‘But why should that bother you?’ she asked in genuine confusion.
Alex looked heavenwards like a male in torment. Then he breathed out and strode forward with a disturbing air of purpose. He flipped the bedding back off her.
‘Alex!’ she gasped.
A pair of powerful arms snatched her up off the mattress. ‘You can nurse your headache in my bed tonight...and every other night,’ he asserted fiercely.
‘Put me down!’ she shouted at him furiously. ‘Have you gone mad?’
Letting rip with something that she had no doubt was exceedingly rude in his own language, Alex wrenched open the door and carried her, kicking and fighting, down the corridor. Sarah went crazy. ‘You’re a maniac!’ she screeched at him at the top of her voice. ‘I offer you the divorce or the separation that you should be gasping for and you go ballistic!’
Crushing her to his broad chest to still her frantic struggles, Alex slung her a filthy look. ‘You noticed?’ he queried darkly, between clenched even white teeth. ‘Well, then, you’re learning. I am wildly encouraged by such astute observative powers.’
He kicked open a door, strode across a well-lit room and deposited her on a bed. Sarah was up like a deer and off that mattress before he had even straightened but Alex blocked her passage back to the door.
‘Get out of my way,’ Sarah told him unsteadily, hitching the sliding strap of her embarrassingly thin, slinky nightdress back on to one pale shoulder.
The movement was a mistake. Alex’s golden gaze flamed over her small, slight figure, every slender curve of which was blatantly revealed by the light behind her. He backed a step and turned the key in the lock.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. ‘How can you be so childish?’
‘I have no intention of chasing you round the château for the entertainment of our staff.’ Alex pocketed the key. ‘Why don’t you get into bed?’
‘Because I refuse to share a bed with you!’ Sarah drew herself up to her full height, pride, self-preservation and innate obstinacy evident in every inch of her bearing.
‘You sleep here from now on,’ Alex delivered flatly, tenaciously. ‘In my bed.’
Sarah squared her shoulders. Wanting him was one thing, condoning that weak shameful craving another. She had promised herself that she would never allow him to use her again and she intended to keep that promise. ‘I am not the kind of woman who just does what you tell her when you snap your fingers,’ she said witheringly..
His night-dark eyes slashed into her. ‘Then allow me to explain your position,’ Alex murmured, his voice frighteningly quiet and low in pitch. ‘If you don’t get into my bed, I’ll rip off that nightdress and do what I am burning to do...so thoroughly and so often, you won’t be fit to get back out of that bed for at least twenty-four hours.’
Sarah’s tongue shot out to wet her dry lips.
‘On the other hand, if you do get into bed, I’ll struggle manfully to respect your headache...’
Sarah shot into bed without another word. Meek as a lamb, she conceded furiously, but then heroism in the face of overwhelming odds would not have brought its own reward. It would have been another dose of humiliation, she reminded herself. Sex that was just sex was not a practice she had any desire to take up on a regular basis.
Alex reached for her several minutes later.
‘Don’t!’ she launched over her shoulder.
‘If you don’t shut up,’ Alex whispered silkily, forcing her close with hard, strong hands, ‘I’ll forget I ever made such a self-sacrificing concession as letting you lie here untouched...’
She stopped breathing. The heat of his body, the incredibly intimate feel of him against her trembling body warned her that Alex was not joking...he was very aroused. Reaching out, he turned off the light. Hot as hellfire, she lay there in the darkness.
‘And if you can’t stop moving about in that wonderfully encouraging way, you had better start praying...’
Hardly breathing and not moving, she lay there, fighting the flood of heat warming her and the wanton stab of excitement tugging low in the pit of her stomach. She just didn’t understand Alex Terzakis; she just didn’t understand him at all. And, for a female who liked to know exactly where she stood at all times, that was a terrifying admission.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘UP!’
The next morning, some horribly cruel character trailed the bedding off Sarah, letting in a cold draught.
She opened her eyes to see Alex, fully dressed and breathtakingly immaculate in a beautifully tailored navy suit. ‘Up?’ she whispered weakly. ‘What time is it?’
‘Seven. And, like a good little wife, you are going to get up and have breakfast with me...’ With absolute sadism, Alex lifted her and dumped her in a heap on the stool in front of the dressing-table. ‘You brush your hair, wash your face and come downstairs.’