Bridal Bargains

That brought her swiftly on to the next soul-crushing point—did they therefore know just where he had gone tonight?

The mistress.

The other woman.

Did they know that he had climbed out of her bed only to climb into another bed with his mistress?

Humiliation poured into her blood, searing a path to a temper few knew she possessed. With a flash from her glinting green eyes, she reached down and grabbed hold of that lemon cover, yanking it clear away from the bed and tossing it in a heap on the ground at her feet.

From now on, she vowed, every time she walked into this room she would mess up this rotten bed! If they wanted to bear witness to their employer’s bed duty, let them! Let them change this damned bed fifteen times a day and wonder at his incredible stamina!

Keeping two women busy at the same time—the rotten, crass bastard!

Not that she cared! she told herself tightly as she crawled between those pristine white sheets. She couldn’t give a damn what the man got up to so long as he was practising safe sex with the other woman. Other than that, she had no interest whatsoever in his sex life!

That was the exact point at which she made her brain switch off because she had a horrible feeling that she might begin to care if she let herself dwell on the subject too much.

Thankfully, sleep came to her rescue with a single lowering of her eyelids. Wearing a nightdress of cream satin and curled on her side with her long hair flowing across the white pillow, she didn’t know another thing for hours. Hours and hours of blessed oblivion from the bleak prospect of what her life was going to be like from now on.

A hand grasped her shoulder. ‘Wake up,’ a deeply masculine voice insisted.

Just as she had managed to push it all away with the single blink of an eye, it was suddenly all back again. ‘W-what?’ she mumbled in sleepy confusion. ‘What do you think you’re doing!’ she gasped as he rolled her onto her back and pinned her there with his weight. ‘No—!’

‘Not a word I recognise,’ he informed her with a grim kind of sardonicism.

Her lashes flicked upwards, her eyes finding themselves trapped by glinting dark irises that confirmed exactly what his words and actions were stating.

‘What’s the matter?’ she taunted. ‘Wasn’t she very consolable tonight?’

He frowned, his eyes narrowing for the few moments it took him to grasp her meaning. Then his teeth were suddenly gleaming in the darkness, cruel and incisive like the next few words he lashed her with. ‘She was fine,’ he muttered, ‘but now I want you.’

‘You’re disgusting,’ she said, and tried to wriggle free, but he wasn’t about to let her.

‘Nevertheless, when I want I take and you deliver,’ he said harshly. ‘Don’t ever say no to me again.’

Then he did take, passionately and ruthlessly, his hungry mouth covering hers, his tongue probing with a dark, knowing intimacy that appalled her even as her own desires leapt like the traitors they were to greet him eagerly.

He still smelled of whisky. His lips were warm with it, his tongue tasted of it, transferring the evocative taste to her own tongue and filling her lungs with its heady fumes. His hands were trembling slightly as though his urgency was so great he was having difficulty controlling it. His long fingers ran over the smooth slide of satin, skimming her breasts

, her ribcage, her abdomen and eliciting sharp little stinging responses that made her gasp, her spine arch, her muscles tighten and her hands move upwards to clutch at his shoulders with the intention of pushing him away.

Only her hands never pushed. They made contact with his hard, warm, naked flesh and clung to him, a wretched groan escaping her smothered mouth as his fingers slid upwards to find her breasts again. In seconds her nipples were erect and tingling, his palms rolling them with an erotic expertise that had them pushing against the confines of her nightdress while his thighs were insinuating themselves between her own.

The throbbing contact of his own powerful erection moving against fine satin was so intensely arousing that her thighs widened even more in an effort to gain greater friction where she most needed it.

His mouth left hers and he laughed. It was a sound far distant from humour but held angry triumph. ‘What a hot little thing you are when you let yourself go,’ he taunted. ‘No wonder you preferred me to that grotesque little man who was knocking sixty. He could not have given you half this much pleasure.’

‘Your mind is a sewer,’ she shot at him.

‘My mind is that low?’ he mocked, and grabbed hold of the edge of her nightdress, tugged it up around her hips and entered her. No foreplay, no compunction.

To her utter horror, Mia went wild beneath him. Just like the last time, she was overtaken by an instant orgasm that set her body writhing and her insides throbbing, the tiny muscles inside rippling over him and around him as her head fell back and her throat began to pant out little gasps of riotous intensity while her heart raced out of control.

It shocked him again, held him paralysed for the few stunning moments it took for him to accept just how spectacularly she responded to him. Then his mouth lowered to one tightly stinging nipple. Through the stretched tautness of her nightdress he sucked the pulsing tip deep into his mouth and began to move, thrusting his hips with short blunt stabs that kept her locked in that muscle-clenched storm of hectic climax, the strokes growing longer and deeper and harder as he drove her on and on with no letup, no chance to make a mad grab at sanity.

She was out of her head and it dismayed her, but she couldn’t seem to do a single thing about it. When he withdrew she should really have come tumbling back down to earth with a crash—but she didn’t. She stayed up there, lost in that world of electric sensation.

He muttered something, which she couldn’t make out. His body slid sideways, the nightgown coming off altogether before his mouth clamped on hers again and his fingers began to discover what his throbbing manhood already knew—what it was like to feel a woman in the throes of a multi-orgasm.