‘You’re jealous of Lulu!’ he swung around to declare.
‘I am not jealous of Lulu!’ she denied, storming to her feet again as the taunt hit a raw nerve. ‘But I am jealous of what you and Lulu have, that I can never have if I don’t cut myself free from you!’
‘But you’re only twenty-five years old, dammit!’ he rasped. ‘You’ve got years ahead of you to plan things like home and family!’
She felt herself go icy cold. ‘Leave it until you decide that you’ve had enough of me, do you mean?’
The colour drained from his face, his thickly curling lashes flickering down to hide his eyes from her as he turned back to the window. And Roberta smiled bleakly to herself as her heart flipped over, then lay struggling like a dying fish in her breast. She had just knocked the nail right on top of its indisputable head.
‘You’ve never so much as hinted to me before that you felt like this,’ Mac muttered after a long, heavy moment.
‘I was waiting for you to show enough interest in my feelings to wonder,’ she murmured shakily. ‘But you never have, have you?’
Even she heard the contempt in her voice, aimed entirely at herself for her own powers of self-delusion, and Mac’s shoulders shifted on a gesture of discomfort as he picked up on it too.
‘But that really is not the main issue here.’ Grimly she shifted things back on to the right track. ‘The issue being that I am no longer willing to have a hole-and-corner affair with a man who can’t even acknowledge me for what I am supposed to be to him, in front of those people he cares for, because he is ashamed of me.’
‘Now that’s a downright bloody lie!’ Mac barked, spinning around to lance her with a murderous look. ‘You know what you are without my having to spell it out for you!’ he bit out angrily. ‘You are beautiful, you are bright, you are enchanting to be with, and you’re damned fantastic in bed! And any man would be proud to call you his—including me! So stop coming on to me as though I treat you like some dirty secret I keep swept beneath the carpet, because it just isn’t true!’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ he growled, advancing on her with wrathful intent gleaming in his eyes. ‘You are the first woman in ten years that I’ve given my complete loyalty to!’ he reminded her as he reached her.
‘But I gave you a whole lot more than that.’ She had been referring to her love but, typical Mac, he completely misunderstood her.
‘Yes!’ he hissed. ‘And I have never ceased to be grateful for the honour of being your first lover!’ he mocked her cuttingly. ‘But if you think I am going to pay for it by being cornered into marrying you, then you have another think coming!’
‘But I told you,’ she reminded him, ‘I don’t want to marry you.’
‘Then what the hell do you want?’ he shouted.
‘Out,’ she said simply. ‘I just want out.’
‘God in heaven, woman—no!’ he rasped, and reached for her, his fingers digging into her shoulders as he tugged her up against him. ‘No,’ he repeated, and brought his mouth down hard upon her own.
She had been doing fine until then, Roberta thought wretchedly as Mac began a ruthless plundering of her mouth. She had been managing to hold all these traitorous feelings right at bay—until he’d touched her. And now—now...
She groaned, trying desperately to pull away from him before her clamouring senses got the better of her. But he was big and strong and hungry, and the angry aggression in him answered a softer feminine need inside her to be mastered by his superior will. Her lips parted to the demanding pressure of his mouth without his having to try hard to make it, and on the sensual caress of his tongue she yielded—yielded like a weak little kitten to the superior dominance of the big, powerful cat.
‘If I’d been here,’ he muttered against her clinging mouth, ‘you wouldn’t have got as far as packing your damned lipstick!’ He moved his hands in a possessive gesture down her body. ‘We would have been doing this in two seconds flat instead, and any talk of leaving me would have flown right out of the nearest window!’
She couldn’t deny it. Her senses were on fire already. He was angry, which only heightened her awareness of him. And he was a little frightened; she could tell by the tremor in his fingers as they moved over her, by the way his voice had deepened into thick huskiness as he spoke, all of which touched that softer part of her that she had tried so hard to lock away.
He kissed her deeply, his body straining against her, moving with a hot and hungry need that made her own flesh burn, her senses throb and the breath leave her lungs on low, anguished little sobs while she tried so hard to fight her own feelings as much as his heated seduction.
But to no avail. And it was Mac who brought it all to an end, pushing her to arm’s length then holding her there while he studied her through hard, narrowed eyes, his own breathing no steadier than her own as she stood there swaying dizzily.
‘Where did you go this weekend?’ he demanded.
‘Jenny’s,’ she answered, having to fight not to fling herself back into his arms.
‘Bitch!’ he rasped. ‘Did Joel take you there?’
‘I...’ She lifted a trembling hand to push her hair away from her face, still too dazed to think clearly. ‘I w-went after he dropped me off,’ she lied, but the hesitation had damned her, and Joel too.
Mac’s face turned to granite. ‘That’s brotherly loyalty for you!’ he muttered tightly.
‘What he did he did for me!’ Roberta insisted. ‘That doesn’t make him disloyal to you.’
‘It doesn’t?’ he jeered. ‘In my book it makes him a bloody traitor!’ Grabbing hold of her chin, he lifted it threateningly. ‘Where else has he been deceiving me, I wonder?’ he grated. ‘With you, perhaps? Has my kid brother been trying his luck with you, Roberta? Is that what this is really all about?’
Angrily she pulled away from him. ‘That is a disgraceful thing to suggest!’
‘No more disgraceful than the insults you’ve been throwing at me since I came in here,’ he defended. ‘Joel fancies you. He always has, and don’t try telling me otherwise.’
‘You’re crazy if you believe that,’ she sighed, shakily trying to pull herself together.
‘Not crazy,’ he denied. ‘Just aware of what’s going on around me. Joel always did want you for himself, and the only reason he has never made a serious move on you before is because I threatened to knock his block off if he ever did.’
‘Then why throw us together the other night, if you really believe that?’ Roberta cried in angry amazement.
‘Because I thought his respect for me meant more to him than his desire for you,’ Mac stated. ‘But I’m beginning to see that I was wrong.’
‘Wrong about a lot of things, if you honestly believe either Joel or myself would do such an underhand thing as to play you false!’
