She felt strong muscles flex in his shoulders as he lifted her up from the marble, felt the hard and pulsing sexual promise in his body as he flattened her to his chest. Her legs had wrapped themselves tightly around him and they might as well have been back in the ocean with no clothes on because she could feel everything that was happening to him.
It was only when he tipped her down onto the bed that she realised where they were now. With a gasping drag on her unwilling lips she broke the kiss to look around her. With a swimming sense of disorientation noticed for the first time that since she'd taken her shower earlier' someone had been in here and closed the shutters over the windows to keep out the fierce heat of the afternoon sun. The room had a warm, soft, sultry feel to it as if it had been deliberately set for making love.
Even the bedcovers had been drawn back, she realised. Her gaze flicked back to the man lying in a languid stretch beside her on the bed, lazily reading each expression as it passed across her face. He offered her a mocking smile. The air went perfectly still in her lungs. He'd done it. When he'd come up to take his own shower he'd come in here and made this room ready for seduction as if it had always been a forgone conclusion that it was going to happen this afternoon.
'No,' she pushed out across taut throat muscles.
He merely held on to the smile and brushed a stray lock of Titian silk from her suddenly pale cheek. 'I've spent a whole year imagining you lying here with your beautiful hair splayed out around you and your beautiful mouth warmed and pulsing as it awaits the pleasure of mine.'
Sensation trickled right down the front of her. 'We are not going to do this,' she insisted shakily. For an answer he began to unbutton his shirt. Nell stared as warm, bronzed skin roughened by dark hair began to make its appearance. Everything about him said man on a course he would not be moved from. Real alarm struck her with a frightening clarity.
She drew in a taut breath. 'Y-your m-mother,' she reminded him. 'W-we-'
'I don't need her permission to do this, agape mou,' he drawled.
'But she-'
He moved, long fingers leaving the shirt to come and frame her heart-shaped face from pale cheek to trembling chin. Pinpricks leapt across the surface of her skin as he bent to brush his mouth across hers. 'No more reprieves,' he murmured very softy. 'This is it, my beautiful Helen. It is time to face your fate because it is here...'
Her fate. Nell stared at him. He was deadly serious. To her horror he began to stroke the hand down her throat and across her shoulder, fingertips pushing stretchy jade fabric out of his way.
'Stop it!' she choked out and at last found the sense to put up a fight.
Dark eyes lit with a kind of cold amusement that chilled her as he captured her flailing fists and flattened them to the bed above her head. 'The little game you've been playing with me is over,' he said grimly. 'Accept it, for you are about to get your just desserts.'
'You're angry,' she gasped in shocked realisation. His tight grimace confirmed it.
'But-why?'
The innocent question locked his lean, handsome face. 'I've done nothing but treat you with respect since we married and you paid me back by leaving me for another man.'
With his free hand he went back to undoing shirt buttons in a grim display of intent.
'Just thank your lucky stars that you did not make it, my beautiful Helen,' he glinted down at her. 'Or you would not be about to enjoy Alexander Pascalis the lover, but the other Alexander Pascalis-the one that makes big men quake in fear!'
'How do you know I didn't make it?' she prodded recklessly, staring as more and more of that muscled, bronzed, hair roughened chest appeared. 'How do you know I didn't make it a dozen times during the week Hugo Vance wasn't around to stop it from happening?' she choked up at him. 'Before I decided to leave you for good'!
The fingers stopped working the buttons. Nell heaved in a wary breath of air as a frisson of alarm shot across her heaving breasts.
'But you didn't, did you?'
It was a very seriously driven warning to be careful what she said next, making her wish her mouth would just shut up but it wouldn't. He might already be wearing the face that made big men quake, but she had a whole year's-worth of unfairness pounding away inside her, and it needed to be heard.
'Y-you left me alone on our wedding night,' she reminded him, beginning to struggle again to get free. He subdued her by clamping a leg across her thighs. 'You refused to make excuses or defend yourself-you couldn't even be bothered to lie! I've had to live with that, Xander, not you. Y-you just went back to your life and didn't care what you left behind!' Tears were threatening, making her soft mouth quiver and turning her eyes into deep green pools of hurt. 'W-well, you left me behind w-with a twenty-four-hour guard to do the caring for you! If I went to the local village shop Hugo Vance came along with me. He had to do-he was in charge of the remote control for the wretched gates!'
