‘YOU’VE got guests to take care of,’ Dane murmured with a brilliant and quite terrifying smile. ‘Though I do hate to break up such a touching scene.’
The blaze of fury in his sapphire eyes was visible only for a second before his thick lashes cloaked their expressiveness. ‘Move, Claire,’ he added softly.
And leave Max to his tender mercies? Was he joking? Hot-cheeked, she bit her lip, unable to understand why he was so angry. ‘I’ll just see Max out,’ she dared.
For a moment she thought he was going to object. He flung Max, who was standing behind her, a cruelly amused appraisal. ‘I wasn’t going to lay a finger on him, Claire!’ And with that, he swung on his heel.
‘Does he usually talk to you like that?’ Max muttered, fiddling with his collar as if it was strangling him.
‘When he’s angry … he—–’ Distressed by Dane’s behaviour, she spun again. ‘I’m sorry. You’d better go. I do wish you well, but …’
‘He doesn’t love you,’ Max jeered, reacting to what he read in her eloquent face. ‘He just looked at you like you crawled out from under a stone. He’s a decadent, womanising …’
‘I might have liked you better if you’d said that to his face,’ Claire retorted crushingly.
Max departed in high dudgeon in the wake of several other guests. If Carter hadn’t already gone, Claire would have given him a piece of her mind. Balked of her prey, infuriated with Dane, she stayed out of his path none the less. Why should she throw Max out, just for visiting? Dane had probably slept with a dozen different women during their separation and—why didn’t she face it?—since their reconciliation. His sexual uninterest in his wife was self-explanatory. He was clearly finding physical satisfaction outside their relationship, and she’d been cravenly burying her head in the sand sooner than meet that sordid truth head on.
Ironically, Max’s hypocritical comments on Dane’s reputation had plunged her back to hard reality. Dane had chipped away at her self-respect until she had no backbone left at all. She loved him more than it was healthy to love anybody. Perhaps it was sick of her to have compromised to such an extent.
Dane appeared to be politely ignoring her when she returned to the party. It was Randy who hissed in her ear. ‘What’s wrong with Dane?’
‘Nothing,’ Claire murmured tautly.
‘Gil said he’s furious about something,’ her friend confided rather tipsily. ‘Not that I can see it. He’s smiling.’
Why should he be furious? She hadn’t asked Max to come! But Dane still believed she loved Max—the admission slunk into her disordered thoughts. She had never disabused him of the notion. He had never brought it up. She shot a less defiant glance down to the foot of the room where Dane was calmly chatting to friends. How much of their conversation had he heard?
The last of their guests departed mid-evening in a sudden, dismaying clump. Claire headed away from the hall at a steady rate of knots. A hand fell on her shoulder and spun her back.
‘Going somewhere? If it’s your bedroom, I’ll join you. But first—–’ Dane enunicated shortly, his supple hands easing slowly down over her taut spinal cord to cup the swell of her hips and weld her intimately into the hard cradle of his thighs, bringing her into full, forceful contact with his rawly masculine body. ‘This.’
Caught totally by surprise, her own body’s needs and wants rushed uncontrollably to the fore when he drove her lips apart with a hard, very sexually orientated kiss. His effect on her after so long was explosive. He lifted his silvery head and she read the purpose in the hot glitter of his eyes. Shock winged through her in waves. She was shaking all over, a gnawing ache of need she despised now, making its dissatisfaction felt inside her.
‘I was going to wait for ever if I was going to wait for an invitation,’ he said roughly. ‘What was he doing here?’
Trying jerkily to detach herself from his fierce hold, she snapped, ‘It was just a social call.’
‘Like hell it was a social call!’ You standing there weeping apology for the trap you were in, mumbling about the twins like they had a stranglehold on you!’ Dane gritted, smouldering down into the flushed triangle of her now bemused face. ‘If you go, you go without them, but if you stay, you share my bed. I’m damned if I’m putting up with this any longer. Maybe it’s time you remembered that you’re my wife and that wives have certain obligations …’
‘No,’ Claire said flatly, unequivocally. As she understood his intent, a seething, bitter anger was rising tempestuously within her slim frame. Dane was never again going to use sex to subjugate her with, and that was evidently his aim. It stung his pride that Max had come here and that she had seemed upset. She couldn’t forget how indifferent Dane had been to her physical attractions out in the Caribbean or since their reconciliation. It was a base insult for him to invite her to his bed now, and a tragic irony that had he invited her yesterday or the day before she would have fallen eagerly into his arms, convinced their marriage finally had a future. But not this way, not when he was angry and his desire was motivated purely by the lowering suspicion that his homely little wife might actually still prefer another man to him.
‘And my goodness, things must be getting desperate when you have to come down to making a move on me!’ she threw in helpless bitterness. Even the sound of her own sharpened voice pained. She sounded all that she despised in herself. A violently jealous and insecure wife.
‘Claire,’ Dane breathed.
‘I prefer things the way they are,’ she interrupted shakily. ‘It’s healthier.’
‘Excuse me, Mr … Mrs Visconti.’ Their nanny’s icy, rigidly disapproving voice fell into the pool of silence. Dane’s arms dropped from her but the cold threat in his eyes hadn’t dwindled.
Before he could utter a further upsetting word, Claire took advantage of their audience to flee, crimson-faced, to her room. She turned the key in the lock and hurled herself on the bed. Right at this moment she hated him for being capable of making love to her only out of anger, when she had been pathetically suppressing her own need for him every hour of every day and telling herself that she could cope with a platonic marriage as long as he still lived with her.
‘Open this door, Claire!’ The brass handle rattled.
‘Get lost,’ she mumbled into the pillow. If only he’d been jealous. She had forgotten how cruel Dane could be and how damnably unpredictable. She had forgotten that he looked on her as a possession, and she was suddenly so grateful that he didn’t know that she loved him. That was the one defence that enabled her to stand up to him. Shorn of it, Dane would get away with murder.
There was an awesome crash and a splintering squeal as the door crashed back drunkenly on its hinges, framing Dane on the threshold. ‘Don’t you ever lock a door against me again!’ he warned.
The atmosphere was explosive. Claire coiled back cravenly against the headboard. For the count of ten soul-destroying seconds, Dane studied her. An expression of angry distaste hardened his bronzed features. ‘You want him that badly, go to him,’ he said very quietly. ‘I’m an ungrateful bastard, aren’t I? You didn’t put a foot wrong with him. You told him you were in love with me. You’d stay because you promised me you’d stay, and for the twins. And the only damned thing you can’t control is your response to me sexually and you’re terrified of that now. It doesn’t go with the martyred image.’