‘Oh, well.’ She licked her lips nervously. ‘I just wanted to help my mother.’
‘How sweet.’ There was a pause. ‘What are you throwing away?’ he asked casually.
Shelley jerked. ‘What?’
‘You heard me. I asked what you were throwing away.’
And she made the lie a thousand times worse by attempting to put him down. ‘Surely you aren’t interested in the contents of my garbage bin, Drew?’
‘So you’re not going to tell me?’
‘Drew!’ Her heart was hammering.
‘Let me see.’
‘Drew—’
‘Let me see.’
She turned away, her heart thumping so painfully that she thought she was about to die. But she didn’t hear the rustle of plastic as Drew withdrew the package she had just put in the bin, and she turned round again to find that he hadn’t moved. Misplaced hope made her look at him optimistically, praying that she had been given another chance.
As soon as she saw his face she knew that her prayers had not been answered. It was dark and demonic, condemning and cruel—and her own crumpled in response.
‘Yes,’ he jeered softly. ‘Infidelity. It’s written all over your face as clearly as if you’d marked it with an indelible pen.’
‘I can explain—’
‘Explain what?’ he demanded coldly. ‘Explain that you went off with your fancy Italian playboy?’
‘Drew—’
‘Went drinking with him? Flaunting yourself at the Westward with him?’
‘It wasn’t like that—’
‘Like what? Like what everybody told me?’
Shelley gave a silent sigh of relief. So he hadn’t seen her for himself. Oh, thank God. It was bad enough, but at least it could be rectified.
‘And that he bought you champagne and fed you olives with his fingers? And that you sat there, giggling like a girl of fifteen—’
‘Instead of an old woman of nearly twenty-one, you mean?’ she flared back at him, stung at the loathing which had hardened his face. ‘Whose fiancé keeps her on a leash?’
He carried on as if she hadn’t spoken, and by losing some of its fire his voice had become even more dangerous, even more destructive. ‘And then he drove you back here in that monstrous-looking car of his—’
‘You’re just jealous!’
‘Of his car? I don’t think so. A man usually buys a car like that to compensate for certain…how shall I put it…inadequacies. You know what they say—big car, small…’ He let the unsaid word hang on the air, insultingly. ‘But you would know about that, wouldn’t you, Shelley?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Oh, come on! Please don’t insult my intelligence by trying to play the innocent with me! I saw you! Okay?’ His voice shook. ‘Saw you with my own eyes!’
‘You…saw me?’ she stumbled in frozen disbelief.
‘Yes. Saw the way he was kissing you. I was standing watching, and it’s burned on my memory, kitten—’
‘Then you will also have seen that I jumped out of the car,’ she defended. ‘Won’t you?’
‘Oh, sure,’ he agreed. ‘Because I don’t think that even you would be so brazen as to have sex in the car in full view of your mother’s and your fiancé’s house!’
‘You’re mad! Completely mad!’
‘Yes, I think I must have been,’ he agreed evenly, only now there was something unrecognisable in his eyes which made her heart lurch with fear. And excitement.
‘Drew,’ she said warningly, only she could not work out what the danger was.
‘What?’ he answered softly. ‘What is it?’
He pulled her into his arms and drove his mouth down onto hers in something which could never be described as a kiss. Not if a kiss was supposed to be a gesture of mutual desire and caring. Oh, the desire was there, all right—but nothing in the way of caring.
‘Drew!’ she gasped, through the hot anger of his breath.
‘What?’ He ground his mouth down harder and pushed his hand up underneath her sweater to roughly cup her breast, running his thumb across the nub with a fire and a fury that made her body cry out for his possession. And Shelley was appalled to feel her knees sag.
‘God, you’re really turned on, aren’t you?’ he breathed. ‘Did he get you all hot for me, kitten?’
She opened her mouth to object but he had pushed her up against the wall, kissing her little moans of protest away until they became tiny yelps of pleasure. And then his fingers were trembling at her denim skirt, buttons flying open, and his hand was splayed hotly on her thigh as he pressed against her urgently. Desire soaked her as she felt him hook her panties with an impatient finger, and then suddenly he made a choking kind of sound, and tore himself away from her, his breathing sounding like someone who had been starved of air for more than three minutes. Someone who was nearly dead.