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The door shut behind her, and Romain called softly from across the room. ‘Come here.’
Feeling more and more like Alice in Wonderland, slipping down a hole, Sorcha haltingly moved forward. If she could just get into the bathroom -
‘You don’t need to look like you’re about to go to your own funeral,’ he drawled, ‘It’ll be nice, I promise…’
Sorcha looked at him then, and stopped by the bed. He’d cut through the turmoil in her brain even as her insides clawed with guilt. Nice? She shook her head as if that might try and clear it. ‘I’m sorry…look…what do you want?’
He pushed himself off the door and strolled towards her with dangerous intent in his eye. Too late, Sorcha realised what his intention was only when he came so close that she couldn’t breathe.
‘I told you that next time we wouldn’t be interrupted…’
He couldn’t mean…
‘I want you.’
He did. Within a cataclysmic split second Sorcha’s world was reduced to Romain pulling her into his arms, chest to chest, and before she could say stop, or go, or even take a breath, his mouth was stealing every bit of sanity from her.
The rush of sensation and reaction made her forget everything. With shocking ease, her whole being melted into his.
The matter of fact way he’d just come in…the intent in his eyes that reached out to wrap her in a haze of desire…it scrambled her brain so much that all she was aware of was the need to have him kiss her again, to feel his arms around her. That last kiss was seared onto her memory, and now she was coming back to life in his arms.
His mouth moved over hers with insistent mastery. A flame of white-hot desire was racing along every one of Sorcha’s veins, and when her mouth opened on a little sigh, and his tongue made contact with hers, her hands reached out and tightened on his shoulders to stop herself from falling at his feet.
Sorcha’s two arms twined up around his neck. She stood on tiptoe, couldn’t stop the hitched indrawn breath against his mouth when she felt his hand on her back, reaching under her T-shirt to stroke up over the silky skin, moulding the outline of the curve of her waist. An aching wanting grew at the apex of her thighs, and when Sorcha innocently moved her hips, felt his arousal press insistently against her, her heart beat so fast she thought it would burst from her chest.
His arms around her felt so good, so strong, and when one hand moved down to cup her bottom through her shorts, moving her even closer, she couldn’t help a little mewl of acquiescence. His hand on her bottom sought to get even closer. She felt him slide it into her pocket—
Sorcha’s whole body went rigid in a second. As if ice had just been poured through every artery. His hand was right there.
She pulled back and looked up into his face. She couldn’t help the look of shock she knew must be there. At another time his reaction might have been almost comical.
He looked surprised at first. Then a small frown appeared and, with deadly, awful inevitability, his fingers closed around the small paper packet and she felt him pull it free from her back pocket. His arms slackened, and all the heat and insanity disappeared as he let her go.
Romain stepped back and a chasm opened up, like an arctic wind blowing between them. Sorcha’s eyes closed, her hands were dead weights by her side. She didn’t think she was even breathing. The situation was so horrifically awful and unfair she couldn’t take in the magnitude of what it meant.
His voice was so cold when it came that it made her flinch.
‘Open your eyes.’
She opened them, and could feel the colour drain from her face again. She was freezing.
He held the folded-up paper which had opened slightly, revealing the white powder between his forefinger and thumb, a look of complete and utter disgust on his face—much the same as hers had been only short moments before. Moments which now felt like years.
‘I…’ Her voice felt scratchy and her lips and mouth still tingled.
‘There is not one thing you can say. Not. One. Thing.’
Sorcha’s mouth shut. The total and utter immediate condemnation on his face shocked her. He hadn’t even a shred of doubt in his mind…and why would he? But it hurt. She bit the inside of her lip so hard she could feel blood. She wrapped her arms around her waist and felt shock set in, felt the shaking starting up, that awful dropping of her stomach—even though she hadn’t even done anything wrong!
But one thing she did know, and it was very clear. She could not subject Lucy to this man’s wrath. She was just a young girl, starting out in her career. And Sorcha knew she’d look even worse in Romain’s eyes if she tried to blame someone else younger, more inexperienced.
Having made the decision to take the blame, or at least protect Lucy, Sorcha felt a kind of calmness wash over her. After all, what did she really have to lose? Wasn’t this what he had expected all along?
The shaking subsided.
Romain saw her chin tilt up minutely, her shoulders straighten. A light of defiance come into her eyes. And as the awful, betraying disappointment rushed through him he felt himself get cold and hard inside. Fool, fool, fool. And yet even now, in the midst of this, he was taking in her huge blue eyes, the delicate pale column of her throat, the way her breasts pushing at the thin fabric of her T-shirt made him think of the way they had just pushed against his chest. And, much to his abject horror, his body reacted to that image, that thought.
