The Veranchetti Marriage(12)

His generosity surprised her afresh. There had been a time when Alex could not have admitted being less than perfect. But he had looked back, he had seen the distance which had forged them apart. “I did love you.” She didn’t know why it was so important that he accept that now, but it was.

Alex shot her a caustic and cynical smile. “For the last time, I do not want to hear you talk about love. It got us nowhere in the past. If it was love, it was a shallow and mawkish sentiment. All I want from you now is the outward show of wife and mother. That should not tax your ingenuity too much.”

Deeply hurt, she turned her head aside.

“Do you want a nightcap?” he asked as they entered the apartment.

She shook her head. “I’ll go to my room,” she muttered tightly. “As they say, the show’s over.”

“On the contrary…” Black-lashed golden eyes met hers in glancing challenge. “It’s only beginning.”

Kerry retreated to her room and twisted angrily out of the dress. She thrust it from her sight bitterly. Alex had dressed her as he saw her now. As a woman on offer to the highest bidder. A woman who could respond to his caresses as happily as she could respond to any other attractive man’s. A woman who was easy sexually. Easy to seduce, easy to take. Dear God, that wasn’t her! “That isn’t me,” she muttered in soundless despair to the mirror. If she had been like that there would have been a lot of other men since their divorce.

To think of Alex possessing her again with contempt and a hard desire to humiliate turned her stomach over queasily. She couldn’t let that happen. She could go back to him, live with him, take whatever he had to throw at her, but she could not let him use her body. Whatever she had done, she was still an individual with a right to self-determination.

She slipped into bed and lay there. Alex was no rapist. He wouldn’t force her to accede to his sexual demands. How could he really even want her? If she made it clear how she felt…oh, dear lord, Alex was the most Latin of men in that field. Even if he didn’t desire her, he would go through the roof if she tried to bar him from her bedroom. She would have to be more subtle than that.

The door opened and she pulled herself up against the banked-up pillows, huge green eyes wide in the lamplight. Alex shut the door again with a decisive snap. He wore only a short black robe. A tangled mat of dark hairs showed between the parted edges. “Why should I wait for what I want?” he drawled softly, unperturbed by her obvious shock at his appearance.

“You can’t…we’re not married!” Wildly disconcerted by his unashamed intent, Kerry studied him in shaken disbelief.

Alex padded calmly over to the side of the bed, his long fingers already lazily loosening the tie of the robe. “We will be,” he parried.

“Th…that’s not the point! I don’t want this!” she hurled at him wrathfully. “You can’t do this!”

He shed the robe fluidly. “ ‘Can’t’ doesn’t belong in my vocabulary, just as ‘no’ does not belong in yours.” Dark golden eyes held hers in fierce and obdurate purpose. “When I have made your body mine again, I will have obliterated other memories with my own. Capisci, cara?”

In Alex, twentieth-century female liberation had only ever received lip-service. Not an inch beneath the surface ran the hot-blooded buccaneering instincts of his seagoing forebears and the dark, domineering strength of a man who had absolute conviction in his own innate superiority over the female sex. It was the ice on the outside and the tantalising hint of the fire underneath which had first drawn her to Alex.

Dry-mouthed, in paralysis, she took in his lean, sun-darkened nudity. There was nothing shy about Alex in the bedroom. But Kerry had always possessed a girlish modesty which had in the past amused him. Something told her that there would be no such allowances made tonight.

“You can’t,” she whispered. “It would be wrong.”

“Wrong?” He wrenched back the duvet and got in beside her with a harsh laugh. Her skin burned hot and tight over her bones as he gathered her into his arms, making no attempt to conceal his obvious arousal from her. “No, this is not wrong,” he asserted arrogantly. “I will not be easy until I have known you again in the only fashion in which I ever knew you.”

Rage shuddering through her, she endeavoured to evade his hold. He had planned this all along, and in her innocence she had trustingly agreed to spend the night, never suspecting the depths of Alex’s determination to mortify what little self-respect she had left. “No!” she raked at him.

