Fire Beneath the Ice

"Isn't it the same thing?" His face and voice were perfectly expressionless but the piercing eyes were watching her intently, their blue ness as sharp as glass.

"Are you telling me...?" Her voice faltered. He couldn't be saying what she thought he was saying. Not a man like him. Handsome, inordinately wealthy, with _the world, or his own part of it at least, at his feet. It was ludicrous.

"Are you saying you pay for your women?" she asked faintly.

"Of course not." He was instantly and angrily scathing. "Not in the way you mean." He eyed her sardonically, his lip curling at her confusion.

"But what I do mean is that the females of my acquaintance expect to be wined and dined in some... comfort, escorted to all the right places--you know the routine."

"I don't, actually." She was sitting very straight in her seat now, her cheeks fiery but her eyes steady as they watched his face.

"And I'm very glad I don't."

"Oh, come on, Lydia," he drawled lazily, with a small, mocking smile that didn't reach his eyes.

"You are a very beautiful and desirable woman and I'm sure you must have had lots of men-friends before you married your husband. Are you telling me you didn't get the most out of them you could?"

"Now, just hang on a minute," she interrupted frostily as a flood of burning hot rage swept through her small frame.

"Just hang on a dam minute! Don't you dare make assumptions about me. Wolf

Strade." She forgot he was her boss, forgot all the normal social niceties such a relationship warranted, as her eyes filled with rage (I and her body became as taut as a bow.

"Matthew was my first and only boyfriend, as it happened. We grew up together from children, and if you expect me to apologise for that you've got another think coming."

Lydia--' But she was in no mood to listen and swept on, her next words hardening the face that had softened at her admission.

"It sounds to me as if you get exactly what you deserve in your relationships. If all you're interested in is someone to grace your table and your bed, a live _doll with the right connections, not to mention proportions-- ' “I merely choose women of like mind," he interrupted coldly,

'who are happy with no commitment, no ties."

"No, you don't." He stiffened at the challenge, but she was too angry to notice.

"You choose women who are shallow and materialistic, who have no real values.

That's what you do." Her eyes were flashing fire.

"Your earlier comments when you lumped the whole female sex together in one greedy package prove that! And what on earth is with this " choosing" idea, anyway? Women aren't clothes that you can select at will and wear for a time before you dispose of them--not real women. But if you only shop in the tinsel and glitter department that is all you're going to see, isn't it? A real relationship isn't a matter of choosing in the way you mean, with one person selecting another like a lump of meat."

"You're being ridiculous." His voice was deadly cold.

"You didn't like it when I thought you paid for your women, but really that's exactly what you do," she said slowly.

"All the time.

Not with money, nothing as crude as that, but with the places you take them so they can be seen, the presents and attention they take as their right, even your performance in bed. You pay, Wolf. Don't fool yourself. " She stared him straight in the eyes, her cheeks scarlet.

"My performance in bed?" He hadn't liked that last bit, she could tell from the way his face hardened almost savagely.

"So you think I give a performance, do you?"

As he leant over her the warm, clean fragrance of his skin mingled with the intoxicating sensuality of his aftershave and she felt her senses begin to spin even before his mouth came down on hers. She had expected anger, violence, but the moment his lips touched hers she realised this was a deliberate assault on her senses, a subtle form of punishment for her condemning words but one she was powerless to resist. The kiss was more teasing than penetrating. at first. She could have moved away--he wasn't holding her, after all, his mouth just lightly resting on hers--but it wasn't until much later that she realised the idea had never even occurred to her.

And then the kiss became more demanding, his tongue exploring the soft contours of her lips and mouth and causing tiny helpless shivers to shudder down her spine. She had never guessed it could be like this. The same emotions she had felt that day in the lift returned to torment her.

She was twenty-seven years of age, had a small daughter who was all her own, and yet it was as though she had never been kissed before in her life. The thought had the power to jerk her away from Wolf as though she had been burnt. How could she betray Matthew's memory like that? And with a man like

Wolf Strade? And especially after what he had just said?