'He was there for your safety,' he bit back impatiently.
'He was there to control your limp rag of a wife!' she cried. 'You said that you and I are alike; w-well, tell me, Xander, would you have lived my life for the last year without doing something about it?'
'But I repeat-you didn't, did you, Nell?'
Nell lay there beneath him heaving and panting, his leg heavy across her legs and her shining hair caught beneath the hands he still pinned above her head. She glared hotly into a face that was coldly mask-like, reminding her of that rock his mother had talked about. And the stinging pinpricks attacking her flesh were the sparks of her mutiny bouncing right off him.
Hewn, hard, handsome and so threatening she shivered. Yet backing down now just wasn't an option she was prepared to take. 'Do you think you are the only one that can be discreet about their lovers?' she heard herself dare to challenge. 'Do you think that because you didn't want me I should think myself unfit for anyone else?'
Maybe she did have a death wish, she thought tensely as a new level of stillness locked his hard eyes on her face with an expression that was too frighteningly inexplicable to dare to read. He was eleven years older than Nell and at that precise moment she felt every one of those years boring holes into her head.
'Are you telling me-without the guts to make the full statement,' he pushed out finally, 'that you have taken lovers since you married me?'
Nell's quivering upper lip had to fight to break free from her bottom lip. 'Would it make me a lesser person in your eyes if I said yes?' she quavered huskily. 'Perhaps totally unfit for you to touch?'
It was living on the edge, Nell knew that as she said it, feeling more afraid of what she was prodding here than she dared let herself think. But she needed to know. She'd lived the last year loving a man who'd locked her up in a glass bubble marked, 'Virgin. Sole possession of Alexander Pascalis', as if it was the only thing about her that made her worthy of the place she held in his life, while he blithely continued to bed his mistress as if that was perfectly OK.
But the real point she was making was, would he still want to be here with her without the provenance?
A stifled gasp escaped when his hand came to rest beneath her breast, where her heart was racing madly. It began a gentle stroking as he lay stretched out, half beside her, half on top of her, a look of grim contemplation taking charge of his face. She'd stop fighting to get free and had never felt more vulnerable because she just didn't know what he was going to say or do next. His eyes weren't telling her, his expression wasn't telling her, even the light stroke of this hand wasn't telling her anything because she wasn't sure that he was aware it was doing it.
It was a test, Xander knew that. He was not so blinded by those beautiful flashing eyes and this sensational body he had pinned to the bed that he could not recognise a challenge when it was being tossed at him. What he could not decipher was if the reckless little witch was talking like this because she wanted to hit him hard with the truth or because she was taunting him with the possibility of it being the truth.
Was it the truth?
He still did not know. She had still not made that yes a full-blown, bloody statement of fact. Did it make a difference to how he felt? To wanting to make love to her? Not the slightest difference to the desire pounding away in his blood.
To this creature he had respected more than anyone else in his entire life? Hell, yes, it made a difference there. Nell belonged to him. She wore his ring on her slender white finger. She had loved him so much once that he refused to believe that she was capable of making love with any other man but him.
But he discovered he was scared that in a fit of rebellion she might have done. He pulled in a deep breath. The atmosphere was so thick with his long silence that he could taste it on his tongue as he slid his hand up to cover her breast. Its receptive tip stung to life to push into his palm and another strangled gasp escaped her soft, quivering mouth. He looked at her hair spread out across the cover like a burnished copper halo. Then at her face, heart-shaped, exquisite but wary as hell. His eyelashes glossed over his gaze, dipped lower, across the smooth-as-silk shoulder he had exposed that looked so sexy and inviting, then further to where his long fingers cupped her breast over sensually moulding jade coloured fabric. The tips of his fingers were in tantalising contact with smooth flesh just above the dress, where a little pulse was beating wildly. He stroked, she quivered, his body tightened in response.
Then came the rest of her, slender, flat-planed yet deliciously curvy inside the hugging dress. She was stretched out beneath him like an offering. But what exactly was on offer? Experienced lover or the beguiling innocent he'd walked away from on their wedding night and since suffered so many hot dreams about?