watched him stop and stiffen as if something really nasty had just stepped into the room. Antonia was very pleased to watch him do it. The man could be so insufferably conceited sometimes that it made her want to hit him where it would hurt the most!
‘I sit here swathed in the finest silk,’ she continued, to compound his momentary disconcertion, ‘with my flesh pampered by the finest beauty products money can buy. I live in the kind of luxury most people only see between the pages of glossy magazines, and downstairs in the basement sits the kind of car most women only dream about owning—’
‘The car belongs to me,’ he inserted. ‘You are merely permitted the use of it.’
‘Permitted—!’ A choked gasp brought her twisting round on the stool to stare at him. Then, ‘Ah…’ she said. ‘So now we get down to the nitty-gritty. The car is yours. The luxury accommodation is yours. The expensive clothes I wear belong to you, as does the wonderful array of priceless jewels you keep carefully locked away in your safe until I require the use of them. So—yes,’ she acknowledged, ‘I suppose it is natural for you to believe that I sold myself to you.’
‘I never said that,’ he snapped, a deep frown suddenly darkening his features as fresh irritation flicked into life.
‘Then let’s just clarify the point, shall we, so that it can be done with once and for all?’ Getting up, she went to stand right in front of him. Confrontation wasn’t in it. ‘If, let’s say, I decided to walk out on you right here and now, what would I be allowed to take with me?’
‘This is stupid,’ he sighed, sliding the strip of black silk out from under his shirt collar. ‘When we both know you have no intention of walking anywhere.’
‘The car? No,’ she continued, regardless. ‘The jewels? Definitely no. What about all the designer clothes, then? Have I performed well enough to earn the right to take those, Marco?’ she questioned provokingly. ‘Or do you intend to let me walk out on you naked? If so,’ she added, without giving him a chance to answer, ‘then you surely can’t say that I sold myself to you. For what exactly is it I am supposed to have gained from doing so?’
‘A year of great sex?’ he suggested nastily.
‘Oh,’ she pouted. ‘I was hoping you would have the good taste to leave the sex thing out of this.’
‘Why?’ he asked tauntingly. ‘When it is all I—’
Marco stopped himself—but not soon enough. And the black anger went flooding through him again as he watched her annoyingly provocative face blanch.
‘You asked for that,’ he insisted, wishing to hell he had never started this.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I surely did.’ But the fight had disappeared from her tone, and his jaw felt so tight it was in danger of snapping.
She went to turn away from him. It was sheer frustration with the whole sordid scene that made him stop her, he told himself. It had nothing to do with the sudden suspicion that if he let her turn away she would never turn back to him again.
So his hands found her shoulders and drew her against him, then, simply because he needed to do it, he lowered his head and his mouth took her mouth by storm.
At least she didn’t fight him, but neither did she respond. She just stood limp and lifeless against his body while his mouth ravaged hers without receiving any feedback at all.
Not liking what was happening here, and liking even less the knowledge that she could stand there lifeless while his own body was reacting as fiercely as it always did to her, he went for the kill with a pride-staking vengeance aimed at demolishing her resistance.
For he knew this woman, he consoled himself grimly as he began covering her face with the kind of small light teasing kisses guaranteed to drive her wild. Her cheeks, her jaw-line, her firmly closed eyes, the length of her small straight nose. His kisses found all the right pleasure points while carefully avoiding her mouth even when, with a helpless whimper, she slackened its tense little line in sensual expectation.
Yes, he confirmed triumphantly. He knew her so well. The way her breathing quickened, and she began to vibrate to the feather-light stroke of his fingers. It was easy to urge the silk from her shoulders and leave it to slither down her body until the only thing holding it up was the belt knotted around her waist.
As she released a gasp in startled surprise he at last captured her mouth again. She fell into his kiss like a woman with a fever. When her fingers came up to clutch at his rock-solid biceps, he stroked her hair, stroked her body, and stroked her beautiful breasts with their sensitive points that simply begged for his further attention.
He gave it willingly, knowingly—ruthlessly, arching her over his arm so far that she had no choice but to reach up and hook her hands around his neck to maintain some control over her own balance.
Within seconds she was groaning. Eyes closed, head tilted right back so her long silken hair swung in a rippling swathe over his arm as he grimly tore through every veil of rejection she had dared to pull on against him. When the groans became hot little gasps of pleasure, he consolidated his success by gliding a hand along a silken thigh until it found the cluster of golden curls that shrouded her sexuality. The robe was no barrier; it had already slid apart to give him easy access. But the real triumph came when her thighs parted for him in all-out invitation.
The battle, in his mind, was surely over. Having won it, as abruptly as he had started it, he brought it to an end and watched with a grim detachment as she leaned weakly against him, dizzy and disorientated enough to find it impossible to support herself.
‘You want me, Antonia,’ he declared in a tough cold voice that made her shiver. ‘Try dangling another man in front of me in an effort to improve on what we have, and you will find yourself having to learn not to want.’
It was an outright warning.
Standing there in his arms, Antonia said absolutely nothing. He’d done this to her merely to make a point. It was humiliating.
After a moment, he sighed and let go of her. She swayed a little, but found her balance, and remained exactly as she was while he strode for the door. And what was the picture he took with him? Antonia asked herself as she watched him go.
His suitably chastened mistress standing there with her seduction-red silk robe still hanging from her waist by the belt, and her breasts still taut and alive and throbbing. Like her mouth—like her sex.
She had never felt so sickened in all her life.
Sickened by herself—sickened by him. Sickened by the knowledge that really they were both as bad as each other. For Marco might take and take and take, but she had let him do it.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered, not sure if she was telling herself that or the wretched man striding out of the door.
Whichever, he heard it, paused and turned. There was contempt in that lean hard handsome face of his. Enough contempt to make her skin crawl.
‘Take my advice, cara, and think carefully about on which side your bread is buttered. Beautiful women come in disposable packs of ten these days.’ The cut of his cynicism was deep enough to draw blood. ‘A poor performer can therefore be tossed onto the scrap heap and replaced as easily as—that.’
The snap of his long brown