He moved towards her, and all Sorcha’s paltry bravado disappeared. He took her arm in a harsh grip and half-dragged, half-walked her over to the bathroom.
He was curt and harsh. ‘You know what to do.’
He thrust the folded-up parcel at her as if it was contaminating him, and Sorcha felt like crying, laughing and screaming all at the same time. What would he say if she told him that this was exactly what she had been about to do before being interrupted?
With shaking hands she emptied it into the toilet, flushing the offending drug away. The sound was magnified unbearably in the tense atmosphere. With legs shaking so much that she’d fall if she didn’t sit, she sank back onto the side of the bath. She looked at the ground. She had to try something.
‘Romain—’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
She looked up, her eyes huge, beseeching, and quailed at the coldness she saw in his face. It was nothing like she’d ever experienced.
She tried again. ‘It’s not what you—’
He laughed harshly, arms crossed against his chest. Arms that had just now held her so tight she’d never wanted him to let her go. She ached inside.
‘Think? That’s original. No wonder you were in such a hurry after lunch. Tell me…’ he said, and he relaxed back against the sink, one hip propped up. But the lines of his body screamed anything but relaxed. ‘Was the whole purpose of your little walk just now to get drugs? Is that why you were so eager to get away? Because you needed a fix? Did you have someone lined up before we even got here? I’m interested to know how this would work. Do you call ahead. Or is it—’
‘Stop it!’ Her hands gripped the edge of the bath as she tried to make sense of what he was saying, the barrage of questions. ‘I…How do you…?’
‘How do I know you took a walk?’ he asked. ‘Because I was taking a walk myself, and saw you go into the temple.’
His mouth twisted as he remembered following her. Being captivated by her.
He looked unbearably harsh. ‘Charming picture. Playing with the kids…taking photos…lighting incense.’ He shook his head. ‘Dieu…what a fool I am. You were on your way to pick up your stash. I actually thought—’
He cut himself off. His eyes were so glacial that Sorcha felt as if a layer of her skin was being peeled off slowly. But she couldn’t take her eyes from his.
‘I lost you, though…after the market where you bought that salwaar kameez. That’s obviously when you went off to find your little…contact.’
She shook her head miserably and stood, legs still shaking.
‘I promise you…it’s not what you think.’
‘Promise me? That’s rich.’ He stood upright and towered over her in the small space. ‘To think that in Dublin when you asked if I would believe you’d never touched drugs I actually thought about it…considered it…I would have believed it if I’d heard nothing but your chain of lies today. But only a mere hour after telling me breathlessly about the outreach centre, how important it is, you’re—’
A look flashed across his face, and as if he’d said too much he cursed in French and strode back out into the bedroom.
Sorcha followed him, stood at the door of the bathroom. He had his back to her, looking out of the patio doors. She didn’t know where to start, what to say. She could see exactly how he would construe events…words…and could only watch his taut, unrelenting back helplessly. And even in the midst of this the memory of how it had felt…He turned and fixed her with those cold eyes, and immediately her skin flushed guiltily. As if he could see her shameful thoughts.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked bravely, and steeled herself.
He looked at her for a long moment. She could almost see the cogs whirring in that sharp brain. And then, as if having come to a decision, he strolled nonchalantly towards her. His face was unbearably cold, but the look in his eyes was full of desirous intent. His demeanour spelt absolute danger. Sorcha instinctively grabbed onto the wall beside her as he came close. She looked up helplessly. Ensnared.
And suddenly she thought of something.
Without passing it through the filter in her brain, she found herself blurting out, ‘Look, I know why you’re reacting like this. I know what happened with your mother…’
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#u96210df4-c053-5fd1-be0c-16231f16d7ef)
HE STOPPED dead in front of her, and immediately she knew she’d made one of the biggest errors of her life. He froze. His face became a mask of non-reaction, his eyes glittering jewel-hard shards of icy grey. He spoke after what felt like aeons, and his words dripped with disdain and disgust.
‘What do you know?’
It was a question but Sorcha wasn’t foolish enough to open her mouth again.
‘Maud told you. It can only have been her. What did she tell you?’
This person before her was someone Sorcha had never seen. Even at his most dismissive, judging…this cold creature hadn’t existed. A thousand miles gaped between this man and the man who’d taken her for lunch, the man who had kissed her.
