Last week she had prayed that she could run away. She had dreamed of it, longed for it, hoped for a chance. But there was no chance. Too many people depended on her. If she had had any doubts about that, then the latest news only this week of how dangerous her mother’s heart condition really was had destroyed them for ever. She couldn’t run away and leave them all in the lurch.
But there was tonight.
Tonight she could run away—at least temporarily—from everything that was weighing her down. She could escape into a world of fantasy and sensual delight. A world that was so unreal she couldn’t really believe it was happening to her. A world in which, for once in her life—for the one and only time—just for a few short hours, she could experience the full heights of passion and the fierce sensuality that she had tasted so briefly just a few moments before.
One of the hardest things to accept about this marriage to Cyril Antonakos was the fact that her unwanted wedding night would be her first experience of sex. She was still a virgin and had never known any man who could make her feel enough to want to change that situation.
Until now.
Now she couldn’t bear the thought that a man nearing sixty would be her first, her only lover—when there was this man who only had to touch her and she felt as if she were going up in flames.
She could have tonight.
I promise you, you’ll be safe with me. I swear…
He didn’t even have to know her name. And tomorrow, as in some modern-day Cinderella story, reality would close in around her once again.
But she would have had tonight.
If only she could bring herself to answer him. If only she could find the courage to say…
‘Skye?’
Her name was rough on his tongue now, raw impatience and that devastating accent turning it into something new and strange. A sound she didn’t recognise as the name she heard every day.
‘Are you ever going to answer me?’
Skye tried. Swallowing hard to ease the dryness of her throat, she fought for the control, the strength she needed.
But then his long-fingered hand came under her chin, lifting it so that her face came up to meet his, her grey eyes meeting and locking with the deep, deep blackness of his. Drowning in their darkness.
He bent his head slowly and his mouth took hers. This time his kiss had none of the fierce, wild passion of moments before; instead it was soft and slow and heartbreakingly tender. It seemed to draw her soul out of her body, melt her bones, so that she was trembling against him, needing the potent strength of his body to support her so that she didn’t fall to the ground.
‘So tell me, my beauty,’ he whispered in a voice that was as dark and rich as the black velvet night sky above them. ‘Will you go or will you stay?’
My beauty, Skye thought hazily.
No one, not even her mother, had ever called her beautiful. Or made her feel it the way his kiss made her feel right now, here in this cold, rain-spattered street.
And suddenly there was only one answer to give him. Only one answer she could give him.
She had to have tonight. She might regret it in the morning, when reality hit her in the face. But the one thing she was sure of was that she could never regret it as much as she would bitterly regret saying no.
And so she lifted her head and kissed him back, putting her answer into the caress, but knowing she had to speak it too.
‘Oh, yes,’ she breathed softly, confidently. ‘Yes, of course I’ll stay. But on one condition…’
CHAPTER THREE
THEO flicked on the light and surveyed the room before him with a critical eye, frowning as he did so.
‘Are you sure that this is what you want?’
He supposed that the room was all right, as hotel rooms went. It was at least clean and reasonably sized, with a comfortable-looking bed, and the usual furniture and fittings. Through a door off to one side was the tiny en suite bathroom, severely tiled in plain, cold white, with toiletries, towels and bath robes all in the same non-colour.
It was all totally soulless, functional but impersonal, and therefore unwelcoming. And not at all the sort of place he would have thought that he would end up in tonight.
But then, nothing tonight had gone the way he had expected it.
He had certainly never anticipated ending up in an anonymous hotel room with a woman who stirred every single one of his most primitive senses, but whose first name was the only thing he knew about her.
‘We’re strangers,’ she had said, ‘and I want to keep it that way. You don’t know me and I don’t know you—that’s the way it has to be.’
No way! That was his first response. He actually stiffened, half turned to walk away, but she was still so close to him, he still had his arms around her, and the hot blood racing through his veins, the hungry need that clamoured at his senses, blurred his thoughts.
He couldn’t let her go.
He had known that in the moment that he had seen her turn to hail a taxi to take her away and out of his life. And if she went now, then she would be gone for ever. He would have no way of tracking her down. She would disappear into the night and he would never see her again; never know anything more about her.
‘You ask a lot, lady,’ he managed, his voice husky and rough.
She didn’t show any sign of reconsidering. Her light-coloured gaze held his unwaveringly, and her soft mouth firmed to a determined line.
‘It’s that or nothing,’ she said, reaching up a slim hand to smooth it across the front of his shirt, and the small movement brought a waft of her scent up to his nostrils, tantalising his senses and drying his mouth.
Beneath the caress of her fingers, his skin burned and his heart kicked savagely, making his pulse throb, his senses swim.
‘That or nothing,’ she repeated and he knew that he could never live with ‘nothing’. He would always curse himself if he let this woman get away from him now.
‘Whatever you want, lady,’ he said, knowing it was nothing less than the truth. ‘Whatever you want.’
And what she wanted was this.
For tonight at least.
Well, he would let her get away with it for tonight—after all, she wasn’t the only one who had been a little…economical with the truth. But tomorrow always came.
Tomorrow he would be asking a lot of questions. And he’d want some very definite answers to all of them.
Meanwhile, he’d spend tonight convincing her that it wasn’t ‘that or nothing’ at all.
‘Skye?’
