The Married Mistress
Kate Walker
Gorgeous Greek tycoon Damon Nicolaides is always in the news…so when the paparazzi get a tip-off about his new mistress, they come banging on her door!Actually, Sarah and Damon were married a year ago! Sarah left him, thinking their marriage was a lie. Now Damon's come back to claim the wife he truly loves. But first he must protect her from the press by pretending that Sarah is merely his mistress…and to do that, he tells her, they'll have to make their love affair real!
With Valentine’s Day, February is always a romantic month. And we’ve got some great books in store for you….
The High-Society Wife by Helen Bianchin is the story of a marriage of convenience between two rich and powerful families…. But what this couple didn’t expect is for their marriage to become real! It’s also the first in our new miniseries RUTHLESS, where you’ll find commanding men, who stop at nothing to get what they want. Look out for more books coming soon! And if you love Italian men, don’t miss The Marchese’s Love-Child by Sara Craven, where our heroine is swept off her feet by a passionate tycoon.
If you just want to get away from it all, let us whisk you off to the beautiful Greek Islands in Julia James’s hard-hitting story Baby of Shame. What will happen when a businessman discovers that his night of passion with a young Englishwoman five years ago resulted in a son? The Caribbean is the destination for our couple in Anne Mather’s intriguing tale The Virgin’s Seduction.
Jane Porter has a dangerously sexy Sicilian for you in The Sicilian’s Defiant Mistress. This explosive reunion story promises to be dark and passionate! In Trish Morey’s Stolen by the Sheikh, the first in her new duet, THE ARRANGED BRIDES, a young woman is summoned to the palace of a demanding sheikh, who has plans for her future…. Don’t miss part two, coming in March.
The Married Mistress
Kate Walker
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
All about the author…
Kate Walker
KATE WALKER was born in Nottinghamshire, England, and was the middle child in a family of five girls. She grew up in a home where books were vitally important, and she read anything she could get her hands on. Even before she could write she was making up stories.
But everyone told her that she would never make a living as a writer, so she decided that if she couldn’t write books, at least she could work with them by becoming a librarian.
It was at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, that she met her husband, who was also studying there. They married and eventually moved to Lincolnshire, where she was a children’s librarian until her son was born.
After three years of being a full-time housewife and mother she wanted a new challenge, and turned to her old love of writing. The first two novels she sent off to Harlequin were rejected, but the third attempt was successful. She can still remember the moment that a letter of acceptance arrived instead of the rejection slip she had been dreading. But the moment she really realized that she was a published writer was when copies of her first book, The Chalk Line, arrived just in time to be one of her best Christmas presents ever.
Kate is often asked if she’s a romantic person because she writes romances. Her answer is that if being romantic means caring about other people enough to make that extra special effort for them, then, yes, she is.
Kate loves to hear from her fans. You can contact her through her Web site at www.kate-walker.com or e-mail her at kate@kate-walker.com.
To all my special friends in the Teahouse and Gonnabeez from the Queen Bee.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
SARAH stepped back from the partly open door as smoothly and as silently as she could.
It wasn’t easy. The thought of disturbing the occupants of the room, of making them realise that she was here, and that she had seen them, made her heart race and her head swim.
Beneath the bright red-gold hair, her face had lost colour, the brilliant emerald-green of her eyes standing out dramatically against the pallor of her cheeks.
She felt sick—sick with anger and betrayal—and she needed a minute or two to pull herself together before she faced the inevitable. She had to get downstairs again. Had to get away from the scene that had met her shocked eyes as she had first opened the door, taking with it that little peace of mind that just lately she had thought she had finally reached.
Peace of mind. Huh!
That was a laugh! she told herself as she reached the top of the stairs. Peace was something she hadn’t known in a long, long time. Not true peace. Not the wonderful soul-rooted peace that came from knowing you were truly happy, deep, deep down. Truly happy and contented with your world. As she had been once, she’d thought, in a time that now seemed so long ago.
No, she wouldn’t think of the past now. Couldn’t think of it. She had to concentrate on the here and now. The past was what would destroy her ability to handle this.
‘Sarah?’
Jason’s voice: thick and rough with shock.
Sounds of the bed creaking. Of the thud of heavy masculine feet on the carpeted floor. He had heard her and was coming after her.
The man in the hallway heard the sounds too. Heard the voice—a very male voice that made his heart kick sharply and something like disgust twist painfully in his gut.
She had a man. Here. In this house they had once shared. Clearly she hadn’t believed his threat to come back—and soon.
But not soon enough, it seemed. His sweet Sarah had been busy during his absence. She had found herself another man. Found him, and lost him too, if the haste with which the slim auburn-haired figure in the smart pale green shirt and darker pencil skirt was coming down the curving staircase was anything to go by.
Sarah was not happy. She was so unhappy that she didn’t see him standing well back, where his black hair and dark leather jacket blended with the deep shadow of the door. And, that being so, it told its own story of just what she had discovered up in that first-floor bedroom.
The bedroom that had once been theirs.
It was a thought of dark rage, one that brought a red mist rising before his eyes, cutting off his vision completely, and destroying his ability to think rationally. To think at all.
‘Sarah?’ Jason called again, his voice thick with echoes of things she didn’t even want to consider. ‘That you?’
Jason sounded angry now, and before she could find a way to answer, or even make any sort of sound to indicate her presence, he had stumbled out onto the landing and was leaning over the banisters, staring down at her.
His longish fair hair was still ruffled, his cheeks distinctly flushed. But at least he had taken the opportunity to pull on a pair of jeans, even if his chest was still bare, as were his feet.
‘So it is you? Didn’t you hear me calling? Why the hell didn’t you answer? What are you doing back this early?’
It was a technique she recognised only too well. A way of firing questions at an opponent in rapid succession, and so disorientating them that they didn’t know which one to answer first. It meant he was rattled. Because he wasn’t sure just how long she’d been there or whether she’d only stayed downstairs.
‘I can come and go as I please, Jason. This is my house!’
My house, technically, the man in the shadows corrected in the privacy of his thoughts. The big London house had always been the property of the Nicolaides family. He had let her continue to live in it because it suited him that way, but she didn’t own it. Even if she was still, technically, his wife.
But only technically, it seemed.
A moment ago he had been severely tempted to step forward, out of the concealing darkness, and confront the pair of them. But from the moment that the blond man had appeared on the landing outside the bedroom he had changed his mind. Watching and waiting seemed a much better idea. Because if ever he had seen evidence of an illicit assignation, a sexual romp unexpectedly disturbed, it was right there on that bastard’s guilty-looking face. If he was any sort of judge, the other female involved was still right there in the room behind this Jason.
‘Sarah, don’t get so huffy about nothing!’
Jason was descending the stairs now, smoothing his hair back with a hurried hand, belatedly fastening his jeans as he came down.
‘Nothing!’
The freezing note in Sarah’s voice made the watcher grin sharply. He knew that tone well. Too well. Oh, yes, he’d been subjected to just that icy note of indignant reproof more than once. He was still mentally smarting from the impact of the last time.
‘Nothing?’
‘Well, OK, so I took a nap in your bed.’
Clearly the blond man thought he could bluff his way out of this.
‘What’s so terrible about that? We’re going to be sharing it from now on anyway.’
‘I haven’t actually agreed to you moving in.’ To anything, if the truth was told.
