The Billionaire Affair

‘Was the poor devil in love with you?’ Ben demanded. His voice was harsh, a strand of bitterness threading through the obvious scorn.

It was a question he had no right to ask. Besides, she didn’t know the answer. Oh, she’d caught Jeremy looking at her in ways that had made her feel uncomfortable and she’d been the unwilling recipient of a couple of clumsy, slack-lipped kisses. But love—no, she didn’t truly think so. Lust was more like it and a willingness to fulfil their respective fathers’ wishes in that rather spineless way he’d had.

She merely shrugged, took another gulp of the brandy-spiked milk and widened her eyes in shock as he castigated abruptly, ‘Still a heartless bitch!’ Then his voice flattened, as if control had been sought and found, and he said, ‘Your letter telling me my services were no longer required was obviously written a little too late. Because by then he must have found out that you’d been having some fun on the side and the engagement never took place. The man must have been gutted.’

He took a pace forward, bending to thrust his face close to hers, his black eyes brimming with contempt. ‘And all you can do is shrug!’

Anger as hot and sharp as his pulsed through her. How dared he act this way! Putting her mug down on the faded Persian carpet she got to her feet, the tilt of her chin mutinous as she countered scathingly, ‘You’re trying to put the blame on me for what happened to hide your own guilt—it’s what people do, isn’t it? Why should you be any different?’

His dark eyes flared as he took a step towards her. Caroline stood her ground. The situation was explosive but she wasn’t going to run away from it. He had been guilty of almost every sin in the book, not she!

The palms of her hands were slick with sweat and the heat of his body consumed her, as if the fire of their anger was pulling them closer instead of pushing them further apart.

His lips curled thinly in a parody of a smile. ‘Is that so? Then you deny writing to tell me you never wanted to see me again? You didn’t even do me the courtesy of telling me to my face.’

Of course she couldn’t deny it! She wanted to hit him for trying to put her in the wrong. ‘You weren’t around.’ She spat the words out scornfully. ‘After my father had been to see you, you’d taken off, remember?’

Even now she could hear her father’s thin, sarcastic voice, ‘You can forget your loutish lover. I offered him money to make himself scarce, and he couldn’t take it fast enough. He won’t be back and, if that’s not enough to cool your ardour, ask young Maggie Pope who fathered that brat of hers.’

Caroline expelled a shaky, emotional breath. She hadn’t wanted this bitter confrontation, or the dreadful effect it was having on her body, making her aware of every pulse point, of every inch of burning, sensitised skin. The adrenalin flooding through her was turning passionate anger into a dark and dangerous pleasure.

‘So I wrote you a letter and left it with your mother. What else did you expect?’ she said, her voice a low, tortured growl.

She was out of here, she had to be, before she said something that would rob her of her pride, something that would tell him how much, and for how long, his cruel betrayal had affected her.

As if he’d read her intentions, Ben’s hand curved sharply round the back of her neck, his black eyes burning into hers. ‘What did I expect?’ He repeated her words, his voice thick now. ‘You tell me! But there was a time…’ the fingers that had been like talons on her neck gentled with the suddenly lowered tone of his voice ‘…when you more than fulfilled all my wildest expectations. Remember?’

The sof

t, stroking movement of his fingers on her skin held her far more effectively than that earlier threatening grip. Sensations she had denied for so long were springing to demanding life, making her head spin giddily when he repeated thickly, ‘Remember, Caro? Remember how we only had to look at each other? How looking was never enough? How we had to touch naked skin, move our bodies in the dance of love, how you couldn’t wait to take me inside you?’

‘Don’t!’ The word was a moan of denial, issued from quivering lips. Her whole body was shaking with all the old dark magic, uncomfortably mixed with the aching sense of loss and betrayal that still echoed through the years. ‘Let me go,’ she said thickly, her mind horrified by her body’s sensual anticipation.

‘I would if you wanted me to.’ His voice purred softly. ‘But you don’t. You’re as ready for me now as you ever were. Deny it all you like, but these don’t lie…’ Gently, he rubbed the ball of his thumb over her parted, pouting lips, the soft friction setting up a primal ache deep inside her, making her need to draw his thumb into her mouth take on a forbidden and self-destructive urgency.

He dropped his hand as if he’d read the need in her eyes, his fingers finding their way along the angle of her jaw, sliding down her throat and slipping beneath the edge of her robe where the soft silk trembled with the panicky force of the beats of her pulse.

‘And neither do these,’ he added, his voice slow, sultry, infinitely disturbing as long fingers grazed the crests of her blatantly peaking breasts, lingering, easing beneath the insubstantial barrier of fabric.

Caroline couldn’t breathe. His caressing fingers sent shafts of exquisite pleasure through her, just as they always had. Whatever he’d done in the past was obliterated for just this moment when the ties of passion were the only memories.

Her lips parting, she lifted her suddenly leaden eyelids and met the harsh, hungry lights in the narrowed blackness of his eyes. Her breath juddered on a soft whisper of sound, the atmosphere was so emotionally charged it stung—a million pinpricks of sexual awareness; sharp, intrusive, deeply exciting.

She could taste all the old need and raw desire on her tongue, here and now, not something left over from the past, sternly pushed away if it dared to float into her consciousness on the wings of memory. Here, binding her to him as it always had, here in the assured claim of his night-dark, compelling eyes, in the slight, slow smile that curved his undeniably beautiful mouth, a sizzlingly sexy smile that robbed her mind and body of all strength of character.

‘So…’ He expelled a long, slow breath, his thick lashes sweeping down as he gazed at her mouth. ‘No denials, Caro?’ His dark head bent, his mouth a breath away from hers. ‘Good. That’s good.’

Her lips parted in helpless invitation. She could smell the fresh almost savagely male scent of him; it made her giddy. And then his mouth touched the corner of hers and she turned her head, instinctively, urgently seeking the remembered heady magic of his kiss, that total surrender to the ecstatically wild passion that no other man had ever come near to making her feel.

But he merely touched her full lower lip with the tip of his tongue then lifted his head, both hands fastening lightly around her narrow waist, keeping his control where she had lost hers entirely, and she was almost sobbing with cruel frustration as he said wryly, ‘Like taking candy from a baby.’

Ben released her, stepping back, his mouth compressed as his dark eyes swept over the evidence of her body’s arousal, from her peaking breasts, her softened, parted lips, the haze of sexual desire that clouded her deep violet eyes. ‘Round one to me, Caro,’ he added, then jerked his head towards the door, his voice clipped, impersonal. ‘Get some sleep. You’ll need it. At seventeen you could be up all night and still look ravishing in the morning.’ He gave a slight, humourless smile. ‘But things change, don’t they?’

The implication was that she would look like a raddled hag in the morning, that she was over the hill and, just as shaming, that she had lost everything that had once driven him to wild passion, unable to look at her without needing her with a desperation that had consumed them both.

How she managed to walk in a straight line, get out of the room, she didn’t know. The humiliation was so intense it turned her bones to water and filled her head with a fiery red mist that blinded her.

When she woke Caroline was mildly surprised that she’d managed to sleep at all and not at all surprised to note the dark rings around her eyes. Her normally pearly translucent skin was grey and dull in the bright spring light that flooded the small bedroom.