He, perversely, seemed to think he had already weathered the worst. He folded his arms across his chest, slowly rotating to follow her prowling progress. ‘I don’t have to. You’re doing a very good job of frightening yourself. I always wondered what you’d look like in a passion. Now I know. You should lose your temper more often.’
She knew he was trying to distract her. ‘And you should be ashamed of yourself!’ she spat, clenching her hands in the soft folds of her skirt. All the thwarted passion of a few minutes ago was now channelled into the relief valve of rage.
‘I think I should be complimented for my honesty,’ he protested. ‘I’ll even admit that I looked and I lusted but the flesh was sadly unwilling.’
Was he trying to tell her that no man would want her, even served up on a platter? She flinched, then rallied furiously. She wasn’t going to let him get away with sexually humiliating her. She had promised herself that no man would ever do that again. ‘It damned well wasn’t unwilling when I woke up,’ she flung at him. ‘You were certainly plenty aroused then.’
He had the gall to flaunt a grin. ‘I’m usually at my best in the mornings,’ he said modestly. ‘And I was probably dreaming about what was to come...so to speak. I had every intention of making love to my luscious satin-wrapped present when I’d slept off my jet-lag. I was very disappointed to find her a figment of my lustful imagination.’
‘You’re disgusting!’ choked Vanessa, coping with a rush of conflicting feelings—relief, embarrassment, forbidden delight...
‘I’m a man.’
‘You’re a pervert!’
‘The perversion would have been if I’d brought you up here and made love to you without telling you that it was our first time together. It wouldn’t have done for us both to discover you were still a virgin—’
‘I’ve made love before!’ she flared defiantly.
‘Good. Then I won’t have to worry about hurting you—’
She shuddered at the painful memory that that evoked, wrapping her arms around her waist and hugging herself in a revealing gesture that made his eyes narrow and his mouth thin.
‘Surely you don’t have the gall to think that I’d let you—’ She choked to a halt as he moved closer, his voice gentling.
‘Not let, Vanessa. Fully participate as a mature adult. Nothing’s changed. You wanted me enough to come this far—’
‘No, I didn’t, I was just curious.’
His mouth thinned still further. ‘Was, and still are. Would you like me to prove it to you, Vanessa? At least I’ve been honest with you. More so than you’ve been with me...’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All this outrage about what I did or didn’t do to you. Isn’t it really a mask for your own guilty feelings? Didn’t it secretly excite you to think about how liberated our lovemaking must have been...neither of us in any state to worry about restraint or inhibition? Weren’t you even a little aroused when you woke up to find me beside you?’
She hugged herself tighter. ‘I was shocked—’
‘Of course you were shocked. But there you were, semi-nude, cuddled up with a naked, aroused man who was completely vulnerable to whatever you chose to do to him. You were curious about me then, too, weren’t you, Vanessa? It never occurred to you that it might have been rape, because subconsciously even then you trusted me. So you didn’t scream. You looked at me instead. You looked at my body. Did you touch me? Did you want to touch me? I would have liked it if you had. I would have liked to have been woken that way, liked it more than anything...’
She couldn’t look at him, turning her back and trying to retrieve her badly fragmented composure. ‘I—’
‘Because I touched you, Vanessa,’ he told her with devastating candour as he moved up behind her.
‘When I got into bed with you I fondled you a little before I drifted off to sleep—your long, gorgeous back and especially that beautiful, rounded bottom.’ His arms came around her body to wrap themselves over hers and gently tug them down to her sides, pressing them there as his voice nuzzled in her hair. ‘It was so irresistible...all bare and warm under that flimsy satin slip, like a delicious, downy peach I wanted to bite into... You were lying on your front so I couldn’t stroke your breasts, but I knew they must be ripe and full because your slip was loose and I could see the luscious swell at the side where your breast was compressed against the bed. I went to sleep thinking about turning you over and cupping them in my hands, finding out how your nipples would taste, whether they were big or small, cherry-pink or—’
‘Stop it!’ she cried faintly, far too late for the protest to be effective.
‘Why, am I turning you on, Vanessa?’ He ran his hands lightly up and down her arms and then, taking her by surprise, spun her around, looking deeply satisfied when he saw her flushed face and cornered eyes, the full lower lip that he had bitten so voluptuously earlier now captured by her own nervous teeth.
He touched her hair with a tenderness that made her eyes sting. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to force you to do anything that you don’t want to. Not tonight, anyway. I won’t rush you but I’m not going to let you deny your feelings, either, or mine. I give you fair warning that I have every intention of fulfilling my fantasies where you’re concerned!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
VANESSA lifted her head and let the stiff breeze float her loosely bound hair off her shoulders. She dug her cold hands deeper into the pockets of her down jacket as she walked along the beach, stepping carefully in her thick-soled trainers to avoid slipping on the piles of loose rocks.
Unlike the silky white-sand beaches of the east coast of the Coromandel, most of the west-coast bays were small, rock-strewn stretches of brown sand scalloped from point to rocky point, the mussel- and oyster-encrusted rocks at the waterline giving way to small boulders than could be overturned to reveal scuttling colonies of crabs and, up past the high-tide line, bleached driftwood and stiffened brown seaweed lay among thick drifts of smoothly weathered stones and pebbles ranging through the spectrum of earth colours.
Vanessa looked up at a sharp cry, but it was only a seagull wheeling above the shallow inshore waters, brown with stirred-up sand. She watched its soaring, wind-tossed flight across the pale grey sky, envying its freedom. There were times she would like to fly free, away from all her problems. But instead she could only drive and