out so well. And I don’t want anything of you, Rory.”
His eyes lingered for a moment on the heave of her breasts before lifting to hers, a direct challenge in their vivid blueness. He raised one of his rakishly arched eyebrows, a mocking invitation for her to explain why she was here.
“I wanted to see you,” she blurted out, her cheeks stinging with a rush of heat she could not control.
His mouth twisted with irony. “You thought the best way was to remind me of what you believed meant more to me than our marriage?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t come to rake over old arguments.”
“Does success make me sweeter for you, Joanna?”
“No.” Her cheeks burnt even more fiercely at his insulting suggestion. “I’m not chasing after you, Rory.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “Of course not. A woman of principle like yourself wouldn’t bend that far. I was the one who did the chasing after you. It was you who showed me to your mother’s door, demanding that I never darken it again.”
He let the memory simmer between them before he added, “I simply find it intriguing that you now darken mine. Do you want the money you so proudly and bitterly refused from me then?”
The sting of this reminder evoked the passionate hatred of him she had felt that night. He had come with a cheque, offering her repayment of all the money it had cost her to support him while he was trying to make a go of his fledgling business. As though money could buy back her love after he had betrayed it with Bernice!
She glared at him with stormy eyes. “I didn’t marry you for money and I didn’t divorce you for money. I came to tell you I’m getting married to someone else.”
She saw his jaw tighten, saw the taunting light fade from his eyes, leaving them empty of all expression. There was a crackle of paper as his fingers crunched her note into a tight ball in his hand. He stood up, tall and straight and suddenly formidable in the clothes of his successful thrust into the world of commerce. He stepped around his desk and pointedly dropped the screwed-up paper into a bin. Then he faced her with a viciously mocking smile.
“So what can I do for you, Joanna? Write you a reference? To whom it may concern? I have known Joanna Harding intimately for a period of...now, how long was it, exactly? As I recall, you were nineteen when I—”
“Stop it, Rory!”
“Something wrong with my memory?”
“I don’t need a reference.” She lifted her chin in disdain of his demeaning summary of their time together. “Brad thinks I’m wonderful as I am.”
“Brad...” He drawled the name as though measuring it for destruction. “Now where have I heard Brad before? Oh, yes! He was the wet-behind-the-ears hero in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, wasn’t he?”
Joanna dragged in a deep breath to calm her churning insides. Her eyes flashed scorn at the cruel injustice of Rory’s attitude. “I thought we could be civilised after all this time apart.”
He laughed at her, his eyes glittering with primitive violence. “I have never felt civilised around you, Joanna.”
“I thought we could let bygones be bygones,” she persisted, clutching at dignity as a defence against the way his eyes were stripping her bare, reminding her of the wildness he had tapped in her sexuality, the mad mating they had once revelled in without any inhibitions.
“Can you forget what we had together?” he taunted.
“I wanted to wish you well, Rory,” she forced out in determination to have done with this chaotically disturbing scene.
“How magnanimous of you! Is it better with Brad?”
The cheap shot goaded her into retaliating. “There’s more to life than sex, Rory Grayson. It’s a pity you haven’t found that out. It means that whatever relationships you have will always fail.”
His expression changed, a bleak fatigue drawing older lines on his face. “Wrong, Joanna,” he said flatly. “I happen to be very good at relationships. Genuine relationships. Not ones that are screwed up by expectations that can’t always be met when you want them met.”
Shock turned into anger as Joanna digested Rory’s perception of what had gone wrong in their marriage. He was blaming her for its failure, as though he hadn’t contributed a hundredfold to the breakdown of any healing communication between them.
“Have you fathered any children I don’t know about?” she fired at him with bitter venom. “Or do all your casual bed mates have convenient miscarriages?”
“Does your mother still ride a broomstick?” he shot back at her. “Force-feed you with poison pellets of hatred for me?”
“Leave my mother out of this!”
“Then leave my alleged affairs out, as well!”
“Right! Pardon me for mentioning them. They have long since ceased to be any of my business.”
“Why don’t you admit your real reason for coming, Joanna? Have a bit of self-honesty for once.”
“I’ve already told you,” she snapped.
He shook his head. “Hypocritical nonsense. You came to see if you were free of me. Because you weren’t sure. And you had to know. A last throw of the dice before you married Brad. So let me clear your mind for you.”
“How?” The word slipped out before she realised it was an admission.
Rory seized the opening, a look of dangerous dev-ilment replacing the derisive challenge of a few moments ago. He started walking towards her, unshakeable purpose in every step. “A kiss for the bride-to-be,” he said with a smile that torpedoed her stand of indifference to him.
“No.” Her hand fluttered up to her throat as she frantically fought a rush of panic.
“A wish-you-well kiss from your ex-husband,” Rory went on. “Make of it what you will, but kissed you certainly shall be.”
She took a defensive step backwards.
“What have you to fear if you’re free of me, Joanna?” he taunted. “Call it a gesture of final release. A graceful goodbye, demonstrating that bygones really are bygones and there’s not a thing left between us. Not a jot. Not a speck. Not a molecule of feeling. Prove it to me that there’s nothing left.”
He was using her own words against her, all so irrefutably reasonable that it robbed her of any grounds to protest. She swallowed hard and came up with a burst of defiance. “I don’t have to prove anything to you!”
“Then prove it to yourself.”
He took the hand at her throat and placed it on his shoulder as he slid his other arm around her waist and scooped her hard against the long, lean power of his body. Joanna was shocked into passivity by a rush of warm feeling, a sense of rightness that seemed so treacherous she trembled in fear of what it meant. Long-standing familiarity, her mind screamed, fiercely rejecting any other cause for the sensation of being where she belonged.
Then his lips were on hers, gently grazing, not forcing any rough mastery over her, allowing her a choice of accepting his kiss or evading it. Rory had always been good at kissing, but his expertise in every act of love had aroused only hostility in her towards the end of their marriage. She told herself it was only curiosity that compelled her lips to move to the persuasive pressure of his, to open to the seductive caress of his tongue. She closed her eyes, needing to concentrate on examining the feelings he stirred now, to sort them out to her satisfaction, to prove...
All coherent thought was lost as Rory deepened the kiss, and Joanna’s mind flooded with vibrant sensation. It was an invasion of all her deeply nursed defences against him, a shattering of bitterly held convictions, and it ignited a wild urge to make him experience the same inner turbulence.