‘No, you haven’t said the words, but we both know it’s only a matter of time.’
He sounded so sure of himself, Sarah thought, anger warring with hurt and betrayal and producing a highly explosive combination in her mind. So sure that it was obvious he believed she hadn’t been upstairs; that she wasn’t aware of what had been going on inside that bedroom.
He still thought that he could worm his way out of this. He truly believed that she was so simple, so gullible, that she would swallow everything he tossed at her. And what infuriated her most was the thought that, lonely and unhappy, she must have given him that impression.
‘But we both know it was on the cards.’
‘Jace? Jacey, baby…’
A third voice, a light, petulant, feminine voice, interrupted what Sarah had been about to say. And as Jason whirled, another violent expletive escaping his lips, the bedroom door opened and a small, curvaceous female sashayed out onto the landing. She was wrapped loosely in a deep red silky gown that Sarah recognised instantly. Made for her own slender height, it swamped the other woman’s shorter frame and was too long for her on her legs, falling almost to the floor instead of mid-calf.
‘Are you ever coming back?’ she pouted, peering over the banisters and down at where he stood, frozen to the spot in the hall. ‘I’m missing—’
‘Andrea, I told you to wait!’ Jason cut in furiously. ‘To stay where you were and—’
‘I was bored!’ the woman addressed as Andrea protested. ‘I got tired of waiting for you to come back.’
“‘Don’t get so huffy about nothing”!’ Sarah repeated bitterly. ‘I wonder what your—friend feels about being described as nothing!’
Her outburst silenced Jason temporarily in the same moment that it drew Andrea’s frowning gaze towards where the other woman stood in the hallway.
‘And who are you?’
‘Me?’
To her amazement, Sarah managed it with only a trace of a shake in her voice, though anyone who knew her would have recognised in the stiffness of her tone the struggle she was having to maintain control. The man who was listening to everything knew it only too well.
‘I’m just the owner of this house—of the bed you’ve just got out of, the robe you’re wearing…’
And Jason’s girlfriend, she supposed she could have added, but the words stuck in her throat.
‘The robe you’re—almost wearing!’
She was tight-lipped against her emotions, stiff as a board.
The watcher in the shadows saw how the colour had ebbed from her cheeks, the muscles in her jaw clenching tight, and he was struck by a sudden and distinctly unwelcome attack of something close to compassion.
Dangerously close.
Compassion was a mistake with this woman—a bad mistake—because it left him vulnerable. Once he had given his heart completely and willingly to her and she had smashed it into pieces and tossed it back at him like so much rubbish. He wasn’t likely to risk that happening again.
‘So might I suggest that you go and get back into your own clothes and get yourself out of here? And take your cheating fancy man with you!’
‘But Sarah—’
‘Out!’
She might be able to hold herself together if he went now, she told herself. If he turned and walked out immediately, then she might be able to forget just how foolish she had been over the past couple of weeks. Foolish in that once again she had stumbled into a relationship that had been all wrong from the start.
It had been a relationship in which she had been looking for nothing but comfort and a hiding place, and that had led her to the mess she was in right now.
‘Sarah—please. It meant nothing—honest! It was just a fling.’
‘A fling? You were prepared to betray my trust—to risk our relationship—for something that didn’t even matter! Nothing more than an itch you had to scratch!’
At least Damon had had the honour to really care for his ‘bit on the side’. His mistress had been the woman he wanted as well, and she had only been the wife of convenience.
Jason’s expression was every bit as hangdog and spuriously repentant as she had expected, and he had actually taken a step or two towards her, coming much closer. Too close.
‘Oh, come on, Sarr! You have to understand.’
Another step forward, and this time his hand came out. He had almost reached her, almost touched her, and it was too much.
‘No!’
Her own hands came up, knocking him away as her nerve broke completely, and she whirled, unable to think of anything beyond getting away. She couldn’t even bear to be in the same space as him any longer. She wanted only to be away and clear and free. Free to forget about Jason and all he had ever meant to her.
Free to think of the man who had once meant everything. Free to—
‘Ooof!’
The cry of shock, confusion and near-panic escaped her on a violent expulsion of breath as she blundered, blind and disorientated, straight into an unexpectedly hard and solid mass that was where no mass should be. A hard and solid mass that blocked her path, barring the way.
A hard, solid and warm mass.
A hard, solid, warm, living and breathing form.
A form that was so intensely masculine, lean and hard and forceful, that it could only belong to a man. A tall, strong man, very much in the prime of life.
A man whose arms came out instinctively, folding round her immediately, supporting her, holding her when she swayed off balance and might have fallen. A man whose chest was wide and strong where it supported her head, her cheek resting against his immaculate white polo shirt. She could hear the heavy, regular thud of his heart, echoing the pulse of blood through her own veins. In her nostrils was the heady, sensually intoxicating mixture of clean skin, the subtle tang of some spicy cologne, and the purely individual aroma that was his alone.
A scent that Sarah knew as well as that of her own body. It was one that she recognised so instantly and so completely, not needing to see the man’s face or hear a word spoken in his voice to confirm her immediate and horrified suspicion. Try as she might, she had no hope at all of denying the truth, or escaping from the forceful impact of it.
And if she had needed any further proof, then the instant reaction that flared through her, burning away all other thoughts, all other hopes, provided it in the space of a heartbeat. It licked along every nerve path, obliterating any doubt even before it had a chance to form.
‘Da…’
The single broken syllable was choked from her, impossible to hold back even though her voice didn’t have the strength to complete the name.
Only one man had ever made her feel this way. Only one man had ever been able to stimulate her feelings and her senses so instantly and so furiously.
‘Damon…’ she whispered. ‘Damon!’
Above her head she sensed rather than saw the sensual mouth break into a wide, wicked grin of pure triumph, and felt the faint rumble of amused laughter under her cheek. She knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was glorying in the fact that he had had such an impact on her, and at such speed, evoking the instant effect that she had been unable to hide.
Only the realisation that she had given him the weapon to use against her, putting it almost into his hands herself, kept her silent in mortification, and she had to grit her teeth against the flurry of angry rejection that nearly escaped her. Damon Nicolaides needed no encouragement at all to feel instantly and infinitely superior to any other human being. His head was already swollen wide enough, and he would only take her hurried protestations as an indication of exactly the opposite of what she said.
‘Damon…’ she tried again, aiming for a very different tone. ‘Let me go this minute!’
Once more she felt the chuckle echo in his chest.
‘You know you don’t mean that, sweetheart.’
It was the first time in over six months that she had heard his voice, and the bitter-sweet sensation of its tug at her emotions, the memories it revived in the space of a heartbeat, almost undid her totally.
‘Oh, but I do!’
Gathering together all that was left of her tattered strength, she twisted in his arms and flung back her head so that she could look up, straight into his dark, shuttered face.
And instantly regretted her action desperately.
If letting him feel her immediate response to his presence had been a mistake, then this was definitely error number two—and a far worse, potentially far more dangerous move than anything she had done yet.
Because as soon as she saw him, saw the dangerously handsome face, with the broad, defined cheekbones, the flashing dark eyes and the sensually warm mouth, it was as if he had never been away. In those few, shaken moments, the hundred and eighty days of his absence from her life slid away like so many seconds, and she was jolted back once more to the appalling, devastating moment in which she had learned the truth. When his own father had forced her to see how her love for this man was built not on the strong, sure foundations she had believed it to be, but instead on slippery, shifting sands that had slid away from under her feet, leaving her reeling and lost without any support.
