Coming to an abrupt halt in front of Claire, Andreas reached out to take the champagne bottle she hadn’t even been aware of holding out of her fingers. Then he stood there, impressively daunting, as he held the bottle out to the side in a grimly silent command for someone to take it from him.
Some very brave person did that, for the angry vibrations Andreas was giving off were frighteningly awesome. ‘Now you may all return to the party,’ he said flatly. And not once—not once had he so much as acknowledged a single one of them by eye contact!
Not even Claire, who was standing there rather like a puppet that had had its strings removed while the group responded to his command without a single murmur, disappearing en masse through the pool-house doors and effectively leaving her to face the angry wolf alone.
Thanks a bunch, she thought ruefully as she listened to their retreating footsteps fade away.
‘Well, that was very sociable of you,’ she drawled in an effort to mock her own tingling sense of trepidation at his continuing grim silence.
He didn’t even bother to retaliate. All he did do was reach down to snatch up her only good wrist then turned and began pulling her towards the house.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ Claire demanded, trying to tug free of a grip that wouldn’t budge.
‘You are drunk,’ he answered scathingly. ‘I have no tolerance with that, so if you value your life you will be silent.’
‘I am not drunk!’ She hotly denied the charge—though she had a vague feeling he could well be right. ‘Where are we going?’ she then queried frowningly when, as they entered the indoor pool-room, instead of making for the door which would lead back to the main part of the house, he headed for the private staircase that connected the pool-room to the upper floor.
He didn’t answer, but his body language did as he pulled her behind him up the stairs. He was blisteringly, furiously angry.
They emerged onto the upper landing. Below them the party was continuing in full swing. The hallway was crowded with people dancing, others spilling out from adjoining rooms. Peering over the gallery as they walked along it, the first person Claire’s eyes picked out was Desmona’s choice for Andreas’s mistress, dancing cheek to cheek with her husband to the slow, smoochy music drifting sensuously in the air.
Two-timer, she thought contemptuously. And flashed the man in front of her a lethal glance.
He opened the door to her bedroom and swung her inside. Only a single small table lamp burned in the corner, casting eerie dark shadows over the rest of the room.
‘Now,’ he said, shutting the door, ‘you are going to pull yourself together and make yourself fit to be seen with me when we return downstairs to our guests.’
‘I was with our guests,’ she threw back. ‘And we were enjoying ourselves until you came and spoiled it!’
‘You mean you enjoyed having that boy paw you?’
A sudden vision of his naked body wrapped around that adulterous woman downstairs had her chin coming up in hot defiance. ‘What’s it to you if I enjoyed it?’ she challenged insolently. ‘I don’t recall either of us making any vows of celibacy when we decided to deceive everyone!’
His eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘Explain that remark.’
Go to hell, she wanted to say, but those narrowed eyes stopped her. ‘Let go of me,’ she said instead, and tried to pull her wrist away.
He wouldn’t let go. ‘I said explain,’ he repeated.
‘What do you think I meant?’ she flashed, hugging insolence around her like a protective shield. ‘If you think I am going to sit here through this marriage like the ever faithful Penelope while you go off doing your own thing—then you can think again!’
The atmosphere between them was suddenly electric. He wasn’t a fool; he knew exactly what she was saying here. If it were possible his eyes narrowed even more. Her blood began to fizz—not with champagne bubbles any more but with a far more volatile substance. Her heart began to pound, the muscles in her stomach coiling tensely as, in sheer self-preservation, she gave a hard yank at her imprisoned wrist and managed at last to break herself free then began edging backwards, attempting to put some much needed distance between them.
But he followed. ‘You are not taking a lover while you are married to me,’ he warned in the kind of deadly voice that put goose bumps on her flesh.
‘You can’t dictate to me like that,’ Claire protested as she fell back another step—then another, until the backs of her trembling knees hit the edge of the bed. ‘I can do whatever I want to do. You promised me that,’ she reminded him. ‘When I agreed to all of this.’
‘And you want to take a lover,’ he breathed in taut understanding.
‘Why—will you be jealous?’ she taunted him, with a sense of horror at her own crazy recklessness.
Something came alive on his lean, dark face that had her hand shooting up to press against his chest in a purely defensive action meant to keep him back.
‘No,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
He said nothing, but his eyes were certainly talking to her. They were gazing down at the hectic heave of her breasts beneath the stretch-silk tulle as if he could actually see this so-called lover’s hands on her body. And at last the alarm bells began ringing inside her head, warning her that she had finally managed to awaken the sleeping devil she’d always known must live somewhere inside him.
She should leave, she knew that. She should get the hell out of this bedroom and hide away somewhere until he had got his temper back.
But she didn’t move another muscle. Instead she just stood there and trembled and shook.
A little whimper escaped her.
It was enough to bring his eyes flicking up to clash with her eyes—and their darkness was so blisteringly intense that her lungs suddenly stopped working altogether.
He was faring no better, she realised. His heart was pounding; she could feel it hammering against his ribs beneath the place where her hand lay flat against his chest in its puny effort to ward him off. He felt warm and tough, the masculine formation of well developed muscle so intensely exciting to her that she froze on a wave of horrified shock.
