by Robyn Donald
‘I’m not worrying,’ she snarled. Furious at the wobble in her voice, she breathed in deeply, so conscious of his nearness and the flood of response in her body that the last remnants of her composure shattered. ‘I’m angry! My brain has no right to go off and make decisions without consulting me! I don’t know who I really am, and I feel naked and exposed and vulnerable. I hate it! I want to go home and be me again!’ Her voice broke on a sob.
Jake’s arms around her were wonderfully warm and strong, but she struggled to get away, terrified she’d betray the consuming need that raged through her, eating away her self-control in a blaze of white-hot urgency.
‘Stop it,’ he commanded. ‘Relax, Aline, you’re as stiff as a poker.’
‘Don’t you dare tell me that things are never as bad as they could be,’ she spat, lifting her eyes to meet his.
They blazed with the colour and intensity of golden diamonds. ‘I won’t,’ he said tautly, his jaw rigid as each word fought its way past gritted teeth.
Heat swirled within her, coalescing into a molten pool between her thighs, prickling through her breasts until the nipples stood proud and pleading against the cotton of her shirt. An aggressive joy jolted through Aline. When everything else seemed to be falling apart, they had this sexual chemistry.
It was dangerous, and to him it might mean little beyond the physical, but it was open and honest. Jake’s cold, disciplined brain could control his face and his voice, but his body obeyed an older, more elemental law. Hardening against her, tense with barely leashed purpose, it hungered for her in the most basic way.
As she hungered for him.
She collapsed against him and buried her face in his throat as she ran her hand down his side.
‘Aline,’ he said, his voice deep and thick and harsh.
‘Are you going to tell me to stop that too?’
‘No, I’m going to tell you exactly what you’re risking.’
He did, in language that was explicit without being offensive, using words that tingled through her with dark, compelling passion.
Waiting until he fell silent, she lifted her face and kissed the tanned column of his throat. Huskily she whispered, ‘I want you so much.’
His arms contracted about her. His hand found her chin and forced her face out of its refuge against his throat. ‘Look at me,’ he ordered in a soft growl.
Aline lifted her lashes and stared into his eyes, blinking because it was like looking into the sun’s inner heart—violent, all-consuming. Yet even there she saw a darkness, as though he was concealing something from her.
Before she could react he swore, and said in a voice stripped of everything but famished demand, ‘I can’t say no to you,’ and crushed her willing mouth beneath his.
Acute pleasure gripped her, submerged her in a heated tide; as she returned his kiss her secret places softened and moistened, preparing for an exquisite surrender and claiming.
That territorial desire wasn’t just his. Somehow, in a time hidden from her and without her knowing it, she had claimed him. Her fingers flexed and dug into his lean hip, then climbed higher to search out the taut muscles that gave him such effortless power. She flattened her hands across his back, relishing the coil and flexion beneath her palms as he picked her up.
Fierce anticipation melted her brain, bringing with it a physical recollection of the slow whisper of heated skin against heated skin, the scent of aroused male, and, just for a moment, moonlight spilling across a floor…
And pleasure, as exquisite and erotic as the pleasure they had shared the previous day. Still sealed mouth to mouth, she closed her eyes as the world whirled.
Against her lips he demanded, ‘What do you want?’
It excited her even more to hear his strained voice. She forced her lashes up and gazed into his face, its classic framework stark with driven need; this was a memory she’d hold for ever, even if she had to journey into hell to retrieve it. ‘You. Where are we going?’
‘To my bed.’ He gave a tight, wolfish smile that sizzled the length of her spine. Striding towards the door, he said, ‘I’m too big to enjoy making love on the floor or the table. Or even the sofa.’
In the huge bedroom, Jake sat her on the bed and knelt in front of her, long fingers deft as he removed her shoes. Startled, Aline looked down at his head, feverish anticipation drumming through her. The wash of fire across his sable hair set her senses reeling: the way his ears sat so close to his head, the spread of his shoulders—all delighted her. He didn’t proclaim his masculine ability with obvious, bulging muscles; instead, his lithe, graceful body signalled smooth, understated power.
