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‘What makes you think Malcolm would want to break it?’ she threw at him tauntingly. ‘Perhaps he prefers me more with the experience than he did without it!’
The whole of Zach’s body seemed to stiffen and harden, and through her elation at having at last got through to him Tamara felt the first beginnings of prickling fear.
‘Well, in that case,’ he murmured smoothly, ‘perhaps I ought to give you some more.’
He moved so quickly that she hadn’t a chance of escape. Her robe was thrust ruthlessly aside, his fingers biting into her shoulders as his mouth came down on hers in a savagely brutal kiss, the touch of his hands on her body, drawing whimpers of pain into a throat raw with tears, her mind reeling from the knowledge that this was the reverse coin of the passion they had shared before; this was passion with a sadistic face, and yet mindlessly her body still responded to its primitive call, her hands locking behind Zachary’s neck, her slim form pressing pleadingly against the hard muscles of his.
When he wrenched his mouth away they were both trembling; Zach with anger, and Tamara with desire.
‘You little bitch,’ he said thickly. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’
Sickly Tamara stared at him, knowing that even if she wanted to she could never make him understand. Her mind knew that he had deliberately insulted and degraded her, but her body knew only that his was the touch it craved and could make no distinction between punishment and pleasure.
‘Tamara, can I come in?’
She froze as she heard Malcolm’s voice, and reached unsteadily for her robe, avoiding the curling mouth and hard eyes of the man watching her, suddenly remembering that she had left the bath water running.
‘Just a moment,’ she called back, hurrying into the bathroom to turn off the tap, before going to open her bedroom door. Let Zach make whatever excuses he wanted for being in her room; she no longer cared; no doubt he thought to humiliate her and hurt her as well, but the only person he would hurt was Malcolm, and little though she wanted that to happen she knew enough about her ex-fiancé to know that the blow would be to his pride rather than his emotions.
‘I wanted to talk to you about last night,’ Malcolm began as he walked in, then the sudden shock of discovering Zachary leaning against the wall was enough to produce a silence and then a heavy frown as he looked first at Zach and then at Tamara herself.
‘What …’
‘I asked your mother which was Tamara’s room,’ Zach explained smoothly. ‘She left this downstairs.’ Miraculously he produced the gauzy scarf which Tamara had indeed left downstairs, ‘and I was just returning it to her.’
‘I can’t think why Mother didn’t simply say she would return the scarf to you,’ Malcolm complained when they were alone. ‘Odd sort of chap, don’t you think? Now, Tam, about last night,’ he began again when Tamara made no response.
‘There’s nothing to say,’ she told him firmly. ‘Our engagement is off, Malcolm, and if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that it’s best that way.’
She compounded the unpleasantness of the weekend by over-sleeping on Sunday morning, and so missing church. Malcolm’s mother made her disapproval plain when they returned, adding that once Malcolm and Tamara came to live in the Cotswolds, it would be Tamara’s duty to set the villagers
an example by going to church. All in all Tamara was not sorry to return to the solitude of her own flat.
She had given Malcolm his ring back in the car. He made no suggestion that they should meet again or that Tamara should reconsider, and she guessed that he would soon find solace elsewhere—possibly with the far more suitable Karen.
The main topic of the return journey to London had, to Tamara’s dismay, been Zach.
Malcolm appeared to have taken a violent dislike to him, for some reason that Tamara could not fathom. From Malcolm she learned that Zach had recently inherited his uncle’s estate and the large house that went with it.
‘He just isn’t our sort,’ Malcolm complained. ‘His mother was on the stage.’ Malcolm made it sound an unpardonable lapse of taste. ‘And the last thing we heard about him was that he was in the Army.’
‘Well, surely your father approved of that,’ Tamara interposed.
‘I suppose he would have done if he’d made anything of it, but he got chucked out, and ever since then he’s been bumming around.’
Tamara wondered what Malcolm would say if she told him that far from ‘bumming around’ as Malcolm so contemptuously accused, Zach had been with the S.A.S., but wisely she refrained from doing so.
* * *
On the Monday morning when she got up for work, a wave of giddiness almost made her lose her balance, and the thought of food of any kind was totally nauseating.
Tamara blamed it on the tension of the weekend, and the heavy food she had eaten.
Nigel remarked that she looked too pale for someone who had been away on holiday and told her that she ought to get her doctor to check her over.
‘Better be on the safe side,’ he told her firmly. ‘You never know with these tropical fevers …’
‘Thanks—I was bitten by a spider, remember,’ she told him, ‘not stricken with Lassa fever!’
