‘You did that for …?’
For me, she had been about to say, but she was glad that she’d paused before doing so when he told her flatly, ‘I know how much it meant to your mother and how she cherished it.’
Vidal made himself cut across the hesitant vulnerability he could hear in Fliss’s voice. He didn’t want to see her as vulnerable or deserving of compassion, because if he did—if he allowed that image of her into his head and his heart—it would mean … It would mean what?
It would mean nothing, Vidal assured himself grimly.
Fliss nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, she did.’ Of course he had not gone to look for it for her. Vidal would never do anything for her. ‘I’m glad you found it,’ was all she could allow herself to say, and she reached out to take it from him, her outstretched fingers curling back into her palm as she recoiled from actually touching him. Because she was afraid. Of what? Afraid of touching him, or afraid that once she did she wouldn’t be able to stop?
He shouldn’t have come here. He had known that. So why had he? Vidal derided himself. To test his self-control? To prove that he could walk through fire? To suffer the torment he was now suffering? He knew that beneath her robe Felicity was naked. He knew that given her sexual history, her sexual proclivities, he could reach for her and take her now, satiate himself in her, with her, until the need that gnawed unceasingly at him, that cried out to him, was silenced.
A tremor knifed through Fliss’s body.
‘Take it,’ Vidal demanded, holding out his hand to her, the gold glistening in his palm.
For a moment they looked at one another, neither of them saying anything. Fliss’s breathing and her balance were both slightly unsteady as her senses registered the sensual tension in the air between them. Vidal lifted his hand, and for a second Fliss thought that he was going to reach out and touch her. She moved back from him, forgetting that a low table was right behind her until she stepped back into it.
She heard Vidal curse as she stumbled, but even then she held up her hands to fend him off, prepared to fall rather than risk being touched by him. Only it was already too late. His hands were gripping her upper arms, and his face was hard with hostility and contempt as his gaze raked her face and then fell to the now open front of her robe.
One of them made a small sound. She wasn’t sure if it was Vidal or herself. Her chest lifted abruptly, its movement driven by an urgent need to expand her lungs and take in more oxygen. Time seemed to hold its breath. She was certainly holding her own breath, Fliss knew, as they looked at one another in silence. Was she the first to break that eye contact, her gaze drawn helplessly down to Vidal’s mouth, her own lips parting on a quivering gasp of longing? Fliss didn’t know. She only knew that when she looked up into Vidal’s eyes again they were smouldering with the sensual intent of a man who knew that the woman he was with wanted him.
‘No.’
Her denial was a soft, agonised sound of despair, but Vidal ignored it. His gaze was obscured, so she couldn’t see what was in his eyes as he looked down at her mouth. Fliss’s heart was thundering with reckless, out-of-control thuds, driven by her heightened awareness of both him and her own longing. She watched as he lowered his head, his lips almost touching her own, his breath an unbearably tormenting caress against her mouth. Unable to stop watching, Fliss moved closer to him.
‘Damn you!’
Fliss could hear the anger in Vidal’s voice as he thrust her away from him. Her chain lay on the floor between them. Instinctively she moved forward to pick it up, and then froze in shock when Vidal took hold of her again.
‘You just can’t stop yourself, can you? Any man will do, won’t he? Any man as long as he gives you this.’
He was kissing her, and she could feel his contempt. She could taste it. He wanted to humiliate her, to destroy her, and she wanted … She wanted to make him see that he was wrong about her. She wanted to punish him for misjudging her. She wanted to see his pride lying shredded in the wreckage of his misconceptions. And now she could do that. Now she could turn his anger-fuelled passion into her own salvation. The sacrifice of her belief that sexual intimacy should be something born out of mutual love would ultimately be Vidal’s humiliation.
Maybe this had always been meant to happen? Maybe it was the only way she would ever be able to walk free of the emotional pain he had caused her? Maybe this was something she needed to experience to be able to finally destroy the foolish dreams she had once had?
Slowly and deliberately, as though her body was weighted and drugged, Fliss moved closer to Vidal, deliberately grinding her lower body into his in a motion she had seen actors using. She lifted her hand to the buttons on Vidal’s shirt, concentrating on unfastening them as his tongue thrust fiercely against her own. A quiver of sensation ran through her but she ignored it. This wasn’t about her own desire—at least not her own desire for Vidal—it was about her desire to be free of everything in her life that had been tied to him.