‘No,’ she breathed in shaken rejection—and went to jerk her hand away from him—only he stopped her by covering it with his own hand.
It was then that the heat went racing through her. The heat of fear, the heat of desire, the heat of a terrible temptation.
But what was worse was she could feel the self-same temptation thundering through him! He was still, he was tense, and he was vibrating with a desire so strong that there really was no denying it.
Anxious eyes flicked back to clash with his. ‘No,’ she repeated in breathless denial of what she saw written there. ‘You don’t want me,’ she whispered shakily.
To her surprise he laughed, the sound so harsh and tight and bitterly deriding that it managed to make her wince. Yet she received the disturbing impression that it was himself he was deriding.
‘You fool,’ he muttered then, and before she could even feed the words into her brain he had spread one set of long brown fingers across the satin-smooth skin between her shoulder blades, cupped the other to the back of her head. And, with a hard, rough, angrily masculine jerk, he tugged her up against him then took her startled mouth hotly and savagely.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE didn’t stand a single chance.
Her senses went haywire, every one of them making a mad scrambling surge towards that life-giving mouth like butterflies set free from the bonds of their chrysalis. Her lips fell apart, her tongue going in urgent search of its partner. He shuddered violently at the intimate contact, his hands banding her more closely to him. Like two magnets of opposing poles, they became locked together in a sizzling exchange that left no room for anything but the burning eruption that was taking place between them.
It was wild and it was hot, fuelled by his anger and her refusal to back down no matter what the consequen
ces. It was a lethal combination that flung the whole thing spinning out of control so quickly that neither was able to snatch sanity back.
He took her mouth savagely—and savagely she replied, inciting the whole crazed, potent experience into a frenzy of desire that closed down time and space to this one small zone filled with a vibrant, soaring, passionate energy.
It was devouring—intoxicating. The more he took, the more she gave, arching to the stroke of his hands on her body, literally sighing with pleasure when he touched her breasts. Her injured hand was locked around his neck so her fingers could cling to his hair, her other hand lost inside his jacket, greedily learning every muscle-rippling contour along his back-bone as he jerked and shuddered to her touch.
It was like touching heaven, and if the door to the bedroom had suddenly swung open neither of them would have heard it, they were so lost, so caught up in a conflagration that had been sharply building between them for days.
‘Claire …’ He groaned her name against her hungry mouth.
Whether in pleasure or in protest she didn’t know, but the sudden flare of heat coming from him set her own flesh burning. She gasped when she felt the power of his arousal surge against her. It caused an echoing eruption within herself, locking her thighs in an urgent need to maintain that vital contact as a flare of bright, blinding, blistering desire went shooting through her.
Like seasoned lovers, she thought dazedly. You would be forgiven for thinking that we did this with each other all the time! When in actual fact Claire had never felt like this before—ever!
The halter-style bodice to her dress dropped to her waistline, his hands feathered over newly exposed flesh, and she gasped on a tremor of nerve-tingling pleasure as her knees gave out and she toppled dizzily back onto the bed.
He followed her downwards so that they landed in a tangle of limbs that only seemed to intensify their excitement. His breathing was fast, his expression intense, his mouth still moist from their long, hot kiss. But it was the look in his eyes that sent Claire completely still beneath him.
In all her life, she had never seen anything like it before. It was hot and it was ravenous but it was also painfully—painfully vulnerable.
‘I want you,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I can tell that you do.’ But it was said very gently. For some reason that she didn’t understand this big, strong, very arrogant man was hurting enough without her adding to it by taunting him.
Without really having to think about the wiseness of it, she reached up and kissed him—as a lover would kiss a true lover.
Then it was back. The hot, hard, driving passion that had no time or room for gentleness or leisure. He kissed like a man who hadn’t done this for centuries, and she responded with a passion that she’d never known she possessed.
Her dress slid away without her even noticing, then his jacket, his shirt and tie. He kissed and licked and caressed and suckled her until she was so lost in the frenzied storm that she had no idea what she was doing any more.
So when she dared to fold her hand around the length of his burgeoning sex it came as a shock to feel him go utterly motionless beside her. Opening heavy, love-glazed eyes, she lay there watching as he seemed to take an actual pause in life itself. His eyes were closed, his dark face taut, his mouth flattened into a single white-ringed line of unbearable tension.
Yet not sexual tension, but a different tension.
‘Andreas?’ she breathed, unsure what was happening.
When he didn’t respond she went to take her hand away, a hot flush of mortification staining her cheeks. But his hand snaked down to stay her, long fingers trembling slightly as they kept hers tightly wrapped around him.
Then he let the air out of his lungs in a long, slow, measured way, and his eyes fluttered open, revealing those dark, dark irises where that awful, wretched, pained vulnerability was back again.
He didn’t say anything, though, and when he came to lean over her the tempo changed—the man changed, turning from ravaging hunter into devastatingly rich and sensual lover.
