‘Of course,’ she managed.
‘I would feel really bad if you gave all this up purely for my benefit.’ His smooth insincerity twisted her stomach. ‘I mean, suppose it didn’t work out between us? I have to be honest. I’m not sure I could handle that responsibility. We both need to think very carefully about what we’re doing.’
He said he had an appointment. He wanted to extract himself without embarrassment and mull over what she had told him. Leah felt like an automaton, was scared to feel again. You fool, you fool, echoed at the back of her head. She had fallen for the first smoothie to pay her attention. And of course Paul had listened, supported, encouraged. He had flattered her battered pride, buttered her up with compliments. Naturally. He had wanted her to leave Nik but only if she brought Nik’s money with her.
She went back upstairs and worked frantically to complete her packing. Nothing had changed, she told herself. Paul might no longer figure in her future but she didn’t want Nik there either. She was finished with Nik, finished with the past. And she damned well didn’t need any man to lean on! Three in a row. Her father, Nik, Paul. All of them using, manipulating, abusing. And what had she done? She had put up as much resistance as a boneless, brainless rag doll! Her anger was so great, she could hardly contain it.
Her cases downstairs, she called a cab. Boyce hovered.
‘I won’t be needing you,’ she said, and when he argued added, ‘I’m leaving him.’
Boyce looked shattered. But everybody would know soon enough, she reasoned.
The cab came. As it drove off she took a last look back at the house and it was scary knowing that she was leaving security behind. The cab driver was very helpful about suggesting a hotel. She checked in and went out immediately to buy a newspaper. Finding somewhere to stay and a job were her only priorities.
A knock on the door of her room sounded at ten that night. Leah slid off the bed and unlocked the door. She took one devastated look at Nik and attempted to shut it again. His golden features taut and furious, he planted a hand against the door and thrust it back to the wall, forcing her to retreat.
‘How the hell did you know where I was?’
‘Boyce had the wit to follow you.’ Nik leant back against the door and locked it.
‘He had no right to do that,’ she said bitterly.
‘He works for me and you’re a prime target for kidnapping. He did what he had to do,’ Nik bit out. ‘Just as I’m about to do what I have to do.’
Leah stiffened, clashing with murderous black eyes. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I’m not letting you go,’ he breathed fiercely.
Pain slivered through her but her sapphire eyes gleamed with contempt. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone you buried and forgot about. You had no interest in that bone until somebody else dug it up!’
‘You are my wife.’
‘Since when? Since when was I your wife? You think feeding and clothing covers it?’ Leah jibed helplessly. ‘Well, you can keep your clothing and your food and your rotten money because I don’t want any of it. Any more than I want you!’
‘You always wanted me...’
‘You missed the boat. I got over you a long time ago,’ Leah flung with a sort of embittered enjoyment that was new to her.
‘But you still want me to pay,’ Nik slotted in, strolling fluidly closer. Shimmering dark eyes assailed hers with force, the anger he was controlling blatant in that hard stare. ‘So you walk out without even telling me. I didn’t even qualify for a note—’
‘And what did you expect? Dear Nik, it’s been a lousy five years, goodbye? That’s about all I could have to say to you!’
‘You brought him into my house,’ Nik murmured roughly.
Leah stilled, her hectic colour sliding away, utterly silenced by the news that he was aware of Paul’s visit.
‘And no doubt if it had suited you you would have taken him to our bed as well!’
An edged laugh was torn from Leah. The smouldering tension in the atmosphere was so thick she could taste it but she refused to be intimidated. This confrontation was long overdue. And finally she was having her say. ‘We never had a bed, so fulfilling that ambition would have been a little difficult!’
‘Stop it,’ Nik grated, a tiny muscle pulling at the corner of his compressed mouth. ‘I am trying not to lose my temper.’
‘I don’t want you and your temper in this room. I want you to leave—’
‘Not without you.’
‘Why? What’s so special about me?’ Leah demanded tempestuously, out of control as she had never been before, her stormy emotions feasting on every acid word. ‘Why don’t you marry one of your bimbos, Nik? Or am I missing something here? Were the bimbos as much of a front as our marriage was? You see, I am not as dumb as I used to be. Why do you want me to stay so badly? Could it be that you’re gay?’
