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 selfpreservation, 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 consequences. 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,