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A chill ran over her flesh and doused the rebellion incited by an entire evening spent firmly beneath Alex’s thumb.
His chiselled mouth compressed. “I should not have said that,” he drawled curtly. “I apologise.”
It was an apology of glacial and grudging proportions. Ahead of her stretched a lifetime of them. Her infidelity was as fresh as yesterday to Alex, and it always would be.
“You’re never going to trust me again, are you?” she muttered sickly.
“I wouldn’t trust you to the foot of the street,” he agreed in a simmering undertone. “And it gives me no pleasure to tell you that. But since I believe that you are…genuinely sorry…”
“You mean, you really believe that?” Shame could not drown out anger. “You’d have been much happier if I put myself over a cliff somewhere, Alex. That’s your idea of genuinely sorry,” she whispered strickenly. “And you damned near succeeded in getting your wish. If I hadn’t been pregnant I…I…”
He had lost colour. “Don’t talk like that!” he snapped.
“No, you don’t want to hear it, do you? All about the revenge you took then.” Her tremulous voice was breaking. “How you let me crawl…I’ll never forget that, Alex, and I’ll never…forgive you either…”
He swept her out to the hall and sent a maid off for her jacket while smoothly thanking their hostess for her hospitality. She noticed the columnist covertly absorbing their departure and she reddened miserably, regretting her loss of control. But she could not for ever hang her head in remorseful silence, listening to Alex bestow pious comments. She was only human. The trouble was that Alex wasn’t. Even loving her, he had given no quarter to either of them. He had meted out punishment with a ruthlessness which still had the power to make her shiver.
“You will never forgive me…ha!” Alex vented in the suffocating atmosphere in the rear of the limousine. “You wrecked our marriage. You went out like a spoilt, over-indulged brat and got drunk and gave yourself to another man while you carried my child. Am I to apologise for not having it within me to forgive you? I knew I couldn’t. I stayed away for your safety, too. You were pregnant, you might have lost the baby. Perhaps I was hard upon you…”
Her teeth had bitten into her tongue, and the salty tang of blood had filtered into her mouth. “There is no perhaps about it. You nearly destroyed me. I loved you.”
“If you had loved me, you would never have let another man touch you, drunk or sober!” Alex ripped back at her, all cool abandoned now that they were in private. “Do not talk of love to me. You were infatuated. Once the novelty had worn off, you wanted your freedom back.”
“That’s untrue…I was unhappy, but I didn’t regret marrying you.”
“Well, believe me,” Alex breathed cruelly, “I regretted marrying you.”
Dear God, what sort of relationship were they to have in the future? Alex tearing at her continually for a past she could not wipe out, and Kerry hating him for the grain of truth in every pronouncement. It was a vicious circle.
He sighed. “I don’t wish to talk to you like this. I concede that I made mistakes too. Instead of giving way to my desire for you, I should have decided upon a long engagement, during which we could both have adapted to the differences between us. You were too young and insecure, and I was too selfish and intolerant,” he conceded tautly. “I should have bought us a home in England. You would have had your own family then, and I would not have felt the need to play both father and lover. The combination does not work, and I disliked the necessity, but I asked for the problem.”
His generosity surprised her afresh. There had been a time when Alex could not have admitted being less than perfect. But he had looked back, he had seen the distance which had forged them apart. “I did love you.” She didn’t know why it was so important that he accept that now, but it was.
Alex shot her a caustic and cynical smile. “For the last time, I do not want to hear you talk about love. It got us nowhere in the past. If it was love, it was a shallow and mawkish sentiment. All I want from you now is the outward show of wife and mother. That should not tax your ingenuity too much.”
Deeply hurt, she turned her head aside.
“Do you want a nightcap?” he asked as they entered the apartment.
She shook her head. “I’ll go to my room,” she muttered tightly. “As they say, the show’s over.”
“On the contrary…” Black-lashed golden eyes met hers in glancing challenge. “It’s only beginning.”
Kerry retreated to her room and twisted angrily out of the dress. She thrust it from her sight bitterly. Alex had dressed her as he saw her now. As a woman on offer to the highest bidder. A woman who could respond to his caresses as happily as she could respond to any other attractive man’s. A woman who was easy sexually. Easy to seduce, easy to take. Dear God, that wasn’t her! “That isn’t me,” she muttered in soundless despair to the mirror. If she had been like that there would have been a lot of other men since their divorce.
