The Morning After

And in seconds she could feel herself surrendering, her mouth wanting to part, her tongue to join with his, her fingers trembling with a desperate need to rip open his shirt and bury themselves in the crisp, dark hair covering his chest—the whole lot threatening to fling her screaming with delight into that wild, hot well of passion.

Oh, God, she thought dizzily. But she wished that she could hate him! She knew that she should hate him! She wanted to hate him! But she didn’t. She loved him!

With a sob of anguish she tried to thrust him away. He growled something impatient, brought his hands snaking up to rake roughly through her hair—cupping her head—arching it backwards—long thumbs sliding across her heated cheeks to hold her face up to his—enthralling her with the urgency with which he forced her lips apart and hungrily deepened the kiss.

And in an act of sheer self-preservation she gave a violent push at his shoulders and managed to wrench her throbbing mouth to one side. It stopped him. His dark head came up, his big chest heaving, his own cheeks flushed with desire, and his eyes barely focused as they stared at her.

‘If you’ve quite finished,’ she heard herself say with unbelievable cool, ‘then I would now like to get packed and leave.’

He was suddenly very still, the new silence beating like a hundred war drums inside her head as she stood there defying him with her eyes. Ever since she’d met him—all along the line!—she’d given in to him. But this time—this time she was determined to win.

And at last and finally he must have realised it, because his eyes went black with anger then cold as pale green ice. He took a step back from her, severing all body contact like a scalpel slicing through flesh.

‘OK, Angelica,’ he said grimly. ‘If that is what you want. You win.’

With that he turned and walked out of the room.

‘You win’, she repeated dully to herself as she wilted against the wall behind her, eyes closing, heart hurting at the prize that she had just managed to win for herself.

Freedom, she supposed you’d call it. She’d just won the freedom to choose to leave here at last.

So why did she feel as if she’d just lost the biggest prize of her life?

No, that’s weak thinking, Annie, she told herself grimly. He doesn’t love you. He wants you, she conceded bitterly. He desires your body like crazy, and he’s possessive and territorial about it. But that isn’t love.

A man in love doesn’t lie and cheat and connive to trap. He doesn’t blackmail and bully and seduce and—Oh, shut up! she told her hectic brain. Shut up! Stop rubbing it in!

Eyes flying open with a flash of pained anger, she thrust herself away from the wall—

It was then that she saw it—a brown paper package lying askew on the pale wood tabletop. Her mind did a flashback of César tossing it there.

Slowly, uncertainly she began to walk towards it. Drawn there. Unable to resist.

It was an envelope, she realised. A special kind of envelope. Big, rectangular, card-backed. Her mouth went dry, clammy sweat breaking out all over her as she recognised it instantly for what it had to be.

The kind of

envelope a photographer put prints in.

Her flesh began to tingle with a new guilt-ridden fear, and she knew why. She was going to look inside it—knew she couldn’t stop herself. Even though she knew with a cold sense of anguish just what she was going to see.

Susie decked out for the Cliché launch.

It had to be. What else could it be?

Fingers trembling, heart hammering, she slipped open the flap and slowly slid the contents onto the shiny tabletop.

For a dozen heart-stunning moments she was completely unmoving. Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t function at all on any human level.

Because they were not photographs of Susie.

Tears blurred her eyes, hot and burning, catching as a sob in her throat.

They were not even photographs in the true sense.

They were mock-ups of the front and centre-fold pages of a magazine—‘CLICHÉ’ superimposed in red across a beautiful Caribbean blue sky.

‘Oh, God,’ she whispered as she stared at them, a hand jerking up to cover her trembling mouth.