And then her hesitancy was forgotten as he suddenly pushed her back against the bed, growling against her mouth, ‘You’re the one who wanted this.’
‘I do…I want you,’ Annie whispered back. ‘I love you…so much…’
She gave a small moan of delight as he pushed back the duvet, his hand and then his mouth hotly fierce against her naked skin, her naked breasts. In the clear morning light she could see the rosy crests of her nipples, her breasts still slightly flushed and swollen from the night’s lovemaking.
As he touched her Annie felt a tremendous surge of longing kick through her body. Lovingly she reached out for him, tensing in shock as he pulled away from her, saying sharply, ‘No!’
‘You really do want your breakfast, don’t you?’ Annie teased him tenderly as she smiled up at him.
‘I’ll go down and start preparing it,’ she heard him telling her almost tersely as he got off the bed and turned away from her, heading for the bedroom door.
Annie watched him go. Her body still ached for him, and yet beneath that ache lay a delicious contentment, a warm, positive memory of the night they had shared.
The bedroom had its own en suite bathroom which she quickly found, almost as though she knew already where it was. So much about the house was familiar to her that in certain other circumstances she might have found her instinctive familiarity with it slightly spooky. As it was she simply felt that it was all part of the extraordinary workings of fate.
Once downstairs, she found the kitchen as easily as she had done the bathroom, this time not so much by instinct as by the smell of freshly brewed coffee and cooking bacon.
‘I’ve scrambled your eggs for you. I know that’s how you prefer them.’
Annie stared as she was waved into an empty seat at the table and a plate of piping hot food was placed in front of her.
‘I…I never eat a cooked breakfast,’ she whispered. ‘Only…’
‘…at Christmas and other special occasions. Yes, I know,’ she was told, her sentence finished for her.
Grimly Dominic watched her as confusion shadowed her eyes and she toyed with the plate of food.
‘I can’t believe that you can know so much about me without us ever having met,’ she began slowly, and then she stopped, a brilliant smile illuminating her face as she told him blissfully, ‘I’m so glad that we’ve found each other and that you love me.’
‘Found each other,’ Dominic derided grimly. ‘You can stop pretending, Annie, the game’s over. And as for me loving you…Just what the hell do you think I am? What kind of fool do you think I am? There is only one reason for what happened between us last night so far as I’m concerned, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with love. Quite simply I reacted to man’s age-old need to scratch a certain itch.’ He paused and waited.
Annie stared at him. Her heart had started to hammer shockingly fast, hurting her so much as it thudded against her chest wall that she could barely breathe.
‘I don’t understand,’ she began painfully. ‘What are you saying…? What do you mean…? I…’
‘Oh, come on, Annie, get real. How much of a fool do you take me for? All that rubbish about fate…My God, but you’re a cool one. Walking back into my life…crawling into my bed just as though the last five years have never happened.’
Annie felt as though a huge weight, a huge stone was crushing down inside her, preventing her from thinking, preventing her from speaking, preventing her from breathing, almost. But not preventing her from feeling fear and pain. No, not preventing her from feeling those.
‘Please,’ she croaked when she could finally force her vocal cords to unlock themselves. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t understand?’ Dominic countered irritably.
She could see the way his chest rose and expanded under the pressure of his anger, but her fear of it and of him was somehow distant and vague, as though she simply didn’t have the energy, the strength to come to terms with it as she battled with the enormity of the shock she was suffering.
‘Do you think I understood when you walked out on me…on our marriage?’
Their marriage!
Without knowing she had done so Annie stood up, and then gasped as the room spun giddily around her. In that instant she heard a harsh male voice speaking sharply.
‘Oh, no, you don’t. You won’t escape by pulling that trick on me and pretending to faint. Annie…Annie…’
She heard him emphasise her name in raw fury as she finally slipped into the blessed relief of the darkness waiting for her.
When she came round she was sitting down again, but this time in a deep comfortable armchair in a large, pleasantly furnished sitting room. Like the other rooms of the house she had already seen it was somehow vaguely familiar to her.
