Bridal Bargains. Michelle Reid

between them was suddenly electric. He wasn’t a fool; he knew exactly what she was saying here. If it were possible his eyes narrowed even more. Her blood began to fizz—not with champagne bubbles any more but with a far more volatile substance. Her heart began to pound, the muscles in her stomach coiling tensely as, in sheer self-preservation, she gave a hard yank at her imprisoned wrist and managed at last to break herself free then began edging backwards, attempting to put some much needed distance between them.

      But he followed. ‘You are not taking a lover while you are married to me,’ he warned in the kind of deadly voice that put goose bumps on her flesh.

      ‘You can’t dictate to me like that,’ Claire protested as she fell back another step—then another, until the backs of her trembling knees hit the edge of the bed. ‘I can do whatever I want to do. You promised me that,’ she reminded him. ‘When I agreed to all of this.’

      ‘And you want to take a lover,’ he breathed in taut understanding.

      ‘Why—will you be jealous?’ she taunted him, with a sense of horror at her own crazy recklessness.

      Something came alive on his lean, dark face that had her hand shooting up to press against his chest in a purely defensive action meant to keep him back.

      ‘No,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

      He said nothing, but his eyes were certainly talking to her. They were gazing down at the hectic heave of her breasts beneath the stretch-silk tulle as if he could actually see this so-called lover’s hands on her body. And at last the alarm bells began ringing inside her head, warning her that she had finally managed to awaken the sleeping devil she’d always known must live somewhere inside him.

      She should leave, she knew that. She should get the hell out of this bedroom and hide away somewhere until he had got his temper back.

      But she didn’t move another muscle. Instead she just stood there and trembled and shook.

      A little whimper escaped her.

      It was enough to bring his eyes flicking up to clash with her eyes—and their darkness was so blisteringly intense that her lungs suddenly stopped working altogether.

      He was faring no better, she realised. His heart was pounding; she could feel it hammering against his ribs beneath the place where her hand lay flat against his chest in its puny effort to ward him off. He felt warm and tough, the masculine formation of well developed muscle so intensely exciting to her that she froze on a wave of horrified shock.

      ‘No,’ she breathed in shaken rejection—and went to jerk her hand away from him—only he stopped her by covering it with his own hand.

      It was then that the heat went racing through her. The heat of fear, the heat of desire, the heat of a terrible temptation.

      But what was worse was she could feel the self-same temptation thundering through him! He was still, he was tense, and he was vibrating with a desire so strong that there really was no denying it.

      Anxious eyes flicked back to clash with his. ‘No,’ she repeated in breathless denial of what she saw written there. ‘You don’t want me,’ she whispered shakily.

      To her surprise he laughed, the sound so harsh and tight and bitterly deriding that it managed to make her wince. Yet she received the disturbing impression that it was himself he was deriding.

      ‘You fool,’ he muttered then, and before she could even feed the words into her brain he had spread one set of long brown fingers across the satin-smooth skin between her shoulder blades, cupped the other to the back of her head. And, with a hard, rough, angrily masculine jerk, he tugged her up against him then took her startled mouth hotly and savagely.