thread of alarm began slinking along her spine while she stood there breathless and still, the sudden deathly silence filling her ears, drying her mouth while her eyes flicked anxiously around the dark clearing.
By legend, this was highwayman country. And she could conjure up at least three gruesome tales of ghostly sightings in these parts. She’d always laughed them off before—while secretly wishing she could witness something supernatural. Now, she was rueing that foolish wish.
The horses shifted, bridles jingling as they nudged against each other. Madeline blinked, her eyes stinging with the effort it took to pierce the pitch-blackness.
‘Who’s there?’ she demanded shakily.
‘Who do you think?’ drawled a mocking voice.
It was then, as she caught the lazy mockery, the dark velvet resonance of the voice, that the fear went flying as a new and far more disturbing emotion took over, making her hands clench in her pockets as she saw a movement over to the right of the horses.
A tall figure of a man detached itself from the shadow of a tree, looking more wicked than any highwayman could to Madeline’s agitated mind. She had known him to come upon her like this many times, using shock tactics to heighten her awareness of him. He was that kind of man. A man who thrived on others’ uncertainty.
‘So, the prodigal has returned at last.’
‘Hello, Dom,’ she said, forcing herself to sound cool and unaffected by his sudden presence, even as her nerve-ends scrambled desperately for something she refused to acknowledge. ‘What brings you out here tonight of all nights?’
The moon came out from behind its cloud, and his smile flashed white in his shadowed face. ‘The same thing as you, I should imagine,’ he answered, close enough for her to see the clean taut lines of his handsome face. ‘Hello, Maddie,’ he belatedly responded.
He seemed to loom like the trees, tall and dark, black jeans and a heavy black sweater exaggerating the muscled power of his body. Everything about Dominic Stanton was in general larger than life, she mused acidly. Including his vows of undying love.
Abruptly she turned away from him, a hard pang of pain twisting in her ribs. They had used to meet here often once. It had been their place—among several others along this eerie riverbank. She would always arrive first, the more eager, she bitterly recalled. And he would come out of the darkness to take her in his—
A hand touched her shoulder. She reacted violently, his unexpected touch coinciding so closely with her thoughts that she took a jerky step back, and felt the riverbank tilt dangerously beneath her feet.
‘You stupid fool!’ he growled, fingers digging into her shoulders as he yanked her on to safer ground. ‘What do you think I’m going to do—rape you?’
Rape? A noise left her throat like a hysterical choke. Since when had he had to resort to rape with her? Surely it had been the other way around.
‘Let go of me,’ she insisted, disgusted with herself because even now, after four long years, one look at him and everything she had in her was clamouring in hungry greeting, sending her pulses leaping wildly.
His eyes still looked down at her with that same passionate intensity; his mouth was still firm-lipped and sensual. He still stood eight inches above her, still exuded that same hardcore sexuality that had always driven her mad with wanting—and still had the ability to stir her wayward nature.
She hated him for that. Hated him for making it happen.
His hands left her instantly, and she almost sagged in groaning relief. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said tightly. ‘I want to touch you probably less than you want to feel my touch on you.’
‘W-what are you doing here?’ she demanded, wanting to rub her arms where his fingers had dug in—not because he’d hurt her, but because her flesh was stinging as if she’d just been burned.
‘To see you, what else?’ He moved back a step to thrust his own hands out of sight in the tight pockets of his jeans. ‘Four years is a long time not to set eyes on the woman who made a public spectacle of me.’
She had made a public spectacle of him? Madeline almost laughed out loud. ‘As I remember it,’ she smiled bitterly, ‘it was the other way around.’
‘Not from where I was standing, it wasn’t,’ he grunted. ‘Humiliated by a spoiled if beautiful black-haired brat who has never given a care for anyone but herself!’
‘Thank you,’ she drawled. ‘It’s so nice to know how fondly my then fiancé thought of me.’
‘As nice as it was for me to find out what a faithless fiancée you were to me?’
Madeline visibly flinched, guilt and shame four years in the nurturing holding the breath congealed inside her lungs. And she had to look away from him, unable to defend herself against that ruthless thrust. There was just too much truth in it.
Silence fell hard and tight between them, and they stood stiffly in the moonlit clearing, neither seeming to know what to say next to hurt the other. It was amazing how the antipathy was still there throbbing like a war drum between them. It should have dulled a little by now, at least withered into a mutual dislike maybe, but it hadn’t. And this meeting could be happening the night after the country club ball for the way they were reacting to one another, and the intervening years might as well as not have gone by.
The moon hung like a silver lantern above their heads, etching out each harshly handsome line of his smooth lean face: the silky black bars of his eyebrows, almost touching as he glowered down at her; his eyes glinting at her from beneath those dark thick lashes; his slender nose, long and arrogant, just like the man. And his mouth, she noted lastly. Just a thin taut line of contempt which even then could not disguise its in-built sensuality.
‘Four years,’ Dominic muttered suddenly. ‘And you still look the same bewitching child. Still more beautiful than any woman ought to be.’
Something inside her twisted in pained yearning, and she went to turn away from him, only to find her arms caught once again in his bruising grip. ‘Not yet,’ he bit out. ‘You’re not going to escape again just yet. Tell me, Madeline...’ He pushed his angry face closer to her own so that she could see the bitterness burning in his eyes, feel it pulsing right through him. ‘Did you do it just to punish me? Or was it that you simply did not care?’
‘Your desire to know comes four years too late,’ she threw back, lifting her chin to let her cool gaze clash with his angry one.
He looked ready to shake her out of her coolness, and certainly his fingers tightened their grip on her arms. Then he suddenly seemed to think better of it. ‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘Four years is a long time to await an answer which really does not interest me. But what does interest me, Madeline,’ he persisted harshly, ‘is whether Boston and those damned four years have managed to make a woman out of the wilful child I thought I loved!’
She should have expected it, Madeline realised a moment later. She should have read it in the sudden flash of those coldly burning eyes, seen it in the tension of his hard mouth just before it landed punishingly on top of her own. But she hadn’t, too shaken by her own disturbing reactions accurately to interpret his, and his warm breath rasped against her cold mouth as he went from the verbal attack to the physical in one swift angry movement.
Stunned
