She met his eyes. ‘I beg your pardon?’
He gave a snort of savage laughter. ‘Madre de Dio—don’t look at me like that!’
‘I wasn’t looking like anything!’
‘Oh, yes, you were,’ he contradicted softly. ‘With shock and horror written all over your face. As if I were suggesting some kind of striptease when all I meant was that your necklace doesn’t look very comfortable.’ He ran a disparaging glance over the heavy, wide choker which gleamed around her slender neck. ‘Studio told you to wear it, did they?’
‘Yes.’ But he was right. She was aware of the costly gems digging into her flesh, making her feel as if she was wearing some upmarket dog-collar. Blindly, her hand reached up behind her, tried to reach the clasp, but failed—and there was no mirror…
‘You want me to do it for you?’ he questioned.
Jennifer hesitated, because it seemed almost too intimate a thing to do. The putting on and the taking off of a necklace was the kind of thing a husband did for his wife in the seclusion of their bedroom when they were properly married—not about to enter one of the biggest divorce battles of the year. Yet what choice did she have?
‘I guess so. Never has the word “choker” seemed so appropriate,’ she added sardonically.
He gave a wry smile. ‘Turn around, then.’
But, confronted with the sight of her bare back, Matteo found his mind slipping into forbidden places. He silently cursed as he felt his erection grow even harder, thankful that she couldn’t see his face—for he was certain that it had contorted into a pained expression of exquisite sexual frustration.
‘You see…ex-husbands do have some uses,’ he observed evenly, and lifted his fingers to unclasp the necklace, letting it slide into the palm of his hand like a heavy and glittering snake. ‘There. Better?’
‘Much…thank you.’ Jennifer composed her face and turned—noting the dull flush of colour which was accentuating his high cheekbones. She knew what it meant when he looked like that—or at least she thought she did. Was he just getting overheated, or…?
Did he still want her? Was he imagining what they would have been doing in here if they were still married? Him rucking up her dress and pushing at her panties, unzipping himself and thrusting deep inside her, with her back pushed against the steel wall?
Oh, Lord—what was the matter with her? How could the thought of sex with him be so unbearably exciting despite everything that had happened between them? Everything they’d said and thought and done and accused each other of.
‘Do you want me to put it in my pocket?’ he asked. ‘What?’ asked Jennifer blankly.
He held the gems up. ‘This.’
‘Sure.’ She nodded her head and turned away, unwilling to watch him slide them into his trousers, some sixth sense telling her what her eyes did not want to see—that he was hard and aroused.
So why did that thought give her some kind of primitive satisfaction instead of shocking her to the core?
As the minutes ticked by she could feel beads of sweat trickling down her back and a faint dampness gathering beneath the heaviness of her breasts. Shifting her position in her high-heeled shoes, she could see the faint sheen on Matteo’s olive skin, and she swallowed as their eyes met in an uncomfortable moment of awareness.
‘It’s hot,’ he said huskily.
‘Yes.’ She looked into his face because there was nowhere else to look. Nowhere to run. The bare steel walls seemed to be shrinking in on them, and suddenly Jennifer was terrified of this false intimacy—frightened of the sensations which were beginning to creep over her skin and the thoughts which were flooding into her head.
She turned away from him and lifted up her fist, pounding it hard on the metal surface of the wall and wincing as she struck.
‘Help! Let us out!’ she called. But the silence was deafening. She raised her voice. ‘Let us out!’
‘Why do you shout when no one will hear us, Jenny?’ ‘Somebody’s got to hear us! Because being in here with you is driving me mad!’
‘I thought you liked that aspect of our relationship.’
‘I wasn’t talking sexual!’
His eyes drifted over the hard points of her nipples. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘Oh, can’t you keep your mind on something other than your bloody libido?’
Matteo almost smiled. She was angry. And she was aroused, too. He knew that with a certainty which only increased his own desire to an almost unbearable pitch. Would he ever again know a woman as intimately as he did this one?
She wished he would stop looking at her. She wished he was anywhere other than here. Because just his presence was making her have the kind of thoughts which were forbidden. Longing thoughts. Wishful thoughts.
‘Help!’ she screamed again, and this time she began to drum both fists against the wall. ‘Please, somebody—help us!’
‘Jenny, don’t—’
But his words inflamed her even more—or maybe she was just in the mood to be inflamed. And seeing his insufferably enigmatic face as he calmly watched her losing it was like pouring paraffin on an already blazing fire. ‘I’ll do as I damn well please!’ she retorted furiously. ‘And you can’t stop me!’
He wanted to marvel, because this raging woman was utterly magnificent, but he could see from the rapid movement of her breathing that she was in danger of hyperventilating. ‘That’s enough! Now, stop it,’ he said flatly.
‘No!’ she yelled, and hot, angry tears began to spill from beneath her eyelids. ‘No, I won’t stop it!’
Swiftly he moved towards her, wrenching her away from the wall, and she whirled round, imprisoned in his arms, and began to beat against his chest instead.
‘Si,’ he urged her softly. ‘Hit me. Hit me if it makes you feel better, cara!’
‘Bastard!’ She slapped him. ‘You bloody, bloody cheating bastard!’
‘Si. That, too.’
‘That’s for that bitch you slept with!’
He took her furious punch without flinching.
‘And so is that!’
She made a little roar of rage as she drummed against his chest until her hands ached. And then suddenly her rage became frustration, and all the fight went out of her, to be replaced by a different kind of emotion. She shook her head, trying to deny it, her hands falling as she looked up and saw something change in his eyes, too.
The look of understanding, of empathy, and the fleeting look of sorrow had been replaced by something else. Something she knew all too well and had never thought to see again—even though she had longed for it in the sleepless nights which had followed his departure. And it was wrong. Wrong. Oh, so wrong. He had been to bed with another woman!
‘Was she better than me?’ she demanded.
‘Jenny, stop it.’
‘No, seriously—I want to know. Did you do it to her lots of times? Like you did to me when we first met?’
He winced as if she’d hit him, and then the need to destroy her foolish fantasy simply overwhelmed him. ‘You want to know the truth?’ he exploded. ‘I did it to her once—just once—and it was the biggest non-event of my life. Do you know why that was? Because all I could see was your face, Jenny. All I could feel was your body.’
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