The instant she said it she regretted it. She hadn’t meant to go that far in her need to lash out. A shudder ran through Nik, naked outrage flashing across his savagely handsome features.
‘No...not gay,’ he bit out with considerable effort. As he spoke, he shrugged off his jacket and ripped at his tie. ‘Maybe you need a demonstration...’
Leah blinked, her blinding surge of rage having more or less vented itself on that final accusation which she was guiltily aware had, for Nik, been the ultimate insult. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Something I should have done years ago.’ He tore his shirt out of his beautifully tailored trousers and pulled it over his dark head, discarding it in a heap with the rest.
‘Would you please put your clothes back on?’ Leah said unsteadily, and she knew she sounded ridiculous, which didn’t help.
‘Scared you’d see something you might like? Cristo...’ Nik intoned rawly. ‘To think I was about to waste time courting my wife! To think I was going to do bloody stupid things like buying you flowers and taking you out! Get on that bed...’
‘Have you gone crazy?’ Leah gasped in disbelief.
Before she could move, Nik caught her up in his powerful arms and dumped her down on the divan behind her. He came down on top of her so fast that she hadn’t a hope of evading him. Waves of shock coursed through her.
‘You’re my wife,’ Nik growled down at her, as if that were sufficient justification.
‘Let go of me...you’re flattening me!’ Leah slung back at him in fury.
‘Maybe you’ll get to like it.’ Nik shifted sinuously above her and meshed one hand into her tumbled hair. He stared down at her for a long, timeless moment. ‘Theos, I am so hungry for you, I ache,’ he muttered raggedly.
Leah’s entire body was an angry pillow of rejection. ‘Go find a bimbo, Nik,’ she urged shakily. ‘At least you won’t have to tell her lies.’
‘I’m not lying. How could I? A man’s body betrays his arousal.’ Sliding a lean thigh between hers, Nik moved against her, shamelessly introducing her to the hard bulge of his manhood. ‘No lie,’ he completed huskily.
Pink starred her cheeks even as an insidious heat flared between her thighs. ‘You’re disgusting.’
‘I want you.’ He buried his mouth hotly in a hollow just below her collarbone.
‘No!’ she whispered frantically, feeling that hot wire of sensation pull tight and reacting in panic.
He lifted his dark head, a blaze of desire in his hot gaze, and then he took her mouth with explosive passion. It was an act of possession, a stamp of ownership blatant in its intent to dominate. And she knew it, fought what he was making her feel with every fibre, but with every kiss, with every sweetly invasive thrust of his tongue, he taught her to want the next. Her hands rose, curved compulsively to the satin-smooth skin of his shoulders, holding him to her.
He rolled over, carrying her with him, and dispensed with her T-shirt by whipping it over her head. He uttered a savage groan as her unbound breasts rubbed against his hair-roughened chest and a split-second later she was lying flat again, his hands shaping the pouting mounds he had discovered.
She shut her eyes, gasping for breath, all reasoning power wrested from her. He found a distended pink nipple with his mouth and she dug her hips into the mattress, her back arching, a wildness she had never known tearing at her. Her heart was racing, her skin damp, every cell firing on red alert. He employed his tongue and his teeth in a grazing torment of a caress, cupping her breasts, sucking at the sensitive buds he had aroused. And she speared her fingers into the depths of his thick, silky hair and moaned with the intensity of the pleasure.
‘You are mine,’ Nik grated in a voice so tortured that she didn’t initially realise that he had spoken in English.
She wasn’t listening anyway. He was apart from her. She didn’t like it. She lifted her head and touched his sensual mouth with her lips and then, more daringly, with the tip of her tongue, unconsciously imitating what she had learnt from him. He shuddered and accepted the invitation with a raw passion that consumed her, his arms banding so tightly around her that she could barely breathe.
They rolled over again, welded together by an increasingly uncontrollable excitement. She heard something rip. It meant nothing to her. She was lost entirely in the heat and the scent and the feel of him. He felt so hot. His scent was an aphrodisiac that sent her senses spinning. Every tiny shift of his lean, muscular body against hers drove her wild, every caress an incitement to a hunger fast reaching fever pitch.