‘Yes.’ Once more she refused to give him the satisfaction of arguing the point with him because, whatever lessons he thought he had learned about her in that blasted bedroom, she, too, had learned her own lessons about him. This man thrived on argument. His sexual drive fed off it, but he would not be fed by her again.
He knew exactly what she was doing, of course. He was not an idiot. He could read silent messages just as well as she could. But to her surprise, he laughed, a warm, dark, sexily amused sound that curled up her toes inside her shoes as his mouth came down to cover her own.
Their bodies fused, that quickly and that easily, from mouth to breast to hips. They came together as though someone or something had simply thrown a switch to let the whole wretched current of electric pleasure wrap itself around them.
His tongue blended with hers, and her hands jerked up to clutch at his warm, tightly muscled neck where her fingers spread along his jawbone, his cheeks and the smooth line of his chin. She felt his body respond by tensing, felt his hands drag their way downwards until they were clasping her low on the hips, drawing her even closer to the pulsing throb where his manhood was thickening, tightening.
Her own body melted—melted on the inside, melted on the outside, a hot, honeyed meltdown that poured into her bloodstream, filling her breasts and that aching junction between her thighs so she moved wantonly against him. She couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t put a halt to what was beginning to happen all over again.
She groaned—at least she thought it was her but it might have been him—and her thighs flexed and parted, searching out an even deeper intimacy against the grinding thrust of him. It was terrible. She didn’t know herself, couldn’t seem to control what was suddenly raging through her system.
When he dragged his mouth free she whimpered and went in blind search of reconnection while his hands bit like twin vices into the flesh around her hips to keep her pressed tightly against him, though he denied her his mouth. Denied it ruthlessly. So much so that her eyes flickered open, glazed by need and a confusion that went so deep that it took several long agonising seconds for her to realise what he was doing.
Watching her.
Watching her with a bite in his eyes that told her exactly what he thought of her lack of control.
Whore, that expression said. Whore.
She almost fainted on the wave of self-loathing that went sweeping through her.
He despised her for responding like this—as much as he despised her for being here at all.
‘Save it,’ he said insolently, ‘until later. I have a mistress to console before I can come back here and console you.’
It was cruel but, then, he had meant to be. Anger was driving him—anger at himself for wanting her like this, anger at her for making him want her and anger at the whole situation which he could only relieve by venting it on her.
With that final humiliation biting deep into her senses, he let go and stepped back from her. Two seconds after that he was pulling open the door and striding from the room. Not just from the room but from the villa. Standing there, trembling, aching and shamed, she listened to the front door slam in his wake, heard a car start up and drive away with a powerful roar.
And through it all she barely breathed, barely blinked, barely functioned on any level.
Why? Because it had finally sunk in just how much he hated her. It didn’t matter that he had already told her so as far back as in her father’s study—the point was that she hadn’t really taken the full thrust of his words on board.
Words like, ‘I will hate and despise you and bed you with alacrity,’ were suddenly taking on their full true meaning. As did his most recent statement, ‘I have a mistress to console before I can come back here and console you …’
She would come second. Second to that lucky lady who probably came fairly far down his list of priorities, which made second a very low status indeed.
She was here for one purpose and one purpose only—to conceive his child so he could claim his prize.
‘Your dinner, madam …’ Sofia appeared from nowhere, her eyes lowered, her expression carefully guarded. ‘The dining room is this way,’ she prompted quietly.
It took another few moments to pull herself together but Mia managed it, following Sofia into the long narrow grandeur of a formal dining room where only one place setting waited.
He had always meant to leave her alone like this, she realised on a fresh wave of agony.
Then, thankfully, right out of the centre of that very same agony emerged the other Mia—the pragmatic, invulnerable, very mocking Mia. The one who could smile wryly at herself for actually being hurt by Alex’s treatment of her.
The one who could sit quite comfortably at a table and eat alone because eating alone was far more preferable to eating with cruel swines like Alexander Doumas—a man like her father.
When the long silent meal was over she left alone, walking out of the dining room with her chin held high as she trod those polished stairs back to the relative sanctuary of her own room where she calmly prepared for bed—and felt the protective casing she had built around herself threaten to crack only once.
That was when she glanced at the bed she had so carefully tidied, before leaving the room earlier. Someone had stripped it, changed the sheets and put on a clean lemon top cover, one which gave not a single hint of what had taken place on that bed earlier—no tell-tale creases, nothing. An act which told tales in itself.
They knew.
She shuddered. The whole damned staff must know what had been going on in this bed earlier.
Did that mean they also knew why it had been going on? By their cold unwelcoming attitude she had to assume that they knew exactly why she was here and, worse, that their employer was accepting the situation only under the severest duress.