He moved closer, and Sorcha tried to move back but the wall was in her way. She wanted to apologise, wanted to tell him that he was scaring her.
‘Did Maud tell you that my mother was addicted to opium since she was a child growing up in Vietnam?’
Sorcha, horribly mesmerized by his nearness and eyes, just shook her head.
‘Did Maud tell you that she lived her whole life in a drug-fuelled haze?’
Again she shook her head, horror spreading through her. He came even closer. She could feel his body now, his chest moving up and down against hers, and to her utter self-loathing she could feel herself respond, her nipples tightening.
‘Did she tell you that she only came out of it long enough to have me and my older half-brother? To make two unhappy marriages?’
Sorcha couldn’t do anything. He was so close now that she could feel his breath. His head came close and a hand was cupping her jaw, angling her head up to his. Please, she wanted to beg. Stop.
‘Did she tell you that at the age of seventeen I found her dead body? Bloated and almost unrecognisable from an overdose?’
An ache clogged Sorcha’s throat, and her eyes stung. With his hand cupping her jaw she couldn’t move her head. She opened her mouth to try and say something, to reach him, and he took advantage, driving his mouth down on hers, full of pent-up aggression and anger.
Sorcha’s hand had come up to his, to try and take it away, but in her shock she left it there. His words were swirling in her head, but all she could feel was him, wrapping his arms around her again, his tongue dancing erotically with hers. He was relentless, a master of her senses, and she could do nothing but succumb even as she felt a tear trickle out from under one eyelid and down her cheek.
After a long, long moment Romain pulled back with a jerky, violent movement and looked down at her. He shook with reaction—to what he’d just revealed, to what he’d found on Sorcha’s person, and most of all to the way she was making him feel. To the way she held his body in her spell. He could see wetness on her cheek, where a lone tear had left its mark, but instead of inciting concern, he welcomed the hardness that settled in every bone. She was looking up at him with those big eyes. Lips trembling, plump from his kiss. And he would have her. Even though it went against every moral principle he’d held dear. Even though he’d hate himself. Because he couldn’t not.
‘You asked what I’m going to do, Sorcha…well, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to take your delectable body when I’m good and ready. And I’m going to sate myself with you, burn myself free of this desire I feel.’
Sorcha swallowed painfully, her head and insides in absolute chaotic turmoil. ‘But…you mean…you’re not going to send me home?’
He shook his head and a cruel smile touched his mouth. ‘No way. At this stage that would cost me money…’ He trailed a finger down her cheek and around her jaw. ‘And cost me my sanity. You’re going to finish the job…as my mistress…’
Long after he had left the room, with nothing more than a curt reminder to be ready to leave for the set at five in the morning, Sorcha sat on the bed in a daze. With a weird, bizarre calmness that she knew was shock, she was thinking of all the advances she’d had from men over the years.
She’d inevitably found their attentions unwelcome, jarring, and very unsexy. As a result, she was vastly inexperienced when it came to men and sex. She had an ongoing fear that somehow she was cold, or frigid. More than one man had hurled those words at her. But, any man who’d tried to touch her with any kind of intimacy had left her feeling cold. And yet Romain was making her feel anything but frigid. Even when subjecting her to his ice-cold disdain.
Why, oh why, did it have to be him? She lay back, rolled over, and curled up into a foetal position. She could never be intimate with someone who was judging her so harshly, even though she knew she couldn’t blame him for this latest development. She had chosen to protect Lucy, and he’d had all the ammunition ready and lined up for just such a situation. And mentioning his mother? She squeezed her eyes shut, the pain of his words still sinking in like knives. She concentrated her breathing and forced her mind away from it, from the sympathy that still gripped her.
In turmoil, she thought of his autocratic assurance that he would make her his mistress. She knew that he wouldn’t have to do much. He’d pretty much established that just by looking at her she turned to jelly and was his. It was pathetic.
She couldn’t stop her mind going back…Eight years ago something had happened to her. And even to this day she wasn’t sure what. How could she explain that to someone who was the least likely to believe her explanation of how she’d ended up in that awful spiral of events? She’d always expected that the moment she decided to let someone be totally intimate with her would be the moment she revealed herself fully. She’d never done that with anyone. Not even Katie or her brother—and they were the only people she trusted in the world.
How could she sleep with someone…with him…when she didn’t even know for sure if she was a virgin? She grimaced painfully. She was sure on an intellectual level that she was. But on some other level, deep down, enough doubt that had been placed in her mind to question herself…and that was a torture she only wanted to share with someone gentle enough, sensitive enough to handle it. She knew well how awful it would sound if she tried to explain, as though. As though—
She couldn’t even go there with herself.