‘I do…’ she tried again, only to hear the words disintegrate as soon as they hit the air, splintering into tiny pieces that had none of the emphasis she aimed for.
And none of the impact she needed, she admitted to herself as she looked into her husband’s deep, dark eyes, and saw there only as much response to her protest as he might have shown if a fly had landed on the olive-toned skin of his arm and he had wafted it away idly with one hand. Instead his smile grew, becoming a broad, fiendish grin as he looked down at her.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he drawled in his softly accented tones. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
Before she could register just what the grin meant, before she had time to realise that she had also made mistake number three as well as one and two, the proud head had lowered swiftly and his mouth took hers in a searing kiss.
A kiss that swept away all pretence at resistance. One that slashed through her defences before she even had time to think about building them, sweeping them aside as a torrential flash-flood might deal with a few weakly rooted saplings it had found in its way, carrying them before it on its relentless, savage path.
Sarah was completely in the power of that storm force. Under attack from a bewildering, devastating array of emotions, she simply closed her eyes and went under, surrendering to the deepest, most elemental demand of all. That of total sensuality.
It was like the first kiss she had ever experienced and yet it was like no other she had ever known. It started hard and fierce and demanding, but instantly gentled as in spite of herself she opened up to him, her mouth softening under his, her lips parting, allowing the arrogantly knowing invasion of his tongue.
She was lost, drowning in sensation, losing all sense of substance, of strength, of reality. The ground was unsteady beneath her feet, the hallway in which she stood just a haze of blue, pale and dark, and the hum of the traffic outside, always present in any part of London, a blur of noise, the buzzing soundtrack to the frantic racing of her heart.
She wanted none of this, her mind screamed at her. Wanted nothing—and yet she wanted everything. She longed desperately for him to release her and in the same thought she prayed that he would hold on to her forever, never letting her go. Letting her go would mean that she was once more cast adrift into the emptiness of being alone, the devastation of loneliness that was all her life had been since their brief marriage had broken up. And, having endured it once, she knew it was something she could not go through again.
‘Excuse me.’
The cold, clipped words vaguely penetrated the heated haze that enclosed Sarah’s thoughts, reaching her only as a tone, not any sort of meaning. But that tone was a million miles away from the ostensibly polite phrase, carrying with it a load of barely controlled fury and cold disbelief.
‘Excuse me,’ Jason repeated, with cutting emphasis.
That at least had some effect on Damon. It made him pause, stilling his mouth on Sarah’s, lifting it slightly away from her.
‘Yes?’
It was curt and disdainful, insultingly so. If Jason’s interjection had been cool, then Damon’s response was nothing short of icy.
‘What is it?’
He was still so close that she could feel the whisper of his breath over her skin as he spoke, still taste him on her lips and her tongue. His scent still lingered tantalisingly in her nostrils. It took a shocking effort to crush down the instinctive, weakly betraying murmur of protest that almost escaped her, and to her horror her hands had actually lifted to pull him back to her before she realised what was happening and determinedly forced them back down again. Only by curling her fingers into tight, defensive fists at her sides, nails digging into her palms, did she feel that she had regained enough control not to give herself away completely.
‘What can I do for you?’
Damon’s words were addressed to Jason, tossed at him with arrogant contempt, so that for a moment or two the other man floundered, knowing that he had definitely lost ground, but not really sure how to go about regaining it.
‘I…I’d like to know…’
The fool was definitely rocked, clearly knocked off balance, Damon thought privately, allowing himself a small, grim smile of satisfaction at the sight of Jason’s uncomfortably flushed face, the look of angry confusion in his eyes. And that was exactly how he wanted it. It fitted perfectly with the plan he had come up with while standing by the front door, watching the little drama that had unfolded before him.
He wanted Jason—and Sarah—off balance and unsure of what to do next. Unsure of themselves—and of him.
He wanted them totally on edge and wondering just how he was going to react.
And so he forced himself to smile into Jason’s belligerent face, clearly taking the other man even more by surprise.
‘Yes?’ he enquired politely, not lessening his grip on the woman in his arms for a moment.
It wasn’t purely for display. Wasn’t just part of the image he wanted to present to this other male—the intruder into his territory, the alien who threatened the peace of his domestic set up.
The truth was that, having once got Sarah back into his arms again after the length of time without her, he simply couldn’t let go. He had waited so long for this, dreamed of it, imagined it in the long, dark silences of the night. And now that he’d finally achieved his aim, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—relinquish it without a fight.
The bitter irony was that it wasn’t the sort of reunion he had dreamed of. There had been no other man involved in his imaginings, and certainly no one like Jason or the blonde-haired floozy in the red gown who was still upstairs on the landing, hanging halfway over the banisters, watching everything that was going on with an avid, open-mouthed curiosity.
But a true gambler had to play the hand that fate had dealt him. And these were the only cards he had, so he had no choice.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Well…’ Jason blustered, even more disconcerted than before. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘No, I can’t, I’m afraid.’ Damon’s tone oozed fake sincerity, apparent concern. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to explain. Just what is it that’s puzzling you?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Jason’s temper was rapidly escaping from his control. ‘It’s you! You’re the problem! Just who the hell are you?’
‘Who the hell am I?’ Damon echoed, pretending to give the matter some consideration, though Sarah was fully convinced that he already knew exactly what he was going to say. ‘I thought you knew. But, as you obviously don’t, then I shall have to explain to you. I—’
He broke off, glancing down sharply as Sarah moved convulsively, just once, in the circle of his arms. He turned a brief, reproving frown on her, tightened his grip momentarily, warningly, and watched with grim satisfaction as she subsided back into rebellious silence.
‘I’ll tell you who the hell I am. You need to know anyway, seeing as this concerns you rather a lot. You see, kyrie Jason, I am the new man in the lovely Sarah’s life. In fact, I am the man who has just replaced you in this lady’s bed.’
And, hearing Sarah’s gasp of indignant fury, seeing her open her mouth to voice an outraged protest, he bent his dark head and silenced her in the most effective way he could think of—by taking her mouth in another of those long, passionate and ruthlessly demanding kisses.
CHAPTER TWO
BUT this was a very different sort of kiss.
This was no longer the beguiling, seductive caress of just moments before. It was a kiss of anger, of domination, of possession, which stamped her as Damon’s as clearly as if it had been a white-hot branding iron pressed to her skin.
And the truth was that Damon believed that she was his to do with as he pleased, until he decided otherwise. He had never truly been prepared to let her go. He had only let her walk out on him because she had given him no choice. She had waited until he was away, as he so often was, on business, and then she had packed her bags and fled from the island.
People just did not do that sort of thing to Damon Nicolaides. Certainly, women never did it to him. He made all the running where the women in his life were concerned. He made the first moves; he decreed how long a relationship lasted. And when he was tired and bored, when he felt that things had come to their natural end—as they inevitably did—then Damon was the one who walked away without a backward glance. Not the woman he was leaving.
Sarah had broken all those rules. And as a result she knew that Damon had never forgiven her—would never forgive her. He would hold the memory of what he considered to be her betrayal and the insult to his fiercely macho pride deep in the darkness of his unloving heart, and he would never let it go.
