Bittersweet Passion

by Lynne Graham

  ‘I don’t like the outfit,’ he said softly. ‘You know, when Cinderella got her Prince, she didn’t put on a pair of jeans and turn into everybody’s idea of the dewy-eyed girl next door.’

  ‘If she’d got you she’d probably have hanged herself!’ Claire spat.

  His husky laughter filled the dining-room.

  Her small face stiffened. ‘I’m not going to apologise for not meeting your standards of perfection.’

  ‘You’re going to. In the heat of yesterday I didn’t get around to showing you the new wardrobe I got for you. Originally I planned it as a surprise,’ he delivered equably.

  She was dumbfounded. Her downbent head flew up as she belatedly realised that those clothes in the bedroom were for her. ‘You bought me clothes? I don’t want them!’

  Cool purpose gleamed in the intense blueness of his eyes. She made a performance out of sugaring her coffee. Unused to rejection of any kind, that was Dane. And she didn’t care how angry she might be making him. She didn’t care either that he’d probably been with another woman last night. It was just her disgust that was making her feel sick, her fury that he should believe a trunkful of fancy clothes would sweeten her humour.

  ‘While you’re living with me as my wife, Claire, you’ll dress for the part, and I like feminine clothes on a woman.’

  It was the last straw. She had meant to greet him with wooden disdain over breakfast but even a block of wood couldn’t have remained cool in the face of such downright, shameless provocation. Thrusting her chair back, she got up.’ Then find another actress,’ she suggested. ‘I’m not a very good one.’

  ‘If that was acting last night,’ Dane savoured lazily, ‘I reckon you’d win an Emmy!’ As he spoke he stood and his arms closed round her, denying her a quick exit.

  ‘Let me go, Dane!’ she gasped heatedly.

  In answer he crushed her mouth under his and it started all over again, that unbelievably strong surge of excitement that she had already learnt to fear. His palms cupped her cheekbones, sentencing her to stillness, his tongue delving with inherent sensuality between her lips until her slim body shook with the force of the sensations he could evoke so easily. One of his hands slid down to span the curve of her hips, tugging her closer to the hard cradle of his thighs. His eyes were a deep, dense blue when he raised his head. ‘I want you,’ he confessed roughly. ‘And you’re fortunate I do want you, so why fight what appears to come naturally?’

  ‘This is sex,’ she retorted in revulsion. His grip loosened and she side-stepped him to stalk, badly shaken, back to the bedroom. Why, oh, why couldn’t she have remained cold in his arms, she demanded of herself? If she could prove to Dane that she didn’t want him, that would finish this whole baiting game of his.

  ‘And what’s wrong with sex?’ He was behind her when she turned, poised with the lithe grace of the immensely confident, his mocking gaze rousing deeper colour in her cheeks. ‘You made it sound like some sort of nasty disease.’

  If he touched her, she was his. He had proved that indisputably this morning and yet, if he touched her again, she was convinced she would die inside. He wanted her. Now at this very moment he wanted her and it meant absolutely nothing. Dane was very highly sexed and she was available and she was new, sufficiently different from her predecessors to possess a certain novelty value. That was all. Nobody needed to tell her that Dane treated sex as an appetite that required fairly frequent gratification. Their lovemaking was not associated with anything less ephemeral in his mind. Nor was she in any way special to him now. She was just the same as the rest.

  ‘Claire …’ His voice held a husky note of cajolement. ‘Don’t you think you’re over-reacting?’

  He sounded so damned reasonable and polite! It was hard to believe the same male had ruthlessly silenced her objections a few hours ago and made love to her quite exquisitely as if to set the final seal of proof upon his ability not to become emotionally involved. Now all of a sudden he was putting his arms round her again, and she went rigid with dismay. ‘You can’t … want …’ she stammered. ‘Not again …’

  A throaty chuckle sounded above her head. His hands anchored her remorselessly to him. ‘Do I apologise for that? I’m likely to be quite a trial to you, Claire. But I’m not a selfish lover. I know that physically you wouldn’t find it very comfortable, so I’ll wait until your pleasure can equal my own.’

