The Morning After

CHAPTER ONE

ANNIE wanted to scream. She tried to scream! But every time she opened her mouth he covered it with his own.

It was horrible. A violation. She felt sick.

And it was dark in the room—very dark. The air hot and stifling, filled with the laboured breathing of their uneven struggle. Hands grappling against intrusive hands—her strangled sobs mingling with his thick, excited groans. Alien sounds, smells and textures swamping her senses to hold her trapped in a terrifyingly black void of wretched helplessness.

Suffocating—she felt as if she was suffocating. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think beyond that vile, thrusting tongue. She could feel her heart pounding in wild fear. It throbbed in her chest, her head—thundered in her ears.

Her clothes had gone. She didn’t know where or even how they had gone—but they were no longer covering her body.

Louis Alvarez was. Big, strong and repulsively naked. His greedy hands touching everywhere—everywhere.

It didn’t help that she was slightly drunk from the amount of champagne that she had swallowed. She felt weak and dizzy, her head swimming as she tossed it from side to side in an effort to evade his awful mouth.

He dealt with this by reaching out to grasp a fistful of her silken gold hair, using it to clamp her twisting head to the bed. Her whimper of pain brought his smothering mouth back onto hers.

And then the real nightmare began.

His free hand, shifting to cover one madly palpitating breast, moulding, squeezing before moving on, palm sliding over quivering flesh, eager, hungry. Fingers searching, probing, hurting until, on a sudden surge of sexual urgency, he thrust a knee between her thighs and wedged them wide apart.

Then he was there, heavy on her, his mouth dragging sideways away from hers on a rasping sigh of pleasure as his swollen manhood made contact with her warm flesh.

And at last from somewhere—from nowhere—she didn’t know where—she found the ability to scream. Her body arching away from the invading thrust of his body, her slender neck arching away from the sickening threat of his thrusting tongue—

Then a door was opening, a burst of light flooding like acid through her tortured mind. And the scream came, thick and wretched—a cry from hell, filling the air around her…

* * *

The flash bulbs began popping even before the limousine drew to a halt outside the hotel. Annie Lacey and Todd Hanson were big news at the moment. And the paparazzi were out in force.

The car stopped, a uniformed attendant stepped forward to open a door and the flash bulbs went wild, catching frame by frame the appearance of a strappy gold shoe and one long, long silk-clad female leg. Then a head appeared, breast-length, die-straight wheat-blonde hair floating around a physically perfect female face, followed by the rest of the exquisite creature, wearing nothing more than a shimmering short scrap of pure white silk that seemed held to her body only by the thin gold belt she had cinched into her narrow waist.

Annie Lacey. Tall, blonde and leggy. A lethal combination. Beautiful, with a pair of cool, cool pure blue eyes which were so disconcertingly at odds with her shockingly sensual siren’s mouth. She was the present-day super-sought-after supermodel. And super-tramp to those who believed slavishly every word printed by the tabloid Press.

They envied her, though. Love or despise her for her morals, they envied her how she looked and what those looks had brought her.

Fame. Fortune.

Gods, to a lot of people. Unreachable dreams to most. To Annie herself?

Well, she used that gorgeous mouth to smile for the cameras while those blue eyes gave nothing away of what was going on behind them. What Annie thought or felt about most things was kept a close secret—which was why the Press had such a field-day where she was concerned. They could say and print what they liked about her, safe in the knowledge that she wouldn’t retaliate.

Smile and say nothing, was her motto. Because whatever you did say would be taken down and twisted into something completely different—mainly something more likely to sell papers. And that meant lies, sex and the inevitable scandal—a lesson she had once learned the hard way.

A man—a big, blond-haired, blue-eyed man who was as handsome as she was beautiful—rounded the car to arrive at her side, and instantly the media interest intensified.

‘Mr Hanson—Mr Hanson! It is true that Annie got the Cliché contract as a direct result of her relationship with you?’

Todd’s hand settled about Annie’s waist, drawing her close as the next question hit.

‘Are you lovers, Mr Hanson?’

‘Will Susie Frazer return to the States now she’s lost both you and the Cliché contract, Mr Hanson?’

‘Is there any truth in the rumour that Miss Frazer dumped you because you refused to dump Miss Lacey?’

‘I hate you for setting us both up for this,’ Annie threw at Todd through gritted teeth.

‘Just keep smiling and ignore them,’ was all he replied, pressing her into motion towards the hotel. ‘They’re just fishing. They don’t really know anything.’

‘What, with Susie feeding them their lines?’ she drawled.

‘She’s a bitch,’ he allowed, ‘but not that big a bitch.’

‘Was that a joke?’ Annie mocked him. ‘She’s out for blood. My blood preferably.’

‘I wish you two could have become friends,’ he sighed as they stepped through the hotel doors.

‘And pigs might fly,’ was her only reply to that.

There never had been any love-loss in evidence between the two top models from the moment they’d first met. That had been just over six months ago, when Susie Frazer had come to London from her native Los Angeles to attend the British Advertising Awards.

Annie had been there with Todd that time too, he in his role as head of Hanson Publications and more specifically as representative of Cliché magazine—one of the top British monthly glossies on the present-day market—and Annie because she was featured in that month’s issue of Cliché wearing that season’s latest from the Paris shows.

Susie had taken one look at the dynamically handsome Todd Hanson and fallen like a ton of bricks—had seen that he had none other than the notorious Annie Lacey hanging on his arm and declared outright war on the spot.

‘Who does she think she is, looking at you as if you’re dirt?’ Todd had demanded furiously.

‘My reputation goes before me, darling,’ she’d drawled mockingly in reply. ‘But, you have to admit, she does look rather spectacular glaring at me like that.’