‘Damon…’ she managed against the demand of his mouth, struggling to make it a protest, hearing only the sigh of acquiescence in her tone. ‘I—’ 20
‘Hush, agape mou,’ he reproved, infuriatingly more in control than she had ever been, so that she heard in his words a fake softness. A gentleness that he could never have meant but that he managed to communicate with total credibility. ‘Leave this to me.’
‘But—’
Again she tried to protest, and again she failed as once more he kissed her into submission, this time stealing her soul away with a stunningly enticing caress, one that made her senses swoon and her heart sing with rare delight.
‘Leave this to me,’ he had told her, his tone redolent with a supreme confidence that she would do exactly as he instructed.
And, weakly, she knew that she would. There was nothing else she could do. The ability to act, along with any hope she had of even thinking straight, had evaporated swiftly in the heat of her instant reaction to him. Just his very closeness, to be held so tightly in the warm strength of his arms, crushed up against the hard wall of his chest, had been bad enough, depriving her of the control, the restraint that she had believed she’d acquired in her time apart from him. But the sensations sparked off by those kisses had made everything infinitely worse, buzzing round in her head, fizzing through her body, until she was incapable of thought.
Those three very different kisses had revealed so perfectly the many sides of Damon’s nature. In his make-up, the supremely gentle, irresistibly seductive blended so perfectly with the cruel, the almost brutal ruthlessness that was the opposite side of his personality. The negative to the positive, darkness as opposed to light. She had known them all in her short time with him, and at first she had believed that the gentle, enticing character had been the real man.
She had been very quickly—and very thoroughly—disillusioned. Life, and Damon’s father, had stripped her of her rose-tinted spectacles with ruthless efficiency. And from then onwards she had never been able to look at him in the same way.
‘You’re who?’ Jason demanded, the bluster in his voice showing how rattled he was.
‘The name is Damon Nicolaides,’ Damon tossed at him, clearly expecting, and getting, the instant start of response that always came with the recognition of his name.
‘Nicolaides?’ Jason’s voice shook.
Everyone knew who Damon was. Everyone.
His wealth and his international, jet-setting life put his name and his photograph into the society pages. His relationships with models and actresses, his friendships with film producers and media moguls kept him in the celebrity magazines, where his stunningly masculine looks made a huge impact on every female reader from sixteen to seventy. His money and power meant that he frequently appeared in financial columns, and his ability to constantly acquire more of both made sure that his reputation was as huge as his business empire.
‘Damon Nicolaides?’
He was clearly the last person Jason had expected to come up against in this particular situation. How the hell could she know him? The question was obviously in his thoughts, revealed in his stunned intonation.
‘That’s right.’
Sarah knew that tone of Damon’s voice well—too well. Careful, polite, controlled—but only just.
It meant that Damon was right at the edge of his patience. That he would not take pushing any further or any harder. Not if the person he was talking to was wise and wanted to avoid a full-scale volcanic explosion.
‘Jason…’ she tried, only to feel her body given a small, rough shake of warning by the man who held her.
‘Let me answer the questions, Sarah. It’s simpler that way.’
‘Simpler!’ she couldn’t help protesting. ‘For who?’
‘For everyone!’
The admonition that had been in the way he had shaken her was there again, more strongly this time, in the undercurrents in his voice, a note that sent a shiver down her spine in unnerved response.
This was the Damon she had seen in the past, when some member of his staff had angered him with a foolish mistake, or a journalist had proved too intrusive. It was the prelude to a much more savage outburst, one that made her shudder in fearful anticipation. She had only ever experienced that side of Damon briefly, but that had been enough. She never wanted to see it again.
‘Everyone?’
Damon bent his dark head again until his sensual mouth was level with her ear, the warmth of his breath stirring the auburn tendrils of hair that lay against her cheek.
‘Do you want me to get rid of him or not?’
Oh, yes, she wanted Jason out of here. Out of her house, and out of her life. And she wished he’d take Damon with him. But that, she knew, was not the slightest bit likely.
And so, grasping at what she could see was the only possible lesser of two evils, she clamped her lips tight shut on the furious protest that almost escaped her once more and forced herself to nod in silent acquiescence.
It was all that Damon needed. Satisfied that she had handed over control of the situation into his hands, he faced Jason again.
‘Was there anything else you wanted to know?’
Everything, if she knew Jason, Sarah thought. But he contented himself with one question, his voice wobbling on a note of disbelief.
‘You claim that you two are an item?’
‘Not claim,’ Damon retorted sharply. ‘We are.’
As if to prove his point, he pulled her closer, one steel-hard arm coming round her to hold her just where he wanted her, staking his claim. One ear, one cheek was against his chest, muffling her hearing. But she caught Jason’s dumbfounded response.
‘And you agree with this, Sarry?’
Another silent nod was all she could manage. Just let Damon get rid of Jason, she prayed inwardly, and then she would get rid of Damon. If she could. Damon in one of these stubborn, determined moods was as immovable as a rock, and every bit as hard.
‘So when did you two meet—and where?’
‘The art gallery reception last night,’ Damon stunned her by retorting immediately, and totally unexpectedly. ‘You must have noticed that she didn’t come home. Or perhaps not…’
The movement of his head told its own story. Sarah didn’t even have to look to know that he had directed his black-eyed gaze across the room and up to where Jason’s bedroom companion still lingered, watching everything, silently agog with curiosity.
So silently that Sarah had almost forgotten she was there.
‘I’m sure you were otherwise engaged.’
Damon was fast losing patience now. The sordid little drama he had interrupted might have amused him for a while, but its appeal was strictly limited, and it was evaporating rapidly. He wanted Jason and his trollop out of the house as fast as possible. If they didn’t move now then he couldn’t guarantee that he would be able to keep a strict hold on his temper. And if it slipped from his control then he couldn’t be answerable for the consequences. Things could get really messy.
And the worst part of it all was having to admit just what was affecting him most. Which certainly wasn’t this sleazy rat and his cheap little tart, that was for sure.
‘I wasn’t here last night! My name’s Andrea, by the way.’
It was the other woman who spoke, and Sarah felt a shock of instant recognition at her tone, bringing with it the kick of some primitive reaction deep down inside her. Even fresh from another man’s bed as she was, this Andrea had still responded to Damon’s forcefully macho appearance with a predatory interest that put a husky purr of sensuality into her tone. Wriggling slightly in the iron-hard hold, Sarah could just peer upwards to where the voluptuous woman was leaning over the banisters, displaying an ample amount of what she clearly thought was enticing cleavage.
But Damon appeared far from enticed.
‘You’re here now,’ he flung up at her. ‘And I’d much prefer it if you weren’t. So get some clothes on and get yourself and your lover out of here—fast! Or I won’t be answerable for the consequences.’
Andrea pouted petulantly at his tone, but she read it well enough to know that he meant exactly what he said. Flouncing into the bedroom, she must have tossed on clothes at speed, pushed into action by the threat in Damon’s tone, because it was only minutes before she reappeared, fully dressed in a tight white shirt and the miniest of miniskirts, the red satin robe slung carelessly over one arm. Clopping inelegantly down the stairs in white sling-back stilettos, she marched over to the small group in the hall.
‘I believe this is yours.’
