Bittersweet Passion

by Lynne Graham

  The tip of her tongue crept out to wet her dried lips. ‘Dane?’

  ‘You sound like a repeating clock, Claire, and it’s very, very irritating,’ he murmured. ‘Do as I ask before I get less polite.’

  ‘… polite?’ she echoed on the brink of tears. How dared he dismiss her like a naughty child to her room! But she went because she was at a total loss and he was in a very dangerous mood, an aura of scantily leashed violence clinging to him, though he had yet to raise his voice, yet to hurt her—apart from that loathsome kiss.

  ‘The remainder of your clothes have arrived, madam. I took the liberty of hanging them.’ Thompson stepped out in front of her with the merest hint of a smile.

  ‘Clothes?’ What clothes was he talking about?

  ‘May I ask if you wish a maid to be hired, Mrs Visconti?’

  Claire froze three steps past him and surprised a grin on the older man’s features. Damn him, he’d only been testing her.

  ‘I’m very happy …’ he announced stertorously.

  ‘Oh no … please don’t let Dane know you know!’ Claire hissed in despair. ‘Please Thompson—it would be the last straw …’

  Impervious to his avid curiosity, Claire fled. She snatched up the phone in her room and rang directory enquiries for the number of the one friend she did have in London. She had gone to school with Randy, who was now a model. The line was engaged, which was more than hopeful. Randy had her own flat and the spare room she had mentioned on more than one occasion suddenly sounded very tempting. She whipped out a case from the foot of the wardrobe.

  ‘If that is anything to do with what I suspect—’ a soft drawl sizzled from just inside the door ‘—nowhere is big enough—not even London—for you to do a vanishing act until the heat dies down. If you fondly imagine you’re going to walk out the day you marry me, you’re a fool.’

  She was on her knees, a rather apt position as he moved forward, already shorn of his elegant suit. A pair of tight-fitting, faded jeans that were fresh out of the wash and left little to her imagination now hugged his narrow hips.

  ‘It’s better if I leave now,’ she responded. ‘Anyway, you don’t want me here.’

  ‘Correct, but you’re not going anywhere.’ He shot her a bitterly angry glance as he thrust the door shut. ‘Such a fragile little flower as you are, I wouldn’t want to shock Thompson with your screams. Not that he’d interfere. You look worried, Claire. All your past and present sins rising up before you? That call I was waiting on came, confirmation from one of my top accountants in Pretoria.’

  Claire got up off her knees clumsily. ‘Pretoria? W … what are you talking about?’

  Dane lounged back against the dressing-table, a predator, coiled to spring for the jugular. There was anger … and there was anger. Claire was only acquainted with the blustering, red-faced rage of her grandfather. Dane’s ability to remain outwardly cool in the grip of that white-hot blaze silvering his magnificent eyes, cool despite the highly tangible aura of zapping, raw tension he emanated, was far more demoralising.

  ‘Ken is one of my accountants. He was superintending Adam’s bundle of investments for me.’

  ‘So?’ The word was forced from her jerkily.

  A tiny pulse was beating fast at the corner of his mouth. ‘Just another nail in your coffin, Claire. And you can drop that innocent, wide-eyed look! Adam was as sly as they come. He taught you well, didn’t he?’

  Claire backed even though he had not moved. Wild explanations for his insane behaviour were whirling faster and faster in the paralysed limbo of her brain, nothing connecting to make sense.

  ‘Only you didn’t bargain on being around when the balloon went up, did you?’ he prompted in a black velvet voice. ‘I guess the next time I was going to hear from you was via some fancy divorce lawyer. Or were you planning to crawl back and grovel? Are you that obsessed with me? Did you think I’d forgive you?’

  ‘What are you accusing me of?’ The cry, edged by the shrillness of hysteria, came from the very depths of her being.

  A winged ebony brow lifted. ‘Do you love me? Is that what all this is about?’

  Drugs … he was high, not himself … her imagination ran riot. ‘L … love you?’ she parroted, nearly tripping over the foot of the bed. ‘Of course I don’t love you … lay one finger on me, Dane and I’ll scream.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll gag you.’