His hand closed on the bodice of her cotton nightdress and ripped it asunder. It was a gesture not of violence, but of sheer cool resolution. “Either submit or leave,” he challenged her ruthlessly. “I gave you the terms before you came to me today, and you are still free to change your mind.”

Her shaking hands drew together the remnants of the destroyed garment. She turned the pale curve of her cheek aside in anguish and despair. He had changed, and it wasn’t only love that he had lost in the intervening years. He appeared devoid of tenderness and compassion, too.

“And you’ll be content with submission, will you?” she muttered tremulously. “Knowing that you are humiliating me, knowing that I have no choice?”

“Yes, I will be content,” he grated, his golden gaze skimming stormily to the revealed upper curves of her breasts. “I want you. God forgive me for it, but I want you on any terms, and I do not need you to preach on the subject of my fastidiousness. I am damned if I will deny myself what you could give to a stranger.”

She shrank under the duvet with pained remembrance of what had rent both their lives asunder. He would enforce his mastery in this relationship. He would take her to prove that he was no longer sensitive to her infidelity. But in doing so, she swore, he would receive little satisfaction.

“Put the light out,” she mumbled.

“No…do you know how many women have turned into you in the dark over the years?” His savagery flailed her. “But you are no longer special to me. I will satisfy myself in that tonight.”

“I’ll hate you for this until the day I die!” she hissed. “You’re barbaric!”

“You made me that way.” His powerful body was blocking out the light, shadowing her hectically flushed face. “Why shouldn’t you taste the fruits of your own endeavours?” he demanded with seething bitterness. “But I will give you pleasure, even if it is only an empty pleasure. It ought to satisfy you. I wonder how many other men there have been to give you that same pleasure…”

“None; you turned me off men for life!”

His sensual mouth twisted. “I cannot believe that.”

“I don’t care what you believe, you savage!” she snapped back, outraged beyond all bearing by his insults.

The force of his mouth drove her head back against the pillows. The power of his hunger ravaged her. She lay completely still, a peculiar weakness overwhelming her. He would not use his superior strength against her. She was in no danger of a forced possession. Yet, even knowing that a struggle would drive him from her in aversion, she did not move a muscle. And even in the instant of questioning the inconsistency of her behaviour, a shaft of arrowing excitement seized her and drove her mind blank, as his hand moved expertly against her breast, brushing aside the ripped cotton, curving to the unbearably sensitive mound beneath. He muttered something thick and impossibly sexy in Italian, and she shuddered against the tautened length of his body.

I mustn’t, I mustn’t, I mustn’t was rhyming in her subconscious, in a litany already becoming meaningless. His fingertips found the engorged bud of her nipple and he lowered his mouth there, employing his tongue and the edge of his teeth in a grazing, tormenting caress, while his other hand prepared the neglected twin for a similar onslaught. Her defence system flew down like a domino run. Her back arched. The blood was pounding in insane excitement through her veins, and the pleasure was breathtakingly all-encompassing. It had never been so intense or so powerful for her. Her fluttering fingers tangled with the blackness of his thick hair, and she was lost beyond reclaim in a physical world of sensation. A pervasive heat was building up agonisingly inside her. Her thighs parted at the brush of his fingertips.

“You want me…badly,” Alex muttered roughly, his eyes brilliant with triumph. “Very badly.”

She could not have denied him. Need was a burning, remorseless compulsion within her traitorous body, a dam-burst of hunger ignited by his first touch. As he explored her intimately, he captured her swollen lips again in an urgent admission of impatience. His weight came down on her as he slid between her legs and he took her in a sudden, passionate storm. There was a moment of unforewarned discomfort, followed by the torment of a passion rising close to assuagement. He thrust into her powerfully, conquering her brief spasm of withdrawal, and suddenly she was clinging to him in the grip of an ecstasy which was intolerable. It finally pushed her over the edge, and Alex jerked against her with a surging groan of satisfaction, driving his body violently into the pliancy of hers.