by Miranda Lee
And then he was there, and she was taking him in, and there was no thought of saying no again, no thought of stopping, no thought of anything except doing what he wanted, what she wanted.
Dimly she heard Byron's groan of dark triumph. And then she heard nothing, her senses whirling into the eye of an erotic storm which could only end one way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CELESTE leant against the marble vanity-unit, and then slowly lifted her face to the mirror.
How could I have allowed that? she asked herself shakily. More to the point, how could I have enjoyed it?
She shook her head, dropping her eyes back into the basin and the water still swirling there. Snapping off the still running tap, Celeste turned away before she caught another glimpse of that humiliating reflection with its flushed cheeks and over bright eyes.
Pride battled with her ongoing desire. You can't go back out there, she lectured herself. You just can't! What must he think of you to demand such an intimacy without love?
What must he think of you now that you have given it to him, seemingly without love?
Oh,God ...
Celeste's head dropped into her hands, self-disgust beginning to override everything - till that old familiar tape clicked into play and she remembered everything that he had done to her, everything he had set in motion.
Byron might still be her Achilles' heel in a sexual sense, but he didn't have to be in any other way. OK, so she loved him somewhere down deep in her psyche, but she hated him at the same time. He might think he could use her again, but she would prove him wrong there. If anyone was to be doing the using this time, it would be her.
Picking up a hairbrush, she took her hair down out of the combs that kept it back from her face and brushed it out till it tumbled in wild waves around her shoulders and halfway down her back. There seemed little point in putting lipstick on her pink puffy lips so she merely sprayed some perfume over her totally naked body, took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.
A pair of wintry blue eyes surveyed her nakedness as she walked across the plush-pile carpet. Not that he could make any comment when he was lying in the nude on top of her bed, his arms linked nonchalantly behind his head.
'Are you planning on staying the night?' she asked as she bent over with seeming nonchalance and picked up the robe of the negligee set.
She slid her arms into the silky sleeves and did her best to resist the urge to pull it tightly around her. 'For if you are, I'll go down and lock up.'
When he didn't say anything, she was forced to look over at him. Suddenly, the expression on his face infuriated her. How dared he lie there in judgement of her? How dared he look at her with that hard gleam of contempt in his eyes?
As always, her only satisfaction lay in apparent indifference to what he thought or felt about her. After all, she already knew he still wanted her as much as ever. She also doubted he would be able to resist the temptation to stay and taste whatever other delights he thought she offered all her lovers. That in itself was sweet vengeance.
A softly mocking smile teased her mouth as she drifted back towards the bed, the action of walking sending the robe floating back from its centre parting. She exulted in the way his eyes became riveted to her body, and the triangle of dark curls at the junction of her groin. She sat down on the bed, and crossed her legs, leaning over to place a provocative hand on his nearest thigh, then running it up over his body till it rested on his chest. His heart was hammering like mad beneath her hand and she knew he was hers, whenever she wanted him. He'd crossed a line tonight and she would never let him go back.
'I want you to stay,' she whispered huskily. 'Please, darling .. .'
His eyes flashed with the endearment, his hands whipping down to snatch her wrists and pull her up on to his body.
'You bitch,' he rasped. 'You'll pay for this. I don't know how, but you will.'
'Maybe I already have .. .'
He laughed. 'And what was the price?'
'I've never been able to assess it. What price do you put on one's sanity, or one's life?'
He frowned at this, his hands tightening around her wrists as he dragged her further up on to him. 'What the hell are you talking about?'
'That's what I'm talking about. Hell. A living hell.'
He laughed again. 'Yes, that's what you are all right, Celeste. A living, breathing hell. You've never been any different. Even when you were little more than a child, you were the devil's child, tempting me, corrupting me.'
'Corrupting you?' she scoffed. 'I was only seventeen, for pity's sake. You were twenty-seven. Who was the corrupter, I ask you?'
His face darkened with fury. 'Don't try to blame me, Celeste. You know damned well what you did. You found every excuse to come into my office those two weeks. You wore the most exotic perfume I've ever smelt on a female. You never wore a bra. Sometimes I wondered if you had any underwear on. You flicked those cat's eyes of yours my way all the time and you let me know with every movement of your lush, nubile young body that I could have you whenever I wanted you.'
An irritatingly guilty heat flamed in her cheeks. Yes, she had been provocative. She had to admit that. But she'd been in love, dammit. She'd adored the man. How else was she to get him to notice her when he could have any woman he wanted? She had to show them that she was a woman, or nearly one.
'I see you agree with me,' Byron snarled, seeing her betraying blush.
'I do not!' she snapped. 'I was a silly young girl, I admit, but only silly because I was in love. You took advantage of me, Byron. You made me think you loved me.'
'I made you think I loved you!' he exploded, rolling her over and spreading her arms wide on the pillows, his grip quite brutal on her flesh.
