had set in and she had come to realise that Zarek was more than capable of wanting without any sort of love.
The door was shut, everyone else was gone. Shifting from one foot to another, Penny nerved herself for whatever was to come. At least standing upright she felt better equipped to face him. She had always been considered too tall by most men, but never for Zarek Michaelis. Somewhere in his past family history there had been an ancestor—probably his Irish great-great-great-grandfather who was always referred to as The Giant—who had brought a gene for height into the family and Zarek had inherited that in maturity. Even at five feet ten, Penny had to tilt her head back slightly to meet his eyes.
‘So now…’ she said as he closed the door a little too firmly for her mental comfort. ‘What…?’
But the words caught in her throat as if a knot had tied tight around them, preventing her from getting them out. She could only stand and stare as Zarek lifted a hand to the right side of his face, just by his temple, and rubbed at the skin as if something there was troubling him.
‘Are you all right?’ she questioned sharply. ‘Is something wrong?’
When he didn’t respond but simply stood, back stiff, shoulders tight, head turned away from her, she felt the rush of memory like a sort of stinging mental pins and needles flood into her mind.
Someone else had done just that. And not too long ago. The memory seemed to dance at the corners of her thoughts, slipping away whenever she tried to get a grip on it. But right now she had other, more important concerns on her mind.
‘What is it? Zarek? Do you have a headache?’
Still he didn’t answer but stood motionless as a statue so that she launched herself towards him, covering the short space between them in a matter of seconds and whirling round in front of him.
‘Tell me what’s wrong?’
Without pausing to think, she reacted instinctively, lifting her hand to cover his where it still lay against his face, pressing her fingers over his as she looked up into his dark, shuttered face, seeing the way his heavy lids had come down over the darkness of his eyes. Hiding them from her.
‘Tell me!’
For the space of a couple of jerky heartbeats he didn’t move a muscle, but then at last he shifted slightly, moving the weight of his body from one foot to another, and drew in his breath on a slow, deep sigh. The warmth of his flesh reached her through the fine cotton of his shirt and the movement brought a waft of a deeply sensual scent, the ozone from the sea, sunshine on skin, and underneath it all the warm, musky scent that was personal to Zarek alone.
And in a split second the mood of the moment had changed. Where there had been nerve-twisting apprehension there was suddenly a heart-stilling tension. In Penny’s veins the blood seemed to pulse infinitely slowly, shockingly heavy. Her breath too seemed frozen, leaving her with her mouth slightly open, unable to inhale, unable to think.
All she was aware of was the feel of Zarek’s skin under her fingers, the heat and the softness of it, with the power of muscle and bone beneath the supple flesh. It was as if sparks had flown from his skin to hers, holding her melded to him, unable to move.
And the burn along her nerves reminded her only too painfully of how it had once been between them. The way that she had never been able to resist his touch, his kiss. The way that her body was yearning for it, reaching towards him even now.
‘Zarek…’
His name was just a whisper across lips that were suddenly parched and dry, her tongue seeming to tangle on the sound so that she had to swallow hard to ease the discomfort in her throat. ‘Zarek…’
‘No…’ Zarek said, his eyes still closed against her, his voice rough and seeming slightly ragged at the edges. ‘Don’t…’
‘Don’t what?’
But then he opened his eyes and looked down into her face and she knew exactly what he meant. What exactly he did not want her to do.
He didn’t want her to touch him. He was rejecting without words the feel of her hand on his, the connection of skin on skin. He didn’t have to say a word; it was there in his face, in his eyes.
And that was when she realised just what a terrible mistake she had made. Impulse and concern had made her break through the barriers that she had felt between them. The barriers that she had erected in her mind in self-defence because of the need to protect herself from the shock of his sudden arrival, the memory of all that had been between them before he had left.
‘So your wife is not allowed to touch you?’
‘My wife…Were you ever truly my wife?’
His eyes burned into hers as he raised his other hand to fasten around her fingers, clasping them tightly under the warmth and roughness of his palm. And as he pulled at it, bringing it down and away from his face, the force of his hold made her wince as her fingers were squeezed together.
But a moment later the slight discomfort was forgotten as shock ricocheted through her thoughts, making her head spin.
‘You!’
She spat the word at him as she fought for control, struggled with the need to lash out with the hand that was free or launch herself straight at him, pounding her fist on his chest.
‘It was you!’
She had seen the long white line of the scar before but then it had gleamed in the cold burn of the moonlight, the only visible part of a face that had been hidden by a cap, the fall of long dark hair, a heavy beard. The last time she had seen that scar it had been on the face of the man she had believed was a fisherman.
‘You were spying on me!’
The memories of the previous night, the recollection of Jason’s arms around her, and the thought of those dark burning eyes watching her put a new tension into her voice.
‘Spying?’ Dark cynicism rang in Zarek’s voice. ‘That word implies that you have something to hide.’
‘As opposed to you who was hiding from me.’
She shouldn’t be doing this, Penny told herself. She shouldn’t be taking the conversation down this route. What she should be doing was asking Zarek where he had been, what had happened to him. She should want to find out—she did want to find out—just how he had come by that dreadful scar and what had happened to him. But she couldn’t make her mouth actually form the questions. Her tongue seemed to have frozen and her throat wouldn’t work on those words. Instead she heard the provocative and aggressive words come out as a challenge.
The thought that he had come home earlier but had not let her know that he was alive burned in her heart. That he had hidden from her, watched her, waiting—for what?—for her to betray herself in some way, was like a knife twisting in the wound. She had once been convinced that when she knew that he was alive and well she would be so happy, and had even allowed herself to think they might just have a chance to start all over again.
And now this…
Did she need further proof that, whatever else had happened while he was away, nothing had changed his mind about their marriage? He still regarded her with suspicion, as someone who was not to be trusted. Not as the woman he had loved and missed. But then of course she had known that that was the case from the start.
‘Don’t you think that I had the right to find out just what had been happening while I was away?’
‘You didn’t want to see me? Ask me.’
Another of those darkly blazing looks told her that he didn’t need to ask. That in his mind she was already tried and condemned without a chance of appeal.
‘“I want to get away from here, start living again,”’ he quoted cynically, leaving her in no doubt that he had heard every word of her talk with Jason. ‘“I’m tired of treading water.”’
‘You