Bittersweet Passion

‘You’re hurting me,’ she bit out reluctantly.

‘Stay put then. Tell me how

it was all set up,’ he invited. ‘That South African venture went bankrupt over a year ago. Adam lost every penny—and every penny of an amount that was by no means a fortune even to begin with.’

He had no need to tell her to stay where she was. ‘I don’t … nothing?’ She read the paralysing truth of his announcement in his grim features. ‘Absolutely nothing?’ she almost squeaked.

‘He mortgaged the house to settle his debts and keep afloat long enough to fool everybody,’ Dane supplied pitilessly. ‘Indeed, not only are you not worth a red cent, you’ve actually cost me money. Carter will be down on his knees in the local church, thanking God he was passed over …’

She was in shock. Nothing, not a single penny. It was like a judgement upon her for marrying Dane to qualify for a non-existent inheritance. And the humiliation of it all froze her. All those clothes she had bought, she was thinking wretchedly, all that money she owed to Dane. So it took her, in her shattered state, several seconds to register that Dane was adroitly flicking loose the three buttons that stood between her and her underwear. Her immediate retreat was over-matched by Dane’s fast reflexes, and the delicate crepe de Chine rended with a ripping tear. ‘See what you made me do …’ he murmured almost pleasantly.

‘Dane … what are you doing?’ Her hands made frantic movements to hold together the parted edges of her dress.

He gazed down at her coldly. ‘That’s a pretty dumb question and I know you’re not precisely dumb, don’t I? I mean, I’ve escaped far better bets than you in the matrimonial stakes. But you’re the one who struck gold.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ she flared, relieved his hands had dropped down to her waist. ‘If you’d just calm down …’

‘I’m calm. And if you want to know why,’ he drawled softly, his very tone as insolent as his scathing appraisal, ‘it’s the only use you’ve got.’

Dane was punishing her on a level she couldn’t compete on, hitting back with a cool sexual candour that left her tongue-tied. Awake now to the dangers of sending his temper right over the edge, she whispered, ‘But you don’t want me.’

He tilted his sunstreaked head back. ‘I’m stuck with you and, newly married as I am, who do you suggest I invite to have an affair with me?’

His hands swept up to her shoulders and when she struggled he simply wrenched her ruthlessly out of the dress’s folds, dropping it carelessly down on to the carpet. He caught her again before she could get out of reach. His fingers forced up her chin. ‘Do you want this to be rape?’

‘Dane, you’re wrong, you’re wrong about everything,’ she stammered in desperation. ‘I didn’t know about the money. I swear I didn’t! You don’t want me, you never have … so why do this? You’ll only regret it.’

He straightened. ‘Stop pleading,’ he breathed. ‘Nothing’s going to get you out of this room unscathed, Claire, and on top of the last enthralling couple of hours, those tears leave me cold.’

He yanked his shirt out of the waistband of his jeans. ‘What, no maidenly scream?’

Her mouth was dry, her heartbeat a crazy tattoo behind her ribs. She just couldn’t believe that this arrogant beast was Dane. Dane, who had meant a lot of things to her in both past and present but who had never once shown her this darker side of his temperament, the discovery of which blitzed her into nervous paralysis, for she had not a clue how to cope with a male in this mood. All the time she was telling herself that the phone would ring or a knock would sound on the door … or more probably someone would shout CUT … and he wouldn’t go ahead with any of his threats. And why wasn’t there a lock on the inside of the bedroom door? That stray thought popped up amidst the turmoil, too.

‘Dane.’ One last attempt to reason with him, she told herself. ‘I love Max, and if you touch me … well, Max isn’t going to want me any more … and you know—’ she was retreating again down the side of the bed ‘—I wouldn’t be much fun.’

Unexpectedly, Dane burst out laughing. ‘At this moment you’re hilarious,’ he contradicted, digging his thumbs into the waistband of his unzipped jeans to peel them off.

The amusement had failed to reach his eyes. There she glimpsed the enormity of what he believed her capable of. Coldly and calculatingly trapping him into marriage. Turning the tables with a vengeance on a master game player. What price now his casual fondness for her when he saw her every move as plotted and carefully executed? She had begged him to marry her. She had sworn blind she loved a man she could not even bring here. Indeed she had not a shred of evidence to produce in her own favour, and there was a wildness in Dane, a wild recklessness he kept under lock and key most of the time but which was flaring out of control like a bushfire inside him now.

‘I don’t want you.’ She turned her back hastily on him to grab up the peignoir she had discarded earlier that day.

A pair of hands lightly encircled her slim shoulders. ‘Don’t you?’ His tone was insultingly disbelieving, based on a rampant, raw confidence built up after endless far too easy conquests.

She fought free and still ended up tossed on the bed as if she weighed no more than a feather, Dane calmly holding her down without hurting her this time. ‘Well, you did ask me to marry you,’ he reminded her cruelly, his derision searing hectic pink into her cheeks. Then his head swooped down to block out the mid-afternoon sunlight that fired his hair into a silvery aureole.

He didn’t touch her mouth. He tasted the tears on her cheeks, the corner of her swept-down eyelids, before executing a glancing foray down over her sensitive jawbone to the flickering pulse at the base of her throat, a destination she found outlandishly vulnerable to his assault. She tried desperately to twist out from beneath him, for it seemed to her that if she lay like an inanimate doll he might take that as encouragement.

When he covered her mouth it was shatteringly intimate, his tongue parting her lips and invading her as she had never been invaded. A choked cry of protest escaped her. ‘No!’

But he taught her ‘yes’ with pitiless purpose and, as she was a stranger to passion, that devilish and tormenting expertise worked a savagely powerful spell on her defences. His kiss consumed her and a kiss had never been like that before, branding into her bones an instinctive need for its continuance. When her hands were free, her fingers clung to the sleekly muscled strength of his shoulders and from thence into the surprisingly silky luxuriance of his hair, holding him to her, drowning in that sea of need as his urgency grew.

Abruptly Dane loosed her reddened mouth, staring down into her passion-glazed eyes. ‘You’re a real challenge, aren’t you?’ he scorned cruelly.

Her body went cold. ‘Dear God, I hate you! Hate you!’ she railed as she understood what he had done to her.

For an eternity it seemed she struggled, her slim body writhing and twisting under his until the heat in her blood was no longer enough to sustain her energy.

‘Finished?’ Dane meshed long fingers into her damp, tousled hair, listening to the audible rasp of her breathing. ‘And all this because what?’ he questioned insidiously. ‘You’re afraid of enjoying yourself? Isn’t that a little bloody-minded, when you married me for this? And this—’ his palm instantly cupped the heaving swell of her breast ‘—is all that is available so it’s foolish to rail about what you can’t have, isn’t it?’