Once again, she was pinned to the mattress, and once again, her skills of self-defense were useless. 'That's a laugh. I would have said the very opposite was true if it didn't make me look a fool. Not that you didn't make a fool of me back then, Celeste. It was only after you'd gone back to school and I found out what an experienced little seducer of older men you already were that I appreciated the extent of my stupidity. You say you were in love with me. Well, you seem to fall in love a lot, don't you, Celeste? Is it that you need to tell yourself you're in love to justify what you do with me?'
Celeste's eyes widened at his astonishing accusations, her heart racing. 'What do you mean, I was already an experienced seducer of men? You were my first lover.'
'Oh, for pity's sake, Celeste, even if Irene hadn't told me all about you, I still knew there'd been others before me. You were no virgin when I made love to you that day in the office.'
Celeste bit her lip as she realized that that awful incident when she'd been only fourteen would have destroyed her technical virginity. Even the doctor who examined her back then had waffled over the possible extent of her sexual activity. When she'd reported the teacher for attempted rape, he had claimed she'd been more than co-operative, then another teacher on the staff had backed him up by saying the same thing about her.
It had been a conspiracy, of course, for the first man to escape retribution for his vile act. The two men had been devils in arms and she had unfortunately left it a couple of weeks before reporting the frightening incident. By then any damage to her young body had healed and she was left with no evidence of forcible entry.
Her mother had believed her, however, taking her away from that school and putting her in another. She'd also put her on the Pill for safety, aware that Celeste had the sort of looks men found it hard to resist.
'What. .. what did Irene tell you?' she asked shakily, staring up into Byron's glittering blue eyes.
'The truth! That you'd slept with half the male staff at your school when you were only fourteen. That you were expelled and that your mother had to put you on the Pill because she was scared you'd be pregnant before you were fifteen, you were so sex-mad. From the way you acted with me, she did the wise thing.'
'And what if I said I didn't sleep
with those teachers or any other men before you? What if I told you one of the teachers tried to rape me, that he actually had me on the ground before I kneed him in the groin and got away?'
'What would you say if I said your behavior over the years hardly backs up that story?' he countered savagely. 'You're verging on being a nymphomaniac, Celeste. Admit it. You are sex-mad. Over the years you've craved younger and younger men because they can probably last longer and can do it more often. But let me assure you, sweetheart, I'm not done yet tonight. I'll give you what you crave.'
He used his massive legs to push hers apart, settling his weight between her thighs. Without letting her arms go he began to probe with his body. Celeste tried not to feel anything as his desire rubbed and pressed against hers, but she could not prevent the exciting sensations he was evoking or the way her blood began to pound in her head.
She sucked in a sharp breath when he finally achieved success, gasping when he drove his desire home to the hilt.
'This is what you want, isn't it, Celeste?' he said through gritted teeth, surging into her again and again. 'But it's not love. It's pure unadulterated lust. Say it like it is for once, Celeste. Tell the truth and shame the devil. You want this, and only this ... '
Her body convulsing uncontrollably around his made him cry out with raw satisfaction. His back arched away, his hands pressing her wrists down in the pillows as his own arms straightened. And then he was pulling her up from the bed, keeping their spamming bodies fused together as he sat back on his heels. With a tortured groan, he released her wrists to wrap his arms around her, clasping her close and rocking her to and fro, his head dropping to bury his face in her hair.
Reaching up her back, he grasped a clump of hair, pulling her head back so that he could feed on her throat like some ravenous animal.
Celeste was beside herself with the awful ambivalence of the sharpest emotional pain yet the fiercest of sexual satisfactions. To have the man you loved find such pleasure in your body, despite his despising you, had a kind of perverted triumph to it. Celeste chose to lock on to this bittersweet victory, rather than any crippling despair, for she'd long learnt that there was no future in harboring hurt over Byron's opinion of her, just as there was no point in arguing with him over Irene's lies.
Byron would never believe her version of events, just as he would never believe the truth about the way she'd lived her life since. She'd been hoist by her own petard and she would just have to live with it.
At least there was some consolation in a new understanding of the events on that day in the billiard-room at Belleview, two years after he married Irene. Byron hadn't been quite the callous bastard she'd always believed him to be, merely a man torn apart by unwanted feelings for a girl he thought unworthy of anything but the basest treatment.
Which was how he’d treated her that day, taking what she had unconsciously offered him again, then scorning her afterwards when she broke down and told him how much she loved him? It was at that point that Irene had walked in, taken one look at their guilty faces then left the room, whereupon Byron had launched forth into a bitter tirade.