  With superhuman effort she pulled herself free, her fair skin burning to her hairline with chagrin. ‘I despise you,’ she said, and it was a lie. Of the two of them she despised herself more. Dane owed loyalty to no one else. He was merely taking what he estimated was on offer, what he felt he had already paid for in advance in Paris, while she had no decent excuse at all to supply for her own behaviour.

  ‘You’re still getting off very lightly,’ he responded drily. ‘And maybe by the time I’m bored, you’ll be lying awake nights praying for me not to get bored because you can’t stop wanting me. I’ll settle money on you, compensation for one seriously damaged fantasy.’

  He was flattening her again. Rolling her out and proceeding to walk on her. Her only consolation was that he had about as much hope of making her love him as she had of engendering similar emotions in him.

  ‘Compensation for being used? What a shame it is that sex is all you can give a woman,’ she heard herself bite out bitterly in retort. ‘Didn’t you ever want a woman who wanted you for yourself?’

  ‘Like you?’

  Instead of drawing his blood, she had drawn her own. ‘I happen to be in love with Max,’ she assured him shakily, but she couldn’t meet his eyes now when she said it, though she still knew it to be true. Love to her was an all embracing, exclusive emotion centred upon one person. It made no allowances for a fiery, renegade attraction to someone else. And the most unbearable thing was that that someone else should be Dane. He wasn’t a stranger she could escape, and he was much too clever to fool. He couldn’t respect her now either, when he recalled how vehemently she had proclaimed her feelings for Max. Her behaviour must exactly fit Dane’s cynical picture of love—or at least it would do when he realised that Max did exist. Then, ironically, he would be even more contemptuous.

  ‘And you’re so incredibly faithful to him in mind and body?’ Long, brown fingers spun her back to face him. ‘You don’t love me? I don’t want your love, Claire, but I’ll take everything else becasue you’re mine now, bought and paid for just like the carpet under your feet and the sheets on the bed. And, just like them, you have a place for as long as I want you,’ he specified coolly.

  ‘Dane, let me leave,’ she begged abruptly.

  ‘Something tells me you don’t fancy a return trip to Paris. I did plan on staying there a couple of days.’

  Her breath rattled in her throat. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’

  ‘I guess it doesn’t matter where the bedroom is,’ he drawled insolently.

  ‘I’ll leave,’ she threatened jerkily.

  ‘No way will you leave. You don’t even leave this apartment without telling me exactly where you’re going,’ Dane raked arrogantly.

  ‘And in return I get the same right?’ A shaky laugh left her throat. He looked distinctly taken aback by the idea of being answerable to anyone. ‘Relax, I don’t want those rights,’ she whispered.

  His hands settled on her rigid shoulders. ‘I think you need a little breathing space for a few hours. I’ll turn into the office and maybe—’ he dared to murmur intimately ‘—when I come home later, you’ll stop me in my tracks by wearing something …’

  Scarlet-faced, she broke free of him. ‘I’m not dressing up like a tart to …’

  ‘Claire, I doubt if your idea of a tart and mine match.’ There was an unforgivable vein of humour in the interruption. ‘You know, this suffering act isn’t entertaining.’

  ‘Then I suggest you go where you can be entertained. If—–’ Her eyes glanced off his.

  He didn’t let her finish. ‘You mean that?
’ he grated.

  If you had let me explain, if there had been room within you to trust, none of this would ever have happened, she had been about to say. But how did she explain Adam’s misleading will when she didn’t understand it herself?

  ‘You haven’t bought me,’ she replied stiffly, proudly. ‘And I don’t own you. You can sleep with whoever you like, Dane. It won’t touch me.’

  For a shocking instant, in collision with the untamed brilliance of his lapis lazuli eyes, she thought he might strike her. Then the threat passed over, his fury gone as quickly as it had come, and he cast her a glittering smile. ‘I confess I’d never hoped for carte-blanche within marriage.’

  ‘This isn’t a marriage,’ she countered fiercely. ‘You don’t respect me. I don’t feel married and neither do you. If you did, you wouldn’t be so determined to use me.’