An overwhelming realisation clutched her heart, wound its way around and through it, binding it with fetters of steel.
I really do love him, she thought, pale with shock. I’ve loved him for months—probably ever since I saw him. I don’t remember it, and I don’t believe in love at first sight, but when I looked into his face and heard his voice something went snap and I knew I was lost.
He looked up, and went as still as a hunter ready for the kill, eyes burning as they scrutinised her face. ‘What is it?’
Aline leaned forward. ‘You have the most beautiful mouth,’ she whispered against his lips. ‘I love to look at it, and I love it on me.’
Of course he knew she was evading a direct answer—she saw ironic comprehension in his smile and his eyes—but he let her get away with it. ‘So kiss me,’ he said, deep and raw.
She did, with lingering intensity, afire with euphoria at the thudding of his heart against the palm of her hand. His mouth hardened and she opened hers to it, shivering as he responded.
She moaned when Jake lifted his head and yanked her shirt up and over, not caring when the buttons popped. Her bra followed immediately, and then his shirt. His face intent and purposeful, he kissed her again, pushing her inexorably back into the pillows until she lay beside him, her hair spread out over the white cotton.
‘You are,’ he said against her mouth, against her throat, against the soft curves below, ‘so beautiful you make my heart shake.’
The last word was breathed against the rosy centre of her breast. Aline’s breath locked in her lungs when his mouth fastened onto her nipple. Sensation stabbed her, bucking her upwards as she shuddered at the primeval, mindless pleasure of it.
He looked up, reading her face instantly. A slow, ferocious smile curved his mouth. ‘I always knew you could look like this for me,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Wild, ravishing, with your blue eyes full of secrets and your red mouth stained with my kisses.’
She grabbed his hair, shuddering again at the silken coolness of it against her hands, and guided his mouth to her other breast, holding him there while his clever, knowledgeable lips took her into a sensuous paradise where all she was conscious of were Jake’s hands and his mouth and the hot silken slide of his skin against hers, hurtling her into a violent chaos of bliss.
Dimly she realised she was whimpering, pressing her aching, demanding hips against his and then relaxing them, brazenly telling him without words what she craved.
‘Yes,’ he said harshly, and pushed down her trousers, following his hands with his mouth, branding her with kisses for eternity.
She fumbled with the fastening of his trousers, astonished when her touch made him take a rough breath. It gave her a heady sense of power; she bent and kissed the skin over his heart, then languidly, using wiles she hadn’t known she possessed, licked her kiss off.
Jake muttered an oath and let his breath out in an explosive whoosh; with a cat-like smile Aline wriggled sinuously, so that she could reach his shoulder, and bit delicately into the hot swell of muscle.
He laughed. ‘I might have created a monster,’ he said in a constricted voice, and did the same to her.
Aline’s stomach dropped into free-fall when his teeth closed gently on her skin. Black hair gleaming, mocking eyes heavy-lidded, he made an incredible sound, half-purr, half-growl, that turned
her bones to liquid.
Sensation expanded through her, sizzled across nerve-ends, invaded every cell in her body; simultaneously she felt twice as strong as any normal woman, and alarmingly, deliciously weak; she wanted to swarm all over Jake, yet she craved nothing more than to lie pinned to the bed by his big body and yield to the tide of exhilarating, desperate anticipation that washed her further and further away from the shores of common sense.
She stared at him as though she could engrave on her heart the splendid framework of his face, the bronze skin and glittering eyes, the scent of arousal, the way the morning light spread lovingly over his long legs and arms, wide shoulders and narrow hips.
He bore her scrutiny with good grace and a half-smile that affected her so strongly she had to remind herself to breathe.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked eventually.
‘Committing you to memory,’ she said fiercely. ‘No matter what happens, I’m going to remember this.’
