had he taken hold of her? She had no awareness of having moved, but she must have done, because now they were standing in the shadows off the path, and he had manacled her wrists in a grip that hurt. It hurt all the more so because she was struggling against it, and all her frantic attempts to break free of his hold were doing was bringing her up against his body, so that she could feel its heat and smell its alien maleness.
‘Let go of me,’ she demanded
‘Did you enjoy playing your little game? Well, for your information I wasn’t in the least deceived. It was obvious just what you are.’
‘No—’
‘Yes.’
They were only a few yards from the courtyard, but for all the attention either of them were paying to the proximity of the wedding guests they might as well have been isolated from the whole of the rest of the human race. The air surrounding them positively crackled with anger and sexual tension, to the extent that Keira wouldn’t have been surprised if sparks hadn’t suddenly started visibly illuminating the darkness.
Jay dragged her closer to him. He couldn’t remember a time when he had ever felt this kind of male pride–induced anger. It consumed him, sweeping away his normal restraint. Seeing her being held in another man’s arms and enjoying being held there had unleashed it, and now it was demanding appeasement. He lowered his head toward hers, seeking revenge for her insult to his pride.
The rush of sensation pounding through her veins wasn’t just a mixture of anger and fear Keira knew that. But she still froze into rigid rejection when his mouth covered hers. Angrily he nipped at her lower lip, shocking the rigidity out of her body and replacing it with a primeval angry heat of her own that came out of nowhere, compelling her to respond to him with equal ferocity.
How could such blatant savagery be so erotic? How could she feel as though something inside her was breaking apart and consuming her? How could she be standing on her tiptoes to take as much of his punishing kiss as she could get?
He freed one of her wrists to slide his hand into her hair, his fingers splayed against her scalp to hold her head still as he punished her mouth with kisses of such sensual savagery that they were almost a form of torture. A torture she never wanted to end.
The raw sound of their increasingly laboured breath broke the calm silence of the gardens with a raw sexuality that demanded greater intimacy—and privacy.
Jay drew Keira deeper into the shadows, his mouth still on hers as his anger burned into desire. His hand was on her breast, shaping its full softness. He felt her shudder when he rubbed the pad of his thumb across her fabric-covered nipple, tight and hard, already outlined by the moonlight for his visual pleasure. He could feel his erection straining against his clothes. He took her hand and placed it against it.
Keira closed her eyes. This could not be happening. But it was. And, worse, she wanted desperately for it to go on happening—so desperately that she would rather have done anything than stop.
Not even the full spread of her fingers was enough to encompass the length of him, hard and pulsing with a driving demand that her own flesh ached to answer. His tongue probed between her lips, his fingers plucking rhythmically at her nipple, swollen and tight in its eagerness to entice him and be pleasured by him. If they hadn’t been out here in the garden he could have removed her dress and pleasured it properly, with his mouth as well as his hands.
As though he had read her thoughts she felt him reach for the zip on her dress and slide it down. Instead of objecting, she shuddered with excited pleasure.
Jay felt her body’s reaction to his touch, and a thin, cruel smile curled his mouth as he released hers from its possession. Not a true professional, then. If she was she would not have allowed her own desires to be so easily read. She was more of a greedy, highly-sexed woman, who had learned that men were willing to pay for her pleasure and their own sexual satisfaction.
Overhead in the courtyard fireworks started to explode, the noise shattering the highly charged sexual spell Keira was under and bringing her back to reality. As the first bright pink stars fell down to earth Keira pushed Jay away with a vehement, ‘No!’
What on earth was she doing?
Clumsy, but effective, Jay acknowledged. Get a man so wound up that he was prepared to do anything to get satisfaction and then demand a sweetener. It would be a new experience for him to pay a woman for sex—normally they ended up begging him for it, not the other way around.
Keira watched dazedly as Jay reached into his jacket pocket and removed his wallet. But it wasn’t until he opened it to withdraw some crisp notes, demanding coldly, ‘How much?’ that she realised what he was doing.
Nausea clawed at her stomach, humiliation burning her like acid.
‘No,’ she repeated, stepping back from him so that he couldn’t see how badly she was trembling, how dirty and ashamed she felt.
She was turning him down? How dared she—a woman he had already seen take money from one man tonight? Jay could barely contain his fury.
‘I wasn’t offering to pay for more,’ he told her in a voice as soft as death. ‘Having tested what’s on offer, I find you aren’t worth buying. I was simply offering to pay for what I’d already had. Here…’
As he stretched out his hand to push the money down the front of her dress Keira pushed his hand away and stepped back from him, telling him fiercely, ‘I’m not for sale.’
‘Liar.’
He had gone before she could say anything else, leaving her to struggle to re-zip her dress and then hurry to the nearest cloakroom to repair the damage to her face and hair before going to join the other wedding guests in the courtyard.
It was an effort for her to behave normally. She was still in shock—a double shock now, after the accusation he had flung at her. She felt more frightened and alone than she could ever remember feeling. Even as a young girl, when she had first realised exactly what her mother was.
‘Your mam’s a prostitute. She goes with men for money.’
She could still hear the sharp Northern tones of the boy who had cornered her in the school playground and chanted the words to her. She had been eight, and well aware that her home life was different from the lives of the other children at school—children whose mothers waited for them outside the school gates and pulled them away when they saw her, children who didn’t go home to a mother who slept all day and ‘worked’ all night to pay for her drug habit.
Sometimes it seemed to Keira that she had always known shame in one form or another, and that it had been her single true companion for all of her life, shadowing her and colouring her life—her future as well as her past.
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