  When the front door thudded shut the tears rolled down her cheeks. Sniffing, she fumbled for her hanky. She did not hate Dane. Not yet she didn’t. This situation bore a close resemblance to a nightmare but she was still logical enough to see why he was so determined to humiliate her. The simple conviction that she had smilingly tricked him into marriage was sufficient to bring out the devil in Dane. Had she been ravishingly beautiful and an unbearable temptation to his masculinity, she might have understood his behaviour. Only she wasn’t beautiful or witty or … anything … She hiccuped into silence again after staunchly blowing her small nose.

  Did Dane really think it so simple for her to abandon her principles and make hay while the sun shone? That was what he was advocating. She doubted if his ego had ever been threatened by such bitter hostility from a woman. And it might have been amusing had not his unswerving confidence been based on the belief that she loved him to distraction.

  She wasn’t going to find even a modicum of peace until she had straightened things out with Max. He ought to be back at his flat now, and she prayed he hadn’t seen the papers yet. The very least she owed him was a private explanation of her marriage. She couldn’t lie to him. She would have to tell him the truth … whatever that was. That she loved him but couldn’t control herself when Dane touched her? She shrank from such a scene.

  In the hard daylight, the estate looked gloomy rather than threatening. It was busy, children playing and mothers walking with prams and laden shopping bags. Averting her eyes from the rough ground where she had been attacked, she hurried into the tower block towards the lift. What explanation was she to give Max? He wouldn’t be very interested in the finer details when he realised she had been living with Dane, sharing with another man the intimacies they had once expected to share together.

  After her first loud knock on the flat door, she heard a burst of voices within, but it was a couple of minutes before the door opened.

  ‘Oh, it’s you again!’

  Claire gaped in surprise at the curvaceous blonde staring angrily out at her and for a moment she believed she had come to the wrong door. ‘Max …’ she began. ‘I thought …’

  ‘Well, sweetie, I’d say one of us oughtn’t to be here.’ She tossed her tousled blonde head. ‘Max, it’s for you.’

  Taking in the significance of the flimsy short nightdress the older girl wore, the fact that she had so clearly just got out of bed, Claire swallowed. ‘Are you Max’s sister?’

  The woman flung back her head and laughed uproariously. ‘God, that’s a good one!’

  Behind her a more familiar face appeared. ‘Who is it, Sue?’ Max demanded irritably and then he saw her. He frowned, scrutinising her slim, rigid figure. ‘Claire …? Lord, I wouldn’t have known you!’ he burst out almost accusingly. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Sue cast Claire a self-satisfied smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it, darling,’ and she flounced out of sight.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Shock absorbed, Max was now tasting the full horror of her arrival unannounced upon the scene. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he muttered, his bleary dark eyes swerving from hers.

  ‘Your ladyfriend said it for you.’ Her voice was low-pitched and intense, a loud thrumming in her ears that left her light-headed and clouded her brain. She lifted her chin. ‘I hope you’ll be happy … you and … Sue. Really, you should’ve just written and said there was someone else,’ she managed jerkily.

  He looked mysteriously different, as if time had dealt imperfection to her memory of him. In her high heels she was eye to eye with him, or would have been had he had the guts to meet her scrutiny. Instead he was hanging his head, dark colour creeping down his neck in a tide because he didn’t know what to say. Caught in flagrante delicto, Max of the sterling character and steadfast promises!

  ‘I’m entitled to freedom,’ he snapped out suddenly. ‘You don’t understand. It’s different for a man, and we’re not married. What was I supposed to do? Wait the next twenty years for you? Claire? Claire!’

  She was already walking back to the lift, deaf to his frantic repetition of her name. Tears marked her cheeks but her face was icily controlled. Everything she had dreamt of throughout the long months of Adam’s illness seemed somehow shoddy. How long had Max had his flat to himself? Had his family ever shared it with him? He couldn’t have told her without risking his cosy set-up with Sue being disturbed. There was a hateful irony in the fact that Sue was the kind of sexy, brash woman Max had always purported not to like.

