by Penny Jordan
‘Oh, that wasn’t a threat, Imo. It was a promise. A promise that I shall do such things to you and for you as to make you scream my name with longing in the darkness of the night; make you ache with your need for my possession; make you—’
‘No!’
The denial was strangled in Imogen’s throat as the young waiter suddenly appeared and nervously asked if they were ready to order. She knew that her face was burning scarlet with colour, her thoughts a wild, chaotic stampede of disbelief and fury.
How could Dracco say such things to her one minute and the next be calmly discussing with their waiter what exactly the ‘specials’ were, and whether or not they had a particular wine he wanted?
‘You will like this wine, Imo,’ he told her calmly once they were alone. ‘Your father introduced me to it. It was produced in the same year as you. And, like you...’ he continued, his voice dropping to a slow, sensual rasp that licked against Imogen’s raw nerve endings in the same way her tormented, traitorous imagination was telling her that his tongue might rasp against the intimate sensitivity of her skin. ‘But no!’ he told her softly. ‘I shall not tell you now what characteristics it shares with you!’
* * *
Imogen had ordered mussels as her first course, and her mouth watered when they arrived, cooked in Luigi’s special sauce. They had eaten simply and cheaply in Rio, and she was unaware of the way Dracco was watching her as she ate her food with almost childlike enjoyment.
He wondered how she would react if she knew what he was really thinking; feeling; wanting! He took a deep swallow of his wine; like Imogen herself, it had an allure that drew one back almost compulsively to it. His mouth twisted bitterly. It was probably just as well that she didn’t know just what was going on inside his head, or inside his body. If she did she would probably run a mile, or rather six thousand miles or so, back to Rio.
Dracco’s eyes grew bleak when they rested on Imogen’s downbent head as she mopped up the last of her sauce with a piece of bread. If she hadn’t come back of her own accord he had had plans in hand for bringing her home. And now that she was home it was up to him to make sure that she stayed there.
As Imogen lifted her head, as if somehow conscious that he was watching her, Dracco dropped his. Observing Dracco’s hooded gaze fixed on his plate, Imogen frowned, wondering why on earth she had thought he was looking at her.
‘Good; you enjoy that?’ Luigi was demanding, beaming as he removed her empty plate.
‘Scrumptious,’ Imogen assured him, reverting to her favourite childhood word as she started to smile at him and then stopped, the smile which had begun to dimple her mouth fading as she glanced warily at Dracco. Was a married woman allowed to smile at another man? And why should she care anyway whether Dracco approved of her behaviour or not? She didn’t, and there was certainly no way she was ever going to allow him to dictate to her what she did!
‘Dracco, and Imogen, isn’t it? I thought I recognised you. My goodness, what a surprise!’
The angry turbulence of Imogen’s thoughts came to an abrupt halt as she stared into the familiar face of one of her stepmother’s closest friends.
Her stepmother and Miranda Walker had been tennis partners and had both had membership at an exclusive local health club. Imogen had liked Miranda only marginally less than she had liked her stepmother. Miranda’s husband, she remembered, had spent a lot of time working abroad, but he was obviously back at home now.
It was a shock to see someone so closely and so unpleasantly connected with the past so soon after her return, although she admitted she should perhaps have expected it, as Emporio’s had always been the town’s most favoured restaurant.
She could almost feel the speculation emanating from Miranda as she continued to stand at their table, ignoring her husband’s obvious desire to move away.
‘Are we to take it that the two of you are back together?’ Miranda was asking with a suggestive coyness that nauseated Imogen. ‘I always did think it was rather impetuous of you to run away from him like that, darling.’ She laughed as she gave Imogen a fake smile accompanied by a sharply assessing look. ‘Wait until I see Lisa. Fancy her not telling me.’
When neither Imogen nor Dracco said anything Miranda demanded excitedly, ‘She doesn’t know, does she?’ There was a pause. ‘Oh, dear! She isn’t going to be very pleased. She’s still in the Caribbean and won’t be back for another week yet, will she?’ She directed this question at Dracco.