  ‘Dane …’

  ‘Tie you down?’ He still hadn’t moved a muscle. ‘I ought to congratulate you on the immense and naïve simplicity of the trap. It has to be the only time within my experience that a woman has relied not on sex and not on intelligence but on puppyish appeal. Well, I’m sorry, Claire. You don’t look remotely pathetic right now,’ he asserted with sibilant emphasis. ‘Ring Max.’

  Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. She was completely off-balanced. ‘Max?’

  ‘Yes, Max,’ Dane repeated shortly. ‘There’s the phone. Use it.’

  Hot pink feathered her cheeks. ‘I told you he wasn’t on the phone.’

  ‘But his friend is. That is what you told me, blithely ignoring the fact that you never made a single call from the Dorchester and were with Hannah outside it,’ he filled in with unutterable cool. ‘He doesn’t exist, does he?’

  ‘Of course he exists!’ she cried.

  ‘Carter had never heard of him and if he exists, take me to him or get him over here. I’ll even send a car,’ Dane told her silkily. ‘What? You can’t manage that, either?’

  She breathed in unsteadily. ‘He isn’t in London at present.’

  Dane laughed scornfully. ‘My opinion of your IQ is divebombing, Claire. I have a helicopter, a private jet, a whole fleet of cars, and yet Max is quite inaccessible? Where is he? Lost in the Amazon?’

  ‘I don’t know … all right, I lied to you!’ she gasped. ‘But he was living on that estate where I was attacked, and when I went there no one was in. I don’t know when he’s due home.’

  Dane’s mercilessly hard gaze positively shimmered. ‘And this man whom you purport to love and who was ready to marry you at the drop of a hat … you expect me to believe that you don’t know where he is, that you can’t reach him by any method and that you could marry me without even discussing that with him?’ he summed up derisively. ‘Oh, come on, Claire, a child in the nursery could tell more credible lies than that! Max is a figment of your imagination. The ploy you used to persuade me that that ceremony today was a formality.’

  Her control snapped. ‘Damn you, he exists!’ She went plunging over to her handbag and emptied it on the floor while Dane watched her like a hawk. ‘You have to be out of your mind to think I could tell lies like that …’ She fumbled through the scattered cosmetics and then stilled, glancing back at him in horror. ‘My bag was stolen. My photos of him, his letters … they’re all gone.’

  ‘That was a coloratura performance. Garbo couldn’t have done it better,’ Dane pronounced grimly. ‘And if Max did exist I’d be nailing his hide to the wall permanently, because he could only be your accomplice in this rip-off. Although Adam qualified most for that.’

  ‘Don’t you dare run down Grandfather!’ she snapped, and suddenly started towards the door. ‘I’m getting out of here.’

  A hand as cruelly strong as an iron vice reached out and enclosed her narrow-boned wrist, literally jerking her back. Dane gripped her squarely in front of him, his jewel-bright eyes stabbing like diamond cutters into her starkly pale face. ‘To go where? You’re broke but for the clothes you stand up in, and I can tell you where the couple of thousand cleared off the sale of Ranbury are going,’ he breathed contemptuously. ‘To the old folk you were so keen to pluck violin strings for.’

  ‘I may … be broke,’ she muttered. ‘But I can go to the Social Services.’

  ‘You’ve never worked and you’re married. Catch twenty-two! You’re my responsibility.’

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she bit out reluctantly.

  ‘Stay put then. Tell me how
it was all set up,’ he invited. ‘That South African venture went bankrupt over a year ago. Adam lost every penny—and every penny of an amount that was by no means a fortune even to begin with.’

  He had no need to tell her to stay where she was. ‘I don’t … nothing?’ She read the paralysing truth of his announcement in his grim features. ‘Absolutely nothing?’ she almost squeaked.

  ‘He mortgaged the house to settle his debts and keep afloat long enough to fool everybody,’ Dane supplied pitilessly. ‘Indeed, not only are you not worth a red cent, you’ve actually cost me money. Carter will be down on his knees in the local church, thanking God he was passed over …’

  She was in shock. Nothing, not a single penny. It was like a judgement upon her for marrying Dane to qualify for a non-existent inheritance. And the humiliation of it all froze her. All those clothes she had bought, she was thinking wretchedly, all that money she owed to Dane. So it took her, in her shattered state, several seconds to register that Dane was adroitly flicking loose the three buttons that stood between her and her underwear. Her immediate retreat was over-matched by Dane’s fast reflexes, and the delicate crěpe de Chine rended with a ripping tear. ‘See what you made me do …’ he murmured almost pleasantly.

