are you just standing there?’ she challenged, dry mouthed. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted? To carry me up here so that you could get what you paid for?’
Dio flushed darkly and scowled. Was that how he had sounded? Like a thug?
‘Nearly a year and a half with no sex, Lucy. Are you telling me that I got a fair deal when I married you?’ His voice was harsher than he had intended and he saw her flinch.
‘Maybe neither of us got much of a fair deal.’
Personally, Dio thought the deal she had ended up with had been a hell of a lot better than his.
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘You brought me up to your room for sex and here I am. You’re getting what you paid for!’ Brave words, but the way she cleared her throat alerted Dio to the fact that she might be talking the talk, but that was where it probably ended.
It seemed just one more thing that wasn’t fitting into the neat slot he had shoved her into for the past year and a half.
A cold, opportunistic woman would surely not have been able to replicate the nervous wariness he could see beneath the brave statement of intent?
Her fingers wouldn’t be digging into her arms to stop them from trembling...
‘I find that I’m not as much into self-sacrificing martyrs as I had imagined,’ Dio said, pushing himself away from the window ledge against which he had been leaning.
‘Even the ones you forked out good money to buy?’
‘You were never that cynical, Lucy.’ He had a vivid image of her laughing at him with genuine, girlish innocence, the sort of girlish innocence that had made him lose his mind. She might not have been quite as innocent as she had pretended but she certainly hadn’t been as sharp-tongued as she was now.
‘I grew up,’ she said with painful honesty.
‘You can run along,’ he told her, reaching to the top button of his shirt. ‘I’ve had a long flight. I’m tired. I’m going to have a shower and hit the sack.’
She didn’t want him to.
She could play the passive victim and scuttle off but she wasn’t going to do that. She felt as though she had spent the past year or so playing the passive victim—had spent practically her whole life playing the passive victim—and now would be her only window in which to take control of a situation.
‘What if I decide that I don’t want to run along?’ she asked with considerable daring.
Dio stilled, hand still poised to remove his shirt. Her chin was mutinously jutting out and he smiled, reluctantly amused by the expression on her face: stubborn, holding her breath, eyes squeezed tightly shut..
‘What are you saying?’
‘You know what I’m saying.’
‘I like things to be spelt out in black and white. No room for error then...’
‘I’ve wondered, okay?’
‘Wondered what?’ He was standing right by the bed now, looking down at her with a smile of male satisfaction.
‘What it would be like...you know...? With you...’
‘Even though you’ve spent many months being an ice-queen?’
‘I’ve been very friendly with all your clients.’
‘Maybe I’ve been longing for a few of those smiles to be directed my way,’ Dio murmured. He slowly began unbuttoning his shirt, watching her watching him as his brown chest was exposed inch by inch.
Lucy was riveted. How long had she wanted this? How had this insane desire been so successfully hidden under layers of resentment and simmering anger, with a large dose of self-pity thrown in for good measure?
She watched as he tugged the shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, drew in a deep breath and held it as he shrugged off the shirt altogether, tossing it casually on the ground.
‘So, you’re curious...’ He felt as though he was suddenly walking on clouds. It was an extremely uplifting sensation. In fact, when it came to the feel-good factor, this was as good as it got. Her eyes were huge and, yes, curious. He was bulging in his trousers, thick and hard and desperate for a release, which he was going to take his time getting to.
Drugged by the sensational vision of him half-naked...her bronzed god of a soon-to-be ex-husband... Lucy was deprived of speech. She nodded and didn’t even bother trying to tear her eyes away from his glorious body.
‘I confess I’m curious too,’ Dio admitted, basking in her undiluted fascination with his body. ‘So it’s time for you to return the favour...’
‘Huh?’ Lucy blinked.
‘One good turn deserves another,’ Dio said drily. ‘Or, in this case, one semi-striptease deserves another.’
‘You want me to...?’
‘We’re man and wife.’ He gestured broadly. ‘A little bit of nudity should be as nothing between us.’
‘I hate it when you do that,’ she complained. He grinned and that grin erased all the forbidding, harsh lines of his beautiful face; made him seem almost boyish.
‘Do what?’
‘Oh, don’t play the innocent with me.’ But she smiled shyly and sat up. Her fingers were shaking; her hands were shaking. He had no idea that she had never done anything like this in her life before. Okay, at university there had been some good-natured fumbling with the two boys she had dated for six months and three months respectively. But they’d been boys and he was...
Dio...
Nerves ripped into her with a vengeance, but she had committed to this path, wanted this path, and she wasn’t going to give in to cold feet now.
But that didn’t mean that she wasn’t shaking like a leaf as she dragged the tee-shirt over her head and flung it to the ground where it joined his shirt.
He had folded his arms and was staring, just as though she really was performing a proper striptease for his benefit only.
Which, she supposed, she was, in a way.
She closed her eyes, reached behind, unclasped her bra and, still with her eyes shut, flung the bra onto the little growing heap of discarded clothes.
‘You can open your eyes,’ Dio drawled. He was surprised he could talk at all because the sight of her was enough to take his breath away.
He loved the way she was sprawled there on his bed, her head averted. He could see the tiny pulse beating in her neck and, God, he wanted to fall on her, take her, sate himself with her body.
She was beyond captivating.
Pale,
