and remembering how he’d cruelly shattered her life, part of her still hungered for him with a deep, primitive desire that frightened her half to death.
One hand dropping to cradle the warmth of her nape, the fingers of the other following the curve of her cheek and tracing the neat contours of her ear, he leaned closer.
Her lips parted and, drowning in a wave of emotion, she waited.
But instead of kissing her he tugged at first one earlobe, then the other.
She saw him slip something into his pocket but, dazed and disorientated, it was a second or two before she realized he had deftly removed her earrings.
‘What are you…?’ The slurred words were lost and every thought went out of her head as he nuzzled her ear, exploring the neat whorls with the tip of his tongue, making her shudder.
Firm and sensual, his lips travelled along the line of her jaw to find and linger at the warm hollow at the base of her other ear. While she stood spellbound, his teeth nipped playfully at the lobe, before that marauding mouth began to move towards hers.
At last. She closed her eyes.
His lips reached the corner of her mouth and lingered there tantalizingly. She was waiting in an agony of suspense, when suddenly he lifted his head and moved away, leaving her bereft.
Her eyes flew open.
He was watching her with a taunting little smile. ‘In view of what I said earlier about not moving off the couch, it might be better to call a halt before things get too heated.’
‘Why did you do that?’ she asked jerkily.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Because you were angry?’
He raised a dark brow. ‘You think it was meant to be a punishment?’
‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Suppose we call it an experiment.’
‘An experiment?’
‘I wanted to find out just how much you do care about Beaumont…’
Watching her bite her lip, he added softly, ‘And I’d say not a great deal.’
‘How did you reach that conclusion?’
Quinn smiled. ‘If you can stop thinking about him and react to me in that way…’
‘It hasn’t occurred to you that I might have reacted as I did because I was thinking about him?’
She had the satisfaction of seeing that mocking smile vanish and his mouth tighten.
‘In any case I don’t see that what I feel about Richard is any concern of yours.
Discarding his jacket once more, he said, ‘Well, if I’m giving up the Van Hamel, I have a kind of vested interest.’
All her earlier doubts surfaced in a rush.
Without pausing to think, she asked, ‘Are you really prepared to let Richard have the diamond? Or is this some kind of game?’
‘I’m quite prepared to let him have it,’ Quinn said evenly.
‘Why, when you went to so much trouble to outbid him? It makes no sense.’
‘The diamond doesn’t matter. It was just the means to an end.’
Determined to have some answers, she persisted, ‘Then what does matter? Why are you here? What’s the point of all this?’
‘Haven’t you guessed, Jo?’
For a second or two shock made her head spin, there was a roaring in her ears, and faintness threatened to overwhelm her.
Watching her lose every last trace of colour, Quinn said abruptly, ‘You’d better sit down.’
He steered her to the nearest chair and, pushing her into it, sat down opposite, so he could see her face. ‘Do you really believe I wouldn’t remember you?’
No, perhaps she had never really believed it. But, reassured to some extent by Quinn’s apparent lack of recognition, she had clung to a forlorn hope, played out the charade he had instigated, because she had been frightened to face the reality.
Somehow she found her voice, and answered obliquely, ‘It all happened a long time ago, and we were only together a very short time.’
‘But you remembered me.’
She’d tried hard to forget him, but she knew now she would never succeed. While ever she lived, he would be part of her very being.
Her eyes were drawn to his face and held there as though mesmerized. In looks alone, the years hadn’t altered him. The only difference was an air of added maturity, lines of control and self-discipline around his mouth, that made him even more fascinating and formidable.
If Quinn had been inordinately attractive then, now he was even more so. He would still be good-looking and charismatic at eighty.
‘See any difference?’ he enquired mockingly.
She shook her head. ‘You haven’t altered at all. I’ve altered a great deal.’
‘Including your name.’ Then he said slowly, ‘You used to be as pretty as a picture. Now you have a kind of poignant beauty… But I never doubted you were the same woman.’
‘If you recognized me straight away, why didn’t you say something?’
‘I was curious as to how things were. It was quite obvious you hadn’t told Beaumont about me.’
‘There was no reason to tell him,’ she said, and was aware that she sounded defensive.
‘I would have thought there was one very good reason.’
She half shook her head. ‘In the circumstances I decided the past was better left behind.’
That was only part of the truth. She had shied away from talking about Quinn. It was like tearing open old, but still unhealed, wounds.
‘Even though you’d agreed to marry him?’
‘You were right in presuming we hadn’t been engaged long. Richard only proposed to me on the way to Belham House. I’d had no time to think things through or decide how much to tell him.’
His green eyes thoughtful, Quinn pursued, ‘But when I appeared on the scene and Beaumont began to introduce us, why didn’t you admit then that we knew each other?’
Elizabeth looked down at her hands clenched in her lap. ‘You treated me like a stranger and I hoped…I hoped I wouldn’t need to…’
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