A horrible, unwanted ice-cold sense of fear was beginning to fasten its death-inducing fingers around the tender vulnerability of her heart. A horrible, unwanted, uncertain sense of…something…
‘I…We…We can’t be married,’ she whispered painfully. ‘I…I don’t know you. I don’t even know your name…’
For a moment she actually thought he was going to strike her he looked so angry, but when she flinched he stepped back from her, throwing back his head and laughing savagely.
‘Oh, my God, now I have heard everything. Last night you were claiming me as someone sent to you by fate, your one true love, and now you’re trying to tell me that you don’t know who I am. Tell me something, Annie, do you make a habit of going to bed with men you don’t know? Is that another part of your personality I never knew existed? Just like your propensity for disappearing without explanation? Did you ever once—just once—stop to think how I might feel? How—’
Dominic could feel himself starting to sweat and he recognised how dangerously close to losing his self-control he was getting. He was becoming far too emotional. After all, what could her lack of love for him possibly mean to him now?
Annie could feel the pain welling up inside her, the awful, uncontrollable feeling of having stepped into a world of nightmarish terror, of having all her worst fears made real.
‘We can’t be married,’ she repeated, her mouth trembling. ‘We can’t be…’
‘Do you want me to prove it to you?’ Dominic asked her tersely. ‘Very well…’
Walking past her, he went over to an antique desk in the corner of the room, pulling open a drawer and extracting a small box from which he produced a piece of paper. He brought it over to her and held it in front of her.
‘Read this,’ he commanded acidly.
Her heart thumping, Annie did as he instructed. Her blood seemed to be freezing in her veins; her hands were deathly cold, her head light and hurting.
Slowly and carefully, as though she was a child, she read the words written on the certificate, lifting her eyes briefly from it to gaze into those of the man holding it with sick dismay before returning to read it a second time.
‘Your name is Dominic,’ was all she could say when he started to refold it.
Her mouth had gone dry and her heart was pounding sickly. There were so many questions she wanted to ask him but she was afraid to do so, afraid of his answers.
Twice now he had mentioned her walking out on him…disappearing. What kind of relationship must they have had for her to do that? Instinctively she knew it was simply not within her to walk out of the kind of commitment that marriage entailed. So what kind of marriage and what kind of man…? The kind of man who would take a woman to bed, as he had done her last night, simply for sex?
‘I can’t stay here. I have to go,’ she began unsteadily, but Dominic was already standing over her, blocking her escape.
‘No way,’ he told her angrily. ‘No way. Not until…Not until you’ve told me why you did it, Annie. Why you walked out on me.
‘My God, it’s the least you owe me, especially after that pathetic charade…that play-acting you put on for me last night. “I’ve wanted you so much”,?
?? he sighed, mimicking the emotion of her voice. “‘I’ve wanted you so much…this is fate…”’
Annie winced as she heard the acid bitterness underlying the contempt of his words. What could she say? How could she explain. Every word he said felt like another blow to her sensitive emotions.
She tried to defend herself. ‘It must have been…I would never…’ She stopped, too proud, too shocked, too raw to tell him of her instinctive knowledge that everything she had said to him was true. Was true? She wasn’t still dreaming about him, was she? Still…
‘It must have been…?’ Dominic was mimicking relentlessly. ‘Can’t you remember?’
Annie swallowed painfully.
‘No, actually, I can’t,’ she told him quietly, raising her eyes to his.
They stared at one another in silence for several tautly tense seconds before he cursed and swung round, so that he wasn’t looking at her when he demanded tersely, ‘What kind of answer is that? What kind of fool do you take me for, Annie? You remembered well enough in bed last night. Every little touch, every little word…every single caress and kiss that ever meant anything to me…’
‘That wasn’t deliberate—’ Annie began, and then stopped. What he was saying was too shocking…too painful. She desperately needed to get away, to be on her own and absorb properly what she had been told.