Savage Courtship

‘He is not a stud!’ she bit out.

‘Apparently not.’ He sounded so smug that Vanessa wanted to hit him. ‘Who’s been holding back—you or he?’

‘Richard and I have had an excellent relationship for two years,’ she said sharply. ‘Just because it isn’t based on sex, it doesn’t mean it’s not intense—’

‘Mmm, it must be intensely unexciting,’ he agreed glibly and she struggled not to scream. She tried to ignore the slow slide of the hand between her shoulder-blades down the length of her tingling spine. It wasn’t until his hand stopped, his fingers splayed across her lower back, curving against the rise of her buttocks, that she found the breath to reply.

‘We’re both cautious people,’ she said blindly, and promptly threw caution to the winds. ‘In fact, we’re probably going to get married in the not-too-distant future!’

They moved in silence for a few tense seconds. She could feel his eyes crawling o

ver her averted profile.

‘He’s asked you to be his wife?’

She bit her lip. ‘No, not yet, but—’

‘But since you’ve slept with me you’ve been feeling so guilty about not sleeping with Richard that you’ve decided it’s time to spice up that “excellent relationship” and see if you’re sexually compatible enough to marry him when he does ask,’ he guessed with devastating accuracy. ‘Is that the reason for the sexy-looking dress you’re wearing tonight? A tacit signal that you’re on heat at last? And where does that leave me? In the role of a “teaser” I suppose, although I thought they were used to arouse hesitant stallions rather than reluctant mares.’

‘How dare you?’ she spluttered, hating him for reducing her uncertainties to barnyard analogies.

‘Very easily, my dear Flynn,’ he drawled. ‘Just think of me as saving you a lot of wasted energy. If there’s been no sign of spontaneous combustion between Richard and you so far, then no amount of desperate fanning is going to create the missing spark.’

‘You’re talking about sex, not love—’

‘You love him?’

She refused to dignify his impertinent surprise with an answer and stared resolutely away from him.

‘Vanessa, look at me.’ His hand released hers to take her chin in an unpleasantly firm grasp. He turned her face so that she looked fully into his. ‘Do you love him?’ he demanded, his expression so intent with serious concern that she was momentarily stunned.

‘I—yes.’

She was afraid her hesitation had betrayed her, and to cover it she said aggressively, ‘I suppose you’re going to say that if I loved him I never would have betrayed him by having sex with you, no matter how drunk I was?’

The soft pad of his thumb stroked the corner of her mouth. ‘No, actually I wasn’t,’ he said gently. ‘I don’t think I have to tell you anything about your feelings for Wells that you don’t already know, deep down inside yourself. It’s the strength of your own doubts that’s the real betrayal, not anything you might or might not have done with me...’

‘Oh, and you think you know me that well, of course,’ she said with distinctly shaky sarcasm.

‘I know that you need to be loved with a reckless abandon and Wells isn’t a man prone to recklessness or, from what I’ve observed, abandon. He’s too tame for you. He’ll disappoint you, Vanessa, and not only in bed.’

‘Damn you, who in the hell do you think you are? I don’t have to take this from you!’ whispered Vanessa angrily, dismayed at the ease with which he rifled her private thoughts.

‘Thinking of quitting on me, Flynn?’ he said as the music died around them. ‘I wouldn’t advise it.’

She flung back her head defiantly. ‘Why not?’

‘Because if you do I’ll make damned sure that you don’t have your tame Richard to run to,’ he said with silky menace. ‘I think he’ll appreciate being made a fool of even less than I did.’

Vanessa paled. ‘You mean you’d tell him?’

‘Not only him. You know what they say, my dear; a lie has no leg but a scandal has wings. I can just imagine the titillating headlines the tabloids could concoct if they got wind of the true identity of the lascivious ghost of Whitefield Inn. Why, we’d open to roaring trade and you’d be the media’s latest darling. Shall we return to your ardent swain? I see him looking rather anxiously this way and I wouldn’t like him to get the wrong idea, would you...?’

CHAPTER SEVEN

BARELY fifteen minutes later Vanessa was numbly allowing herself to be put into the passenger seat of Benedict’s BMW.

Even while a detached part of her brain despised herself for her meekness she seemed unable to fight the old sense of helplessness that had come flooding back at his final verbal thrust on the dance-floor.