‘Are you feeling better?’ He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers.
‘Better?’ For a split second she thought he was referring to the baby before she realised how ridiculous she was being. ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine now. It’s...the heat,’ she said quickly.
‘Is it?’ He glared at her, his dark eyes flashing over her slender shape and pale, drawn face in a razor-sharp scrutiny that did nothing for her fragile equilibrium, before he added insult to injury by stating flatly, ‘You look as though a breath of wind would blow you away.’ It wasn’t meant as a compliment.
‘Do I?’ She wouldn’t have imagined just a few minutes before that she could spring up from the sofa with such suddenness, but the white-hot fury that had her in its grip banished even the faintest remnant of weakness. ‘Well, now you’ve come spreading happiness and cheer, perhaps you’d like to leave? I don’t remember inviting you in in the first place,’ she added caustically.
‘You’d rather I’d left you sprawled in the doorway?’ he drawled derisively, his temper apparently quite restored.
‘Yes!’ And then, as the black eyebrows rose, she amended, ‘No. Oh, you know what I mean,’ she floundered angrily. ‘I was perfectly all right before you came.’ She glared at him, her colour high.
‘Were you?’
The mockery was all gone, his voice soft and low, and she shivered at its power over her, but her voice was firm when she said, ‘I want you to leave, Zac. I want you to leave now.’
‘I’ve only just arrived,’ he countered easily.
‘I mean it.’ She raised her chin, looking him full in the face.
‘Yes, you probably do.’ He looked down at her, the black eyes onyx-hard and very cold. ‘But we have things to discuss, Victoria, whether you like it or not.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ In the past she had always rather relished the fact that he was nearly ten inches taller than her five feet six inches, but now it was merely daunting. ‘I have absolutely nothing to say to you except goodbye,’ she said flatly.
‘For crying out loud!’ It was a snarl of savage frustration. ‘What’s the matter with you? Listen to me, woman.’
‘Don’t “woman” me, Zac,’ Victoria said coldly, forcing her voice to betray none of the trembling that was turning her stomach over and over. ‘Save that form of address for—’ She found she couldn’t say Gina’s name and substituted, ‘Your other women.’
Part of her couldn’t believe she was talking to him like this and she doubted if anyone had before. Zac Harding was a law unto himself, a powerful, ruthless law which was dangerously self-sufficient and utterly without mercy for those who crossed him. He had terrified her when she had first met him all those months ago—terrified and fascinated and enthralled her to the point where she had been unable to imagine a world without him. And then she had thought she didn’t have to, she reminded herself painfully. Fool that she was. But she’d learnt her lesson well.
‘I refuse to have this conversation again.’ It was icy and overbearing, and so utterly him that Victoria wanted to stamp her feet and throw a tantrum in a way she hadn’t done since she was a toddler. ‘And you wall listen to me, Victoria, but for now—’ he eyed her white face and the trembling she couldn’t quite hide ‘—you need something to eat,’ he finished smoothly.
‘Eat?’ She stared at him as though he were mad. ‘I don’t want anything to eat for goodness’ sake, and I’ve told you—’
‘And I’m telling you.’ He crossed muscled arms over the wide expanse of his chest—a chest that was broad and hairy and wonderful to snuggle up to, Victoria thought weakly, before she slammed the door on that particular avenue of thought—and stood surveying her with narrowed eyes, his legs slightly apart and his body relaxed.
‘I’ve been travelling for I don’t know how many hours and I haven’t eaten since last night. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and my patience is at an all-time low, okay? Added to which you look as though a good meal would do you no harm at all. Now—’ he held up an authoritative hand as Victoria went to speak ‘—I promise that once we’ve eaten, and had that little chat, I’ll leave. There was no compromise in his tone.
‘I want you to go now,’ she repeated stubbornly.
‘No way, Victoria.’ It was final, and she knew him well enough to know that she could talk until she was blue in the face and they would still end up having that meal.
But she still persisted. ‘You’ve got no right to barge in here like this—’ She stopped abruptly as he rounded on her angrily, his dark eyes flashing fire and his face black with rage.
‘I have every right,’ he stated with imperious authority. ‘I am your husband—or had that little fact slipped your memory?’
‘Only until the divorce becomes final,’ she countered swiftly. ‘And...and I’m not using my married name any more.’
‘That doesn’t make you any less married,’ he said with unarguable logic. ‘You’re my wife, Victoria. It’s legal.’
‘We were barely married.’ Victoria was aware her voice was higher-pitched than normal and strived desperately to bring it down an octave or two as she continued, ‘It was only for a day.’
‘And a night.’ His gaze narrowed as he saw his words register in her liquid, violet-blue eyes, his cleanly sculpted mouth twisting in a sardonic smile as he added, ‘Don’t forget the night, Victoria. Annulment is definitely not an option.’
As if she could forget. She stared at him, her face suffusing with enough colour to satisfy even Zac. She had been an innocent twenty to his experienced and far from innocent thirty-five, and he had taken her into a heaven that was indescribable. The wedding had been a fairy-tale one of white lace and orange blossom, despite the fact that it had all been arranged in as little as four months from the point at which they had got engaged, and every moment had been one of exquisite beauty and romance. But the night... The night had been one of unforgettable passion.
Victoria had been nervous when he had first shut the door of their hotel room, and they were alone at last. Nervous of her naiveté, of her potential inability to please and satisfy a well-versed man of the world like Zac, of her ingenuousness and lack of sophistication in the arts of love.
She had met Zac Harding the day after she had returned to England from Romania, where she had been taking a year out after A levels working in an orphanage before taking up her university place. She had been nineteen and untouched.
It had been her mother who had introduced them. Coral Chigley-Brown had thrown one of her little parties—ostensibly to celebrate Victoria’s safe return from that ‘awful place’, as her mother termed Romania, but really because Coral was the sort of social butterfly who found a different excuse for a soirée of some kind every week. Even now Victoria could picture the look of satisfaction on her mother’s pretty, expertly made-up face as she had watched Zac’s dark, glittering eyes narrow with interest on her daughter. She just hadn’t known her mother’s real reason for desiring an alliance between the Chigley-Browns and the Hardings. Not then.
‘Victoria?’ Zac’s voice brought her back from a dark place. ‘I presume this little idyll far from the madding crowd has