To think of Alex possessing her again with contempt and a hard desire to humiliate turned her stomach over queasily. She couldn’t let that happen. She could go back to him, live with him, take whatever he had to throw at her, but she could not let him use her body. Whatever she had done, she was still an individual with a right to self-determination.
She slipped into bed and lay there. Alex was no rapist. He wouldn’t force her to accede to his sexual demands. How could he really even want her? If she made it clear how she felt…oh, dear lord, Alex was the most Latin of men in that field. Even if he didn’t desire her, he would go through the roof if she tried to bar him from her bedroom. She would have to be more subtle than that.
The door opened and she pulled herself up against the banked-up pillows, huge green eyes wide in the lamplight. Alex shut the door again with a decisive snap. He wore only a short black robe. A tangled mat of dark hairs showed between the parted edges. “Why should I wait for what I want?” he drawled softly, unperturbed by her obvious shock at his appearance.
“You can’t…we’re not married!” Wildly disconcerted by his unashamed intent, Kerry studied him in shaken disbelief.
Alex padded calmly over to the side of the bed, his long fingers already lazily loosening the tie of the robe. “We will be,” he parried.
“Th…that’s not the point! I don’t want this!” she hurled at him wrathfully. “You can’t do this!”
He shed the robe fluidly. “ ‘Can’t’ doesn’t belong in my vocabulary, just as ‘no’ does not belong in yours.” Dark golden eyes held hers in fierce and obdurate purpose. “When I have made your body mine again, I will have obliterated other memories with my own. Capisci, cara?”
In Alex, twentieth-century female liberation had only ever received lip-service. Not an inch beneath the surface ran the hot-blooded buccaneering instincts of his seagoing forebears and the dark, domineering strength of a man who had absolute conviction in his own innate superiority over the female sex. It was the ice on the outside and the tantalising hint of the fire underneath which had first drawn her to Alex.
Dry-mouthed, in paralysis, she took in his lean, sun-darkened nudity. There was nothing shy about Alex in the bedroom. But Kerry had always possessed a girlish modesty which had in the past amused him. Something told her that there would be no such allowances made tonight.
“You can’t,” she whi
spered. “It would be wrong.”
“Wrong?” He wrenched back the duvet and got in beside her with a harsh laugh. Her skin burned hot and tight over her bones as he gathered her into his arms, making no attempt to conceal his obvious arousal from her. “No, this is not wrong,” he asserted arrogantly. “I will not be easy until I have known you again in the only fashion in which I ever knew you.”
Rage shuddering through her, she endeavoured to evade his hold. He had planned this all along, and in her innocence she had trustingly agreed to spend the night, never suspecting the depths of Alex’s determination to mortify what little self-respect she had left. “No!” she raked at him.
His hand closed on the bodice of her cotton nightdress and ripped it asunder. It was a gesture not of violence, but of sheer cool resolution. “Either submit or leave,” he challenged her ruthlessly. “I gave you the terms before you came to me today, and you are still free to change your mind.”
Her shaking hands drew together the remnants of the destroyed garment. She turned the pale curve of her cheek aside in anguish and despair. He had changed, and it wasn’t only love that he had lost in the intervening years. He appeared devoid of tenderness and compassion, too.
“And you’ll be content with submission, will you?” she muttered tremulously. “Knowing that you are humiliating me, knowing that I have no choice?”
“Yes, I will be content,” he grated, his golden gaze skimming stormily to the revealed upper curves of her breasts. “I want you. God forgive me for it, but I want you on any terms, and I do not need you to preach on the subject of my fastidiousness. I am damned if I will deny myself what you could give to a stranger.”
She shrank under the duvet with pained remembrance of what had rent both their lives asunder. He would enforce his mastery in this relationship. He would take her to prove that he was no longer sensitive to her infidelity. But in doing so, she swore, he would receive little satisfaction.
“Put the light out,” she mumbled.
“No…do you know how many women have turned into you in the dark over the years?” His savagery flailed her. “But you are no longer special to me. I will satisfy myself in that tonight.”
