Marriage on the Rebound

Not for either of them, obviously! Or he would not have needed to have secret meetings with Madeleine, would he?

Once again she tried to tug free of his grip.

Once again he refused to let her go. ‘OK,’ he murmured. ‘Then tell me what it is you do want and I’ll do my best to give it to you!’

And his voice was tense—dark and tense—roughened by a bone-melting urgency that almost had her believing that he must care more than she thought he did.

Then she saw him with Madeleine and it all fell apart. ‘You can’t give me what I want,’ she whispered bleakly.

There was silence while he absorbed the full, brutal thrust of that, a long, taut, agonising silence while she stood against him and throbbed with the agony of her own unrequited love for him.

‘My God,’ he breathed then as a sudden thought hit him. ‘It’s Piers, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ Shaan frowned in confusion. ‘I don’t—’

‘Shut up!’ he cut in, and suddenly let go of her, spinning away, a hand going up to rake through his hair before it clamped itself around his nape and stayed there while he glared down at the floor beneath his feet. His big shoulders, body—every part of him—was locked in a rigid pose of tension that held her breathless and silent.

Then he let out a soft, angry huff of laughter. ‘I should have guessed straight away,’ he muttered, more to himself than to her. ‘The bastard arrives back in London on Monday and you’ve left me by Wednesday!’

‘But I haven’t even seen Piers,’ she denied, not seeing that he was offering her a way out of this ugly scene until it was too late and the denial had already been made.

It didn’t matter, because he didn’t believe her. ‘Liar,’ he sighed, unclipping the hand from his nape so he could clench it into a fist which he pushed to his brow. ‘Of course you’ve damned well seen him.’

Had he come to that conclusion because of his own clandestine meeting with Madeleine? she wondered. And would have laughed at the irony of it—if she had been up to laughing.

But she wasn’t because she was closer to weeping. Then he let out another of those laughs, as if he too saw the bitter irony in the whole wretched mess. ‘What did he do?’ he flashed sourly at her. ‘Shoot hotfoot round to see you at the first opportunity he had, knowing I was out of the country which therefore made the weasel feel safe enough to bare his soul to you and beg forgiveness?’

Well, that’s rich, Shaan thought, coming from the man she had seen with her own eyes begging something from Madeleine! And in an act of sheer defiance she lifted her chin, her mouth flattening into a tight little line in an outright refusal to answer him.

So he made up his own answer. ‘The bloody worm,’ he gritted. ‘How long did it take him to slither his way back into your heart, Shaan?’ he taunted jeeringly. ‘A couple of minutes? An hour, playing the poor, confused lover?’

‘You’re beginning to sound jealous, Rafe,’ she hit back tightly.

It had the most unbelievable effect on him.

His eyes changed, turning almost as black as her own, and heat poured into his face as if she’d just exposed some terrible, dark secret that forced the top off his barely held anger. And it was the sight of that anger which had her stumbling back a step in real alarm in an effort to avoid the hard hand that suddenly shot out towards her.

But she was too late to stop it from curling around the back of her neck and tightening as he yanked her up against him. Then his mouth landed on her

s, hot, hard and merciless.

And everything special she had ever felt for him dropped like a wounded bird to the pit of her stomach and lay there quivering as he proceeded to plunder her mouth with a ruthlessness that utterly reviled everything they had ever shared before it.

By the time he let her go she was actually sobbing, her tear-filled eyes almost filling her whitened face.

‘Get your things out of my house,’ he gritted as he spun away from her. ‘I don’t want to find a single sign that you’ve ever been there by the time I get home tomorrow night—got that?’

Got it? Oh, she’d got it, all right, Shaan acknowledged with a blistering fury of her own as she watched him stride angrily for the door through a bank of hot, stinging tears.

What was OK for him was unacceptable for her!

‘And just for the record,’ he added tightly as he reached the door, ‘you can warn Piers from me that if he hurts Madeleine with all of this then I’ll personally sort him out.’

Ah, thought Shaan with a strange little smile pulsing across the fullness of her kiss-swollen lips. So we come to the nitty-gritty of all this aggression. Poor Madeleine. We must not upset Madeleine.

‘You utter hypocrite,’ she derided.

It stopped him mid-stride, turned the full blast of his black fury back on her as he spun to face her. ‘What was that supposed to mean?’ he demanded.