  How dared he try to make out that the blame was somehow hers! Passing the buck with a vengeance. She trembled. It hurt to misjudge someone so badly. He was weak and she had thought him strong. He was a hypocrite too, a liar when she had believed him innately truthful. Possibly she had seemed an excellent matrimonial prospect at Ranbury. Maybe Dane—and Adam Fletcher—hadn’t been so wrong. Max could have proposed with part of an eye on the main chance. Why else had he kept on writing to her, retaining his hold on her affections when he was practically living with another woman down here?

  Max, of all people. If it had been Dane … She blundered out into the fresh air. People were never predictable. She might have married Max. She might never have known that he was capable of such deception. And there was Dane, whom no sane woman would trust out of her sight. He wouldn’t have done this to her. Oh, good lord, no! Dane would be cruelly candid when the sun went down on their relationship.

  When Dane finally realised that Max existed, he’d go through the roof to learn simultaneously that Max had replaced her. She’d sooner crawl over broken glass than face Dane’s derision … worse still, his pity. Even her jobless, unremarkable boyfriend had found better fish to fry. Her savaged pride burned hotter than a furnace. No, she didn’t owe such painful truth to Dane. Before he had swept her into his bed, yes. But not now.

  Back at the apartment she looked at the beautiful clothes in the built-in units. Mounds of them. Leisure wear, evening wear, lingerie she blushed to look at. All the props necessary to turn an ugly duckling into an almost swan. It was a typical Dane gesture of almost offensive largesse. Easily given and in this case grudgingly and ungratefully received; but reality was beginning to creep into her thoughts now again. She had got Dane into this marriage. She owed him the outward show.

  Without really thinking beyond her need to hear a friendly voice, she tried Randy’s number again. Her friend answered breathlessly. ‘Claire? Gosh, you’re the last person I expected to hear from. There I was, reading the morning paper under the effect of the most hideous hangover … Lord, I dropped it in my muesli! You and Dane Visconti? You might have dropped a teeny hint,’ she complained. ‘I know we haven’t seen each other in ages, but really, Claire! I thought you were in love with some wholesome country character called Max and then I find I’m not just a chapter behind, I’m a whole book behind!’

  Claire had forgotten just how hard it was to get a word in edgeways with her garrulous friend. ‘I’ll bring you up to date some time.’

  ‘Where are you? You sound very clear. I imagined you’d be abroad. Are you?’

  Suddenly she saw the complete impossibility
of dredging out the story behind her amazing marriage. Dane had put up a front for his friends. She had no right to spill all to Randy. ‘We’re still in London. I just thought I’d ring and say hello.’ Claire fiddled with the phone cord, stuck for light conversation. ‘How’s your career going? The most evidence of its vitality I receive are postcards from foreign parts,’ she teased.

  ‘I could reach down this line and strangle you!’ Randy groaned. ‘How dare you sound calm! You’ve married one of the most divine-looking and sexy men I’ve ever seen and you’re asking about my latest assignment? Oh hell, there’s the bell. I’ve got a date. I suppose it’ll be ages before I hear from you again.’

  Claire swallowed ruefully. ‘No, it won’t be. I’ll see you soon.’ And before Randy could comment in surprise, she rang off.

  Dear God, if one more misinformed person told her how lucky she was to have got Dane to the altar, she’d end up in an asylum! She wandered aimlessly about the apartment and then, as the idiocy of inactivity struck her, she conceived sudden purpose, stepping briefly into the kitchen to tell Thompson she would be back in time for dinner.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘I REALISE you’re keen to find work, Miss Fletcher.’ The older woman gave her a less impersonal smile than she had been rewarded with at the two previous employment agencies. ‘But without qualifications it won’t be easy. Even the most junior clerical job requires some O-level grades.’ She sighed meaningfully. ‘Perhaps you ought to consider domestic service.’

  Claire was ready to do anything but that. With a reasonable job prospect she might have talked to Dane. But not about domestic service. He would consider that an insult. When she got home, Thompson smoothly broke into the announcement that Dane would not be back for dinner. He tacked on the supposed mention of a business meeting and apologies which she estimated to be his addition rather than Dane’s.