The Marriage Surrender

‘Hate?’ he mocked. ‘Can’t stand me touching you? You have been hungrily eating me up with your eyes ever since you set foot into my building!’ he accused.

‘That’s a lie!’ she denied.

‘A lie?’ His hard mouth curved upwards, without actually smiling. ‘Well, let us just see, shall we?’

And, with no more warning than that, he took hold of her arms and pulled her to her feet as panic came back to envelop her. She hit out at him with her closed fists, imprisoned arms struggling to break free from his grasp.

‘So wild,’ he muttered, fielding her blows by capturing her wrists and using them to pull her hard up against him. ‘So very wild when protecting that precious virtue you hang onto so tenaciously!’

Her mind went white—a complete white wipe-out of bright, blinding pain that had her fighting all the harder to get free. Pulling, pushing, kicking, scratching. ‘Let me go!’ she choked, trying uselessly to twist her captured wrists free.

‘Never,’ he declared. ‘You are back with me now. And this time I will make sure you stay!’

Then his dark head was lowering, his parted mouth angling across her own tensely held lips, his arms coming around her, imprisoning her, holding her trapped by the one thing she feared the most.

The power of his kiss.

It was like being tossed back through dark lonely chasms to a time when she’d barely existed between moments like this.

Sandro—Sandro—filling her mind, her heart, her body with a wild, wanton need that broke through every single barrier she had ever erected between them. It was wonderful, it was right, it was like touching Heaven after spending years as an outcast in Hell. It was heat after the big freeze; it was solid land after being cast adrift. It was her destiny rediscovered in the soul-healing crush of his warm, wonderful mouth.

She groaned, whimpering because she could feel herself coming alive, every emotion she possessed exploding through the constraints she exerted over them. Her lips began to cling instead of trying to break free, her heart was thundering with a power that almost completely enveloped her, breasts tightening, their tips seeming to waken from a long, long sleep that now set them pulsing and stretching, reaching out like twin sensors towards the only stimulus that ever roused them.

And deep, deep down inside her a fire began to erupt, an old fire, a fierce fire, a fire that was lit only by the match this man had the power to strike.

He felt it. His mouth lifted from hers, his parted lips moist and pulsing. ‘Cara mia...’ he breathed, bringing her stunned blue gaze jerking up to meet the driven blackness of his. ‘I knew it.’

‘No,’ she denied, trying—trying to tug it all back under wraps again.

But it was already too late. She could see it burning in the knowing glitter of his darkened eyes, see it in the flush of heat striking out from his high cheekbones, could feel it in his body that was slowly tightening with desire against her.

She could taste it in his mouth, which was suddenly covering her own again with a passion that left her no room whatsoever to scurry back into hiding.

Sandro had kissed her before many times. He had kissed her gently, he had kissed her coaxingly, he had even kissed her teasingly—especially during those earlier, happier days of their relationship. Later had come the impassioned kisses, the ones he’d struggled to keep in check because their desires had ignited so easily then. After they were married, and frustration began to play a vital part in any kisses they used to share, he would kiss her hungrily, sometimes angrily, but mostly with a painful kind of plea that used to tear her apart inside.

But this was different. This wasn’t teasing, or angry, or anything like that wretched pleading that used to tear her apart so much. This was mutual need, pure and simple, and it flooded through both of them in a hot and torrid gush of dark, dizzying pleasure.

Then, ‘No,’ she breathed. ‘I can’t do this.’ And she abruptly broke free of him, taking a couple of very necessary steps backwards, haunted eyes fixed on his oddly sombre expression, considering the victory he had just won over her defences.

‘Why can’t you?’ he asked, very, very gently.

Tears washed across her eyes, then left again. ‘I can’t,’ she repeated shakily—then, almost tragically, ‘I just can’t!

He sighed, a flicker of pain disturbing his long,

lush lashes—before he was grimly blanking it out. ‘None the less,’ he said firmly, ‘this is where we begin, cara, not where we end it. Now, come,’ he commanded, giving her no chance to clear her brain of one trauma before he was resolutely swinging her into another by firmly taking hold of one her hands.

Ignoring the way she tried to break free from him, he pulled her towards the waiting lift. ‘We are late,’ he informed her as they reached it. ‘We will have to hurry if we are to make it in time.’

‘But—where are we going?’ she demanded, trying not to react to a new wave of panic, which belonged to the lift, not to Sandro’s grimly determined behaviour as he pulled her inside it.

‘You will see soon enough,’ he replied, holding onto her wrist as he turned to set the lift doors closing.

Then his attention was fully back on her, his gnp shifting to her slender waist as he propped her up against the lift wall and held her there. They began to move. She closed her eyes and tried very hard to fight the whole gamut of horrors suddenly rocketing through her. Not least was his closeness, the shattering residue of that incredible kiss they had just shared, and his words, which had carried such a threatening thread of finality with them.

And, of course, there was the lift, that wretched lift.

‘Tell me, why are you so frightened of travelling in this lift?’ Sandro asked huskily.