‘For the present.’
‘Give it a chance.’
‘So you can play and lay while I have your children?’ She turned derisive eyes to his as the taxi halted in front of her. ‘No, thanks, Damien. I’ve been through that once. Perhaps the next woman you feed that line to will be more accommodating. Goodbye and good luck to you.’
The passenger door of the taxi was held open for her by the hotel employee. She stepped forward and swung herself into the back seat.
‘Natalie...’
She ignored the urgency in Damien’s voice, but she couldn’t ignore the strong bulk of his body.
‘I’m coming with you.’ His powerfully muscled thigh pressed against hers.
She hastily scrambled to the other side of the seat. ‘No, you’re not,’ she protested.
‘Otherwise we will never see each other again.’
‘That’s what I want.’
He closed the door. The inside of the car suddenly seemed filled with his presence. It pulsed with an energy that clutched at her heart and caused her senses to sharpen alarmingly.
‘It’s over!’ she cried, feverishly desperate in her need to convince him.
‘It never started,’ he replied, a rough edge of passion in his voice.
‘It wasn’t meant to be.’
He turned to her, his face stripped of any civilised veneer. Raw, jungle hunger leapt from his eyes and impaled her.
‘I won’t accept you judging me by your experience with Brett.’
Her mind swam with the realisation that she had underestimated Damien. She shouldn’t have likened him to Brett. He was as dark in nature as Brett was bright. Dark and deep and intense, and with all his unleashed energy, indefinably dangerous.
For years she had wondered what went on inside him. What restraints he had...and, if all his secret longings were bared, what would a woman experience? The thought had intrigued her. She was getting more than a glimpse of the answer now, and it both fascinated and frightened her. She saw a primitive male hunter, relentless in his determination to track down his quarry, unstoppable.
She shivered. ‘I don’t want you, Damien. I don’t want you.’ She heard the wary, almost excited note in her voice, and didn’t care as long as he got the message.
‘What would happen if I took you in my arms, Natalie?’ His eyes burned down to the agitated rise and fall of her breasts as she took quick breaths to calm her pulse-rate. ‘If I were to kiss and caress you...’
‘Stop it! I won’t listen! Go away!’
But the images evoked did have an insidiously seductive power. Damien might be the hunter, but as a woman she knew if she tossed over the traces, threw everything upon the wind...anything and everything was possible. There had been solitary, vulnerable moments when she had fantasised... Damien wild, irrepressible, adoring her, approving of her, being proud of her. They had been some kind of solace at the time when Brett was entertaining himself with some other woman.
She had sternly repressed such wicked thoughts. That they should focus on her husband’s best friend made them even more reprehensible. They were not fitting for a married woman who considered herself moral and decent. It dragged her down to Brett’s level. Natalie had been ashamed of herself that they had occurred at all.
Now Damien wanted to do what she had forbidden herself to think about. More. Natalie felt there was some key to her mind and heart and body, and if some man was to unl
atch the lock... Brett had had the key for a while but he had thrown it away.
Damien probably had the key, too, but it would not last. The experience would be wild and wonderful and dangerous, and in the end, as with Brett, would cost her too much. She had to stop this now, not let Damien tempt her into something she knew would lead to more hurt and disillusionment. Men didn’t seem to understand how it was for a woman: the giving of more than her body.
She felt for the handle of the passenger door on her side. If Damien wouldn’t get out of the taxi...
‘You’ve always avoided touching me, Natalie,’ he said softly, suggestively.
‘You avoided it, too,’ she flung at him.
‘We didn’t dare touch one another for fear of what would follow,’ he taunted her.