Sleeping Partners

His kiss was fiercer and hungrier when she raised her head and he took her lips again, and Robyn matched him in desire. He was so beautiful; every inch of him was beautiful and she would never make love with anyone if she didn’t make love with Clay, she told herself feverishly. It would be unthinkable to let another man touch her, kiss her like this.

How long they touched and tasted each other Robyn wasn’t sure afterwards—it could have been seconds or minutes or hours, such was her intoxication—but when she felt his hands pulling at her dress, the skirt of which had ridden up high against her thighs, refusing him didn’t enter her mind.

And then she realised he was smoothing her skirt down as he lifted her off him, his voice husky as he said, ‘Come upstairs, Robyn. I want our first time to be long and slow and pleasurable, not a quick, lusty coupling on the sofa.’

‘What?’ The feverish agony of need that had consumed her made her voice dazed and plaintive, and then, as he repeated, ‘We’re going to bed and I want you to stay the night,’ she gazed at him bewilderly.

He looked back at her, the silver gaze steady and controlled despite the passion that had narrowed his eyes and had brought a dark streak of colour across his chiselled cheekbones, and suddenly, shockingly, she knew exactly what he was doing.

He had told her that when she finally went to bed with him it would be because she had chosen to do so because she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Eyes wide open, his conditions met and accepted, no surge of emotion, sexual or otherwise, blurring the issue.

She suddenly felt sick. And she would become his slave. Loving him as she did, she would become his slave, because if ever a relationship was one-sided this one was. He thought she had been nervous about a physical relationship because of a bad experience in the past, and that once she had grown to like him and accept all the advantages an affair with a man like himself could bring, she would be content to relax and have fun for as long as it lasted. Surface emotion, nothing too deep or uncomfortable.

She struggled off the sofa and then stood swaying slightly, her head whirling, and when he rose swiftly to his feet and took her arms in his she didn’t shrug

him away for the simple reason that she felt she would collapse in front of him if she did. It was only moments and then the faintness had receded, and when he looked down at her, his voice a mixture of concern and surprise and something else she couldn’t fathom, he said, ‘Robyn? What is it?’ She breathed deeply before she spoke.

‘Let go of me, Clay.’ Her voice was small but firm.

‘What?’ His eyes narrowed, darkened.

‘I said let go of me.’ Whatever he had expected her to say, it wasn’t this, she realised grimly, as his hands dropped from her arms.

‘Are you ill?’ he asked carefully.

‘No, I’m not ill.’ He looked magnificent standing there, her heart cried out desperately; the blue silk shirt open to the waist and his thickly muscled torso and lean, strong shoulders tanned and flagrantly male. ‘I just have to leave, that’s all.’

‘Leave?’ He repeated the word almost uncomprehendingly, a small muscle jerking under one high cheekbone. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I can’t stay here and spend the night with you, Clay. Not now, not at any time,’ she said very clearly, considering her insides had broken loose from their casing and her heart was jangling about in a million pieces.

‘The hell you can’t.’ His eyes raked over her white face, their piercing quality threatening to strip her to the bone. ‘That was you lying next to me a minute ago, Robyn. Your lips murmuring my name and asking me, begging me, to relieve your torment.’

Had she? She seemed to remember that other woman, the one that had been alive until a few moments ago, doing what he had said. She nodded slowly. ‘I know.’

He stared at her, his eyes running over her stiff countenance and the frantic pulse beating at the base of her slender throat. ‘So what’s changed in a minute or two?’ he asked evenly, his voice cool. ‘You’re still the same woman, I’m still the same man.’

She stared back at him and then answered his question with one of her own. ‘You don’t like emotion, do you, Clay?’ she said quietly, her voice small but very clear. ‘Emotion smacks of letting go, of not being in control, doesn’t it?’

‘We’re not discussing my likes or dislikes,’ he said harshly.

‘All your childhood was made up of emotion: highs and lows that swept you along from one crisis to the next. One minute hoping everything would be all right between your parents and seeing your father happy for a while, then the next back to your grandparents while another catastrophe was dealt with. Then after Mitch’s death things got even worse until the final meltdown when your father died. Then along came Laura.’

‘Is there a point to this?’

His hard voice made her wince inside but she didn’t reveal it to the crystal gaze watching her. ‘You must have craved peace of mind by then, a life of dignity and restraint after the war zone you’d lived in most of your life.’

‘You know nothing about me so cut the psychoanalysis,’ he said with a sharpness that told her she was getting to him.

‘But I do know quite a lot about you, Clay, don’t I?’ she said quietly, her face as pale as alabaster. She knew he wouldn’t like being reminded of the fact but she had nothing to lose now; this was goodbye whichever way she looked at it. ‘And with Laura came more furore and heartache, possibly the worst yet, or maybe losing Mitch or seeing your father die inch by inch over the years was the worst thing—I don’t know.’

‘You mean there’s actually something about me you think you don’t know?’ he said with acid sarcasm. ‘How refreshing!’

‘And so after Laura and your mother died and you were released from it all for the first time in your life, you determined that never again would you put yourself in a position where passion or sentiment or desire or love could govern you. You would always be in control, always call the tune, be it business or your personal life.’ Her eyes were huge as she stared into his face.

He was looking at her as though he hated her, and that more than anything else told her she was forcing him to acknowledge the demons that sat on his shoulders. And he would never forgive her for this, for showing him that she understood what he considered his Achilles heel.

‘And so you live your life in a cold, dispassionate vacuum, unmoved and detached from the things that touch the rest of us poor mortals, and in the final analysis, when you look at it with the cold logic you’re so proud of, you have to acknowledge that Laura and your mother have won. They’ve accomplished what they set out to do: dominated your thinking and mastered your life.’