that held her immobile, for him to go on touching her. Easily, naturally, she gave herself up to the feeling. “You just don’t want to admit you made a mistake,” she said, her voice husky. Cassie saw no contradiction between arguing with him and being aroused by him. “You’re not very flexible, Gideon. You think that because you’re married, however—” Her breath hitched as his fingers slid back up her arm, dragging tingles behind them like the frothy wake of a boat. “However accidental that marriage was, you think you should stay married. Stubborn.”
“Consistent,” he corrected. His fingertips slid up under the sleeve of her shirt. The small invasion felt unbearably intimate, as if he’d found some secret place On her body. “I’m a very consistent man.”
“It’s not logical,” she insisted as his fingers trailed around to the inside of her arm...lightly. Ever so lightly. Her skin broke out in goose bumps. “You don’t want to be married to me.”
His mouth, that beautiful, sensual mouth, tilted up at one corner. “Don’t I?” When his fingertips made a little circle on her arm, his knuckles grazed the side of her breast.
Oh, my. She swallowed so she wouldn’t gasp. Or moan. “You were going to marry the Icicle. I mean Melissa. You got drunk because you couldn’t marry her.”
His fingers stopped moving. His eyes went still with the dark, chill quiet of a frozen pond at night. Deliberately, his eyes fixed on hers, he repeated the motion of a moment before, circling the skin on her arm with his fingertips...circling the side of her breast with his knuckles. “You’re not sure if you can trust me, are you, Cassie?”
“It’s not very... consistent...of you,” she managed to say, “marrying me when you wanted her.”
He abandoned the pretense of rubbing her arm. His knuckles skimmed up the side of her breast. “I don’t want her now.” Slowly his hand went down. again. Up.
Helplessly her eyes closed as the undertow caught her, dragging her along like a shellfish tumbled by the tide across a gravelly ocean bed—a rough place in spite of the lightness of his caress, a place of confusion and sharp, conflicting currents.
Those hard, seemingly casual knuckles traced the curve of her breast, dipping under it, coming close to the nipple on the way up. Half of her breast seemed to catch the heat from his hand and reflect it back at him. The other half was cold, aching, bereft. His touch skimmed under her breast, around, closer to the tip, nearly touching it...nearly...circling...
“Gideon—?”
Her own longing forced her eyes open. He wasn’t looking at her face anymore. He stared openly at her breasts, at the bumps. her nipples made beneath the silk—the nipples he’d made harden, but refused to touch.
She grabbed his wrist. Her breath came hard, as if she’d been running. She didn’t know if she was going to shove his arm away or move his hand where she needed it. “What do you want?” she demanded hoarsely. “I have to know what you want from this marriage.” Sex? she thought wildly. He’d never wanted her before. Maybe his body remembered last night, though, even if his mind didn’t, because he wanted her now. Was sex enough to begin a marriage with? Could she accept it, if that was all he wanted from her?
Could she refuse?
Slowly his gaze left her breasts, sliding up again to her face. But she couldn’t read anything in his eyes, nothing but the settled darkness that spoke of both passion and control, a mixture Cassie couldn’t understand. “One year,” he said. “Give me one year to keep my word to you. Then we’ll end it.”
The pain was sharp enough to send her shooting to the surface. She sucked in air as if she’d actually been underwater, and stepped back. “An annulment would—”
He was shaking his head before she finished getting the word out of her mouth. “No. Not now. Not ever.”
Why? Why would he prefer divorce to—unless, she thought with an awakening flick of temper, he wanted to have her in his bed for that year.
That was it, she realized. The man had decided he wanted her, therefore he would have her. For a year.
She tried to step back. His hands slid to her waist and stopped her.
His eyes were unfathomable as they met hers. His harsh face gave nothing away, but his hands spread out, claiming more of her. His thumb almost brushed the underside of her breast. Heat arrowed through her, reminding her of passion... and frustration. “I’m not going to agree to an annulment,” he said. “Nor to a divorce. Not yet. Will you fight to be free of me, Mermaid?”
His eyes are so dark, she thought. So dark and filled with answers and questions she couldn’t guess, reasons and motives he didn’t want her to see. But for a moment as his fingers stirred her subtly, powerfully, she thought she saw past the control to the man beneath. A man who wanted her. A man who could be hurt.
“I guess,” she said, her voice damnably unsteady, “I’ll give it a try.”
She saw triumph, quickly masked, flare in Gideon’s eyes, and looked away. She wished she knew just how much of a fool she was being. How much had he manipulated her? With his touch, yes—he’d used his skill and her own hunger against her. She acknowledged that. But the other? Had she seen past the surface into the vulnerable man beneath—or had he let her have that glimpse, because on some level he knew that it was the one sure way to get what he wanted from her?
Three
When the door to Cassie’s apartment closed behind her at twelve-thirty that afternoon, she was alone.
Thank God.
She leaned her back against the door and looked at her haven, badly in need of this chance to catch her breath. She’d driven here from the airport, where her car had been parked. Gideon—her husband—had taken a limo to his apartment. A place she’d never seen. The place she was supposed to move into this afternoon. A moving company would be here soon to pack up her things, most of which would go into storage. Gideon had insisted on arranging it.
Exhaling with a whoosh, she sank to the floor, then just sat there, dazed, looking around the room that had been home for the past five years.
Cassie’s one-room apartment took up half of the converted third floor of a narrow old house in a part of Dallas the yuppies and preservationists hadn’t gotten around to saving yet. She’d collected its furnishings from flea markets and the occasional going-out-of-business sale. Because she loved textures, she had both wicker and wooden furniture. Because she loved color, both wicker and wood were painted in stained-glass colors, and the braided rug on the oak floor could have competed with Joseph’s coat of many colors. A huge, handwoven wall hanging on the north wall mixed feathers, yarn, rope, string and shells in shades of cream, turquoise and rusty red. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held books and other important objects. In one corner her banana-colored sheets and turquoise spread dipped to the floor from the sides of her unmade bed.
She looked at that bed. Only yesterday morning she’d been running late and decided not to make it up before leaving for work. Yesterday morning, when she was still single.
Cassie’s room was otherwise clean and tidy. She might thrive on chaos, but order, she firmly believed, had its place, and clean dishes were almost as important as clean paint brushes. Both the tidiness and the mismatched furniture suited her, as did the whole room full of comfortably worn objects—objects
