Bond of Hatred

‘So it took me a couple of weeks to settle down into the idea of being married,’ Alex murmured huskily, a bare brown shoulder shifting in an infinitesimal shrug, dark golden eyes resting on her hungrily, ‘a couple of weeks to come to terms with the fact that I had a wife who makes the perfect mistress...a little mental adjustment and here I am. Why sulk?’

Sarah was speechless. It was like trying to argue with a maze that kept on increasing in complexity, losing her at every turn. ‘Here I am’, he said with such staggering self-assurance, as if she could not fail to be grateful to win such a prize.

‘After all, you fought back like an Amazon warrior,’ Alex told her thickly, his dark head lowering inch by inch. ‘You ignored me, you ignored it all and the more you ignored what I was doing, the more I seethed... I discovered that the one thing I cannot stand is to be ignored.’

She didn’t know what he was talking about. He appeared to be suggesting that her avoidance of him had been part of some sly, manipulative female plot to attract him and his unquenchable ego took to that idea like a duck to water. On the brink of acidly disabusing him of that notion, her parted lips met on a shocking collision course with his.

Alex groaned against her mouth and possessed it again with renewed vigour and a force of hunger that ran a scorching blaze of heat right down to her toes and back up again. She fought the effect, concentrating her mind on the picture of herself pregnant and miserable while Alex strayed to be chased, flattered and encouraged by other women.

Tearing her swollen lips from his single-minded onslaught, she gasped, ‘I don’t want to get pregnant.’

‘No chance,’ Alex muttered in thickened agreement. ‘Not for at least a year. It might curb this...’

He teased her mouth with his tongue, mimicking a far more intimate penetration, and she quivered, every limb boneless, every nerve-ending begging for more, and, feeling that, she wanted to scream. If she had had the capability to lie there like a waxen dummy, unresponsive to his seduction, Alex would have left her alone. And she wanted Alex to leave her alone, didn’t she...?

One hand was in his silky hair, the other curved round his warm shoulder, rejoicing in the silky smoothness of his skin...and she didn’t know how either had got there. Her body appeared to be totally detached from her brain. It had broken out all on its own. And she wanted to touch him, she realised in dizzy shock, wanted so badly to be in his arms that the thought of not being there, of actually tearing herself free, physically hurt.

Rolling over, Alex shed the remainder of his clothing in a couple of fluid movements. Dark golden eyes drew her. ‘Come here,’ he urged softly and opened his arms.

The shock of even that brief separation had chilled her. She shifted across the bed so fast, she made it in record time.

Alex tugged her down on top of him and curved two lean hands to her cheekbones. ‘At last,’ he breathed, as conscious of that tiny instant of surrender as she was. ‘Don’t ever deny me again.’

She felt his power over her and her mind recoiled from that reality. It was just sex and if she really wanted to fight it she could—of course she could, a voice inside her head protested. But she trembled in his grasp, sentenced to stillness by the charismatic lure of his magnetic gaze. He held her there by sheer force of superior will.

‘Ever,’ he repeated persistently.

Utter surrender, that was what he demanded. She knew it, she hated it and yet she still did not fight him.

‘And you’ll find out just how generous a lover I can be,’ Alex completed.

Her brain had turned to mush. A long-fingered hand was skating down her arching throat into the valley between her breasts. His thumb rubbed against a painfully taut nipple and she gasped, quivered, closed her eyes tightly against the intrusion of his. He pulled her up over him and suddenly curved his mouth to that betraying peak, the silk providing a quite inadequate barrier.

Sarah moaned in a crazy mixture of shame and excitement. Impatient hands trailed down the straps, baring her breasts. She tensing, and her eyes flew open. He engulfed a thrusting pink bud with the heat of his mouth and she cried out, lashed and tormented by sensation, the image of his dark head against her breasts forever imprinted inside her head.

Alex spread her flat and she was breathing as though she had run a mile in a minute, boneless as a rag doll. He touched her, shaped her, caressed her and moved down her quivering length with his tormenting mouth and the kind of erotic expertise she was defenceless against.

He ran the tip of his tongue across her stomach and her thighs parted involuntarily, an ache that was sudden agony stirring and making her clutch at his hair with near frantic fingers. He knew where she ached and she stiffened in sudden shock as he touched her but, before she could obey an instinctive impulse to jerk away, his hands curved over her thighs, imprisoning her.

‘No...not that...’ she gasped.

But he didn’t pay any attention to that stifled plea, and a moment later she was lost, possessed by a desire so all-encompassing, she couldn’t even vocalise through it. The impossibly intimate explorations Alex was subjecting her to reduced her to a quivering, whimpering state of mindlessness quite unequalled in her slender experience.

Pleasure and the pursuit of it engulfed her in the screaming demands of her own body. She moaned, she jerked, she burned, the victim of a consuming hunger that made her nails scrape down the sheet beneath her and every part of her blaze with unbearable heat. And just when she was on the torturous edge of the fulfilment she craved Alex moved over her and drove into the honeyed welcome he had prepared for himself. Instantaneously she was thrown into a climax that threw her shivering body into spasm after spasm of hot, drugging, glorious pleasure.

Alex was watching her when she surfaced again to the world she had left behind. Dazedly, her lashes fluttered on the brilliance of his smile. He thrust into her again, slowly, purposefully, and she shut her eyes, shattered to feel the electrifying excitement awakening afresh. He made love as if there were no tomorrow and she was overwhelmed because she never ever wanted tomorrow to come. The pleasure went on and on and on and the second time she hit the same heights of fulfilment it was even better...

* * *

Sarah surfaced in the tumbled bed, wondered what day it was, where she was, who she was... Five hours in bed with Alex had made her more than a little uncertain. She had a vague memory of him dressing befor

e she fell asleep. Dressing in haste but not so fast that he hadn’t had time to survey with satisfaction the plundered, witless female still lying in his bed.

Sarah cringed. Alex had strolled out of his bedroom, positively re-energised by the completeness of her surrender. And she had smiled dizzily back at him with what lingering energy remained to her, possessed of an utterly appalling belief that Alex was so incredibly wonderful that she was blessed above all other living women.

Passion killed her intelligence. In bed, she didn’t think with Alex, she merely functioned like some sort of passion toy, programmed solely to give and receive pleasure. And she didn’t think she could blame her response on a teenage experience of rejection any more. It wasn’t that simple. She was falling in love with Alex, falling like a brick from the top of a high building, her feelings rushing faster and faster as she headed for sure and certain devastation when she hit the ground.

Now she knew why it hurt when Alex accused her of being a liar. Now she knew why she hadn’t had the strength to fight Alex off. On a deep atavistic level she wanted Alex any way she could get him. When or how could it have happened? How could she possibly have started falling in love with a male like Alex? He was the very antithesis of what she admired in the male sex.