flesh taking her off guard. She had gasped slightly, her eyes wide and wondering, wonder giving way to a totally different emotion when Kieron slid the thin strap down from her shoulder, placing his lips to the burgeoning flesh his hand had just vacated.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he had told her slowly, his hands removing her clothes and his eyes doing incredible things to her emotions. She told herself that what she was doing was wrong, only her arguments were somehow less than convincing. How could the way she felt about Kieron ever be wrong? It was deliciously and passionately right.
She couldn’t remember how they got into the bedroom, but she could remember, with vivid clarity, the hard warmth of Kieron’s body against hers; the strangeness of his male flesh, and the aching sensation of intense need that seemed to start somewhere in the pit of her stomach and spread languorously all through her body.
Once, as his lips roved possessively over her skin, she protested, the small sound silenced as he cupped her face and kissed her lingeringly until there was no thought in her head but him.
He was beautiful, she had thought achingly, staring wonderingly at his body. He was like a Greek statue come to life, and she wanted to touch him and go on touching him for ever. As though he sensed what she was feeling he had guided her hands to his skin, murmuring soft encouragements whenever shyness made her hesitate.
The thought of his possession brought her no fear. His slow, expert lovemaking had expunged that, but what she had not expected was her own sudden passionate need, kindled by his touch and expertise, and pushing aside the barriers of innocence and inexperience.
When she arched against him, her fingers tensing into his back, he soothed her softly, driving her almost into a mindless frenzy of intolerable aching need, before finally parting her thighs with his full weight.
In confirmation of his greater experience he was ready for her sudden tremulous fear and clenching muscles, his hands steadying her and soothing her tension, as he kissed her softly, murmuring to her to relax. The pain was sharp and intense, and she cried out to him to stop, but her cry had been ignored and for a moment hurt and pain combined with outraged resentment to make her fight against his domination. But as though he had expected it, the rebellion was quelled, his body taking her through pain to pleasure—a pleasure such as she had never dreamed of, her cries of pain turning to soft moans of desire and those to hoarse, throbbing pleas for fulfilment.
She fell asleep in his arms, convinced that life could hold no greater happiness, her limbs tangled sleepily and trustingly with his. She felt no shame for what had happened. It had been natural and beautiful and she was filled with gratitude for his patience and skill. Her last conscious thought was that she could not imagine what she had ever done in her life to deserve him.
In the morning she felt exactly the same thing, but in a totally different context. While she slept, wrapped in pleasurable dreams, Kieron had searched the flat, and found, as he expected, the evidence of James Myers’ duplicity. He had managed to get the paper to hold the front page for him, but Briony did not see it until she got to work.
The article caught her eye while she was taking off her coat, and recognising the Myers name she had started to read it, work forgotten as numb, appalled realisation swept over her. The article bore Kieron’s name—as though he was proud of what he had done, she had thought bitterly. She had looked so ill that her boss had sent her straight home. When she reached the flat it was to find it besieged with reporters and police, and none of them had been gentle with her. ‘Kieron Blake’s informant,’ was how one paper described her. Others were less kind. Susan had returned from the country with her parents. Sir Arthur had been deliberately cruel and remorseless, and at the end of the week her boss suggested that because of the notoriety, it might be as well if she found another job. She worked in a solicitors’ office, and as he explained in great embarrassment, clients might not feel they could trust a firm which employed a girl known to have betrayed a friend’s trust.
She had wanted to scream that it hadn’t been like that, but pride held her silent. Her only crime was that she had believed herself loved; stupidly, criminally, foolish of her perhaps, but she had not and never would have breathed a word of anything that might have deliberately been construed as breaking a trust.
The police had questioned her for hours, and when Sir Arthur died from a heart attack just before the case came to court she had received an avalanche of poison pen letters. That was when she had decided to change her name.
For three months she had endured absolute hell, and not once in all that time had she heard a word from Kieron—neither of compassion, nor regret, not even of acknowledgement of what he had done. She had not tried to contact him. Pride alone had sustained her through the horror of it all, but her trust, her faith, and her innocence were smashed beyond repair.
The office door swung open, banishing the past. She looked up quickly, her eyes freezingly disdainful. Kieron had always been tall, but now he was broader than she remembered, filling the small space, his eyes deeply and darkly contemptuous as they looked at the open telephone directory. One lean finger ran smoothly down the page, stopping unerringly against the number of the employment agency.
‘No luck?’ he drawled sardonically. ‘Too bad.’
Briony forced herself not to respond, her eyes carefully blank as she removed the directory and put a piece of paper in her typewriter.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Blake.’
‘Mr Blake?’ he sneered coldly. ‘Oh, come on, surely we needn’t be so formal—Beth!’
The last word was said softly, almost a taunt, and Briony swung round, her eyes blazing with anger and contempt.
‘Don’t call me that!’ she snapped.
‘Why not? It’s your name.’
‘Not any longer,’ Briony told him crisply. How dared he deliberately remind her of the past! ‘I left it behind me.’
‘How convenient.’ Kieron had his back to her, his dark head bent over some papers, ‘Tell me, Briony, did you bring anything of Beth with you, when you decided to trade personalities?’
‘Not a thing,’ Briony assured him shortly. Why was he plaguing her with these questions, resurrecting memories she would rather had remained forgotten?
‘That’s a pity. At least she was a warm, living, breathing woman.’
‘Who you destroyed!’
The words were out before she could stop them, and Kieron’s eyes narrowed sharply as he swung round and stared at her.
‘What makes you say that?’
Sheer disbelief held her rigidly silent. How could he stand there and ask her that? Hadn’t he deliberately and coldbloodedly used her, and then when he had got his story, simply dropped her? He knew how she had felt about him—she had never made the slightest attempt to hide it. He was an intelligent man; he must have known how she would react, how shocked and distressed she would be. She had learned from a photographer who had worked with him, and whom she had bumped into by accident three months after he had left, that his career was flourishing. He had been posted abroad somewhere, although where the photographer had not said.
‘So, nothing of the Beth I knew remains?’ Kieron persisted.
He was watching her intently and Briony felt like a helpless little fly being pursued by a particularly relentless spider. What did he want?