She tossed the robe onto the floor at their feet, then turned to the still staring Jason and caught hold of his arm.
‘C’mon, Jace,’ she said. ‘It’s time we were out of here.’
‘I should listen to the lady, Jace…’ Damon laced both the nickname and the word ‘lady’ with the stinging bite of acidic sarcasm. ‘It is time you were going.’
‘But—’ Jason began, then looked straight into Damon’s deep black eyes and clearly thought better of what he had been about to say.
‘OK,’ he muttered. ‘I’m coming.’
But there was something in his voice that told Sarah he was not finished yet. That he had more to say—or do—before he left them in peace.
Instinctively she tensed in Damon’s arms, waiting, wondering…
But whatever she had feared never came.
The slam of the door behind the departing pair was a sudden shock to her system, jarring every nerve in her tense body and making her head jerk upwards from its secure pillowing on Damon’s hard chest.
‘It’s OK.’
Lazily he stilled her, soothed her with a stroking hand down over her hair, her shoulder, her arm.
‘They’ve gone.’ He looked down at her, grinned into her warily watchful green eyes. ‘It’s safe to come out now.’
‘I wasn’t scared!’
Desperately, Sarah tried to gather together some of the tattered strands of her shattered self-esteem so as to meet the smile in his eyes with some degree of composure. He looked too damn pleased with himself by half.
‘I wasn’t!’ she repeated more emphatically, to answer the tormenting question that was clearly in his thoughts, lifting the corner of one jet-black eyebrow in mocking inquiry. ‘I was simply—held prisoner by you.’
To emphasise the point she twisted in his still restraining arms, attempting to pull herself free. At first, for a heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to resist, forcing her into either an ungainly and undignified struggle or a humiliating submission. But then, suddenly, he released her with an abruptness that had her swaying uncomfortably on unsteady feet, stubbornly refusing to reach out a hand and cling on to the strength of his arms for support.
The fact that he so obviously knew exactly what was going through her mind only added a hundredfold to her discomfiture. She hated the way that the gleam in his eyes brightened, the tiny quirk upwards at the corner of his lips revealing his amusement.
‘So now you’re free,’ he drawled softly.
‘Yes,’ Sarah managed, adding because she felt she had to, ‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’
He was bending as he spoke, reaching down to scoop up the red robe from where Andrea had tossed it moments before.
‘This is yours, I believe.’
Sarah turned a glance of loathing on the inoffensive article that Damon held out to her. It was impossible not to notice the contrast between the strength of the blunt, strong, tanned fingers and the fine, slippery material that seemed totally insubstantial in the firm grasp. But the thought of touching either made her shiver inside.
Slowly she reached out, took hold of the crimson silk, then gave in to her inclinations and, crushing the garment mercilessly, she crumpled it into a ball and flung it with all her strength as far away from her as she could manage.
‘I don’t want it! Not after she’s worn it! I couldn’t bear to touch it again.’
Damon’s dark eyes followed the bright sliver of material as it sailed through the air in a graceful arc and fell to the ground once more. Then his gaze swung back to Sarah’s face, looking deep into her eyes.
‘I’ll buy you another.’
‘No need—I…’
The words died away as she realised not just what he had said but the implications behind it. Clearly Damon planned to stay around, for a while at least. And that was not something she was comfortable with. Certainly not after the scene he had just witnessed, and the interpretation he had obviously put on it. And, even worse, after the discovery that she had made about herself.
‘I can get one myself. I earn a good salary at the art gallery; I can afford to buy myself a nightgown…’
She was speaking only to fill the silence, she knew. And to distract her own thoughts. There were too many things she didn’t want to think about—didn’t dare to think about—and for now it was so much easier to concentrate on the immediate present and what was happening in it.
After all, there was more than enough to face up to there. Sarah drew in her breath sharply and let it out again on a silent sigh. Jason might have gone—and Andrea. And quite frankly she was more than glad to see the back of both of them. But Damon was still here. And getting rid of him was a different prospect altogether.
Her shoulders, which had relaxed in the moments she had watched Jason and Andrea walk away, now tensed again. Her throat tightened so that she had to swallow hard to ease the dryness there, and her chin came up as defiance flared in the green depths of her eyes.
‘What are you doing here, Damon?’
‘I came to see you, of course, my darling…’
‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it!’ Sarah put in hastily and sharply, terrified of hearing that emotive word ‘wife’ on his lips.
Once she had been proud and happy—so happy—to be his wife, even if for his own reasons Damon had insisted that, for a while at least, they told no one the truth. But now their brief, painful façade of a marriage was something she desperately wanted to forget. To obliterate from her mind, if she couldn’t erase it from her past.
‘I want to know why you’re here—in London.’
‘I have business in town. Important meetings.’
It was not the truth, at least not the full truth, Damon admitted to himself. But the truth wasn’t something he was prepared to admit to. Not yet. Perhaps not ever at all.
He had had a meeting planned—one with Sarah to discuss their marriage, or what was left of it. The thoughts that had been in his mind as he’d arrived at the house such a short time before now came back to haunt him, mocking his gullible beliefs and the naïve hope that had been uppermost in his mind then.
He had given Sarah enough time to calm down, he had told himself. After six months of living on her own, stubbornly refusing to see him, returning every one of his letters unopened, surely she was now prepared to listen?
She would listen, he had told himself. No matter what he had to do to make her. He would talk—and she would listen. Somehow he would make her come back to Greece with him. To Mykonos. Where he would show her what he had done. And then…
He hadn’t got any further than that.
‘I see—business. Of course. What else?’
Sarah’s voice was cold and tight. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said she sounded disappointed. Which might have pleased him when he had first reached the house—when he’d still had hopes and illusions of a future. Before the appearance of Jason and his obvious familiarity with Sarah’s bedroom had shattered those illusions.
‘You know me, ghineka mou,’ he shot back. ‘Always busy, making deals, signing contracts.’
‘Acquiring land?’ Sarah returned with even more bite in her tone. Whatever disappointment she had been feeling a moment before, if disappointment was the right word, it was now totally submerged under the angry bitterness that blazed from her eyes. ‘Built any nice extensions to your hotels lately, Damon?’
‘Not since you left, my love,’ he returned, his tone dripping saccharine-sweetness. ‘And, as I recall, you never signed the papers agreeing to the one that I wanted.’
‘No, I didn’t, did I? That must have made things rather awkward for you.’
Damon’s smile in reply to the barbed comment was grim, tight, totally without any warmth.
‘No more awkward than they were already, agape mou. I told you then that your ownership of that land was not why I married you.’
‘I know what you told me, husband, dear, but I also know what I believe.’
Let him think that what had driven them apart was the piece of land that the Nicolaides Corporation coveted most on all the island of Mykonos. That was the reason she had given him for leaving in the letter she had left behind, the one she had clung to when he had come after her in a towering rage, demanding that she return at once. That and the fact that she had grown tired of their marriage, bored with life on the small Cyclades island. And it was one she would far rather have him believe than the actual, the hatefully painful truth.
‘Admit it, it was remarkably inconvenient for you that I discovered that the land my grandfather had left me was just the part of the island that you wanted. Especially when the old man had declared to your father’s face that he would rather die than sign the land over to anyone from your family.’
