‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded again, his words falling ragged and raw into the shocked stillness of the night. ‘What sort of game—?’
‘No game!’ Penny put in frantically, suddenly terribly afraid that he might still consider this some risky sort of foreplay, designed to heighten anticipation, increase appetite, and decide to go along with what he thought she wanted.
She had had a narrow enough escape as it was, barely managing to escape before the dark seas of need had closed over her head completely, drowning her for ever. If he touched her again she didn’t know if she had the strength to resist him.
‘No game at all! I’m deadly serious…’
The look he flung at her almost totally destroyed what little was left of her self-control, but, heaving in a desperate breath, she forced herself to face him with as much strength and defiance as she could muster.
‘This has gone far enough—too far. I don’t want it. I don’t want you.’
‘Liar!’
It was low and deadly and this time his eyes burned molten with rejection of every word she’d said.
‘You little liar. You wanted me every bit as much as I wanted you. You said so—’
‘I was wrong…’
‘And your body said so too. It’s still telling the same story.’
A wild, contemptuous gesture in her direction emphasised the angry words.
‘You can’t deny—’
‘Oh, but I can—I will!’
Her voice was pitched too high, too shrill. It sounded too despairing, too desperate to protect herself. Which was hardly surprising when she could barely bring her whirling senses back under any degree of control. Her pulse was still pounding in her veins, sounding like thunder in her head.
‘You would?’
Cynical disbelief rang rough in Zarek’s voice, making her shiver because she knew that she couldn’t refute. He knew that she was lying and so did she.
‘You’d deny this…’
Before she could even realise that he had moved he was at her side in three long strides. Hard hands clamped around her naked shoulders, bruising fingers digging into the skin as he swung her round in front of him. This way she faced the big full-length mirror set into the wardrobe on the opposite side of the room.
‘You’d deny this?’ Zarek repeated savagely. ‘Look at yourself!’
Penny closed her eyes tight. she didn’t want to look—didn’t need to look. She knew what he meant; knew what she would see. But a rough shake of her shoulders forced her to open them again. When she did so the first thing she saw was Zarek’s dark eyes looking over her shoulder, meeting hers in the glass. That was bad enough but the burn of something dangerous in that glittering stare made her drop her gaze and face her reflection squarely, wincing in embarrassment as she did so.
It was worse than she had expected.
The green dress was bunched up around her waist, her wildly disordered clothing exposing her breasts. The creamy flesh still marked with red as the result of his kisses, the abrasion of his late evening stubble against the sensitive skin. Her hair was a wild bird’s nest around her face, tumbling in tangled chaos on to her shoulders. Her nipples were still hard and flushed with pink, faintly gleaming with the moisture left on them by his tormenting mouth.
Her breasts stung where they were now exposed to the air and rapidly cooling from the heated response of just moments before. And between her legs the throbbing need his deliberately provoking caresses had awoken and then stoked with every touch was still a burning torture of demand. One that made her feel it might actually drive her to lose consciousness from the agonising frustration of having to fight it. Just for a second she felt weak enough to sag back against Zarek’s strength and support, but realised in time how appalling a mistake that would be.
‘I mean—I can’t deny that it happened. That I responded.’
It seemed that was not the response Zarek was expecting. The grip on her shoulders eased slightly, becoming loose enough for her to twist away. At least this way she didn’t have to look at herself, or meet his darkly accusing eyes.
‘I’d be a fool to try and do that—wouldn’t I? I mean— look at me…’
No, that was a mistake. Bringing his eyes to her exposed body, reminding him of how she looked, how he had made her look, was not going to help her in this. With a flare of hot embarrassment flooding up into her cheeks, she tugged at the skirt of her dress with one hand, the top of it with another, both movements having very little practical effect.
‘Here…’
To her total shock and consternation, Zarek moved across the room, snagged a blue silky robe from the back of the door, shook it out and held it open.
‘What?’
‘Put it on…’
At the sight of her wary-eyed hesitation, he muttered an imprecation in savage Greek.
‘I am not going to harm you.’
‘I know…’
Whatever else there might have been between them—or not—Penny knew Zarek was not was physically cruel or hurtful.
But these were not normal circumstances. She still had no idea at all what had happened to Zarek while he had been away. The whole time of his absence had started with the violence of the hijacking of the Troy by the pirates. Then there had been the ordeal of being held hostage in the tiny, enclosed boat, the bullet that had been meant for his head and had only by some miracle missed by inches.
And after that? That had all been in the very first week—God knew what had happened in the years afterward.
Oh, but the truth was that even when they had been together, she had never truly known him. She had married him in a rush, in the heat of the biggest crush she had ever had in her life. She had been wildly in love, with the emphasis on wild, but she had never really known the man she had married. That had been proved to her by later developments.
‘I’m sorry—I know you wouldn’t harm me under normal circumstances!’
It was meant to be a peace offering, a verbal olive branch, and although Zarek nodded in acknowledgement it didn’t subdue the blaze in his eyes or ease the tension in his jaw and shoulders.
‘Then cover yourself up and perhaps we’ll be able to talk— normally.’
The bitterly cynical emphasis on the last word made Penny wince, as did the bleakly efficient way he was setting about restoring his appearance to—that word again—normality. The way he buttoned up his shirt, tucked it in where she had pulled it adrift at the waist, smoothed the disordered hair her clutching fingers had tangled, spoke very clearly of his instant withdrawal from her.
What had happened to the hot-blooded, fiercely passionate man who had carried her up to his bed just a short time before? Had he really existed? Or had she been deluding herself? Had that been just another sign of cool calculation on Zarek’s part? Like the way he had decided to marry her in the past.
The way he had chosen her as the potential mother for his heirs.
Chapter Eight
SHIVERINGLY cold in spite of the warmth of the September evening, Penny stumbled across the room to where Zarek still held out the blue silk robe and pushed her arms roughly into the sleeves. It was all she could do not to snatch the robe away from him as he pulled it up around her shoulders, but the ordeal didn’t take long. A moment later she was back over the other side of the room, dragging the sides of the robe together and belting it as tightly as possible around her waist. It was made of soft