  ‘Dane … what are you doing?’ Her hands made frantic movements to hold together the parted edges of her dress.

  He gazed down at her coldly. ‘That’s a pretty dumb question and I know you’re not precisely dumb, don’t I? I mean, I’ve escaped far better bets than you in the matrimonial stakes. But you’re the one who struck gold.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ she flared, relieved his hands had dropped down to her waist. ‘If you’d just calm down …’

  ‘I’m calm. And if you want to know why,’ he drawled softly, his very tone as insolent as his scathing appraisal, ‘it’s the only use you’ve got.’

  Dane was punishing her on a level she couldn’t compete on, hitting back with a cool sexual candour that left her tongue-tied. Awake now to the dangers of sending his temper right over the edge, she whispered, ‘But you don’t want me.’

  He tilted his sunstreaked head back. ‘I’m stuck with you and, newly married as I am, who do you suggest I invite to have an affair with me?’

  His hands swept up to her shoulders and when she struggled he simply wrenched her ruthlessly out of the dress’s folds, dropping it carelessly down on to the carpet. He caught her again before she could get out of reach. His fingers forced up her chin. ‘Do you want this to be rape?’

  ‘Dane, you’re wrong, you’re wrong about everything,’ she stammered in desperation. ‘I didn’t know about the money. I swear I didn’t! You don’t want me, you never have … so why do this? You’ll only regret it.’

  He straightened. ‘Stop pleading,’ he breathed. ‘Nothing’s going to get you out of this room unscathed, Claire, and on top of the last enthralling couple of hours, those tears leave me cold.’

  He yanked his shirt out of the waistband of his jeans. ‘What, no maidenly scream?’

  Her mouth was dry, her heartbeat a crazy tattoo behind her ribs. She just couldn’t believe that this arrogant beast was Dane. Dane, who had meant a lot of things to her in both past and present but who had never once shown her this darker side of his temperament, the discovery of which blitzed her into nervous paralysis, for she had not a clue how to cope with a male in this mood. All the time she was telling herself that the phone would ring or a knock would sound on the door … or more probably someone would shout CUT … and he wouldn’t go ahead with any of his threats. And why wasn’t there a lock on the inside of the bedroom door? That stray thought popped up amidst the turmoil, too.

  ‘Dane.’ One last attempt to reason with him, she told herself. ‘I love Max, and if you touch me … well, Max isn’t going to want me any more … and you know—’ she was retreating again down the side of the bed ‘—I wouldn’t be much fun.’

  Unexpectedly, Dane burst out laughing. ‘At this moment you’re hilarious,’ he contradicted, digging his thumbs into the waistband of his unzipped jeans to peel them off.

  The amusement had failed to reach his eyes. There she glimpsed the enormity of what he believed her capable of. Coldly and calculatingly trapping him into marriage. Turning the tables with a vengeance on a master game player. What price now his casual fondness for her when he saw her every move as plotted and carefully executed? She had begged him to marry her. She had sworn blind she loved a man she could not even bring here. Indeed she had not a shred of evidence to produce in her own favour, and there was a wildness in Dane, a wild recklessness he kept under lock and key most of the time but which was flaring out of control like a bushfire inside him now.

  ‘I don’t want you.’ She turned her back hastily on him to grab up the peignoir she had discarded earlier that day.

  A pair of hands lightly encircled her slim shoulders. ‘Don’t you?’ His tone was insultingly disbelieving, based on a rampant, raw confidence built up after endless far too easy conquests.

  She fought free and still ended up tossed on the bed as if she weighed no more than a feather, Dane calmly holding her down without hurting her this time. ‘Well, you did ask me to marry you,’ he reminded her cruelly, his derision searing hectic pink into her cheeks. Then his head swooped down to block out the mid-afternoon sunlight that fired his hair into a silvery aureole.

