back for you, I would! Do you hear me? I would!’ Her voice broke then, and tears, hot and relentless, momentarily blinded her.
He’s still in love with a ghost, Liadan thought chillingly. And he’ll never love me like I love him…Unable to stay, she turned and ran back up the path towards the house.
Adrian stood outside her room. His mind had told him to go straight to bed and forget her, but his body clearly had other ideas. Past the point of understanding any of it—his life, his work, his failure to move on in any meaningful way—all he craved right now was the temporary peace he knew he would find in Liadan’s arms. Even if she hated herself for it in the morning, he knew she wouldn’t deny him what he sought. He would hate himself for using her in that way if he didn’t despise himself enough already.
He knocked briefly, listening for sounds of life from behind the door. He told himself if she didn’t answer in the next ten seconds he would leave and go back to his room. But the door opened before he even finished the thought.
Her russet hair tumbling all around her shoulders, her blue eyes red with crying, she glanced up at him forlornly like a child who’d lost a beloved pet and didn’t understand why it had had to die.
‘Yes?’
Adrian didn’t speak. Instead he commandingly swept her up into his arms as if she weighed less than a feather and carried her to the bed. Without words, he laid her down on the white lace counterpane, then stripped off his shirt and sweater. Kicking off his shoes, he climbed onto the bed on all fours, positioning himself above her with all the precise intention of a man who was certain that his desperate need for comfort would not be repelled—even though he no doubt deserved it to be.
Liadan’s heart was thumping so hard inside her chest that she was grateful for the fact that she was lying down. Now, staring up at Adrian as his gaze burned down at her, hotly and without tenderness or mercy, she gulped and bit down hard on her lip. She drew blood and in the next instant felt his tongue against her flesh licking it clean. The eroticism of that sexy little gesture all but paralysed Liadan, and set up such a clamouring of raw, naked lust inside her that she barely knew herself. Then, his hands settling on her shoulders, his mouth moved across hers, barely touching at first, teasing her response and stoking her desire with a ruthless expertise that right then she wanted to kill him for. He had no right, she thought a little desperately, no right at all to do this to her body and her mind, to enrapture her with delights of the flesh that she was pathetically helpless to deny.
‘I want all of you,’ he breathed against her mouth. ‘No half measures.’
‘No.’ Liadan twisted her face away only to feel her jaw captured by warm, firm fingers and brought round again. Her blue eyes went round as saucers as she looked dazedly up into his handsome face. ‘How dare you? What makes you think I want you after the way you spoke to me? Get out!’
He silenced her with a crushing, passionate kiss that obliterated the rest of her world in one fell swoop and filled her with a fire so burning hot that she thought they would both ignite. Seconds later, he raised his head to glance down at her with sardonic amusement. ‘Still want me to go?’ he asked.
Silently cursing every weak, malleable bone in her body, Liadan slid her arms up around his neck and urged him recklessly down towards her again.
‘God help me,’ she whispered brokenly as his hands shockingly ripped the front of her antique lace nightgown straight down the middle, ‘I don’t want you to go.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘LIADAN?’
Adrian woke from the soundest sleep known to man to find the bright rays of the morning permeating the curtains like laser beams and the woman he’d made love to with such furious passion…gone. Combing his fingers dazedly through his thick dark hair, Adrian swung his long, muscular legs out of the bed and sat there for a few moments with his head in his hands. Her scent was all over him and he didn’t feel like washing it off, not yet. Right now he simply wanted to bask in the feeling of aliveness that seemed to be flowing through his body, when every other morning he woke with the weight of dread around his shoulders and almost didn’t want to face the day. It was obvious who had brought about such a miraculous change in him.
Liadan. Even her name had the power to infuse him with an excitement so great he barely knew what to do with it. His lips twitched into a smile before he realised it. Hardly able to contain his anticipation at seeing her again this morning, he reached for his trousers, buckled up his belt and wandered back down the corridor to his own suite of rooms to take a shower.
‘You want me to go out with you—tonight?’ Raising her astonished blue eyes to Adrian’s perfectly serious dark gaze, Liadan experienced a giddy rush of blood to the head, not sure she had heard him aright.
He shrugged those wide shoulders of his and smiled down at her with a slow, mouth-wateringly sexy smile that both angered and excited her. Liadan frowned back at him, her chest tight. She could hardly believe that he was behaving as if that scene in her bedroom had never happened. She might have responded to his urgent lovemaking with equal passion and need, but this morning her emotions felt as if they’d been scraped raw with sandpaper, while Adrian appeared completely unaffected by such turmoil. What was angering her most was that she’d risen at dawn as usual to light the fire in his study and get his breakfast ready, and left him to sleep on—not knowing where the hell she stood with anything. Right now she hardly knew whether she should go or whether she should stay and yet there he stood, supremely confident in his arrogant maleness and superiority, no doubt imagining she’d be swept off her feet with excitement at the idea he had invited her out.
Plucking the yellow duster she’d been polishing with out of her hands, he tossed it carelessly onto the piano. ‘We’re going to the opera, La Bohème, at the Royal Albert Hall. Courtesy of my editor, Lynne, who fears that I’m turning into Dracula, staying in the house too long and only walking abroad at night.’
Liadan found no humour in his statement. Inside she was wondering if she was simply going to let Adrian dictate to her in the way that Michael had loved to do—no doubt whatsoever in his mind that she might have any objections. ‘What makes you think that I want to go anywhere with you, Adrian? Unless you make it a habit of inviting your housekeeper to the opera? Well, do you?’
Irked by her resistance to what he had automatically assumed would be a good idea, Adrian was deeply unsettled by Liadan’s apparent frostiness. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked irritably.
‘It means I need a little clarification here. You hired me to work for you—correct me if I’m wrong? Now we’re sleeping together and obviously our relationship has changed, so I need to know where I stand. Am I your housekeeper or your girlfriend, Adrian? I can’t be both.’ She couldn’t keep the trembling out of her voice. Her throat was threatening to close and her mouth was stripped bare of moisture, but she was determined to let him know that she was nobody’s fool. If he wanted a proper relationship with her, then so be it. It might mean having to look for another job, but why should she worry about that when she would have the satisfaction of knowing she was with someone who really wanted to be with her? But right now she didn’t know that for sure. All Liadan did know was that she wasn’t prepared to be used again by any man—even one she was crazy about.
Alarm bells were ringing very loudly inside Adrian’s head. Was she considering leaving him if his answer was not to her satisfaction? More to the point—was he in danger yet again of screwing up another woman’s life with his arrogance and blithe disregard for her feelings? This was an ultimatum he hadn’t expected to be confronted with,
