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This was how he had made her feel all those years ago, in Corsica. This was how he had swept her up into a heated world of fantasy and sensuality that had stopped her from thinking, destroyed her ability to reason. She had fallen head over heels, believing that what she felt was love—a love that he shared. Now she knew so much better. She knew all he had felt for her was the burn of lust, the stab of the most basic, primitive hunger a man feels for a woman.
It had flamed hard and hot and hungry—but only for a short time before it had burned itself out. She had still been riding high on the waves of her first encounter, with the passionate feelings that a grown woman could know, when he had tired of the whole thing and had let her drop from a very great height. She had landed so hard and so violently she had never fully recovered.
Now he had stirred up all those unwanted and unwelcome feelings all over again, making a mockery of her belief—her hope—that she was over them for good.
‘Easier!’
How could this ever make anything easier between them? It just twisted things, making them infinitely more complicated than they had been in the moments before their lips had met.
That kiss had opened up her long-locked, hidden Pandora’s box of sensuality and feelings and there was no way she was ever going to be able to close it again. But if Raoul thought that that made her easy…
She wrenched her mouth from his. She pulled away so she could stare into his face, seeing the burn of sensuality under the heavy lids, the moisture that glistened on his mouth from her foolish, unthinking kisses.
‘If that’s what you think then you had better start thinking again! There’s no way that anything between you and me could be any sort of easy. I wish I’d never seen you in the first place—and I so wish that you’d never turned up here again. If I never see you again in my life, it will be way too soon.’
The laughter that shook his powerful form had little real amusement in it. Instead it was filled with a hateful triumph that scalded her mind just to hear it.
‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you, ma belle,’ he drawled softly. ‘You can claim the words—but that’s not what your kisses say.’
‘My kisses?’
Imogen laid her hands flat against his shoulders, pushed with all the strength she could gather up and was happy to find that she must have caught him off-balance, or so sure of himself that he hadn’t braced against any possible response she might make. With one sharp push she had him taking an unwary step backwards, and then another, freeing her to twist away from his grip and move partway across the room.
‘You believe in my kisses Raoul?’ she tossed at him, enjoying seeing the momentary blink of confusion that flittered across his face before he caught it back and froze into immobility.
‘Well, more fool you. Because kisses can deceive every bit as much as words, in fact. And I should know.’
She was almost at the door now, fingers on the handle. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough, but she had one last riposte to fling at him, tossing the words into his now dark, shuttered face.
‘You see, I learned how to lie with a kiss from the very best. I learned it from you.’
And that was as good an exit line as she was going to get, she told herself as she pulled the door open and dodged through it as fast as she could. She didn’t dare look into the black, opaque sheen of his eyes. The way every muscle in his face tightened in anger was more than enough warning that she’d stretched what little patience he had left to its absolute limit.
‘You’re a great teacher, Raoul,’ she tossed over her shoulder as the door began to close behind her. ‘You must be if I convinced you!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE CHURCH LOOKED every bit as beautiful as she had hoped. But the lovely arrangements of flowers, the huge, beeswax candles, were all destined to go to waste. The wooden pews would remain empty, the candles unlit, the aisle silent throughout a day that should have been filled with the bustle and murmur of invited guests, family and friends.
No one was coming to the wedding. Not even the groom, it seemed, though she’d hoped and prayed for a reprieve. Adnan was determined to stay away and have nothing to do with what was supposed to have been their wedding day, and who could blame him? As a result, she was here alone, at this time when she should have been preparing for the big event, getting ready to put on the beautiful, elegant wedding dress that had been hanging in her wardrobe for the past few days.
