‘I promise to tell all later,’ she vowed as she went into his arms for the dance.
‘I’ll keep you to that,’ he warned.
And he did, once they were back home and left alone after everyone else had gone off to bed. Madeline sighed, wondered where to start, then decided the beginning was the only sensible place, which was exactly where she began, leaving hardly anything out, and by the time her voice faltered to a husky halt Perry’s face had gone pale with anger.
‘The bastard!’ he rasped.
‘No,’ Madeline wearily protested. ‘Believe me, Perry, when I tell you that I deserved all I got.’ She dragged in a deep breath then let it out again. ‘You can’t begin to know the kind of person I was then. So spoiled, so criminally wilful! I must have driven Dominic to the point of insanity several times before he eventually snapped. I was an absolute terror. There was no controlling me once I got an idea into my head. I was a danger to myself—and to those people around me. I don’t blame Dominic for what he did to me that night—God knows,’ she sighed, ‘I’d had it coming. I just—just wish he’d found a kinder way of putting me in my place, that’s all.’
‘Rubbish!’ Perry dismissed. ‘You were young and foolhardly, but that gave him no excuse to humiliate you in that brutal way!’
How could Perry be expected to understand things as they had been then when he could only see the new cool and self-disciplined Madeline? she wondered heavily as she lay awake in bed later than night. Even that tiny hint of impishness at the Lassisters’ had stunned him, he was so unused to seeing it. A headstrong and ungovernable Madeline was quite beyond his comprehension.
Nor had she told him about the less obvious pressures brought to bear upon herself and Dominic. From the moment they had shown an interest in each other, they had been picked up and carried along by their families’ mutual enthusiasm for a match.
It had felt as if they were under constant surveillance from both family and friends. Everywhere they went there had always seemed to be someone more than willing to monitor their every move and gesture towards one another, eager to encourage, to tease, to automatically assume that if they were together they had to be in love—which, Madeline had to admit, she’d thought too at the time.
They had been engaged within a month of their first dinner date, and there was hardly a person living in Lambourn who hadn’t wanted to celebrate it with them in some way or another. So much so that she and Dominic had hardly ever found time to be on their own.
Maybe if they had been left alone to allow the relationship to develop at its own pace things would not have got so out of hand. But as it was, and like everything else to do with the old Madeline, she had thrown herself into the excitement of it all as eagerly as everyone else had. Only Dominic had remained calm and unaffected throughout it all. He had seemed more amused by her than anything else, quite happy to indulge her crazy love of secret assignations, meeting her down by the river somewhere for a private hour or so of gentle lovemaking, willing to tease her, play with her emotions with light kisses and mild petting, but any sign of things flaring out of control and he had been quick to curtail things, leaving her feeling only more restless and frustrated as the weeks went by.
She had known he wanted her—she wasn’t so innocent that she didn’t known what desire looked like when it glowed in a man’s eyes—but his self-control had infuriated her, so, in typical Madeline style, she had gone all out to seduce him, and Dominic, though slowly beginning to reveal cracks in his impressive control, had continued to resist her every lure until the tension growing between them had meant they started to argue more than kiss, and she’d harboured a suspicion that Dominic had actually been relieved when he’d had to go away on a week-long business trip to Bonn.
The night he had been due back was also the same night the whole family were supposed to be going to see the latest musical block-buster currently playing in the West End. And Madeline had found herself in the rare position of having Dominic all to herself for a whole evening.
Dominic had arrived at the house, dressed in casual jeans and a pale blue shirt, ready to spend a rare evening alone with his fiancée. And had found a surprise waiting for him….
CHAPTER FIVE
‘WHAT the hell are you playing at coming to the door dressed like that?’ Dominic’s rasping bark came rattling down the years to make Madeline wince even now, four years on. He had stared at her as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
‘Don’t you like it?’ Wearing her father’s best dress shirt—and nothing else bar the flimsiest pair of lacy briefs—she’d thought then that she looked far more seductive than any Mata Hari could do. But, looking back now, she could only cringe in horror now at her own brazenness. It was no wonder Dominic was appalled at her.
‘Go and get some clothes on,’ he commanded, thrusting her ungently inside so that he could close the front door.
Instead, she moved in close to wind her arms around his neck, ‘Without even a kiss from my loving fiancé?’ She widened her deep blue eyes at him, seducing him with every lure she possessed.
‘Madeline…’
‘It’s all right,’ she murmured huskily, ‘we’re completely alone,’ and stopped his protests with her mouth, taking the initiative and kissing him with a hunger that had been building steadily over the weeks. He returned the kiss with an angry reluctance that made him growl, but he parted her lips so that he could deepen the kiss himself. She could still recall the heat of his body as she pressed against him, and the quivering rush of excitement that flooded through her as his arms came wrapping convulsively around her. It was her first real experience of sexual ignition, a lightning that sparked into a flame that began to lick right through her. And her body melted against him, her need so strong that it blanked out everything else.
He picked her up in his arms, and she clung to him, her mouth refusing to let his go as he carried her up the stairs. The pounding of his heart against her breast, the gasping sound of his laboured breathing, the fiery touch of his hands where he held her cradled to him, all culminated to make her unprepared for what Dominic really intended.
She was so drunk on her own success at getting him this far that she never even noticed his own lack of response to everything but the kiss. While her hands ran urgently over his shoulders and his back, revelling in the rippling muscle beneath her fingers, Dominic was grimly planning her punishment.
They reached her room. He sat down on her bed with her still cradled in his arms—and the next moment, he had flipped her over and was issuing her with her very first and only bottom-beating of her entire life!
Deaf to her cries of outrage, he delivered his punishment quite ruthlessly before tossing her off his lap on to the bed so he could get up and stride angrily for the door.
‘You’ve been asking for that for years,’ he growled as he turned to glare at her. ‘You are a totally unprincipled, ungovernable brat, Madeline!’ he snapped. ‘And I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve gone mad wanting to marry myself to a sex-crazed little minx like you!’
Sex-crazed! ‘I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth!’ she screamed at him, so wild with hurt and humiliation she could barely breathe. She knelt among the fluffy pink and white flowered duvet, her hair a mad tangle of black around her flushed face, eyes spitting a hatred at him that only made Dominic’s mouth curl in deriding contempt. ‘And you won’t get another chance to lay a finger on me, you brute! I hate you, Dominic Stanton—I hate you!’
‘You can come and apologise to me tomorrow,’ he said, looking so incredibly aloof, so damned arrogantly pompous that her temper flew right out of control.
‘I’ll burn in hell first!’ she vowed. And with a yank she dragged the lovely sapphire and diamond ring off her finger. ‘I need a real man in my life,’ she spat at him. ‘Not some old has-been who’s incapable of responding with any passion!’
The ring hit his back as he turned abruptly away from her. Now, on looking back on that awful scene, she could see that Dominic had been desperate to get away from the house before he retaliated to that unforgivable gibe. He had always been too sensitive to the gap in their ages, and, saying what she had, Madeline knew now that she had been lucky he hadn’t jumped on her for a reply. As it was, the feel of something hitting his back brought him to a halt, and he turned slowly, looking down at the exquisite ring lying on the rose-pink carpet at his feet.