Her grandfather had been half Greek on his mother’s side. Through that line he had inherited the land on Mykonos. The land in question lay between two of the Nicolaides Corporation’s smaller hotels, and it had been a long-held ambition of both Damon and his father to link the hotels into one spectacular resort by building across the empty space. But Alexander Meyerson’s mother’s family had had a long-running feud with the Nicolaides clan, one that he had held fast to in spite of the increasingly huge amounts offered in exchange for the tiny portion of the island he owned, much to Aristotle Nicolaides’ increasing frustration.
So when Damon had learned that Sarah, as her grandfather’s only heir, would now own the land on Mykonos, he had come looking for her.
And she, poor blindly besotted fool that she was, had made matters so much easier for him by falling head over heels madly in love.
‘How you must have cursed those lawyers who wrote and let me know about my luck before you’d had time to get me to sign on any dotted lines.’
‘It was certainly, as you said—inconvenient,’ Damon growled, his stunning features setting into a dark frown. ‘But it was not necessarily fatal. Or it need not have been if you had only stayed to talk things over with me, or come back…’
‘Come back!’ Sarah couldn’t hold back the exclamation of shock and disgust that was pushed from her lips by his outrageous declaration. ‘Come back to a marriage that had never been a real one right from the start? That was built on nothing but lies and deceit? A marriage that you had been determined not to let anyone know about because you were ashamed of it?’
‘Not ashamed!’ Damon flung at her. ‘It just would have been…difficult to make our marriage public at that point.’
‘I’ll bet it would! Well, perhaps in the end I ought to thank you for that. After all, you spared me a lot of humiliation and the adverse publicity that I might have had to put up with if people had found out that we were married. Now all I have to do is wait for the legalities to be sorted out and we can be divorced as quietly as we were married. Excuse me.’
She tried to sweep past him, only to have to come to an awkward halt as he blocked her way, coming between her and her path across the hall.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Upstairs.’
‘Why?’
‘Is it any business of yours?’
‘Humour me.’
Seeing the stubborn, unmoving set of his face, the taut line of his hard jaw, she sighed her exasperation, knowing only too well that he had no intention of letting her pass until she told him something.
‘I want to go and strip the sheets off the bed that—that Jason and his fancy piece used!’
Distaste curled her lip, tasted bitter on her tongue.
‘I have to put them in the wash immediately—though if I’m honest I’d prefer to burn the damn things!’
To her relief Damon sidestepped neatly, moving out of her way, but as she mounted the first of the stairs she realised that he was right there behind her, following close on her heels.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No!’
But he totally ignored her protest and just kept on coming.
‘Damon…’
She whirled on the stairs until she was facing him. Looking down into his handsome face, she saw the determination stamped hard on it, the unyielding set to his jaw.
‘I don’t need you!’
Just the thought of having this man, the man who had been her husband for such a brief time, follow her into her bedroom spoke of an intimacy that she was totally unwilling to allow herself to recall. I don’t want you, she should have said. But the words had other, much more disturbing implications that meant her voice would not actually speak them with the conviction she needed.
‘It’ll be easier with two,’ Damon returned, and just kept on coming so that she was obliged to skip backwards hastily up the stairs if she was not to have him collide with her.
‘I’ve done it by myself many times…’
‘I’m sure you have.’
Another step upwards necessitated another couple of hasty jumps back and away to avoid a crash.
‘But I’m here now, so there’s no reason for you to have to do it alone today.’
‘Damon, it’s my room!’
Exasperation, a touch of breathlessness from the undignified scramble up the staircase, and a shockingly sensitive awareness of the man below her put a betraying shake into her voice. The physical strength of his chest and shoulders was emphasised from this angle, the gleam of the sunlight on the dark waves of his hair made it shine like glossy silk, and the flash of white teeth as he grinned up at her was startling against the olive skin of his face.
‘Sarah, it’s my house!’ he retorted, with an infuriatingly deliberate echo of her own tone, her own emphasis.
And what could she say in response to that? There was no answer she could give him. At least not one that he would accept, pay any heed to. It was his house, and that was the fact. She hadn’t wanted to take anything from him, but she had desperately needed a roof over her head. And for all she knew Damon had already built on her disputed land. He was perfectly capable of ignoring any morality in the case and just going right ahead.
With inelegant haste she hurried up the remaining stairs and arrived safely on the landing, facing him with determined defiance.
‘You said I could live here!’ she protested, and shivered as she saw a dark tide of change cross his face, shadowing his eyes.
‘I said you could live here,’ he acceded. ‘Not you and sundry assorted hangers-on.’
Now was the time to tell him the truth, Sarah knew. The time to point out that, no matter how it had seemed, Jason had had neither her agreement nor her permission to be in the house. At least not in her bedroom, and certainly not in her bed.
So why did the words stick in her throat? Why could she not just fling them in his face and be done with it?
Because he had no right to interfere in her life. He had given up any rights to that when he had betrayed her trust and treated her as a thing, a chattel, something to be used for his own ends, not as a true wife of his heart.
Wife of his heart!
Hah! That was a joke. A very sick, very black sort of joke. One that slashed at her heart, her soul, like a rusty knife, reopening old wounds that had barely even begun to heal.
She had never really been Damon’s wife, not in the truest sense of the word—not in any sense of the word, except perhaps the sexual one. She had been his wife in bed and nowhere else. He had wanted her physically. There was no way he could have hidden, or faked, the passionate desire he had felt for her. And that must have made the rest of his scheme so much easier for him to carry out.
The pain that came along with the rush of memory drove all thought of common sense from her mind and instead had her spitting at him in blind rage.
‘And I suppose that you’ve been living a pure and celibate life for the last six months!’
He actually looked taken aback by her attack. It even silenced him, and she watched him withdraw into himself, shutters coming down behind the gleaming jet eyes, hiding his thoughts from her.
‘Nothing to say, Damon? I thought not. Ever heard of the saying about pots calling kettles black?’
‘I know the saying, yes. But I do not see its relevance to the current situation.’
He had the nerve to look innocent—and it was unnerving just how innocent he could appear, with his deep, dark eyes wide open in apparent ingenuousness.
For a brief second Sarah closed her own lids against the pain of memory. Against the hated recollection of the moment that Aristotle Nicolaides had revealed the truth about his son’s relationship with Eugenia Stakis. About the marriage that had been planned for so long and that would unite the fortunes of the two Greek dynasties as well as the two lovers. In a moment, he had explained just why Damon had insisted that this pragmatic, purely business deal of a marriage should be kept secret from everyone.
But of course Damon didn’t even know that his poor deceived wife had any knowledge of his machiavellian behaviour and so he still thought he could get away with pretending he was blameless.
‘Of course you don’t.’
Opening her eyes again, but carefully avoiding meeting any lying glance that Damon might send in her direction, she swung away, turning her attention to the rumpled bed before her.
‘I didn’t give Jason free run of my house!’ she said abruptly, covering the savage bite of misery with a sudden rush into action as she snatched up a pillow and shook it roughly out of its pale gold case. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t even have given him a key if I’d known the use he was going to put it to.’
‘But, as you’ve made only too plain, the way you’ve lived your life this past six months is no business of mine.’
Damon’s voice had grown colder by the second. Now it sounded positively glacial, sending icy shivers sliding down Sarah’s spine.
