The Morning After

Silence.

Her eyelashes flickered, then lifted to allow her eyes to focus on him. He was standing there across the room like some—some noble

Apache chief! she likened wretchedly. Wearing that skimpy white towel like a loin-cloth that left too much naked, bronzed muscle on show! His hair was hanging sleek and straight to the proud set of his shoulders while those crazy green eyes of his looked down that long, arrogant nose at her as if he couldn’t believe that this woman could dare to insult him like that!

Then he sighed and moved in a grim gesture of impatience. ‘Dammit, but you are my wife now, Angelica!’ he exclaimed, with what she saw as an appalling confirmation of his arrogance. ‘You do not need to do that kind of work any more! Whereas Susie—’

‘Wife?’ From somewhere—she didn’t know where—anger took over from nausea and shot her furiously back to her feet. ‘And when exactly did I become your wife, César?’ she demanded with a withering scorn. ‘From the moment you realised that your and Susie’s plans were no longer justified, so you had to find another way to keep me here incarcerated on this island?’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ he snapped, beginning to stride towards her. ‘I told you I had no intention of harming you! Why can’t you show me a little trust?’

Trust. There was that rotten word again.

‘What is there to trust?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘Your word—when you’ve done nothing but break it since I met you?’

‘Just because I asked for a little common charity does not mean I am about to break my word to you!’ he rasped as he reached her.

‘No? Well, my answer is a clear-cut, unequivocal no. I won’t hand over the Cliché job to Susie.’ Her blue eyes lifted to challenge him with a look of fierce contempt. ‘So where do we go form here? César—hmm?’ she taunted dangerously. ‘Where…?’

CHAPTER TEN

TO HELL, apparently. They went to hell, Annie decided later as she lay in the middle of the rumpled bed that César had just stalked angrily away from—after taking her to hell by the most exciting route he could find.

And now she lay devastated, maybe suffering from shock—she wasn’t sure. All she did know was that that one small question had exploded into a blistering row and from the blistering row had come the blistering sex.

But, worse, she had not been dragged down into the fiery depths of that hell protesting. No, she’d gone willingly—eagerly!

‘Oh, God,’ she groaned, rolling onto her side so that she could bury her shame in the snowy white pillow.

His pillow. A pillow that held the scent of him. And almost instantly she was assailed with the kind of thoughts and feelings that cruelly mocked the sense of shame.

It wasn’t as if she could even comfort herself with the knowledge that she’d tried to fight him off! Because she hadn’t.

From the moment his hands had reached out to take hold of her she had lost all sense of reason. Pure sexual exhilaration had fizzed up from the centre of her fury to coil in a hot, pulsing constriction around the muscles of her womanhood, and she’d gone, kicking, scratching, biting, into the fiery vats of passion with him, giving him back kiss for savage kiss, caress for ravaging caress until the whole wild battle had finally converged in a soul-destroying climax which had left her dead-limbed, mind-blown and spent, and him punching the pillow with a white-knuckled fist as he fought to regain control of his shattered emotions.

Then, ‘Damn you,’ he’d muttered to her as he’d climbed off the bed. ‘Damn you to bloody hell for making me behave like that!’

If he’d called her Annie the super-tramp he could not have hurt her more than that angry damning did.

Then she heard it, and her head picked up, ears tensed and listening to the faint, deep whooshing sound that took a few moments to register in her sluggish brain.

No, she thought hectically. She refused to believe it—not after what had just taken place on this bed! No!

Suddenly she was jackknifing to her feet, fingers scrambling, body trembling in her haste as she dragged the rumpled sheet with her and began draping the fine cloth around her body even as she ran out of the open French windows and onto the upper balcony.

The sun was high, blinding as it hit her eyes, and she almost lost the sheet altogether when she instinctively lifted a hand to shade out the brightness. Then she saw it, hovering just twenty feet from the ground, the powerful whir of blades shattering the still air with its blunt, cruel statement.

‘No, César,’ she whispered, tripping over the trailing sheet as she staggered to the balcony rail. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare!’

But he did dare, apparently. And it felt as if everything living inside her took a swooping dive to her stomach as the helicopter slowly turned until it was facing out to sea, then shot forward, leaving her leaning there against the balcony rail, watching it go, while hot tears of bitter helplessness ran unchecked down her cheeks.

It hurt. His cruel desertion of her hurt. The fact that he could leave her here like this after what had just taken place in the bedroom behind her—hurt.

Where was he going? Why was he going? Was he going to find Susie to explain that he couldn’t make Annie Lacey bend totally to his will?

* * *

A whole week she was left alone to stew in her own bitterness, seven long frustrating days and nights when all she did was consolidate every bad thought that she had ever had about him. It was a week in which she barely left the villa and had Margarita fussing around her like a worried hen as her moods swung from anger to hurt and from hurt to wretched tears and from tears to a cold, dark depression that refused to lift no matter how often she told herself that none of it was worth this much grief.