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‘I want you…’
She wasn’t sure which one of them said the words first. The truth was that the declaration was torn from both of them in almost the same moment so that the rough-voiced assertion sounded as if there hadn’t been two single people speaking it but one of them as a whole, both male and female proclaiming the overwhelming primal need that had them in its grip.
‘I want you…’ Penny managed again, her low, shaken voice sounding like an echo that had fallen from the very first pronouncement and was now fading away into a broken whisper, almost drowned out by the crash of the waves against the cliffs beyond the open door. ‘I want you.’
‘And you shall have me,’ was Zarek’s ardent response as he lifted her from the floor, swinging her up into his arms and carrying her swiftly from the room.
The hallway and stairs were still in almost total darkness but Zarek seemed to have eyes like a cat so that he didn’t hesitate for a moment but strode swiftly up the stairs, even taking them two at a time at one point, in his haste to reach their bedroom. Kicking open the door, he hurried her across to the bed where he tumbled her down on the covers, coming down beside her in an instant.
‘Ise panemorfi…Ise panemorfi.’
He was muttering the phrase over and over again, punctuating each word with a kiss on a different part of her exposed body. Her face, her shoulders, her arms, down the slopes of her breasts. And then, at last, at long, long last, his mouth closed, hot and hungry, over one tight nipple. Sharp teeth scraped it so gently for a moment, before he suckled hard to relieve the tiny pain, making her arch against him with a low, wordless cry of pleasure.
‘Z-Zarek…’
His name was all she could manage as any thought and the ability to find coherent words were obliterated by the sheer force of the sensual storm that took her. Acting blind, she had managed to pull open his shirt, tug it part way off his shoulders, so that at least her hands could explore the warm, tight contours of his chest, tangle in the rough haze of black body hair that tickled her palms, curled around her fingertips.
Zarek’s hands were dealing with her dress, taking it down further at the front, tugging it up at the skirt to expose her legs, the plain white knickers that were now her only covering apart from the band of bunched material at her waist. And they didn’t last for long under the determined assault of those powerful hands that tore them apart as if they had been made of nothing more substantial than tissue paper.
She had barely time to gasp in shocked excitement when those wicked fingers, gentler now, were stroking through the dark curls he had exposed, finding the moist cleft between her legs, the tiny bud that pulsed with hungry need.
She was so aroused that the first intimate touch of his hand on her had her crying out and throwing her head back against the pillows, her eyes closed so that she could focus on the shock waves of pleasure that rocked her world.
‘I missed this…’ Zarek’s rough mutter close to her ear echoed her own private thoughts and all the time that knowing hand teased and tormented her, building the desire to the point where it almost broke her, then easing back to take her away from the edge just for a moment. ‘And I know you did too. Missed what we had together…’
Penny had no idea where the sudden change of mood came from. The abrupt and totally unexpected switch from blind and greedy passion to a new and very different frame of mind, one that shocked her out of the heated sense of oblivion into which she had fallen. It was as if someone had suddenly opened a window, letting in an icy rush of cold night air that feathered over her exposed skin, cooling her blood and making her shiver in shocked response. As if a cold, cruel voice had spoken out of the blue, and the words she heard inside her head had the force of a slap in the face, jolting her back to bitter reality with a rush.
Missed what we had…
Missed what we had…
And what had they had? Blazing passion, true—a burning physical desire that had blinded her to everything else. But nothing more. There had been nothing between them but sex. At least on Zarek’s part.
And was she going to let him just walk back into her life—and into her bed again—without so much as an argument? When Zarek had left for the Troy she had known that she had never meant her wild and hurting threats that she would not wait for him. She’d told herself that if she stayed, then when he returned she had to stand up to him. That there had to be more to make this marriage work, her love alone wasn’t enough to sustain it, and something was going to have to change.
Two years was a much, much longer wait than the few days she had been expecting, but her resolve needed to still be so much the same. More so if she was to be able to survive as Zarek’s wife ever again.
Nothing would change if she gave in at the first kiss, the first caress.
‘Zarek…’ She tried to speak but it seemed that all strength had drained from her voice and nothing audible came out.
‘Gineka mou…’
Zarek had no such trouble and as he pressed his mouth against her breast again his words were perfectly audible. As was the darkly possessive note in them.
Gineka mou…My wife.
He was staking his claim on her once more, using sex to do so. That was how he’d won her, how he’d held her blind and deceived for the first six months of their marriage. But then she’d learned the truth…
‘No!’
This time she had no trouble in making herself heard. The cry of rejection was loud and clear, echoing round the empty house. In the same moment she tried to push at Zarek, push him away from her. Free herself from his possessive and dangerously enticing hold. His hands still caressed, his mouth pursed to press another kiss against her breast and she could feel the hot, moist touch of his tongue against her skin. Another moment and she would be lost again. Already she could feel the tidal waves of dark desire sweeping over her, threatening to drown out the frantic voice of sanity and self-preservation.
