The Innocent's Sinful Craving

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DANA TURNED AWAY from the mirror, shivering. Rejecting the image of this stranger who had shocked her into more emotional turmoil than she’d ever dreamed possible.

I don’t want to know her, she thought desperately as she began to tremble. I don’t understand where she’s come from. I only know that I can’t afford to live in her head—or her heart.

Because to think how she thinks—to feel what she might feel—would be utter madness. Besides, it’s not true—any of it. It can’t be...

It was better—safer to believe what she was experiencing was simply a recurrence of an old dangerous obsession that she’d believed—prayed—was dealt with and gone.

It had started in the first awful weeks of her banishment from Mannion, as she lay crying herself to sleep each night, hating the injustice of it all. Hating Zac for making a fool of her, then lying about it. Hating him for the dreams she was ashamed to remember in the morning.

They talked about people adding insult to injury, but in her case the opposite was true. Zac’s cynical attempt at seduction, pretending to be Adam, had been the insult.

But accusing her of being some kind of teenage nymphomaniac and having her dismissed from Mannion had been the ultimate injury, for which she would never forgive him.

As the days passed, she’d become unhappily accustomed to her small, hot room at the top of the house, the London traffic noise which never seemed to stop, and even the spoiled whiny children. Most of the time she was able to shut it all out of her mind.

But not Zac Belisandro. He was always there in her head. She found herself almost feverishly scanning the papers for news about Belisandro International and the man they’d christened the Playboy Tycoon, waiting, hoping to read that his life had crashed and burned too.

Instead, he’d seemed to go from strength to strength, in the personal as well as the business sense. The glossy magazines were full of the girls he was dating—usually for weeks, but sometimes, recalling a beautiful French actress and a blonde American model, for months.

It was then that the dreams started again, but this time with herself an unwilling bystander, unable to move, forced to watch him with a series of strangers in his arms.

Common sense told her to give up what almost amounted to an addiction. To stop looking for his name in the news columns and on the internet.

Instead, she’d told herself defensively that she needed to keep tabs on him—to know where he was living, and the places he frequented so she could avoid them. So she could make sure she never bumped into him, even by chance.

His move to the Melbourne office had been like the unlocking of a cage.

I’m free at last, she’d told herself, almost exultant with relief. And one of the chief barriers to Mannion has been removed too. My life is going to change.

And so it had—but in a way she’d never imagined possible.

I want you...

Three little words, blunt and unequivocal, without any gloss of tenderness.

Was that how Zac would be with her—greedy and uncaring—intent solely on his own pleasure?

She told herself that she wished she could think so.

That she longed to believe that the beguilement of his mouth, the whisper of his fingers on her skin meant nothing more than a fixed determination to have his way with her. And that any kind of response from her was not a requirement of the transaction.

It was, she thought, her only hope of a reprieve from what, she now realised with stunning force, was the very real threat of self-betrayal.

I can’t let that happen, she whispered silently. Even when I was a young girl, I recognised the power he had, and it scared me. So, I can’t allow him to control me now. I have to resist. Fight him. And fight myself.

Forget there was a wedding today and treat it as a mere business transaction. And hope that Zac soon becomes bored and starts looking for other interests.

Because to wish for anything else would be madness.

She turned to get out of this room with all its connotations and halted, gasping when she saw that Zac was standing in the doorway to his dressing room, hands on hips, his coat and tie discarded, his shirt unbuttoned almost to the waist, with its sleeves turned back over his forearms.

His appearance might be casual but, to Dana, it made him no less formidable.

She said, her voice breathless, ‘I thought you’d be still engaged with your visitor. You—you startled me.’

‘So I saw,’ Zac returned drily. ‘And my visitor came only to make a delivery.’ He strolled forward. ‘Perhaps, in future, I should signal my arrival by whistling loudly, or shouting Hi! What do you think?’