‘Tamara!’ He said her name thickly, his own eyes mirroring her desire. ‘Do you want me?’
‘Yes … Yes …’ Her body seemed to have developed a will of its own, completely overriding her mind. She moved towards him, pressing tiny hungry kisses along the line of his jaw and the male warmth of his throat, feeling him swallow and stiffen with feminine triumph as his arms came round her and he swung her up in them.
His bedroom was decorated in blues and greys, coolly masculine, but Tamara was barely aware of the sleek fitted furniture or the thick shag pile carpet. She could feel the coolness of the navy silk bedspread against her skin, and closed her eyes childishly, not wanting to look at Zach and see contempt in his eyes.
Why shouldn’t she take what the gods offered? she argued rebelliously with herself. It would be little enough to sustain her through the years.
‘Tell me you want me,’ Zach demanded arrogantly as he leaned over her, his eyes studying the creamy perfection of her body. ‘Tell me,’ he insisted when she trembled under the touch of his mouth against her skin, tracing a destructive line from her shoulder to where the curve of her breast began.
‘I want you.’ It was a husky, broken admission, but it didn’t seem to satisfy him, because he gripped her wrists, pinioning them together, his eyes darkening to jade as he demanded softly, ‘Don’t just tell me, Tamara, show me.’
It was then that common sense should have reasserted itself, should have warned her that there was no way she could touch and caress Zach’s body without betraying to him how she felt, but as though her body exulted in playing with fire, her hands lifted to the buttons of his shirt, her lips placing trembling kisses against the flesh she was slowly exposing, her eyes avoiding Zach’s and the brooding watchfulness she knew was in them.
When she reached the belt of his trousers she stopped uncertainly. ‘Go on,’ Zach urged her thickly. ‘For God’s sake don’t stop now. I want to know your touch on every part of me, Tamara,’ he whispered against her mouth. ‘I want you to remember long after we’re apart and other things are forgotten what it felt like to touch me.’
She might have stopped then, appalled by the cruelty she glimpsed deep in his eyes, but the sweetly insistent pressure of his mouth on hers suppressed natural caution and instead she did as he instructed, her fingers trembling uncertainly over hair-roughed male thighs, Zach’s suddenly fevered groan finding a response within her own body. Her marauding hands were removed and clamped to his shoulders, his lips beginning a sweetly savage exploration of her breasts, fuller since her pregnancy, and as though he sensed their greater sensitivity his possession of their passion-hardened peaks was tender as well as arousing. It was only when his hand explored the subtly altered swell of her stomach that Tamara felt him stiffen, desire no longer hazing his eyes as his fingers stilled on her gently rounded abdomen, a question in his eyes that made her tremble for her own vulnerability.
‘Why didn’t you tell Mellors about the baby?’ he asked softly.
‘I …’ She was lost for words.
‘Did you think he wouldn’t marry you? Or did you break off the engagement before you knew? It was just after our return from the Caribbean that you broke it off, wasn’t it? Don’t lie to me, Tamara,’ he insisted, ‘I know the truth. You see, Dot Partington wrote to me and her letter contained some very illuminating facts—such as the ending of your engagement. And yet you allowed me to believe it still existed, and even to suggest that you had deliberately become pregnant to force Mellors’ hand. Why, I wonder?’
Tamara tried to shrug nonchalantly, a terrible cold fear invading her body. She wanted to get up and run for shelter, but Zach’s superior weight kept her pinned to the bed. Her stomach
clenched and as though he sensed the movement his fingers tightened.
‘The baby’s mine, isn’t it?’ he said flatly.
‘I didn’t want you to think I held you responsible in any way,’ Tamara told him nervously. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you about breaking my engagement, why I let you believe it was Malcolm’s. I was frightened you’d try to force me to have an abortion,’ she admitted, voicing for the first time one of her most terrifying fears.
‘And you didn’t want that?’
Tears filmed her eyes, suspending words. She shook her head.
‘So I completely misunderstood the situation, just as I’ve misunderstood so much. You weren’t holding on to your viginity simply because you thought it was a good bargaining counter at all, were you?’
‘Malcolm never … I … I always avoided men who wanted sex,’ Tamara admitted baldly at last. ‘You see, my aunt—she brought me up—she taught me that nice girls don’t like that sort of thing, that …’
‘It’s okay, I get the picture,’ Zach interrupted harshly. ‘So, you were quite happy with Malcolm, quite content to wait for your wedding night before fulfilling your duties as a wife, and Mellors, damn him, is the type who wouldn’t expect you to want pleasure, never mind ensuring that you received it.’
Tamara’s skin coloured at his frankness, but she didn’t deny what he said.
‘So where does that leave us?’ he asked at last.
‘You mean about the baby?’ Tamara looked nervously at him. ‘There’s no need to worry. I won’t ever tell it that you’re its father, or expect you to do anything for it. I’ve got some money and Nigel has promised that I can keep my job.’
‘Very noble of him,’ Zach sneered savagely, ‘but you can tell him to keep his job—I’m perfectly capable of supporting my own child. And besides,’ he added gratingly, ‘I wasn’t referring to the baby—we’ll discuss that later. I’m talking about this.’
‘This’ was the way her nerves shivered in mindless pleasure as he kissed her slowly and expertly, drawing from her a response that shocked and frightened with its abandoned sensuality. ‘And this,’ he murmured, his tongue trailing fire along her throat and down to where the soft fullness of her breasts thrust urgently against the male warmth of his chest, aroused almost beyond endurance by their contact with his hair-roughened chest.
‘Tamara, listen to me,’ he said at last, cupping her face and forcing her bewildered pain-filled eyes to meet his. ‘I’m not doing this to hurt you, whatever you think now. Hurt you—God,’ he swore fluently, ‘don’t you think it’s tearing the guts out of me, being like this with you, knowing …’ He caught himself up and said quietly, ‘You already know why I was on St Stephen’s. I was trying to come to terms with what had happened in Africa, and the last thing I wanted was my peace of mind shattered by a sexy creature in a minute bikini, whose body drove mine wild, and whose eyes promised innocence combined with the lure of Eve, so I told myself that it was all a deliberate ploy to lead me on, and I kept on telling myself that, all the time ignoring every scrap of evidence to the contrary.
‘When we were imprisoned together I told myself it wouldn’t make any difference, and that what I felt for you was the result of mere propinquity, but propinquity, no matter how effective, never drove any man to want to kill another simply for looking at a woman. Do you remember when we escaped from the caves?’
‘Yes.’ Tamara shuddered. ‘That man …’
‘I knew that was our only chance of escape, but you’ll never know what it cost me to force you to do it. I think I knew then, not only how innocent you were, but that I was falling in love with you, but I wouldn’t admit it, instead I punished you for daring to breach my defences, albeit completely unwittingly.