'I'll never forgive myself for hurting a good woman over a slut like you,' he'd flung at her. 'And you dare to speak of love. That wasn't love you gave me on the billiard-table just now, you little tramp. It was the same thing you give every man who looks sideways at you. I'm married, for pity's sake, to your own sister. Doesn't that mean anything to you? Haven't you any decency at all? God, you disgust me, almost as much as I disgust myself for being too weak to resist your insidious appeal. Go and screw up some other poor bastard's life, not mine! I don't want to set eyes on you again, do you hear me? Get out, out of this house and out of my life. I can't stand the sight of you any longer!'
Much as she had never forgotten those words, nor forgiven them, Celeste could now understand them a little better.
Besides, she thought with a black satisfaction, whose arms is he in now? Whose bed is he in? Whose body can't he keep his hands and eyes off?
Mine!
Celeste ran tantalizing fingertips over his sweat slicked back, squeezing her muscles tightly around him, teasing him back to arousal once again. With the quickening of his flesh, she began to lift her hips in tiny up and down movements, gripping and releasing him till he was fully erect again.
'Yes,' she insisted huskily when he groaned. She pushed him back on to the bed, holding his shoulders down while she straddled him as mercilessly as he had straddled her. This time she was on top and she aimed to keep it that way, riding him as relentlessly and ruthlessly as he had her, closing her eyes so that she didn't see his contempt.
'Yes,' she cried out in exultation when his body finally arched up and exploded into her.
'Yes,' she sobbed as her own body shattered into pieces and she collapsed in a spent heap across his chest.
Did they sleep? They must have, limbs tangled, bodies exhausted.
Celeste snapped awake to the sound of Cora calling out to her up the stairs.
'Are you still awake, Celeste? Shall I lock up for you?'
Celeste lifted her head and spoke in a stunningly calm voice, even though her heart was instantly pounding. Dear God, what if Cora had come up and found her like this? They'd left the bedroom door open, the bed in full view of anyone who even walked past.
'It's all right, Cora. I'll do it. I'll be down shortly to have a nightcap. You go to bed.'
'OK. The movie was pretty awful, by the way. Goodnight, then.'
'Goodnight. '
Celeste closed her eyes with a relieved sigh, opening them to find Byron looking up at her with that familiar mocking cynicism in his eyes. 'I see you have your housekeeper trained never to come upstairs, or to ask sticky questions. I dare say she's used to you having every Tom, Dick and Harry spend the night.'
'Don't you mean Luke, Gerry and Byron?' she retorted.
Celeste had already made up her mind not to try to defend herself to Byron. It was a waste of time. Neither was she going to let him treat her like dirt, or ride roughshod over her emotions. 'Naturally, I don't have to answer to my housekeeper, Byron. Do you ever answer to yours?'
'I don't have a housekeeper any more, as you very well know.'
'Ah, yes. The gorgeous Melanie flew off with that racing-car driver, didn't she? Is that why you started running around with Catherine? Because your live-in lady found alternative outlets for her needs?'
With a low growl, Byron heaved Celeste from his body and threw himself on to his feet, glaring down at her with fury in his face. 'Just because you have all your employees service you, Celeste, it doesn't mean everyone else does.' He snatched up his trousers and started dragging them on.
'Don't you think you should put your underpants on first?' Celeste suggested sweetly.
Byron told her not so sweetly what he thought of her suggestion, zipping up his trousers so angrily that she winced. He rammed the blue sweater roughly over his head, combing his hair back into place with splayed fingers before sitting down on the edge of the bed to put on his shoes and sock.
Celeste knelt up behind him, draping her arms around his shoulders and kissing him on the ear. 'Don't be angry, darling. I don't care what you did with Melanie.'
'I didn't do anything!'
'You must have thought about it. She was very beautiful. '
Celeste felt she had a struck a nerve for he definitely stiffened. 'I have no intention of defending my thoughts. I never touched the woman.'
'Good for you. I'm glad to see you're still as virtuous as ever. When am I going to see you again?'
'Never, if I can help it.'
Her laughter was drily amused. 'Don't be silly, darling. You enjoyed yourself tonight as much as I did. Why, I haven't been this impressed since ... since we were last together.'
'God, don't remind me of that. I've been trying to forget that day for the last twenty-one years.'
'You and me both,' she muttered under her breath, and shrank back on her heels.<
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Byron turned to stare at her. 'If I didn't know better, I'd think you regretted that day as much as I did.'
'Oh, yes, Byron, I still regret it. Bitterly.'
He seemed surprised. 'You might be more human than I thought you were.'
Her smile was ironic, her pleasure warped as she wriggled on to his lap, snaking her arms around his chest and kissing him with tantalizing softness on the mouth. 'I'm very human,' she whispered, and ran her tongue tip over his lips.
His groan thrilled her.
'When am I going to see you again?' she tempted a second time. 'If you don't come to me, I'll come to you. You do know that, don't you?'
'Yes,' he bit out.