‘I said no!’
With urgent, desperate hands, she pushed at him but he was too big, his powerful body too heavy for her attempts to move him. So throwing caution to the wind she resorted to desperate measures. Reaching out, she grabbed a handful of his black hair—two—twisted her fingers in it, refusing to let herself think about the silky slide of it in her grip, and tugged. Hard.
‘Gamoto!’
She didn’t have to know much Greek to understand that Zarek’s violent explosion of sound was definitely a swear word. She only had to see the way his head came up, his eyes flaring sharply.
‘What the…?’
‘I said no!’
Surprise gave her an advantage she hadn’t expected and with a frantic wriggle, another push, she was free of his confining weight, out of the bed and thudding onto the floor. Panic carried her halfway across the room, almost falling as she struggled to keep her balance and get as far away from him as possible so that he couldn’t reach out and grab her, use his superior strength to hold her, keep her prisoner.
‘What the hell…?’
If Zarek’s eyes had been sparking irritation before, now they were positively incandescent. They burned with fury, turning a look on her that she felt really should have shrivelled her into a pile of dust where she stood, silhouetted against the window, the moonlight lighting her from behind.
‘You…’
Zarek stopped abruptly, clearly fighting to bring himself under control. With an effort he drew in a long harsh breath between his gritted teeth and raked an angry hand through his hair, sweeping it back from his forehead so that the harsh white line of the cruel scar showed up so much more clearly in stark relief.
‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded again, his words falling ragged and raw into the shocked stillness of the night. ‘What sort of game—?’
‘No game!’ Penny put in frantically, suddenly terribly afraid that he might still consider this some risky sort of foreplay, designed to heighten anticipation, increase appetite, and decide to go along with what he thought she wanted.
She had had a narrow enough escape as it was, barely managing to escape before the dark seas of need had closed over her head completely, drowning her for ever. If he touched her again she didn’t know if she had the strength to resist him.
‘No game at all! I’m deadly serious…’
The look he flung at her almost totally destroyed what little was left of her self-control, but, heaving in a desperate breath, she forced herself to face him with as much strength and defiance as she could muster.
‘This has gone far enough—too far. I don’t want it. I don’t want you.’
‘Liar!’
It was low and deadly and this time his eyes burned molten with rejection of every word she’d said.
‘You little liar. You wanted me every bit as much as I wanted you. You said so—’
‘I was wrong…’
‘And your body said so too. It’s still telling the same story.’
A wild, contemptuous gesture in her direction emphasised the angry words.
‘You can’t deny—’
‘Oh, but I can—I will!’
Her voice was pitched too high, too shrill. It sounded too despairing, too desperate to protect herself. Which was hardly surprising when she could barely bring her whirling senses back under any degree of control. Her pulse was still pounding in her veins, sounding like thunder in her head.
‘You would?’
Cynical disbelief rang rough in Zarek’s voice, making her shiver because she knew that she couldn’t refute. He knew that she was lying and so did she.
‘You’d deny this…’
Before she could even realise that he had moved he was at her side in three long strides. Hard hands clamped around her naked shoulders, bruising fingers digging into the skin as he swung her round in front of him. This way she faced the big full-length mirror set into the wardrobe on the opposite side of the room.
‘You’d deny this?’ Zarek repeated savagely. ‘Look at yourself!’
Penny closed her eyes tight. she didn’t want to look—didn’t need to look. She knew what he meant; knew what she would see. But a rough shake of her shoulders forced her to open them again. When she did so the first thing she saw was Zarek’s dark eyes looking over her shoulder, meeting hers in the glass. That was bad enough but the burn of something dangerous in that glittering stare made her drop her gaze and face her reflection squarely, wincing in embarrassment as she did so.
It was worse than she had expected.
The green dress was bunched up around her waist, her wildly disordered clothing exposing her breasts. The creamy flesh still marked with red as the result of his kisses, the abrasion of his late evening stubble against the sensitive skin. Her hair was a wild bird’s nest around her face, tumbling in tangled chaos on to her shoulders. Her nipples were still hard and flushed with pink, faintly gleaming with the moisture left on them by his tormenting mouth.
Her breasts stung where they were now exposed to the air and rapidly cooling from the heated response of just moments before. And between her legs the throbbing need his deliberately provoking caresses had awoken and then stoked with every touch was still a burning torture of demand. One that made her feel it might actually drive her to lose consciousness from the agonising frustration of having to fight it. Just for a second she felt weak enough to sag back against Zarek’s strength and support, but realised in time how appalling a mistake that would be.
‘I mean—I can’t deny that it happened. That I responded.’