‘Excuse me.’ Without waiting to hear what Dracco’s response was, Imogen got up and headed for the ladies’ cloakroom.
It was stupid of her to feel shocked, and as for that daunting, aching pain that was draining her, well, there was no way that could be betrayal. She already knew what the score was; knew how cynically determined Dracco could be to have his cake and eat it.
As she reached the sanctuary of the rest room, and started to run restoring cool water over her wrists, she told herself that she didn’t care what his relationship with Lisa was any more. After all, there was only one reason she was here with him tonight and it had nothing to do with any personal desire to be with him. It was because of the children, the shelter, that was all! Just as he was here with her not because he wanted her, but because he wanted her child.
She ought, she told herself judicially, to feel sorry for Lisa.
So far as Imogen was concerned, the whole tone of Miranda’s conversation had given away the relationship between Dracco and her stepmother. Had he told Lisa what he was planning to do? Somehow Imogen rather suspected that he had not.
Carefully drying her hands, she took a deep breath. It was time for her to go back.
There was no sign of Miranda or her husband when Imogen returned to the table. Without saying anything, she sat down. Her head had started to ache badly. She felt almost as though she was about to come down with a bad case of flu; her throat felt tight and sore, she felt slightly sick, and—
Imogen gave a small gasp as the whole room spun round.
‘Imogen. Are you all right?’
Somehow Dracco was standing next to her.
‘No,’ she told him muzzily. ‘I feel sick.’
Frowning, Dracco glanced from Imogen’s barely touched glass of wine to her white face.
‘Let’s get you outside. You might feel better in the fresh air.’
As Imogen felt him moving closer to her she instinctively shrank away from him. Listening to Miranda had underlined for her all the most unpalatable aspects of her situation that she least wanted to think about. The hands that Dracco was reaching out to her had touched Lisa, her enemy; the voice expressing distant concern for her had no doubt whispered soft, passionate words of desire and wanting to her stepmother. The act of procreation he would share with her would be a cold, mechanical, loveless thing, very different from his physical intimacy with Lisa... Imogen shuddered, unable to control her revulsion. No wonder she felt so sick.
Imogen saw in Dracco’s eyes his reaction to her instinctive rejection of him. Bending his head, he muttered angrily to her, ‘We’re supposed to be giving our marriage a second chance. Remember?’
‘You don’t want to give our marriage a second chance,’ Imogen managed to hiss swiftly. ‘You just want...’
Somehow Dracco had shepherded her to the door, and was opening it. Greedily Imogen gulped in the fresh evening air. Her dizziness was beginning to clear, her nausea retreating.
‘Want to tell me what all that was about?’
Warily she looked at Dracco. ‘I felt sick, that’s all. Surely it’s hardly surprising in the circumstances. Nothing’s changed, has it, Dracco?’ she challenged him bitterly.
‘Did you expect it to have done? Don’t you think that’s rather naïve?’
The hard expression she could see in his eyes made her muscles clench. He wasn’t even re
motely ashamed of what he was doing.
‘You didn’t tell me that Lisa was still living locally,’ she told him bitterly. He was shrugging dismissively as though he found her anger an irrelevance, and his attitude goaded her into a fiercely hostile reaction.
‘Lisa was married to my father. She’s—’
He interrupted her. ‘I know what Lisa is, Imo.’
‘You know but you don’t care, do you?’ Imogen couldn’t stop herself from saying the words, even though she could already see the truth in his eyes.
Just as she could hear the anguish shaking through her own voice.
She heard Dracco mutter something under his breath before telling her grimly, ‘You always were too damned sensitive for your own good. And too damned...’ Whatever he had been about to say was lost as the restaurant door opened and another couple emerged, pausing to give them a briefly curious look, no doubt able to sense the hostility and tension crackling between them. Taking hold of Imogen’s arm, Dracco informed her curtly, ‘This isn’t the place for a discussion of this nature,’ as he propelled her to where he had parked his car.
