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He had her then. The deep, dark, throbbing thickness of his voice, the way he had used his own very personal pet name for her, which only escaped his lips when he was desperately aroused, the honesty with which he was telling her why he wanted her—and the plea. A plea she had never expected to hear him use—no matter how much he might want to. They all had her well and truly beaten, and she lifted her eyes to tell him so, give him whatever he wanted from her because never, ever in the twelve months she had known him had she ever heard Mac sound so utterly vulnerable.
Then the sitting-room door opened and Joel walked in. He paused, took in at a single glance just what was going on, and said in that light-voiced tone he used to goad people into reaction, ‘Been priming my date for me, Mac? No need, big brother. I quite enjoy doing that kind of thing for myself.’
Roberta just stood, gasping at the unbelievable crudity in Joel’s taunt, but Mac went one step further than that, his face contorting with black rage as he spun around, took one giant step towards Joel and raised his arm, with a fist clenched ready to punch him on the jaw!
‘No!’ she cried, leaping out to grab Mac’s arm just in time to stop him landing the blow. The muscles beneath her fingers were bunched and ready, and it took the full strength of her two hands to hold him back. ‘He was only trying to rile you, Mac!’ she said urgently. ‘Please!’ she pleaded when the muscles did not relax.
Eyes fierce with anger, he turned on her. ‘You’re defending him after what he’s just implied?’ he choked.
‘Of course I’m not defending him!’ she snapped. ‘But he’s your brother! You don’t punch your brother just because he happened to make a rather crude joke!’
‘But was it a joke?’ Silver-bright eyes had narrowed in hard suspicion. His hand closed around one of her wrists with enough strength to make her wince as he jerked her hard up against him. ‘Has he been making a play for you behind my damned back?’
‘Of course he hasn’t!’ she denied, staring at him as though he had gone stark, staring mad, but then she had not been a party to his row with Joel earlier that day and her ‘How can you suspect such a rotten thing of Joel?’ fell on deaf ears.
‘God,’ he choked. ‘And to think I had allowed myself to believe it was all just the wild imagining of my jealous mind!’
‘All’s fair and all that,’ Joel put in, seeming to be deliberately pouring oil on to the flames of Mac’s anger.
Roberta flashed him a bewildered look, and was shocked to see a glint of cold calculation gleaming in his eyes. ‘Stop it, Joel!’ she snapped at him. ‘This is not funny!’ Then, incredulously to Mac, ‘You know there’s nothing going on between Joel and me!’
‘No?’ Mac’s eyes were so bright with suspicion now that Roberta quivered. ‘Then what the hell is he doing here, walking in as if he was expected?’ he challenged tightly.
‘Perhaps because I am,’ Joel inserted into Roberta’s clear hesitation. ‘Expected, I mean,’ he made provokingly clear. ‘I’m taking Roberta to dinner.’
Mac turned on him like a rattlesnake ready to strike, one hand still wrapped around Roberta’s waist in a bone-crushing grip while the other was clenching into a fist again. ‘I’ve warned you once already today,’ he bit out tightly. ‘Don’t make me repeat myself.’
‘And I warned you too, if you remember?’ Joel countered coolly.
The two men glared at each other, the hostility between them so strong that it crackled in the air around them. Looking anxiously from one to the other, Roberta let out a pained choke. ‘Oh, please!’ she begged. ‘Don’t fall out because of me! I couldn’t bear it!’
For an answer Mac flicked his contemptuous gaze away from Joel and on to her. ‘Get your coat,’ he clipped. ‘We’re leaving, right now.’
‘But I’ve arranged to have dinner with Joel tonight!’ Her green eyes appealed for his understanding. ‘I can’t just—’
‘Look!’ he ground out with desperately waning patience. ‘It isn’t a damned choice between dinner with him or coming with me! It’s me you belong to and me you’re coming with right now! So get your damned coat!’
‘But I’m not even dressed!’ she declared, with a sense of utter disbelief that any of this was really happening.
‘He doesn’t need you dressed,’ Joel mocked lazily. ‘When has Mac ever needed a woman dressed? I would have thought that by now, Roberta, you would know and understand that—!’
Mac did hit him for that one. His fist landed on Joel’s chin with enough force to send him staggering backwards a couple of steps before his legs gave out beneath him and he fell, knocking over a small table and landing heavily against the corner of it before he reached the floor.
On a horrified cry Roberta tried to go to him, but Mac stopped her, his hand tightening around her wrist to jerk her back to his side.
‘Leave him,’ he rasped, the anger in him pulsing out of every bunched muscle in his powerful body. ‘Just go and get dressed.’ He gave her an ungentle shove towards the door.
‘No.’
Where it came from Roberta did not know. Certainly before Joel had come into the room she had weakened enough to do anything Mac could ask of her. But the ugliness of the scene which had ensued, plus something that Joel had just said, had brought her shuddering to her senses.
Grimly she went to kneel down beside Joel.
‘What do you mean—no?’ Mac demanded roughly, glaring as she gently turned Joel’s face so that she could see the damage Mac had done to his jaw. His lip was split and bleeding, his jaw already turning an ugly shade of red. She found a paper tissue in her robe pocket and carefully placed it against Joel’s lip.
‘Just what I said,’ she answered flatly. ‘I’m not coming with you.’
A moment’s silence followed that, as if Mac was having difficulty believing his own ears, then he said roughly, ‘Because I hit the foul-mouthed swine?’