She managed some unintelligible murmur that he could take as agreement or not as he wished and dumped the denuded pillow on the floor, flinging the cotton case after it. It was as she reached for the crumpled sheet that a sudden recollection of how she had felt as she’d stood outside on the landing and heard the sound of Jason’s voice attacked without warning, making her sway weakly, fingers clenching on the bedding until the knuckles showed white.
‘Sarah?’
Damon must have been watching her every move because he stepped forward, reaching her before she had even realised herself that she was no longer steady on her feet.
‘Sarah!’ he said again, his voice rough with some emotion that she couldn’t begin to name.
There was anger in there, but at who? And it was blended with a whole range of feelings that made her head whirl just trying to separate them.
But she was weak enough not to resist when he gathered her into his arms, held her close against him, her cheek resting on his shirt, one hand cradling the back of her head.
‘Sarah, the bastard isn’t worth it! Don’t waste your tears on him.’
Tears?
Somehow Sarah edged a hand up to touch her face and find that Damon had spoken nothing less than the truth. Her skin was wet with tears that she had been unaware of letting escape, her eyelashes spiked into damply clinging clumps.
They were the tears that had been threatening ever since she had pushed open the bedroom door a crack and seen Jason—the man who had said that all he wanted was to heal her broken heart—naked in bed with another woman. She would feel better if she could let them fall. If she could simply give in to her feelings and, abandoning all restraint, weep her heart out on Damon’s supportive shoulder.
It was a dangerously tempting prospect and one she was having to struggle fiercely against, because if she did start crying then she knew the interpretation that Damon would put on it. The only interpretation that he believed was possible.
He would think that she was crying for Jason.
He would believe that the other man had callously broken her heart by being caught in her bed with his mistress in the middle of the afternoon.
He would curse him, call him every name under the sun, possibly even threaten vengeance on him. In fact, if she knew this husband of hers, estranged or not, he might actually try to take off after Jason and then she would have to hold him back, beg him to stay.
And if she did that then she knew it would destroy her.
There could never have been a good moment for Damon to reappear in her life, but this afternoon had to be the worst one possible.
At last she had thought that she was finally growing a new, protective skin over the wounds that this man had inflicted on her in their short marriage. Only this morning she had told herself that she was gradually starting to get her life back under her control again, get things in order, consider the prospect of beginning again without dissolving into total misery. She had a good job as PA to Rhys Morgan, an international art dealer and owner of a hugely prestigious gallery here in London. Jason seemed to have set himself to charming her out of the black depression into which she had fallen since her return from Greece. And, most important of all, the husband she had adored, and who had taken her love and used it for his own totally selfish ends, was thousands of miles away, on the Greek island he called home.
The only reason Jason had been in the house at all today was because she had been expecting an important delivery. The freezer in the kitchen had died with a spectacularly dramatic waste of food, and she had had to buy another. But when she had been asked to go in to the gallery to cover for a sick workmate, she’d thought she would have to cancel the delivery until Jason, who had recently been made redundant from his own job, had stepped in and offered to wait for it instead. They had been out on a couple of what he called dates but in her eyes they were little more than friends.
‘I’m not doing anything important,’ he’d said. ‘Only checking the jobs pages—I can do that as easily at your place as I can at home.’
But then she had come home unexpectedly early, having been given the afternoon off by an unusually preoccupied Rhys, who had clearly wanted to be anywhere but in the office, and she had seen Jason’s car parked outside as she had walked up the street towards the house. Some instinct had kept her silent as she opened the door, crossed the hall. A faint noise from the first floor, the sound of laughter—another woman’s laughter—had drawn her to the stairs, and she had mounted them in silence.
‘This is the life, Jace! I could really get to like this!’ The woman’s voice had floated out clearly to her as she reached the top, and set foot on the thick blue carpet of the landing.
‘Well, don’t get too comfortable, honey.’ Jason’s drawling, upper-class tones had been unmistakable. ‘The prissy Ms Meyerson will be home by five—and you’ll have to get your pretty little butt out of here well before then.’
‘I wish I didn’t have to! I don’t like sharing you with her, Jacey. I really don’t.’
‘And I don’t like wasting my time with her either, sweetie,’ Jason had hastily assured her. ‘But the lady is loaded! Look at this house for a start. It’s huge, and in this part of London it must be worth a fortune! She has to be worth millions. And she’s almost mine. She’s already given me a key so that I can come and go as I please. Another couple of weeks and I’ll have her eating out of my hand…’
And it was then that she had known. Known that whoever it was who had said that lightning didn’t strike twice had been absolutely right.
Because even as she had listened to Jason and his witchy girlfriend planning to play on her emotions simply to use her, she had realised that she just didn’t care. That in spite of her barely formed hopes, her dreams of starting again, Jason didn’t mean a thing to her, and his greedy, grasping plans even less.
No, the shock that had ripped through her, shattering her composure and destroying all that hard-won peace of mind, was the realisation that it had all been just a delusion. That her hopes of a new life, of a new beginning, putting behind her the pain and the betrayal of the past, were built on the shaky foundations of self-deceit. She was no more ‘over’ Damon than she was capable of flying to the moon.
And if she had any room for doubt, any hope of being wrong, that hope had been totally destroyed in the moment that she had blundered into Damon’s arms and into the feeling that she had come home.
She had fallen totally, blindly and irrevocably in love with Damon Nicolaides in the first seconds that she had ever seen him, and nothing that had happened had changed that. He had taken her heart prisoner and he still held it captive in his strong, powerful hands. All the dreaming of a future, of a new life, had been just a fantasy, one that had evaporated like mist before the sun at the first touch of reality.
The reality was that she loved Damon desperately and she always would, while he had never felt anything for her but the searing passion that had driven him to take her to his bed. And even that had been a complication he hadn’t looked for, hadn’t wanted in his campaign to use her to get what he wanted.
It was for that reason and that alone that she now wanted to weep. To try to wash away the savage pain in her heart under the rush of tears.
And of course she could do nothing of the sort for fear of betraying herself totally to the man who was responsible for that anguish in the first place.
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT the hell was he doing? Damon asked himself furiously, suddenly convinced that he had made the worst move possible since he had come into this house.
Getting hold of Sarah like this had to have been the dumbest, the craziest, the most ill-judged thing he could have done. And he was regretting it savagely.
Or was he?
His thoughts might be screaming the need for caution, but in his senses it didn’t feel like regret.
It had been bad enough when she had blundered into his grasp downstairs and he had let his arms close around her, holding her tight. He had known exactly what he was doing then. He’d been supremely conscious of Jason the rat standing there in the hallway beside them, watching every move. And those moves had been deliberately calculated for their maximum effect on the other man.
But they had had plenty of effect on him too. It had been impossible to hold this woman, to feel the satin warmth of her skin, inhale the sweet, clean scent of her body, and not react in the most primitively masculine way. Even now, his body still ached with the memory of the instant, savage hardening, the tightness that had twisted at his guts. The thought of how it had once been.
How easy it would once have been simply to fold her in his arms, lift her from the floor, carry her over to the bed. He could lower her to the mattress, come down beside her…
‘Damon?’
There was a hesitation in Sarah’s voice, a questioning note that asked, without any more words being needed, just what he thought he was doing.
What did he think he was doing?
What was he doing?
