‘We have to talk,’ he told her, ‘but not out here. Let’s go inside.’
As though she had suddenly lost the ability to move independently of him, she let him guide her out of the car and into the darkened house
. Without taking his hand from her arm, he switched on the hall lights and then opened the door into what appeared to be a library-cum-study.
Still shocked by the raw emotion she had heard in his voice, Sara let him lead her across to a large leather chesterfield, obediently sinking down on to it, and watching with wide, bewildered eyes as he sat down beside her.
His movements were edged with a tension that in a less aggressive and assured man she might have thought nervousness, but the thought of any woman making Jonas nervous, least of all her, was so ridiculous that she instantly dismissed it.
Now that she was out of his arms and removed from the powerful spell he seemed to throw over her senses, she felt a renewal of her earlier hostility and resentment. The passion that had flared between them in the car was something she preferred to dismiss.
‘I almost wanted to kill you when you told me you bought that dress for him, do you know that?’
The words were delivered so flatly, it took her several seconds to realise it was not a joke.
Hard, flat patches of colour burned his cheekbones, his mouth compressed so tightly that she could see the fierce beat of the pulse in his throat.
‘I want you, Sara,’ he continued in the same flat, hard tone. ‘I wanted you from the first moment I saw you, but more than that, I’m falling in love with you.’
It took several seconds for his words to sink in. When they had, Sara could only stare at him in incredulous disbelief. He had fallen in love with her? Impossible! She opened her mouth to tell him so, and was surprised by the ferocity of the anger and fear that suddenly engulfed her. How dared he claim to love her? Rick had loved her and she had loved him, but Rick had never treated her the way Jonas did. Rick had revered and respected her…had never touched her in furious desire and anger. Rick had…Rick… A sob of pure anguish lodged in her throat, a sense of fear and betrayal flooding her senses. How dared this man claim to love her; how dared he try to seduce her away from her precious memories? She didn’t want his love. She didn’t want anyone’s love. Unadmitted, buried deep in her subconscious, was the knowledge that to open oneself to love was to open oneself to pain. She had travelled down that road once in her life; she wasn’t going to travel down it again.
With a bitterness that was directed as much against herself as it was against him, she stared at him in incredulity and said, ‘Are you actually trying to tell me you think you’ve fallen in love with me on the strength of a couple of meetings?’
If she hadn’t been so angry she might have been amazed at the way he flushed so darkly.
‘Improbable, I know.’ His voice was harsh and faintly self-derisory, his grimace wry. ‘But true none the less. I’m not an impressionable boy, Sara; I admit that falling in love with you wasn’t exactly something I anticipated—if I gave it any thought at all I’d begun to assume that it was simply something that wasn’t going to happen to me. And to be honest, I didn’t regret it. I’ve seen too much of what ‘love’ can do to relish the thought of it in my own life, but fate, it seems, had other ideas. The feelings I have for you aren’t easy to explain or define, but I know myself well enough to know that they are genuine.’ He leaned forward and cupped her chin before she could move out of the way, holding her so that she was forced to meet his eyes.
‘And you feel something for me, too,’ he finished softly.
Fear kicked painfully in her stomach. ‘I don’t. I don’t feel anything for you,’ she lied frantically, trying to pull free of him, but his hand slid round to the back of her neck, holding her immobile.
‘I love Rick…’ she protested. ‘I always have and I always will.’
‘You love a dead man,’ said Jonas bitingly, ‘A memory, Sara, a man who can’t hold you in his arms any more…can’t make your body tremble with wanting…’
‘Stop it! Stop it; I don’t want to hear any more!’
‘Why?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘Because it’s true? You’re clinging to your dead lover because you’re afraid to let yourself feel any emotion. You don’t love him, not the way I define love. You’re clinging to a safe image, because you’re too afraid to face the real world.’
‘No…no… you’re wrong.’ She almost sobbed the words, her throat tight with panic and pain.
‘No? Then what’s your explanation for this…this feeling there is between us—and don’t bother trying to deny that there is something…?’
She felt herself flush beneath the burning glitter of his eyes, not cold but hot, and bitterly angry.
‘Sex,’ she told him defensively through a raw throat; ‘it’s just sex.’
She knew instantly she had made a bad mistake. A smile twisted his mouth, the glitter in his eyes intensifying as he bent his head towards her, his fingers sliding into her hair to cup and caress her head, his mouth moving silkily over hers, generating a heat which forced her to suppress a moan of arousal in her throat.
His hand left her arm and slid to her breast, the intensity of her physical response to him shocking and shaming to her.
It seemed an aeon of time before he let her go, his lips lingering on the swollen contours of hers, caressing and tasting her with a slow and deliberate languor that she found nearly as dangerously overwhelming as his earlier ardour.
For the first time in her life she was aware of the intensity of a man’s desire and the urgency of his arousal. Just one word, just a look, in fact, would be enough to take her from his study to the intimacy of the bed he had mentioned to her earlier, and, shamingly, there was still a small part of her that wantonly ached for that intimacy, that yearned to know the satin smoothness of his naked skin, the erotic play of his hands on her body, his mouth… She shuddered violently and opened her eyes to see the hot glitter of triumph in his.
‘So it’s just sex, is it?’
She had to destroy that masculine triumph, to hurt him the way he was hurting her by trying to make her forget Rick.