Still greedy, he was greedy—but then, so was she. She couldn’t get enough of him, her teeth biting deeply into powerfully bunched muscle, her lips and tongue hungry to taste, to acquaint herself with this body that was giving her such untold pleasure.
It was as if nothing else in the world existed but each other. The party, the people, the anger—everything had been cast aside for this soul-filling journey into sensuality. He was heavy on top of her but she didn’t care; her long and slender legs were parted while his hips thrust softly against her.
He wasn’t inside her yet—but the experience was magical, the expression on his dark face so deeply intense that her heart swelled in her breast with a joy she could barely cope with.
I do love you so, she wanted to whisper. But just didn’t dare in case she spoiled the magic.
So she did the next best thing and parted her legs that bit wider, smiled provocatively into the dark beauty of his impassioned face, arched her spine towards him—and invited him inside her.
His response was stunning. His dark face grew taut, his eyelids drooping over what she’d glimpsed as a flare of unbelievable emotion. Then, with a shudder that seemed to rip right through him, he buried himself in the deep, dark liquid heat of her body.
The small sting of pain she experienced at his entry barely registered, his short pause when he realised just what he had taken from her an acknowledgement of his prize. Then the passion coiled its hot, needy talons around them again, and the moment was forgotten—for the time being anyway.
No one said that making love had to be an earth-shattering experience. Only the lucky few reached those kind of peaks time after time.
They reached those peaks—surpassed them, rose onwards to another place where reality was suspended and the senses took over. When she began to flip over into that final climactic finish, Andreas wrapped her tightly to him, binding her there with his arms. Then, with each new measured thrust of his body, he watched as she shattered just that little bit more for him, her soft sounds of pleasure growing in strength, in volume, in vigour.
A sob broke from her—not a gasp, but a wild, bright electric sob of surrender that shook her body and kept on shaking it. And on a rasping growl he too surrendered to his own needs with driving thrusts that shattered what was left of both of them.
Coming down to earth again afterwards took a long, long time, Claire discovered as she felt herself drifting gently through layer upon layer of sweet sensual fulfilment.
When she did eventually find the strength to take a small peek at reality, she found Andreas still lying heavy on her with his face pressed up against her throat, and his heart thundering against her breast.
He was still inside her. She could feel the exotic fullness of his manhood pulsing against the walls of her newly sensitised sex. It was wonderful. From hurt to anger to a blistering passion to this, she listed—this exquisite sense of supine contentment.
For the first time in months—maybe even years—she felt true happiness flood through her. ‘I’m in heaven,’ she whispered.
Andreas jerked away from her as if she were a poisonous snake. Taken by surprise by his abrupt withdrawal, her eyes flicked open to watch, in a state of bewildering confusion, him not only withdraw from her body but jackknife to his feet.
But worse than that was the expression on his face as he did it. He looked utterly devastated. Big and strong and godlike as he was in his full naked glory, when his eyes clashed briefly with her startled eyes he actually shuddered, his dark head wrenching to one side as if he couldn’t bear to so much as look at her.
Hurt quivered through her, forcing her to sit up and hug her knees protectively to her chest. ‘What?’ she whispered shakily.
‘No,’ she thought she heard him utter, though even that single word was almost quashed in the way he swallowed thickly. ‘This should not have happened,’ he tagged on hoarsely.
>
What did he mean—it shouldn’t have happened? Claire wondered painfully. ‘Well, it just did!’ she cried, her blue eyes dark pools of anger and hurt at his cruel insensitivity.
He didn’t even acknowledge she’d spoken—couldn’t even bring himself to look at her again!
Instead he just turned and strode quickly towards his own room, wrenched open the connecting door then disappeared through it—leaving Claire staring after him, white-faced and with her flesh chilling in mind-stunning dismay.
It should not have happened …
Still sitting there long, lost minutes later, huddled over her own bent knees in the middle of a sea of tumbled white bedding, Claire was bitterly agreeing with him.
For if it hadn’t happened, then she would not have had to be sitting here feeling so painfully used then ruthlessly rejected.
Or punished would probably be a better word, she thought dully as she listened to him dressing somewhere in his own bedroom. She had also sat here suffering the sounds of him showering her scent from his flesh, because in his eagerness to get away from her he had forgotten to shut the connecting door and it stood half open, allowing her a blow-by-blow account of his every movement.
She shuddered sickeningly. Hating him, despising herself. Her first love, her first lover, and now this terrible feeling of hurt and rejection.
It should not have happened …
She had a horrible feeling that those words were branded in fire onto her very soul for ever now.
She should have run when her instincts had told her to. How could she have lost control like that and let him do what he had done?
Great to work that out in retrospect, she mused bitterly.
‘I am going back down to our guests,’ a deep voice informed her from the connecting doorway.
Claire didn’t even lift her head up. She felt soiled and tainted, and unbearably humiliated.
‘I suggest you remain here,’ he went on stiffly. ‘I will make your excuses for you, blame your early retirement on your recent accident, or bridal nerves or—something. Are you all right?’ he then tagged on with enough clear reluctance to make her wince.
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