"You want me, Lydia, you can't deny that." She had given his pride a body-blow, she reflected silently as she saw the mask of arrogant hauteur that clothed the handsome, harsh features.
"I've waited longer for you than I've ever waited for a woman before, and enough is enough."
If he took her like this, by force, he would never forgive himself.
The knowledge was there inside her. It would poison the rest of his life with an insidious toxic _contamination that he wouldn't be able to overcome.
He was a proud man but he wasn't sufficiently egocentric to excuse this outrage, once the furious rage and bitterness had died.
"Yes, I want you." She faced him, trembling and soft now, her eyes holding his, open and bare.
"I want you because I love you. Wolf, and you're right, it wouldn't be rape."
"You love me?" He shook his head angrily, his voice gritty.
"I've been told that before too."
"I don't doubt it." She stared back at him, conscious that she was laying herself wide open to the worst sort of pain and rejection.
"But not by me. I do love you, whether you believe it or not," she said quietly.
"I don't." But his eyes were stricken as they held hers. "I don't believe love is an emotion that really exists."
"Yes, you do," she said softly.
"No." He shook his head blindly, his eyes hardening. "Sex, lust, desire, those things are real and powerful and honest. You can dress them up as love but the end result is the same."
"Which is?"
"This." His mouth was angry and harsh as it ravaged hers, his arms like bands of steel as he held her so closely into his hard frame that she could feel his heart pounding like a sledge-hammer against the wall of his chest.
She didn't try to fight him, she was intuitive enough to know that any movement of her body would send them over the edge into brutal passion, and she had to convince him that her feeling for him was more than blind desire.
He probably wouldn't, couldn't, accept her love for him, but he had to know that in that alone she was different from all the rest. If she succumbed now, gave in to the fiery heat and sweet sensation that his _nearness produced, she would become just another name in his little black book. But it was hard, doubly so because she had no inner conviction that she could penetrate that cold, dark, outer shell to the real man she had glimpsed fleetingly. Maybe, if she hadn't lied, if he had taken the step of trusting her.
The feel and taste and intoxicating smell of him was becoming more than she could deny. She felt a moment's panic at her weakness, at the vulnerability her love for him had exposed. He would explain away her response as animal desire, she knew that, but it was becoming harder to remain cold and unresponsive in his arms.
His mouth had become more coaxing now, persuasive, moving to her throat and still lower in burning-hot, feathery kisses that lit little chills of fire wherever they touched. She moaned slightly, the sound escaping her lips in spite of herself, and heard a low growl of answering passion in the big body trapping hers. He was hugely aroused against her softness, his mouth ravaging the soft silky swell of her breasts as her blouse fell open under his insistent fingers.
She wasn't going to be able to stop this. As her hands moved up to his back, the hard swell of powerful muscles clenching as he felt her touch, she knew she was lost. She loved him too much. The thought brought a little sob to her lips. Too much to reach him.
She began to shake helplessly, the knowledge that she had capitulated swept away by a feverish hunger to become as one with this strange, cold man who had captured her heart and her mind and turned her body into liquid heat.
"My love, my love..." She wasn't aware she had murmured out loud, wasn't aware of the tears dampening her face, but suddenly he pushed her _from him with a g
roan that seemed wrenched out of the very depths of his body, and as she sank to the carpet, her legs refusing to support her, he stepped back a pace as though from something repugnant.
"You see?" He was panting hard, his face dark and ravaged by an emotion that caused the breath to constrict in her throat. He hated her. He was looking at her as though he hated her.
"Do you?" he demanded savagely. "It all comes down to this, nothing more.
You're no different from the rest."
She stared up at him silently, her eyes wide and luminous like the beautiful eyes of a wounded doe.
"You lied to me." The words were torn out of him,
"I don't know who you are."