It seemed that was not the response Zarek was expecting. The grip on her shoulders eased slightly, becoming loose enough for her to twist away. At least this way she didn’t have to look at herself, or meet his darkly accusing eyes.
‘I’d be a fool to try and do that—wouldn’t I? I mean— look at me…’
No, that was a mistake. Bringing his eyes to her exposed body, reminding him of how she looked, how he had made her look, was not going to help her in this. With a flare of hot embarrassment flooding up into her cheeks, she tugged at the skirt of her dress with one hand, the top of it with another, both movements having very little practical effect.
‘Here…’
To her total shock and consternation, Zarek moved across the room, snagged a blue silky robe from the back of the door, shook it out and held it open.
‘What?’
‘Put it on…’
At the sight of her wary-eyed hesitation, he muttered an imprecation in savage Greek.
‘I am not going to harm you.’
‘I know…’
Whatever else there might have been between them—or not—Penny knew Zarek was not was physically cruel or hurtful.
But these were not normal circumstances. She still had no idea at all what had happened to Zarek while he had been away. The whole time of his absence had started with the violence of the hijacking of the Troy by the pirates. Then there had been the ordeal of being held hostage in the tiny, enclosed boat, the bullet that had been meant for his head and had only by some miracle missed by inches.
And after that? That had all been in the very first week—God knew what had happened in the years afterward.
Oh, but the truth was that even when they had been together, she had never truly known him. She had married him in a rush, in the heat of the biggest crush she had ever had in her life. She had been wildly in love, with the emphasis on wild, but she had never really known the man she had married. That had been proved to her by later developments.
‘I’m sorry—I know you wouldn’t harm me under normal circumstances!’
It was meant to be a peace offering, a verbal olive branch, and although Zarek nodded in acknowledgement it didn’t subdue the blaze in his eyes or ease the tension in his jaw and shoulders.
‘Then cover yourself up and perhaps we’ll be able to talk— normally.’
The bitterly cynical emphasis on the last word made Penny wince, as did the bleakly efficient way he was setting about restoring his appearance to—that word again—normality. The way he buttoned up his shirt, tucked it in where she had pulled it adrift at the waist, smoothed the disordered hair her clutching fingers had tangled, spoke very clearly of his instant withdrawal from her.
What had happened to the hot-blooded, fiercely passionate man who had carried her up to his bed just a short time before? Had he really existed? Or had she been deluding herself? Had that been just another sign of cool calculation on Zarek’s part? Like the way he had decided to marry her in the past.
The way he had chosen her as the potential mother for his heirs.
Chapter Eight
SHIVERINGLY cold in spite of the warmth of the September evening, Penny stumbled across the room to where Zarek still held out the blue silk robe and pushed her arms roughly into the sleeves. It was all she could do not to snatch the robe away from him as he pulled it up around her shoulders, but the ordeal didn’t take long. A moment later she was back over the other side of the room, dragging the sides of the robe together and belting it as tightly as possible around her waist. It was made of soft and thin material, so it was little use as protective armour against him, but at least she was covered and felt more secure that way.
‘You never needed to armour yourself against me.’ Zarek’s drawl stunned her with its hint of dark amusement. Even more so with its uncanny echoing of the word in her own thoughts. ‘And you never used to play games in bed—at least not those sort of games.’
‘I wasn’t playing any sort of game.’
‘No?’
With the blue robe wrapped round her, Penny felt a little more secure and able to face his cold-eyed derision.
‘I wasn’t playing at anything. I know I responded—there was always that spark—OK, more than a spark—of passion between us.’
‘As I recall, you couldn’t keep your hands off me. And vice versa. But then I’m not the one denying the blatantly obvious.’
‘I’m not denying it,’ Penny persisted. ‘I’d be a fool to even try. It’s there, obviously it is—but that doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it.’
Whatever else Zarek had been expecting, it was not that. His dark head went back sharply, his eyes narrowing till they were just gleaming slits in his tanned face.
‘I’m not someone who just jumps into bed with any man in the first moment I see him, no matter how strong the provocation.’
He knew that. She saw the acknowledgement of it in his eyes even though he said nothing in response. She’d come to him a virgin and, in spite of an almost overwhelming longing to change that situation before then, she had been a virgin on their wedding night.
‘I’m not just any man.’
‘But I don’t know you.’
‘I’m your husband!’
It was a sound of fierce exasperation blended with total disbelief of what she was saying. Penny took several steps backwards, away from him, stopping short when she found that her back had come up against the wall. She could see from his face that he thought she had gone completely mad, right before his eyes, and even in her own mind her argument sounded weak and unsubstantial. But then he had got exactly what he wanted from their marriage. She wasn’t yet prepared to open up her heart to him and confess the truth—that he wasn’t the husband she needed.
She had more pride than to admit that until she knew more clearly exactly where she stood.
