The Ultimate Betrayal

‘Then go and make your phone calls,’ she advised, returning her attention to the drink in her hands. ‘Then you won’t have to listen, will you?’

He glared at her across the length of the kitchen table, looking ready to reach across and shake her if she provoked him so much as an inch further. Then, surprisingly, he sighed harshly and turned and walked out of the room. She heard his study door close with a suppressed violence and grimaced to herself.

She went upstairs to use the bathroom while he was busy on the telephone, stuffing her long hair into a shower-cap and taking a quick shower, only then remembering, as she was hurriedly tying her fluffy long white bathrobe around her so that she could get out of the bedroom before he came up, that she had not packed his case.

On a silent curse she hurried into the bedroom, to dig out his soft black leather all-purpose suit-bag, and laid it on the bed to unbuckle the straps.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ his tight voice informed her from the bedroom doorway. ‘I cancelled this afternoon.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she drawled as he closed the bedroom door. ‘Lydia will be disappointed.’

That’s it! he might as well have shouted, the way his lean body jerked as though someone had cracked a whip at him. Rachel knew a moment’s real panic as she stared into his face, white with angry frustration, then was given no opportunity to do anything other than gasp as he reached her in two strides and dragged her against him.

‘I can’t take any more of this,’ he muttered. ‘Nothing I can say or do is going to change your mind about me!’

‘But I have changed my mind about you!’ she countered, afraid of the hectic glitter she could see burning in his eyes, but refusing to show it. ‘I used to think you were a saint, but now I know you’re a bastard!’

‘Then a bastard I will be!’ he snarled, and dropped his mouth down on to hers.

He used no persuasion, no gentle coaxing to get what he wanted from her, but just forced her tight lips apart by sheer brute force. She groaned in protest, his fingers like clamps on her aching shoulders, holding her up to him while the rest of her body curved frantically away from him in an effort not to come into full contact with his traitorous frame.

His tongue snaked into her mouth and she tried to bite down on it, but he was expecting it, and just increased the pressure against her lips until they were pressed hard back against her teeth, then slid his tongue sensually over hers. She shuddered, her hands closing into fists that she pushed into his muscled ribcage in a hopeless attempt to try to stem the unbidden firing in her blood which told her she was vulnerable to him; even though she hated him to the very depths of her being, she was still vulnerable to this.

Another groan, and she kicked out at him with a bare foot. It made no difference. He was not going to release her, and her straining body was simply a supple wand he bent to his will. Taking one hand off her shoulder to loop it around her slender waist, he moved the other to her hair, winding the long silken swath around his fingers in a tight coil before he tugged cruelly to keep her mouth turned up to receive his kiss.

She was burning up inside her thick towelling robe, her body stinging with a prickly heat that made it all the more sensitive to the hard body now clamped tightly against her. And it wasn’t just her temperature that had gone haywire, it was her senses—her senses firing out of control, wanting this, swarming towards it like bees to the sweetest honey ever made on this earth.

It’s not fair! she thought wretchedly, it’s just not fair that he can still do this to me! She hated herself—and despised him for making her acknowledge her own weakness.

‘Damn you!’ she cursed, when at last he came up for air. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes dark pools of bitter frustration as they glared down at her.

‘Yes,’ he agreed on a raw, driven hiss. ‘Damn me to hell! But you want me, Rachel. You want me so badly that you’re literally choking on it. So what does that make you in this nightmare?’

She flinched, the full bitter truth in his cruel taunt making something she had been holding on to for days now snap inside her—she actually felt it give, and she leaned back against his constricting arm, careless of the painful pull it placed on her scalp, careless of everything now as, with an animal growl that was as alien to her as it was to the man who was goading her, she went for him with her nails.

Good reflexes saved his face from serious damage. His head snapped back out of harm’s way just in time, and her nails only managed to graze his neck from jawbone to the open collar of his shirt.

‘You little cat!’ he choked, long strands of strong silken hair clinging to his fingers when he released her to put his hand to his scratched neck.

‘I hate you!’

‘Good,’ he grunted, and he pulled her back against him. ‘That will make it easier when I take you, when the method of taking will make no difference to how you feel about me.’

‘That’s right!’ she jeered. ‘Why not add rape to adultery?’

‘Rape?’ he derided harshly. ‘Since when did I ever have to resort to rape with you?’ His tone sent shivers of self-revulsion rushing through her. ‘In all my life I’ve never known a more sexually eager woman than you!’

‘What—even Lydia?’

She was thrust unceremoniously away from him, his arms raking a wide, defeated arc before both hands went up to grip his nape as if he had to hold on to something or hit her. And he stared at her with something close to torment burning in his eyes. ‘Stop it, Rachel,’ he whispered thickly. ‘Stop trying to rile me into doing something we’ll both regret!’

Was that what she was doing? Riling him like some she-devil, wanting him to take her in anger—to prove to her totally that he was all the rotten things she was thinking about him?

Yes, she realised, that was exactly what she was doing as she continued to stand there, goading him with the hot glitter of her eyes when really she should be getting out of here while the chance to escape was good. She wanted to feed the hatred she felt towards him—the anguish, the bitter disappointment she was feeling, and last of all the great lump of pain that had not shifted from the centre of her chest since Mandy called.

And she heard herself, as if from the other end of a long dark tunnel, goad him further. ‘Then get out!’ she told him shrilly. ‘Why don’t you just do the honourable thing, Daniel, and get the hell out of here! No one’s making you stay! There’s nothing left here to stop you going to your precious Lydia!’

‘Will you stop mentioning her bloody name?’ he grated.