As if she needed reminding!
Her throat tight with tension, she flung back at him, ‘I had no resistance. I was exhausted—jet-lagged, for heaven’s sake!’ She brought her chin up to face him squarely, trying to convince him, if not herself, that that was all it had been.
‘And have you recovered from your jet lag?’
‘Just about. But I…’ The pale curve of her forehead puckered, and a guarded look sprang into her cool, clear eyes as she realised where his question was leading. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned, backing away from him.
‘I told you not to present me with a challenge, Grace,’ he reminded her, his arm shooting out as she almost tripped over the waste-paper basket. ‘And you seem to make a habit of not looking where you’re going.’ He laughed softly as that arm snaked around her, but it was the laughter of a victor, of the conqueror claiming his prize.
‘Let me go!’
As he swivelled her round, he was still laughing, ignoring the pummelling of her fists against his shoulders as he took her mouth with his in a brutal kiss.
‘Why must you always put up a show of fighting me when you know you’ll only respond to me eventually?’ he mocked softly, lifting his head when her hands gave up trying to make an impression on his hard shoulders. They were now clenched against them in a vain effort not to show him how much they wanted to slide over the smooth cloth spanning his broad back. ‘You couldn’t help yourself then, last night, and you can’t help yourself now, can you?’ She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say anything, because right at that moment she was too affected by him to speak. ‘Perhaps you’re one of these women who get their kicks out of being subdued by a man? Is that what it is? Because I’ll play that game with you if you want me to—only we’ll both know that that’s all it is, won’t we, Grace? A game.’
Despising herself, Grace wondered how her body could still continue to react to him in the way it did in the light of what was only his need to avenge himself for what she—her family—had done to him in the past. She dragged herself up out of a cauldron of traitorous sensations to toss up at him, ‘Go to hell!’
‘Oh, I’ve been there, my love. And I can promise you, it isn’t very pleasant.’ His features were chiselled into uncompromising lines. ‘But, if making love to me is hell to your pride, then you’re going to have to get used to it being scorched raw. Because we’re going to burn this thing out between us until there’s nothing left but cinders. So don’t worry—what we want from each other is so fierce it can’t fail to consume itself in the end.’
‘And then what?’ she asked, shuddering from his determination and the furore of sensations his words were producing in her. ‘We both walk away?’
His heavy lids drooped so that she couldn’t see the expression in his eyes. ‘Naturally.’
Only she wouldn’t be able to do that; she was jolted into realizing it. But why? Why, when he meant nothing to her, nothing beyond someone she had had the briefest fling with once? Yet someone whose child she had carried and then lost, as though life had been ridiculing her, exacting payment from her for her naïve and unfeeling indifference.
She closed her eyes against the memories, against the anguish that remembering caused—the longing, the loneliness, the confusion.
‘I can’t do that.’ Involuntarily, the words spilled from her lips; to deflect the meaning he might put on them, she quickly tagged on, ‘Contrary to what you might think, I don’t go in for casual relationships.’
His lips were but a hair’s breadth from hers, so close that even the denial of their consummate touch was a turn on. She brought her eyelids down so that he wouldn’t recognise the hunger in her eyes.
‘Oh, I think you can.’
Her lashes fluttered apart. His face appeared out of focus, a dark, inscrutable image, mouth hard yet oddly vulnerable, cheeks taut, black lashes drawn down against the wells of his eyes.
He was so incredible. So uncompromisingly handsome. And yet so vengeful.
‘Seth, please…’ It was uttered from the depths of her longing for the warm and tender lover he had been all those years ago. A tenderness that had been destroyed by the way both she and her family had treated him. ‘Don’t do this.’
He moved back a little so that he could see her more clearly. ‘Begging, Grace?’
That cruel curve to his mouth showed her, with deepening despair, that there was going to be no reprieve for her.
‘No, just trying to appeal to your better nature, but that’s obviously a waste of time!’
‘Obviously.’ He smiled, an action still devoid of any warmth. ‘How can you expect restraint from someone who’s…what was it you called me?…basic? Now, let me see: what does that mean? Rough? Primitive? Lacking in social graces? Well, don’t worry. I’m sure I can knock all your ex-public-school lovers into a cocked hat! When I make love to you there’s going to be none of the haste or urgency that we were driven by the first time. You’re going to have all the benefit of my cultivated experience in a long slow night of love play befitting a woman of your…sophistication. And you’re not going to get out of that bed until you’re so drunk on sex with me you’ll be unable to stand. Is that clear?’
The hot retort that sprang to Grace’s lips was stalled by a sudden knock on the door.
Pulling out of his orbit, she was still tugging her blouse straight when Simone came in carrying some files.
‘You wanted these, Mr Mason.’
Distractedly, Grace noticed her PA’s eyes dart from her to Seth and then back to her again; she noticed, too, the crisp white handkerchief stained with her lipstick that Seth was pocketing as he turned round, calmly, coolly, as though the air wasn’t charged with a sexual tension so thick that it left Grace trembling, and which she knew the other woman must surely be able to feel.
‘Yes, thanks, Simone. Did you bring your note pad as well?’
He had known her PA was coming up here, Grace thought, aghast, as the other woman laughed a little nervously at something else he said before sitting down. Yet he had still tried to seduce her again in spite of that? What had been his intention? she wondered, fuming—to hope that Simone was the type of tactless employee who thrived on office scandal and would let everyone in the office know that they were having an affair?
His upward glance at Grace from where he was sitting now was almost one of surprise to still see her there.
‘Thank you, Grace, he said, his tone crisp, cold, formal. ‘That will be all.’
He had the audacity to dismiss her, like she was some temp he could call up or dismiss whenever the fancy took him! Or, worse, some fawning little sex-slave at his beck and call.
Well, if he wanted office gossip, she decided, grabbing the letter off the top of the cabinet she realised he’d taken from her, then she’d let him have it.
‘Don’t keep him too long,’ she uttered, bending, piqued, towards Simone. ‘He’s got a heavy appointment coming up this afternoon. Nasty maintenance case.’ Voice lowered, she wrinkled her nose in a knowing little gesture. ‘Best keep it under your hat.’
From Simone’s obvious discomfort, the woman was clearly unsure whether Grace was joking or not. Although Grace knew that her PA would keep any personal information about her employers to herself, Seth didn’t know that.
She didn’t even bother looking at him again before sweeping out of the office, a tight little set to her mouth, her head held high.
The next couple of weeks passed in a hectic blur of board meetings, legal work and negotiations, then Seth was away for a few days, engaged