He was holding Sarah in the way that he had dreamed of, hungered for, over the past six months. He had her in his arms again and her hair was like silk under his cheek, her breath a warm whisper across his skin. When she spoke, her soft mouth came dangerously close to the strong muscle that corded his neck. If he moved—just an inch—then her lips would touch, would caress, would entice…
‘Damon—please!’
It was the note of breathless protest on the words that told him how, unthinkingly, his hold on her had tightened, driving the air from her slender body, almost crushing the delicate bones of her ribcage.
‘Sighnomi—I’m sorry…’ he murmured, but he still couldn’t let her go.
For a second he eased his hold on her, then almost immediately tightened it again, so fiercely that her head came up sharply, wide, startled green eyes looking up into his in an expression of shock.
‘No, I’m not sorry,’ he muttered, the words rough and thick. ‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted this? Dreamed of it?’
The nights had been the worst. The nights when once he had lain awake, the pulsing throb of sexual satisfaction slowly, gradually ebbing from his satiated senses. He had never been able to sleep, because even when he had just experienced the wild, primal explosion of the fiercest climaxes he had ever known he had still been unable to surrender to the weary satisfaction that engulfed his body.
Instead he had always had to lie there; to prop his head up slightly on the pillow so that he could watch her drift into sleep. And even just watching her had been a sensual act in itself.
His gaze had drifted from the high, smooth forehead, down over her softly closed eyelids, where the long, thick lashes lay like feathered crescents on the pale skin of her cheeks. He had traced the warm, sensual curve of her mouth, the sweet line of her jaw and chin, the length of her throat. And when his eyes had moved to the rich curves of her body, to the swell of her breasts and hips, still stained with the afterglow of their passion, then his body had hardened all over again, threatening to throw off the satiated sense of fulfilment in a second and start to clamour all over again for something more. For the renewal of the pleasure his senses had known; to climb once again to the peak of ecstasy that he had experienced during the night. He always ended up wanting her again with even more hunger than he had felt the very first time.
Theos! He felt that way now. His body was on fire; he had never felt so viciously hard, so brutally hungry. If she moved against him, it was blissful agony, making him grit his teeth hard against the groan of tortured response.
‘Damon—you’re hurting me.’
‘Huh?’
Jolted from the fever of his memories, he looked down at her through passion-glazed eyes, struggling to focus. Her face was turned up towards his and her eyes were huge and emerald-brilliant against her pale skin.
‘Sighnomi…’ he began, then broke off violently. His hands clenched on her arms again, giving her a small, reproving shake.
‘Maybe I want to hurt you—I want you to know how I feel. To understand what it’s been like…’
‘I do…I do…’
Kristos! Had he put those tears into her eyes? Had he made them spill out from under her lids until they soaked the fine skin of her cheeks? They didn’t run down her face, but simply lay, like a soft sheen, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, a silent but eloquent reproach.
‘Sarah!’
Her name escaped his lips like a sigh in the same moment that his proud, dark head bent, his mouth coming down, making her jump like a startled deer.
It was his gentleness that was shocking. It was so totally unexpected and so much at odds with the hard, heated pressure of the fiercely aroused body that was crushed so tightly against hers.
But his lips were soft and gentle, tenderly kissing away the tear stains from her face, pressing her eyelids shut and brushing the lingering salt drops from her lashes. And it seemed to Sarah that with them went her fury and distress, the need to fight seeping from her like air from a pricked balloon.
‘Oh, Damon…’
Her breath caught in her throat, escaping on a small, choking cry, a sound of surrender. She subsided softly against him, feeling the need of his support, deeply grateful for his strength holding her when she couldn’t stand alone.
Overwhelmed by all that she had just realised, she buried her face in his shirt, not knowing whether she needed to hide or simply to get much closer to him, burrowing into security like some small, vulnerable creature. She felt his mouth drift over her tumbled auburn hair, the warmth of his breath on the delicate curl of her outer ear. The clean, faintly musky scent of his skin tormented her with the memories it evoked, the heat of his body surrounding her like a protective cloak.
And with the memories came the awakening of need, the savage burn of hunger.
‘Damon…’
Even in her own ears, the sound of his name had changed totally. It was no longer the soft, submissive surrender, but a sharpened sound of longing, of demand. And as she spoke she drew in her breath on a sobbing gasp, turning her face to him once more.
‘Damon, please—kiss me. Kiss me properly.’
‘Kiss you—’
It was raw and thick, hopelessly roughened at the edges.
‘Oh, lady…’
She didn’t know who moved first, whether his dark head came down hard and fast or her own lifted to his as swiftly. She only knew that in the space of a swift, thudding heartbeat, their mouths had met and clashed and crushed so fiercely that she almost expected to see sparks fly up into the air from their joining.
All the loneliness, all the yearning, all the misery of the past six months was in that kiss. All the memory of the long, empty days and the cruel, bleak nights swelled up inside her, rose, and spilled out fiercely like red-hot lava erupting from a volcano and surging, wild and unstoppable, down the slopes of the mountain.
They snatched at each other’s mouths, nipped, bit, came apart to draw in deep, ragged breaths, then rushed together again, unable to stay apart. It was like a fight for survival more than any sort of caress. Like a wild, primal mating ritual that had nothing of the civilised or of courtship in it, only raging need, uncontrollable craving, the desperation of having lost once and the terrible fear that it could happen all over again.
‘I want you,’ Damon muttered harshly against her mouth. ‘Want you—want you…’
His command of language seeming to desert him, he broke into Greek, alternating the words of his native tongue with his suddenly roughened and disjointed English in a raw and incoherent litany of desire.
And Sarah could do nothing but nod again and again, her own mouth only capable of forming the word ‘yes’, repeated with the gathering intensity of a growing thunder storm, a counterpoint to his harsh declaration.
‘Yes, Damon, yes, yes, yes…’
This was all she would ever have of Damon, was the phrase that ran through Sarah’s head. If she could only have today and this elemental, primitive passion that had flared between them, then she would take it and welcome it and enjoy it for as long as she was able.
No, enjoy was not the right word. It came nowhere close to describing this starving hunger, this aching, desperate need.
This feeling was as essential to her as each raw, painful breath she dragged into her burning lungs between each hungry kiss. Without it she could never live, only exist. And yet at the same time she felt each moment of contact, each desperate caress, as torment in her soul, ripping and shredding, increasing the emptiness in her heart in the same second that it appeased the hunger in her body.
‘I want you too, Damon. I’m desperate for you…desperate…’
Her hands spoke for her when she could no longer string two coherent words together. Grabbing at the soft white cloth of his polo shirt, she wrenched it free of the waistband of his trousers, roughly pushing it aside so that her greedy hands could have free access to the bronzed skin she sought, her fingers almost scrabbling his clothing out of the way in her rush to touch him.
‘Sarah—sweetheart—angel…’
There was a shaken, rough note of laughter threading through Damon’s vain attempt at a protest, and the hands he brought up to try and catch at hers, to still them, or at the very least to slow their frantic, urgent movements, were as unsteady as his words.
‘There’s no need to rush—we have all day, the night…’
But even as he spoke, his own actions denied the muttered restraint, the urge to caution.
His movements mirroring Sarah’s, he pushed her blouse up and away from her skirt. The ominous wrenching, tearing sound told of the fact that he had completely forgotten that hers was not a stretchy T-shirt, and a second later there were several soft thuds as broken buttons flipped away and bounced on the dressing table, the window sill, the floor.
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