‘Think about what you’re saying,’ Nik urged huskily. ‘This is you, this is me and we’re already married-’
‘Only on paper-’
‘But we could make it real,’ Nik drawled softly, the dark timbre of his accented intonation shimmying down her taut spinal cord like a dangerous-weather warning.
Prudence worked very hard at blanking him out. Goodness knew, she had had plenty of practice resisting Nik’s intense charisma. Once a stray smile or even the hint of warmth in his gaze had made her silly heart race. But not any more, she reminded herself fiercely.
‘I don’t want to make it real.’
Nik reached for her with sure, steady hands and she let him ease her closer. Her heart was pounding behind her ribcage. Her brain was telling her to back away, laugh it off and extricate herself with style. There was just one problem: she didn’t want to. A little voice had swum up from her subconscious to tell her that it was all right and perfectly acceptable to be curious about how it would feel if he held her close.
‘I may be no good at the romantic angle…but I excel in other fields,’ Nik purred.
‘You’re very modest.’ She was so tense, so wound up with fizzing expectation that she could hardly breathe. In the grip of intense confusion, she was no longer thinking. In fact she was luxuriating in the touch of the long brown fingers smoothing across her cheek to spear into her hair and tip up her face for the raking inspection of his stunning golden eyes.
‘Humility doesn’t win battles.’ He lowered his arrogant dark head. ‘If you run away this time, I’ll come after you…’
A tight little knot had formed in her tummy. She pressed her thighs tightly together. The peaks of her breasts felt incredibly sensitive, the rosy tips distended and tingling. Warm colour mantled her cheeks. Just when she was on the brink of grabbing him, he brought his marauding masculine mouth down on hers. It felt impossibly intimate and incredibly good. She clutched at his jacket to stay upright. Thud-thud-thud went her heartbeat. The invasion of his tongue beyond the tender fullness of her lips pierced her with a deep, aching longing that made her shiver. She wanted more. Her body was like a spring wound up too tight. She wanted to drown in the sweet, wicked pleasure he offered and forget her pride. But as he pulled her closer she knocked her heel on the wooden chest by the wall and cold shame engulfed her as she recognised her hunger and her weakness for what they were.
Tearing herself free of his hold, she staggered away a couple of steps and struggled to calm herself, while attempting to ignore the shrieking sensation of loss tugging at her nerve-endings.
Breathing heavily, Nik resisted an urge to haul her back to him like a caveman. ‘What’s wrong?’
Mortified by her behaviour, she could not stand to look at him. What was wrong was encapsulated in the contents of the chest by the wall, she reflected painfully. She wondered if he had registered that her response had hit earthquake scale and that her legs were still threatening to buckle. ‘I shouldn’t have let that happen-’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I want a divorce.’
‘Why?’ Nik prompted, swift as a panther about to pounce. ‘Is there another man in your life?’
Astonishment almost made Prudence laugh out loud at that question. Mentally she was in a total spin: his suggestion that they make their marriage real had already shattered her with its sheer unexpectedness. The kiss, brief as it had been, had been overkill for her sorely taxed nerves. ‘If there was, it would be none of your business-’
‘Theos…of course it would be my business!’ Nik launched at her, dropping the velvet-smooth approach with a vengeance.
It was the provocation Prudence needed. Stalking past him, she wrenched up the lid of the chest and bent down to lift out a haphazard bundle of photograph albums and scrapbooks. She turned round and clumsily dumped them right at his feet. ‘No…the women between those pages are your business…I’m not and I never will be!’
An electrifying silence fell.
‘What is this?’ Nik swept up a scrapbook. He didn’t want to open it. But cowardice was not his way and he did so. His arrested attention was claimed by tabloid cuttings, magazine articles and picture after picture of him with other women. He felt sick. ‘You put this together?’
Prudence folded her arms in a defensive stance. ‘It was wonderful aversion therapy.’
‘But we weren’t living together. We have never lived together as man and wife,’ Nik countered in a fast-footed and healthy recovery that she could only regard as magnificent, surrounded as he was by all the undeniable evidence of his notorious reputation as a womaniser. ‘But if I had you, I wouldn’t need those kinds of amusements any more.’
Amusements? Women as toys, entertaining distractions for the lighter moments of life. Leo had been right and she had been ingloriously wrong: Nik was an old-style Greek tycoon. An unrepentant womaniser with double standards. It was typical that he should think that she would only want a divorce because she had met someone else. Perhaps honesty was the best policy.
With her emotions all over the place and her lips still tingling from the hard heat of his, Prudence was eager to gloss over the animosity in the air and smooth things back to normal. ‘There is nobody else involved in this. I wasn’t going to tell you at this point but I have made certain plans and I can’t go ahead with them until we’re divorced.’
‘What sort of plans?’
‘I want to…’ she hesitated and then pressed doggedly on, ‘…I want to have a baby.’
The tall, dark Greek went as still as a statue. ‘With whom?’
‘By myself. It’s not that unusual…I’ll go to a sperm bank,’ Prudence explained in a small, reluctant voice. ‘And yes, I have thought very deeply about this.’
For a count of thirty seconds Nik stared at her with brooding force, his golden eyes burning hot as the heart of a fire. ‘Over my dead body…and I mean that literally. That has to be the most disgusting idea that I’ve ever heard and I don’t want to hear it again. It’s freaky-’
‘It is not freaky…There’s nothing wrong with me wanting a child! It’s the most normal thing in the world. I’m twenty-seven-’
‘So? You can have one the normal way…but not that way.’ Pale beneath his bronzed skin, his fabulous, sculpted bone structure prominent, Nik could not restrain a shudder. ‘I suppose I could agree to a baby as well. Anything has to be better than a divorce and impregnation of my wife by a test-tube.’
Rigid with mortification and anger at his scornful and dismissive reaction, and outraged at his offer of that grudging concession on the child front, Prudence said tightly, ‘I think you should leave-’
‘Pudding-’
‘I used to think there was something cute about you calling me that…I’ve changed my mind.’
In a sudden movement that caught her unawares, Nik reached for her hands. ‘No, I’m not leaving. I can’t let this happen. This is not how we are together.’
Her throat thickened and closed over. She nodded in vigorous agreement, not trusting herself to speak.
‘This is not how it was meant to be between us,’ Nik intoned, almost crushing the life from her fingers.
Moisture shone in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. Nik groaned out loud. ‘Don’t…’
She gulped. ‘I’m sorry…go!’