‘Daniel—how nice to see you!’
His face darkened with irritation, and Rachel herself felt a stab of disappointment at the new interruption because she had been allowing herself the rare pleasure of drowning in the smoky urgency of his beautiful eyes.
This time he didn’t get up to greet the middle-aged couple who had stopped by their table. Nor did he introduce her. He just made all the right polite noises, but in a way that had them quickly moving on.
‘Now you know why I don’t like bringing you to places like this,’ he grimaced. ‘We are destined to be interrupted like this all evening.’
‘And what’s wrong with that?’ she asked, bristling because she saw his impatience as reluctance to acknowledge her here for what she was to him.
‘Because when I take you out, I like to have you to myself!’ he said, and that look was back in his eyes, that darkly smouldering, intensely possessive one that turned her stomach inside out and made eating anything else a near-impossibility.
But he was right. They were interrupted no less than three more times during the course of their meal, and in the end Daniel sighed and reached across the table for her hand to draw her with him as he stood up.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We may as well go through to the club and dance. At least while we’re dancing people will be reluctant to interrupt.’
Keeping hold of her hand, he threaded his way through the tables towards a pair of closed doors that swung open at the touch of his free hand. It was darker in here; from the entrance she could just see through the gloom to the opposite side of the room, which had its own bar and a small raised stage where a group of musicians sat playing slow, easy jazz.
Daniel drew her on to the dance-floor and turned her into his arms. Instantly she was assailed by a weird feeling of nervous uncertainty—as if he were a stranger, the kind of tall, dark stranger that appealed to her senses and made her excruciatingly aware of herself as a woman.
This is Daniel, she reminded herself fiercely as he began to sway with her to the music. No stranger, but the man you’ve been married to for seven years.
But this Daniel was a stranger to her, she acknowledged heavily. And not only because she was here with him in his other world, so to speak. They had become strangers weeks ago—estranged while still living together as man and wife.
A sigh broke from her. The sadness in it must have reached Daniel, because the hand covering hers where it lay against the smooth lapel of his dinner-jacket squeezed, and his other moved on her waist, sliding up and beneath her black bolero with the intention of pressing her closer—then stopped, a sudden breathless stillness assailing both of them as his fingers made surprised contact with warm bare flesh.
She’d forgotten the backless design of the dress until that moment, had been uptight about too many other things to care about something she’d had no intention of revealing. But she remembered now and had to close her eyes as a wild wave of sensation rippled right through her.
She tried to fight it, moving her head in an effort to take in air that was not filled with the musky sensual smell of him emanating up from his warm throat. But he stopped her, the hand holding hers lifting to curve her nape, pressing her back against him.
‘Déjà vu,’ Daniel whispered, and she gasped out an unsteady breath when she realised what he meant.
The first time they’d ever danced together she’d been wearing a little cropped T-shirt that he’d slipped his fingers beneath. This time it was a velvet bolero, more elegant, more sophisticated, but her reaction was the same.
Hot and drenching, a sexual awareness that sizzled like liquid on burning coals. Her heart hammered in response, and as she stiffened on a fizz of sensation his fingertips began to graze lightly along her spine.
No, she told herself breathlessly. Don’t let him do this to you!
But the fine hairs covering her body began to ting
le in pleasurable response to his caress, forcing her eyes to close and her spine to move into a supple arch that sent the sensitive tips of her breasts brushing against the heated wall of his chest. She felt Daniel’s body tighten against her, harden, begin to throb with a need older than time itself, and let out a shakily helpless sigh.
His dark head lowered to nuzzle her throat. ‘It hasn’t changed one iota, has it?’ he breathed. ‘We still have this amazing effect on each other.’
He was, oh, so right. And on a final sigh that came from deep, deep inside her, she surrendered to it all, letting herself do what she was desperate to do, and stretched up to brush her mouth softly against his.
It was the first time in long weeks that she had made a voluntary move towards him, and he acknowledged it with a rasping intake of air, his lean body shuddering as he released the air again.
‘Let’s go home,’ he said hoarsely. ‘This isn’t what I want to be doing with you.’
‘I…’ All right, she was about to concede, feeling as if she had nothing left to fight him with. But then another acidly mocking, shudderingly familiar voice intruded, and everything within her seemed to shatter into a thousand broken pieces.
‘Well, if it isn’t Don Juan himself. And with a brandnew conquest too…’
CHAPTER SEVEN
RACHEL closed her eyes, a dark wave of recognition making her blonde head drop wearily on to Daniel’s shoulder while he stiffened like a board.
‘You do know he’s married, don’t you, dear?’ the cruel voice taunted.