  He didn’t touch her mouth. He tasted the tears on her cheeks, the corner of her swept-down eyelids, before executing a glancing foray down over her sensitive jawbone to the flickering pulse at the base of her throat, a destination she found outlandishly vulnerable to his assault. She tried desperately to twist out from beneath him, for it seemed to her that if she lay like an inanimate doll he might take that as encouragement.

  When he covered her mouth it was shatteringly intimate, his tongue parting her lips and invading her as she had never been invaded. A choked cry of protest escaped her. ‘No!’

  But he taught her ‘yes’ with pitiless purpose and, as she was a stranger to passion, that devilish and tormenting expertise worked a savagely powerful spell on her defences. His kiss consumed her and a kiss had never been like that before, branding into her bones an instinctive need for its continuance. When her hands were free, her fingers clung to the sleekly muscled strength of his shoulders and from thence into the surprisingly silky luxuriance of his hair, holding him to her, drowning in that sea of need as his urgency grew.

  Abruptly Dane loosed her reddened mouth, staring down into her passion-glazed eyes. ‘You’re a real challenge, aren’t you?’ he scorned cruelly.

  Her body went cold. ‘Dear God, I hate you! Hate you!’ she railed as she understood what he had done to her.

  For an eternity it seemed she struggled, her slim body writhing and twisting under his until the heat in her blood was no longer enough to sustain her energy.

  ‘Finished?’ Dane meshed long fingers into her damp, tousled hair, listening to the audible rasp of her breathing. ‘And all this because what?’ he questioned insidiously. ‘You’re afraid of enjoying yourself? Isn’t that a little bloody-minded, when you married me for this? And this—’ his palm instantly cupped the heaving swell of her breast ‘—is all that is available so it’s foolish to rail about what you can’t have, isn’t it?’

  ‘Damn you …’ she gasped wrathfully, tears stinging her molten eyes in a wild, angry surge; yet that fire continued to build higher and higher in her under the provocative touch of his far too knowledgeable hands.

  He brushed aside the lace and silk fragility of her bra and bent his head, finding the dark bud of her nipple with his lips and his fingers. Sensation clawed at her in mute defiance of her wishes, sensation that was hunger and despair and seduction all rolled into one hateful attack on her control. And after a while she lost the urge to struggle that had become quite automatic for another more basic instinct, an insane need that was beyond her restraint, had forged its hold upon her, its path through her resistance an
d the sensations then bordered on torment.

  In that storm there was only Dane and a flashfire desire that burned in her very bones until she was crying, gasping she knew not what and he gazed down at her in masterly and triumph when she was quite blind to such calculation, her abandonment drawing an answering shudder from the hard, virile length of his body. For the merest instant he hesitated and she collided with the febrile glitter in his beautiful eyes before he possessed her and even the pain did not prevent that instantaneous explosion of pleasure that shattered her into a thousand pieces.

  Afterwards she burrowed under the duvet like an escaping convict, at sea with herself still, unable yet even to gather those incriminating pieces of self together again, or to forget what her photographic memory had journalled while her wits, her self-respect and her morality were on temporary vacation.

  She listened to Dane in the shower. Her mind was a blank. She listened to the silence and then she waited to listen to him dress. But she missed his return to the bedroom, felt with a jerk of reaction his fingertip trace the exposed line of her backbone. ‘Playing dead, Claire? Or were you hoping I’d come back to bed?’

  Her body ached and she felt that ache of discomfort with a masochistic satisfaction. ‘I hate you!’

  ‘My appetite runs more to food right now. When you’ve trailed yourself out of the sulks, join me in the lounge,’ he ordered in that same murderously cool voice, and she learnt that one could hate a voice, too.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Do you want me to dress you? And wear something presentable,’ he added drily. ‘This is threatening to turn into a wake.’

  He had not baulked at taking her virginity. And should he have? The days when men retreated from innocence were long since gone. Dane. Her husband. A sound betwixt a giggle and a sob seized her taut body and she buried her hot face in the pillows. Dane whom she had trusted … yes, she had trusted him and she had respected him and, in a tiny corner of her subconscious, Dane had still held sway as an unrealistic hero, lacking only a white horse and a pair of pirate topboots in an immature girl’s fantasy.