Passionate Retribution

'Perhaps I just wanted to mess up your pragmatic little mind. Sex can do that.' He gave a low, mocking laugh. 'The word makes you blush virginally. Did Gavin like the ingenue approach? Do you always light up at the flick of a switch?' he continued on a note of curiosity. 'I don't know why you're quite this mad, infant, or do you save the fireworks for the ones with serious intentions?'

'If my ancestry troubles you so much, I don't really see why my sexuality or lack of it need concern you at all,' she snapped back, unhappy by his casual reference to her instantaneous reaction to him. Silently she cursed fate that she was so susceptible to the one man on the face of the earth who definitely wasn't for her.

She'd found out what she'd been missing, and she wished she hadn't.

'All alone in the middle of nowhere,' he said reflectively. 'A man might forget his qualms and take advantage of his opportunity…' He let his voice trail away, his expression terrifyingly speculative.

Emily was sure it was bluff, but all the same… She recalled his expression of fastidious distaste a little earlier, when he had derided the idea of actually making love to her from anything other than a desire to humiliate, exact punishment for the accident of her birth… He wouldn't go that far to exact revenge, would he? Alarm and uncertainty swept through her veins. She looked at him through the veil of her long lashes—his intolerable complacency made her want to scream.

He was no better than her father, for all his faults. No, he was worse, she decided, recalling the bewitching touch of his hands lightly touching her body… Heavens, he'd been able to turn her into a quivering wreck without even touching her, she thought on a rising tide of despair.

'Am I supposed to be terrified?' she enquired with a calm interest that was at odds with the curious sensation she felt, akin to the mingled fear and exhilaration experienced when a big dipper had reached the peak of its ascent and goose-bumps rose under the skin. 'Because, if so, save it,' she advised tartly. 'After all, you might to able to fool the masses who are blessed enough not to know you, but I do and I've never liked you,' she told him in a quivering voice. 'So snide, so bloody superior! Of course, my father's despicable—I'm no idiot, I can accept that. But he is my father. You look down from your morally superior heights and with the same breath calmly manipulate people to further your own ends. You're no better than he is!' At this point it behoved her to make a sweeping exit, but after one step she realised that there was no exit. She stopped uncertainly in the middle of the room, feeling inexplicably foolish under his steely stare.

The silence in the room was oppressive. Emily wondered whether he was going to let her fling those accusations with impunity.

'Did Gavin know about the temper?' he said half to himself with a penetrating appraisal from his sapphire eyes before a slow, devastating smile relieved the grimness of his expression. 'Perhaps that was why he felt obliged to agree with you, infant, for fear of the sharp edge of your tongue.'

'Gavin never did anything…' she began before she recalled exactly what Gavin had done.

'Except sleep with the sister?' He shrugged. 'But it's all in the family, isn't it? I find it strange that you react so much more violently to my relatively minor misdemeanour. After all, a few home truths and a kiss or two wouldn't rate on most folks' scale of unacceptable behaviour as equal to sleeping with the fiancé’s sister.' His eyes narrowed and his thumbs hooked in the belt of his jeans as he threw his head back, watching her with the unblinking, cat-like stare which could be so disturbing. Emily felt a cold sweat break out along her back with the knowledge that she'd pushed Gavin far too firmly to the back of her mind, considering she'd been prepared to spend her life with the man only hours before. 'But then these things are all relative,' he purred in that raspy, velvety voice which made her fingers describe themselves into claws in her fists.

Hateful, hateful snake, she thought, squaring her shoulders. His self-appointed task was to torment! 'I want to go home.'

'What home?' he enquired brutally.

'Happy about that, are you? As a matter of fact I'm without a job, too. Gavin was being…is being transferred to Paris, so I refused the job they offered me as a probationary teacher. That should make you wildly ecstatic. It does occur to me that now I've been symbolically disowned there is little point in my staying here. I can't see there's much more damage you can do.' There was, but she wasn't about to tell him about that.

'Maybe I want you here,' he replied swiftly in a goaded tone that was difficult to decipher.

'And risk being contaminated by a Stapely?' she replied huskily. If he had wanted her… The unbidden thought brought a tide of desolation. 'I won't be some sacrificial lamb, Luke,' she warned him.