She buried her face in the bed, as if to block her predicament out completely. She wasn’t successful.
Sorcha moved from behind a leafy palm and stepped into the glittering white of the inner courtyard. It was dusk. A shimmering pool in the middle offered up reflections of the surrounding intricately carved walls. A bird of paradise flew through in a quicksilver flash of colour. Lotus flowers sat on the water like flowering jewels. And there, on the other side of this oasis of beauty, stood her lover, waiting for her. She walked slowly, as if in a dream, felt the silk of her long dress moving like liquid satin against her legs. She reached him. A stunning portrait of handsome perfection in a black tuxedo. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
Simon’s voice rang out. ‘That’s great, Sorcha and Zane. We’ll do it one more time, and then it’s Dominic’s turn.’
Sorcha smiled at Zane as he let her go. It was a brittle smile, and hid the aching hurt in her throat and chest. It had taken Lucy a lot longer today to do her make-up, after her sleepless night, and it hadn’t been helped by the girl’s monosyllabic bad mood. Sorcha couldn’t feel bad as she was the one who had acted on a reflex, taken the drugs from her and decided to protect her.
She had refused to acknowledge or look to where she knew Romain stood behind a monitor, watching proceedings as they were filmed. Except just now, walking over to Zane, trying desperately to act her heart out, she’d found a lean, autocratic face coming into her mind’s eye, superimposing itself onto Zane’s features. And it was actually only six-thirty a.m. They were pretending it was dusk. There was a whole lot of day left to get through.
By midday, Romain was pacing like a caged tiger. Seeing Sorcha at the crack of dawn in a dress that was breathtakingly indecent was testing his control to the limit. Along with the fact that she hadn’t acknowledged him once, and skittered away if he came near her. Right now she was seated on the corner of the set. She was a picture of contradictions that made his head swim. And the inarticulate rage from yesterday was still close under the surface.
The long, flowing silver-grey dress clung precariously to the soft swells of her breasts. A diamond clipped just under her bosom was the only feature, and the dress fell from there to the floor in a swirling symphony of silk. What had made his trousers feel tight all morning was the fact that it had an artful thigh-high slit. So when she walked one long, lithe and luscious leg peeped out in all its lissome glory.
His decision, his announcement to her that he would take her as his mistress, was making it hard for him to rein in the desire. He cursed himself again for not just taking her last night. Why had he left her alone?
Uncomfortably, he knew why. Because too much had happened, too quickly. He’d reeled with the shock of coming face to face with her duplicity, with the hard evidence…the image of that white powder still made his stomach contract. Reeled at the fact that all along she had been playing him, with what he’d revealed about his mother, and reeled at how, even after all this, he could still want her. Even more. It burned him up inside.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. With her hair piled high, exposing a long graceful neck, she looked like a teenager playing dress-up. Her shoes were off, her legs were crossed, one small bare foot peeping out from under the folds of silk. Her brow was creased over her glasses in concentration as she read her book.
Who was she trying to kid?
After lunch, Sorcha waited for them to get the next set-up ready. She was congratulating herself on having managed to avoid Romain all morning, but every time she saw where they’d had lunch the previous day, on the other side of the courtyard, she felt ill. Clammy and sweaty.
She heard Dominic call for her impatiently. He had it in for her today, and she could only imagine that Lucy must have told him what she’d done. She prayed that he wouldn’t make an issue of it. She should have guessed that things wouldn’t be going her way…
Hours later everyone was crabby: a mixture of the dense, heavy heat and the jet lag which some were still suffering from. Dominic had become so unbearable that Sorcha felt compelled to go over to him and say something—anything, to get him to lay off. She’d even seen Romain raise a brow at one stage, when he’d been sharp to the point of rudeness. When she confronted him he turned on her, making her blanch, and real fear struck her. It was only then that she realised they were cut off from everyone else, behind a huge plant.
He gripped her arm at the elbow, drawing her further into seclusion, and Sorcha bit back a retort.
‘How dare you play almighty God with Lucy? It’s none of your business what—’
Sorcha refused to let the fear rise, to be bullied, and she rallied back. ‘It is my business when it’s offered to me, Dominic. And what are you doing, giving her that kind of stuff anyway? She’s barely out of her teens.’
He smirked, and it was ugly. ‘Yet she pleasures me every night like an adult.’
Sorcha felt bile rise, and tried to wrestle her arm away—but his wiry strength was too much.