His mouth compressed. ‘We’ll both remember this,’ he promised harshly, and slid two fingers inside her.
An untamed sound that should have shocked her broke free of her throat. Enslaved by that primitive invasion, her body arced up into a bow, demanding and insistent. Her hands gripped his upper arms, fingers digging into the coiled muscles.
‘Relax—I won’t hurt you,’ he said deeply, and claimed her with shattering directness.
Transfixed, Aline offered him everything she was, her breath fighting for release as she surrendered completely to the moment.
Unable to think, she surged upwards to meet and match his possession, using her innate female strength to hold him after each thrust, glorying in his strength and her response until the waves of delight peaked and crashed around her. Thrown into some other dimension, she was dimly aware of another cry wrung from her throat as she crested and flew, her body released by serried ranks of pleasure and rapture and a certain, primal understanding that this man of all men was her mate, the only man who could bring her to this place.
As soon as he heard that desperate groan Jake began to move faster and faster within her. Sensing the final shattering of his control, she forced up weighted eyelids so that she could see his face in his moment of truth. This too, she vowed, she’d remember until she died.
A cold foreboding brushed across her. In Jake’s grim face, in his utter sensual absorption, she recognised the basic power and energy of the man; something in her mind shifted, cracked, and she recalled the first time this had happened.
The past and the present crashed together in a seamless meld.
And then Jake moved again, his hands clamping onto her hips. His shoulders gleamed in the morning sun as he thrust again and again, deeper and ever deeper, driving her beyond everything to another peak, another triumph beyond triumph. Together they rose in mindless ecstasy until the only sound in the room was the harshness of their mingled breathing.
He opened his eyes and looked into her, as though he could see beyond the barriers that she’d built with such care over the years. Almost as though he sensed her shock, his arms closed around her and pulled her closer.
Attacked by the clamour of memories, she buried her hot face in his neck, but she couldn’t hide from her reunited brain. Everything slotted into place—Lauren’s revelations, the flight to the island, even the fall over her shoe after they’d made love the first night.
She said into Jake’s throat, ‘My memory’s come back.’
For several humming moments he didn’t react. She was about to repeat it when with one swift movement he jerked her face out of concealment and into the light. Meeting his narrowed eyes was like looking into the heart of a furnace.
‘When?’ he rasped.
‘Just then. I can’t believe it happened with no drama—just as simple and ordinary as someone pushing a window open.’ And she blushed, because it hadn’t been ordinary at all. She’d been suffering the most extreme pleasure a woman could possibly endure without dying of ecstasy.
Crimson-cheeked, she muttered, ‘Well, you know what I mean.’
‘Just like that?’ He spoke dispassionately, and the eyes that monitored her expression were as cold and hard as golden diamonds.
Her skin stung with colour that swiftly ebbed, taking with it that melting inner heat to leave her chilly and bewildered. ‘Yes,’ she said stiffly, pulling out of his arms. ‘Just like that. The neurologist did say that it could happen. I hit my head twice that day—once on the helicopter, and later, after we—when you were outside looking at the moon. I remember tripping over my shoe. I don’t remember getting back into bed.’
Jake lay still on the bed, tanned skin startling against the white sheets. ‘So he did,’ he said, like a judge summing up. ‘How do you feel about your husband’s adultery now?’
‘Angry,’ she admitted, but didn’t add that subsequent events had muted the raw knowledge of betrayal. Perhaps this incandescent love was what Michael had felt for Lauren.
‘It’s odd,’ she said slowly, feeling her way in the face of Jake’s guarded reaction, ‘but for the past two days I was sure I’d be delirious with joy at being able to remember everything again.’
‘And you’re not?’ he said, his gaze very keen and shrewd.
‘Yes, of course I am.’ She frowned, trying to explain. ‘But it’s complicated everything. There’s Lauren, and then there’s that wretched book and its insinuations; Michael was no thief.’
