Marriage on the Rebound

For a moment he took the bait—but it was only for a moment. ‘You provoking little madam,’ he accused.

‘Mmm,’ she said again.

And then it happened—just like that. The playful mood flipped over into something else entirely. In the busiest, most crowded place in the universe, their eyes locked and they suddenly stood alone, lost in the heated grip of a stunning mutual awareness.

Someone accidentally jostled her from behind. It pushed her forward a step towards Rafe. His arm came out and around her in instinctive protection. Their bodies touched. The heat sparked like static all over both of them. She quivered. His chest moved in a hard, tight gasp for air.

‘Let’s go,’ he said huskily.

She didn’t argue, but let him fold her beneath the possessive crook of his arm, and like that they forged a path back through the crowds, making for the nearest train station.

The train was busy. Shaan stood with her back to a piece of metal wall by some doors while Rafe stood in front of her, a hand braced on the rail while the other hand rested at her waist. He didn’t speak and neither did she, but she could feel the tension building between the two of them as the long train snaked its way towards their stop. By the time they got off, she was finding it difficult to breathe. Rafe’s face was taut, unsmiling, as they rode the escalators up to street level.

Their hotel was a few short steps away. There they had to share the lift with several other couples. No chance to speak—say something light in an effort to ease what was throbbing between them.

Rafe stood very close beside her, half-turned her way, so she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek, feel the tight, pulsing tension in his powerful body. Flicking a nervy glance upwards, she felt her breathing cease altogether as she clashed with a pair of glittering dark eyes that sent a wave of prickly heat chasing through her.

He wanted her, and he wanted her badly. Suddenly she could feel him deep inside her again, hot and throbbing.

It was awful—shocking! She looked quickly away, her mouth going dry, her heart pumping madly in a confusing mix of tingling excitement and real alarm at the sheer ferocity of it.

Maybe the others in the lift felt it too—she wasn’t sure, but there was a silence in the compartment that seemed to throb with shared tension. And she spent what was left of the short ride to their floor with her dark head lowered so her hair could hide the self-conscious heat she knew was burning in her cheeks.

Rafe’s hand caught hers again the moment they stepped into the corridor, pulling her along the thick carpet to their room, then inside it. He didn’t stop until he strode into the bedroom, where he let go of her at last, closed the door, then leaned back against it, eyes closing, chest heaving on a tense sigh of what she supposed was relief, though it didn’t seem to relieve anything.

Then his eyes snapped open, and she was taking a startled step back at what she saw burning there.

‘Rafe!’ she gasped as he started to walk towards her, not sure whether she found all this compulsive desire incredibly exciting or absolutely terrifying.

Whichever, he was too lost within whatever it was that was driving him to notice any apprehension on her part as he reached for her and began grimly opening the buttons down the front of her dress.

As it was her body’s senses were not giving off negative signals; her breathing was ruptured, her pulses racing, breasts already swollen and tight in aching anticipation of what they craved the most.

The two pieces of the dress parted. His eyes burned a searing path down her body, which was covered by the flimsiest scraps of white silk at her breasts and hips. He released the front catch on the bra, bent his head and sucked the throbbing tip of one breast into his mouth. As her spine arched on a sharp, stinging shock of gasping pleasure his arm hooked beneath the dress around her waist and hoisted her backwards onto the bed.

What happened next left her lying stretched out across the bed, unable to move in the thick, clamouring silence it left in its wake.

Rafe was lying beside her, his shirt hanging open, an arm thrown across

his face, chest still heaving from the power of his own dynamic climax.

They hadn’t even got as far as removing any clothes. She still had her dress on, the two pieces of her bra were lying open either side of her, and her briefs were—somewhere; she didn’t know where. And as she lay there, exactly as he had left her, with her thighs parted and the soft, pulsing throb between them a reminder of the hard, hot, savage way he had driven them both to the edge and over, she was aware that she had just been utterly ravished by a man who had been completely out of control.

A man who was now finding it difficult to come to terms with what he had done.

‘Rafe—’ She touched his shoulder in a tentative attempt to reassure him.

He jack-knifed into a sitting position as if her touch had stung him, his hand grasping at the back of his tense neck while he glared at the floor, and her fingers fluttered tremulously as they slowly lowered again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said gruffly, after another strained pause. There was no excuse for behaving like a—’ He stopped, lost for words apparently, his jaw clenching on a snap of self-contempt. ‘I apologise,’ he clipped out. Then got up, walked into the bathroom and shut himself inside.

Without so much as glancing at her once, Shaan noted painfully.

Oh, she wasn’t hurt by the stunning swiftness with which desire had taken him over—it had done the same to her. And, after all, she’d enjoyed it, quick as it had been; she’d been right with him all the way. So what if they’d never quite managed to get their clothes off?

Or so she would have thought, and passed it off as yet another mind blowingly new variation on the wild joys of sex—if he hadn’t reacted like a guilty man.

And a guilty man was usually a man who had set out to punish. Was that what Rafe had been doing while she had been so gloriously out of her head with it all? Had he been punishing her for something? Punishing her for—what?