shivering body into spasm after spasm of hot, drugging, glorious pleasure.
Alex was watching her when she surfaced again to the world she had left behind. Dazedly, her lashes fluttered on the brilliance of his smile. He thrust into her again, slowly, purposefully, and she shut her eyes, shattered to feel the electrifying excitement awakening afresh. He made love as if there were no tomorrow and she was overwhelmed because she never ever wanted tomorrow to come. The pleasure went on and on and on and the second time she hit the same heights of fulfilment it was even better...
* * *
Sarah surfaced in the tumbled bed, wondered what day it was, where she was, who she was... Five hours in bed with Alex had made her more than a little uncertain. She had a vague memory of him dressing befor
e she fell asleep. Dressing in haste but not so fast that he hadn’t had time to survey with satisfaction the plundered, witless female still lying in his bed.
Sarah cringed. Alex had strolled out of his bedroom, positively re-energised by the completeness of her surrender. And she had smiled dizzily back at him with what lingering energy remained to her, possessed of an utterly appalling belief that Alex was so incredibly wonderful that she was blessed above all other living women.
Passion killed her intelligence. In bed, she didn’t think with Alex, she merely functioned like some sort of passion toy, programmed solely to give and receive pleasure. And she didn’t think she could blame her response on a teenage experience of rejection any more. It wasn’t that simple. She was falling in love with Alex, falling like a brick from the top of a high building, her feelings rushing faster and faster as she headed for sure and certain devastation when she hit the ground.
Now she knew why it hurt when Alex accused her of being a liar. Now she knew why she hadn’t had the strength to fight Alex off. On a deep atavistic level she wanted Alex any way she could get him. When or how could it have happened? How could she possibly have started falling in love with a male like Alex? He was the very antithesis of what she admired in the male sex.
But fantastic in bed, her wanton alter ego piped up smugly, and her skin burned with embarrassment because she had to live with this new side to her character, this sexually attuned side which took over when Alex touched her. Sudden hope blossomed inside her. Maybe it wasn’t love; maybe it was just a physical infatuation. What did she know about love? Nothing. A severe crush at sixteen and then an emotional desert ever since. It wasn’t love, she told herself staunchly, it was just hormones erupting like a volcano, having been suppressed too long.
She crawled out of bed, aching in every joint. He was oversexed. He treated her like a bimbo. He’d married her with gritted teeth and then informed her that she would make the perfect mistress...yuck! Every move she made was misinterpreted by his rampaging ego! He made Neanderthal man look like the very pinnacle of male mental development. Alex was so basic, he ought to be extinct.