For the first time since he had walked back into her life yesterday, she saw the Nicolas she used to know. The one who didn’t slice her in two with his eyes. The one who looked almost—tender.
A tenderness that was mirrored in the way he dropped her wrist in favour of stroking a gentle finger over her pale cheek. ‘When I married you I went against my father’s wishes,’ he reminded her. ‘In their eyes that makes you my most prized possession.’ He paused, looking deeply into her hollowed, anxious eyes which showed such a complete lack of comprehension, then sighed heavily. ‘The child is enough. They know she is enough, but in case I decide not to toe the line some extra leverage would suit them down to the ground.’
‘But you are toeing the line, aren’t you?’ she demanded with an upsurge of alarm. ‘You won’t put her life at risk by playing games with them?’
His eyes flashed, tenderness wiped out by anger. ‘What do you think I am?’ he muttered. ‘Some unfeeling monster? Of course I won’t put her at risk!’
‘Then why are you trying to frighten me with all this talk of my own safety being at risk?’
‘Because they have already threatened it, dammit!’ he growled, then pulled her to him—as if he couldn’t help himself, he pulled her to him and pressed her face into his chest. ‘I shall kill them if they so much as touch you,’ he vowed harshly. ‘Kill every single one of them!’
‘But you don’t feel the same killer instinct for the baby,’ she noted, and firmly pushed herself away from him.
He sighed, derision cutting an ugly line into his mouth. ‘Is it not enough for you that I can feel that kind of emotion for a faithless wife?’ he mocked himself bitterly.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘It isn’t enough.’ And she walked into the garden shed and away from him.
He followed her, his expression harsh to say the least. ‘You give no quarter, do you?’ he rasped.
‘No,’ she agreed, rummaging through the mad clutter that decorated the workbench. ‘Why should I, when you gave none to me?’
‘I kept you, Sara,’ he seared, ‘when I should have thrown both you and your child out on the street to starve!’
‘And why didn’t you?’ she challenged him, spinning to face him. ‘Because you were protecting your own pride, Nicolas,’ she offered as the answer. ‘That isn’t giving anything,’ she declared. ‘That is just you protecting you.’ With a gesture of contempt, she turned back to the bench. ‘So if you’re expecting eternal gratitude forget it. You did me no favours allowing me to stay here, and if anything I hold you responsible for not protecting us properly when you must have known we were at risk!’
His response to that was a short, hard, mocking laugh. ‘You are amazing, do you know that?’ he said in scathing disbelief. ‘It is no wonder you remain so stunningly beautiful when you can shed blame as easily as you do! Your own sins are not allowed to linger long enough to place a single line of guilt or shame upon your lovely face! It must be the perfect recipe for eternal youth!’
‘And what’s your recipe?’ she countered, then went very still, realising what she had just said.
He was still too, silent, unbreathing, pumping the wretched Freudian slip for all it was worth. Then, ‘For my beauty?’ he prompted silkily.
Her nerve-ends went into panic mode, forcing her hands to move again in short, jerky movements. ‘Men aren’t generally described as beautiful.’ She dismissed his question as casually as she could.
But it was too late. She’d known it was too late from the moment she let the foolish remark slip from her lips. He was suddenly standing right behind her, bending to brace his hands on the bench at either side of her tense frame, his breath warm against her slowly colouring cheek. ‘Yet beautiful was always the word you used to describe me,’ he reminded her softly. ‘You would lie naked on top of me with your lovely hair caressing my shoulders and your slender arms braced on my chest. You would look into my eyes and say with heart-rending solemnity, “You are so beautiful, Nicolas,”’ he chanted tauntingly.
‘Stop it,’ she hissed, having to close her eyes to blot out the picture he was so cruelly building. But it wouldn’t be blocked out. Instead it played itself across the backs of her quivering eyelids. Beautiful hair … She could hear herself saying it in that soft, adoring voice she used to use as her fingertips had reverently touched the smooth black silk. Beautiful nose, beautiful mouth, beautiful skin …
And he used to listen—listen to every shy, soft, serious word with a solemn intensity that made her sure, so sure, that the moment had touched something very deep inside him.
You have beautiful shoulders … Her fingers would trace them, sliding lovingly over the muscular curves and hollows. Beautiful chest …
She let out a shaky sigh, her tongue sneaking out to run a moistening caress around her suddenly dry lips because she knew what her mind was going to conjure up next. And it conjured up the way her head would lower, her soft mouth closing round one of his beautiful, taut male nipples …
His response had been that of a man driven beyond anything, his eyes turning molten, the breath escaping his lungs on a harshly sensuous rasp. And in a quick, sure, purely masculine action he would lift his legs to clamp them around her slender hips then tug her downwards—down until she—
‘Did you whisper those same soft, evocative words to your lover?’
The angry growl had her eyes flicking open, her whole body jumping on a sudden stinging crack back to reality. His hands came up, hard on her shoulders, to spin her around.
‘Did they have the same mind-blowing effect on him they used to have on me?’
She shook her head, unable to answer, white-faced and pained, her breasts heaving on a single frightened intake of air when she saw the anger scored into his face—the hard, murderous jealousy.
‘Have you any idea what it did to me imagining you lying there with him like that?’ he grated. ‘I loved you, dammit!’ he snarled. ‘I worshipped the very ground you stood upon! You were mine—mine!’ He shook her hard. ‘I found you! I woke you! I owned this beautiful body and those beautiful words!’
‘And I never gave either to anyone else!’ she cried.
‘Liar,’ he breathed, and dropped his mouth down to her own.
It was punishment. It wasn’t meant to be anything else. His lips crushed hers back against her clenched teeth until, on a strangled gasp, she gave in to the pressure and opened her mouth. From then on it was both a punishment and a revelation. A terrible, terrible revelation because from the moment their tongues met all sense of now went flying, and she found herself tossed back three years into a hot, throbbing world where this man reigned supreme. It was the smell of him, the taste, touch, texture.
Texture. The texture of his angry lips forcing her own apart, the texture of his moist tongue sliding against her own, the texture of his smooth, tight cheek rubbing against the softness of hers, and there was the sensation of his breath mingling with hers, and the drowningly sensual sound of his groan as she gave into it all and buried her fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, hungry, greedy for something she had not known she had been starving for until this bright, burning moment.
When he eventually wrenched himself away she sank weakly back against the bench behind her, unable to do anything but wilt there while her shattered senses tried to regroup.
The air inside the shed was hot and stifling, the sun beating down on the roof filling it with the musty smell of baking wood, old oil and earth.
He stood about a foot away, his breathing harsh and his body tense. Violence still skittered all around them, the threat of it dancing tauntingly in the motes of dust skittering in the musty air.
Then