The Morning After

No! Bright balls of panic propelled themselves against the back of her eyes, and in one swift movement she leapt like a gazelle into the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind her before sliding heavily down its smooth, panelled white surface onto the cold, hard ceramic-tiled floor.

Her knees came up, her arms wrapping tensely around them, then her head was lowering, the silken tangle of her hair falling like a curtain all around her as she sat huddled, shivering. Exposed.

Exposed for exactly what she was.

A fraud.

For the last four years of her life she had been a complete fraud. She, the shrewd and cynical Annie Lacey, who had believed that she was playing a great game with other people’s perception of her, now realised that she had only been deceiving herself. In her way, she’d believed that she was punishing them all for making her be that way when in actual fact she had been punishing herself—punishing herself for a whole range of things, Alvarez being only a small part in all of that, she now realised.

He had been the conductor, but not the whole orchestra.

‘Oh, God.’ The words came choking from a throat closed tight on tears of self-knowledge.

You hate yourself, Annie, she told herself wretchedly—not all those other people who only responded to what you gave them to respond to. You built Annie Lacey because you truly believe that persona the only one you’re fit for.

Woman as whore. She shuddered nauseously. The fact that you never actually did whore around is incidental. It is what you believed yourself to be.

And now you are, she added starkly—the whore of a man who despises everything about you, even the fact that he could not stop himself from devouring the body he despised so much.

‘Sin’. He had called her ‘sin’.

‘Angelica.’ A tap at the door behind her accompanied the gruff reverberation of her name. ‘Angelica, open the door.’

No. God, no, she thought, and stumbled to her feet, blue eyes so dark with emotion that they seemed black in her paste-white face. Sheer instinct sent her towards the glass door which housed the shower cubicle. She stepped in and switched on the jet, not caring that the water hissed down icy cold on top of her, then almost immediately stinging-hot.

The need to wash away the whole experience kept her locked beneath the shower, lost to everything but a grinding knowledge of utter self-disgust.

If he knocked or called her name again, she didn’t hear him. And she stayed like that for long, long minutes, face lowered, water streaming onto her head until her long hair split and hung in two slick golden pelts from her nape.

Then, slowly, a sense of feeling began to creep back into her numbed flesh, the hot sting of water pulsing down on her urging her back to life, and she lifted her head, found a bar of soap and began methodically washing her

self. Toes, feet, legs. Her thighs where his thrusting body had left marks on her fine, delicate skin.

She washed her hips and her buttocks—sore where the height of his passion had sent his fingers digging in. The smell of him and the feel of him still lingered languorously in the hot, steamy air.

Her belly felt tight and tender inside, her breasts alien parts of her that, when she smoothed soap over the taut, swollen mounds, brought a sharp gasp of reaction from her tight throat as her fingers brushed nipples still erect and raw from his hot, hungry kisses.

He had left his mark here in other ways too—in reddened blotches where his lips had nipped and sucked. Her throat had the same—several tender places where she knew she would bruise later on. It was the way of her skin—pale, delicate, it bruised at the slightest knock.

Her arms seemed to be the only part of her that had escaped the marks of his possession—except for her wrists, she noted as she stared at them, ringed pink where he had gripped them together over her head. Oh, not in a demand for submission, she grimly allowed, but in rough, angry passion. He’d wanted to stretch her out to her fullest so that he could taste every inch of her skin with his tongue, kneeling over her with his dark face fierce with desire.

A ripple fluttered over her skin—in memory of the pleasure he had given. Her mouth, full and throbbing, was still wearing his kisses even though she had washed her lips as well.

Sighing, she turned her face up to the spray then stood there with her eyes closed, trying not to think of it any more.

Then her nails curled tensely into her palms as unwillingly she remembered what she had done to him, how the wild explosion of passion inside her had sent her fingers raking across his sleekly groomed head, searching for, finding and clutching at the slim tail of hair, then tugging—using it to pull him closer so that she could lose herself in his hot, marauding mouth.

Then later…She shuddered, remembering how those same fingers had scraped the ribbon right away, his hair falling like midnight silk around her as her fingers had moved on again, curling into tense claws to score down the full length of his long, muscular back as he’d entered her…Her impassioned cry of pain echoed now in the hollow place her mind had become.

Well, there was one thing, she mocked herself grimly when eventually she made herself move again, she had gone from virgin to experienced lover in one fell swoop, because there had been nothing that he hadn’t shown her in that wildly hectic romp on the bed, nothing he had not been prepared to do to heighten their pleasure.

No gentle introduction for the virgin. No holds barred.

That point between her thighs quivered in response, and jerkily she pushed herself out of the shower before it all took too frightening a grip on her again.

Another huge white bath sheet hung folded on the rail. Picking it up, she wrapped it fully around herself then found another towel which she wrapped turban-style round her head.

It took a teeth-clenching gathering together of all hear courage to make her unlock the door and step back into the bedroom.