‘So what do you plan to do?’ Jake asked, pushing himself up into a sitting position.
She said soberly, ‘I need to get used to—to being me again.’ She needed time to get used to remembering, time to ease the pain in her heart, time to work out how she was going to deal with the tangle of emotions.
He didn’t like that. Aline wondered how she knew; for the past months she had studiously avoided thinking about him, so it probably served her right that she’d somehow become absurdly sensitive to everything about him.
However, he let her go, watching in magnificent, unashamed nudity from the bed as she gathered up her clothes and walked deliberately from the room.
When she reached the door he said in a hard, deliberate tone, ‘Regrouping, Aline?’
She bit her lip. Without looking at him she said, ‘Yes.’
Rustling movements behind her brought her head around. He walked towards her and stopped a few feet away. Hard eyes raked her face as he gave a brief, cold smile. ‘You’d better open that door and get out of here if you don’t want to be hauled back to my bed.’
Furious at the swift, potent tide of desire that his words summoned—sweet and dangerous and almost irresistible—and more furious because she wanted nothing more than to give in to it and forget everything in the heated challenge of sex, she groped for the handle and blundered out of his bedroom.
CHAPTER TEN
BACK in her own room Aline headed straight for the shower. She’d wanted nothing more than to know who the real Aline Connor was; now, with memories battering her as the water played over her passive body, she tried desperately to empty her mind.
Yet the events that had precipitated her retreat into nothingness—Michael’s betrayal, Lauren’s tragedy, her own turmoil over her desire for a man she hadn’t realised she loved—had almost lost their bitter sting. Jake had taken over the empty spaces of her life and filled them. When she thought of Michael and Lauren it was with resignation and a kind of sorrow for them both.
She’d put Michael up on a pedestal because she’d wanted everything in her life to be perfect, she thought, rinsing Jake off her skin, from her hair, from her mouth, accepting as she did that she’d never be able to cut him out of her heart.
And perfection didn’t matter any more; because she loved him, she’d take what she could get without worrying about the past or the future.
A shiver rucked her skin as she recalled the darkly possessive note in his voice when he’d said he couldn’t deny her. If only she dared—but her courage shrivelled when
she considered the cost. She didn’t have what it took to make a man happy; for the long term they wanted warm, loving women, not ice queens with high-flying careers and sharp business brains. Eventually, like the other men who’d claimed to love her, Jake would leave her.
And that would kill some essential part of her.
‘What are you?’ she asked defiantly, combing her wet hair back from her face with her hands. ‘A wimp?’
A sensible wimp, her mind retorted smartly.
But oh, the more she learned of him, the more she loved him. And making love to him was utterly addictive. Even now her body sprang to life…
Mind churning, she dressed, then tied her hair back. A quick, almost shamefaced glance in the mirror at the heavy eyes and wanton mouth of her reflection revealed flagrantly that she’d been well and truly loved.
No, that she’d made love—there was a huge difference. Jake had said nothing about any emotional bond between them. For him it was simply sex, hot and hard and good enough to want again.
And don’t forget, she thought with a cold clutch of anguish, you’ve made the running every time.
Back straight as an arrow, she worked her shoulders a couple of times to ease their betraying rigidity, then set her jaw and left the sanctuary of her room.
Jake was in the dayroom, frowning out over the harbour from the wide door onto the deck. Silhouetted against the bright morning, he looked larger than life, a graceful giant of a man radiating power and a subtle, potent menace. Aline’s mouth dried as she recalled that first night on the island when she’d seen his dark outline against the moon-silvered sea. What had he been thinking then?
What was he thinking now? Like her he’d showered and changed, and not just his clothes; when he turned she saw the mask again, imposed like an autocratic disguise on the striking features.
‘All right?’ he asked, eyes watchful.
She nodded. ‘Fine,’ she said automatically, tension thinning her voice and cramping her stomach.
‘I made you another cup of coffee.’ He indicated a tray on the table.