‘Let go of me,’ Imogen demanded through gritted teeth as they reached it. ‘I can’t bear to have you touching me, Dracco. Not now. Not after...’ She stopped as she saw the intensity of the fury darkening his eyes as he opened the car door for her.
Logic told her that he wasn’t responsible for Miranda’s appearance at the restaurant, but he was responsible for the fact that he had betrayed her father’s trust and was now callously using her. How she hated him, loathed him, despised him!
She took a deep breath as she tried to close her mind against the unwelcome knowledge of just how much she herself hurt, how raw and painful her emotions felt. It was humiliating to know that he could still affect her like this, even now, as an adult.
Wrapped up in her thoughts, Imogen didn’t realise that they had reached the house until Dracco leaned across her to open the car door. This close she could see the fine, soft hairs on his arm, see the taut structure of the sinew and muscle beneath his skin, smell the soap he used, clean and cool—and something else. Something that made her flesh come out in a rash of goosebumps, whilst her nostrils quivered with delicate female recognition of the potent maleness of his personal body scent, hot, musky and dangerous. Her eyes widened as she made an involuntary movement that somehow brought her body into immediate physical contact with his bare arm, her breasts pressing against it as though... Hot-faced, Imogen refused to acknowledge just what the insolent peaking of her nipples might be trying to proclaim as she pulled quickly back from him.
Ignoring him, she climbed out of the car, heading for the house. Behind her she could hear Dracco’s footsteps crunching across the gravel. A sudden tremor of panic flared through her and she started to walk faster, only to realise that she couldn’t get into the house without him, since she didn’t possess a key.
Standing to one side, she waited for him to open the door. For the rest of her life she would hate him for what he was doing to her! Imogen could feel her hands balling into angry fists.
‘Imo.’
Imogen felt Dracco’s hands resting on her shoulders.
‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ she spat furiously at him. But as she tried to pull away he refused to let her go, following the movement she made, so that she was backed up against the door.
‘Imo, listen.’
‘No.’
There was just time for Imogen to see the furious brilliant glitter of his eyes before his head blotted out the light as he grated angrily against her ear, ‘Well, if you won’t listen then perhaps this is the only way of communicating with you.’
She gasped once in outraged protest that he should dare to ignore her wishes, and then a second time, in shocked disbelief, as she felt the heat of his breath searing across her lips. And then she was not capable of gasping at all, as her breath was snatched away and with it her ability to think, and reason, and reject, because every fibre of her being, every single cell she possessed, was fully occupied in dealing with the nuclear fall-out caused by Dracco’s kiss.
Its effect on her anger was like hot chocolate being poured on ice cream, she reflected dizzily, like every feeling, every pleasure, every delicious taste she had ever experienced magnified a million times over. It was like nothing she had ever dreamed of experiencing and at the same time it was exactly...exactly what she had always dreamed it might be, only more so...much more so.
Somehow the original furious anger of Dracco’s kiss had turned to a sensuous, coaxing, lingering caress that involved not just their lips but their tongues as well. And their hands too, Imogen was discovering as her body melted beneath Dracco’s touch, then burned, flamed and hungered...
‘You kiss me like you’ve been aching for me for half a lifetime. Starving for me.’ She could hear Dracco groaning as his hands ran fierce hot shudders of delight over her skin. He drew her body into his own, fitting her against him, fitting himself against her, into the cupped eagerness of her parted thighs.
As the full meaning of his words penetrated the sensual daze of her feelings Imogen suddenly realised what she was doing, and with a sharp cry she pulled away from him.
‘I’m not starving—for anything, and certainly not for you,’ she told him in passionate denial. ‘But the street children of Rio are starving, Dracco, and that’s why I’m here, because of them and only because of them.’
White-faced, she confronted him across the small space that now divided them.
His face was in the shadows, so that she could not see his expression, only sense his hunting immobility and know that he was watching her, making her feel vulnerable and exposed. She waited for him to voice some cutting put-down, but instead of retaliating in any way he simply turned from her and went to unlock the front door.
All the way up the stairs Imogen expected to hear him if not following her then at least commanding her to stop, but there was only silence. She didn’t turn round to see why, though. She did not dare.
CHAPTER FOUR
IMOGEN WAS DEEPLY asleep, lost in the most wonderful dream.
‘Mmm.’ Languorously she reached up to curl her hand against the firm, smooth skin at the nape of Dracco’s neck. She could feel the silky thickness of his hair as she burrowed her fingertips into it, firmly drawing his head closer to her own.
‘You know this is very dangerous, don’t you?’ Dracco was warning her in a sensually raw whisper, the sound caressing her skin with deliciously rough male warmth.
‘I like danger,’ Imogen responded provocatively as she looked up into the deep sea-green depths of his eyes. ‘And I like it even more when that danger is you,’ she added.
A small bubble of laughter gurgled in her throat as she saw the way Dracco was looking at her. It felt so good to be so at ease with him, so intimately aware of the special relationship they shared. At ease, and yet at the same time... A tiny thrill of wanton excitement shivered across her skin as she watched his eyes darken. Her own closed, her lips parting in eager anticipation of his kiss.
When it came the hot sweetness of it melted right through her body, touching every single nerve-ending, reaching into the deepest core of her, so that suddenly what they were doing was no longer a teasing game that she controlled, but a fierce, elemental need that controlled them both.
‘Dracco!’ Hungrily she reached out to drag him down against her naked body, driven to feel him against her, skin to skin, lips to lips, breath to breath! Helplessly her nails raked the firm flesh of his back as her body arched up against his, drawn into a tight, aching bow of longing.
As Dracco responded to her body’s hungry demands he groaned her name against her lips. Imogen opened her eyes. Sunlight streamed in through her bedroom window, glinting on the gold of her wedding ring.
Dracco was holding her tightly
now, his hands roving wantonly over her naked body with the powerful touch of a hungry sensualist, dipping lingeringly into her most secret places of delight, drawing from her a need to arouse him in the same way. Each kiss, each touch was taking her closer and closer to the shatteringly climactic culmination she knew was waiting for her, but as they did so somehow her joy was being overtaken by a fear that her happiness was about to be snatched away from her. A fear that made her cry out in anguish as she clung frantically to Dracco, desperately afraid that somehow she might lose him, lose his love.
‘No!’
The sound of her own sharp moan of panic brought Imogen immediately out of her dream. For a few seconds she was still so wrapped up in it that it took her several deep breaths to realise just where she was. When she did she sat up in bed, reaching for her bedside light, illuminating the bedroom in a soft peachy glow. But nothing could warm the cold tentacles of dread reaching out to wrap themselves around her heart. She had been dreaming about Dracco, dreaming that he...that she...that they... Closing her eyes, Imogen hugged her arms around her body in an instinctive gesture of protection.
‘Imogen, what’s wrong? I heard you cry out.’
The sound of Dracco’s voice as he thrust open her bedroom door and strode into her room made Imogen open her eyes immediately.
‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong,’ she denied tensely.
There was no way she could disclose to Dracco the content of her dream, nor exactly why she had given that anguished moan of distress.
‘I heard you cry out,’ Dracco persisted.
He was walking towards her bed as he spoke, and he was still fully dressed, although he had unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and on the flesh they exposed Imogen could see the tangled criss-crossed darkness of his body hair.
Unable to drag her gaze away from it, she felt her stomach lurch. In her dream he had been totally naked. In her dream she had touched his skin, drawn her fingertips through that silky male covering of fine dark hair whilst her whole body quivered in thrilled sensual pleasure... Imogen shuddered.