Page 16 of His Wedding Day Revenge

‘He beat you?’ she cried, disbelief and outrage throbbing in her voice.

Draco had regretted sharing the moment he’d opened his mouth, but he hadn’t been anticipating her dramatic reaction.

‘I had a late growth spurt, so not after that occasion.’ He’d been safe from his father’s increasingly dangerous mood swings. His father had not been the sort of man who would hit out at someone who could hit back. But he had been the sort of man who would hit someone smaller, so Draco had delayed starting university to make sure that the same didn’t happen to his little brother. ‘He drank himself into an early grave.’ And Draco never had made it to university. He didn’t feel the loss.

‘Good!’ she exploded, then caught his expression and refused to back down. ‘I’m sorry how that sounds but, well, I hate bullies!’ she hissed. Appropriate or not, her emotions could not be contained.

Draco contemplated her fierce expression, the sparking defiance in her green eyes, the hectic flush on her smooth cheeks, and found it hard to believe that he had once considered her a gentle, mild creature outside the bedroom.

The bride he had imagined would create no dramas. Except, of course, her exit from his life had hardly been without drama, he reminded himself drily.

Catching her full lower lip between her teeth, she lowered her gaze and looked at him through the mesh of her dark lashes. ‘I’m sorry if you don’t like that, but there it is.’

‘I wasn’t too keen on him either,’ Draco responded lightly after a long contemplative moment.

Jane didn’t respond. She was struggling with all her strength to escape the hypnotic tug of his dark stare until she reached the point where the necessity to do so didn’t seem so urgent, despite the warning bells ringing in her head.

‘I always assumed that you had a happy childhood,’ she mused, sounding confused as she settled back on her heels beside the sofa. They had been engaged to be married and they had never come close to sharing as much as they had now, when they were nothing to one another.

She shook her head against that deeply bleak thought and, pushing her hair back from her face, tangled her slim fingers in the glossy skein.

She didn’t mean to bring up the elephant in the room; it just happened as she blurted, ‘Why did you ask me to marry you, Draco?’

Draco’s response was equally uncensored. ‘I wanted to keep you in my bed for ever.’ How long before she had been in another man’s bed, the man who had given her a child? The question left him with an odd hollow feeling.

A solitary tear began to trickle down her smooth cheek as he watched, releasing an emotion that he refused to give a name to. He inhaled as it broke loose in his chest, creating a suffocating feeling.

Was she crying for her dead lover, the father of her child?

He leapt to his feet explosively, frustration etched into his lean features.

Jane chose the same moment to get to her feet, and, clumsy in her haste, she almost knocked the first-aid box over. At least it distracted her from the shameful fact that her sensitive pelvic muscles had gone into quivering spasm.

Their impetuous actions had brought them face to face.

Her breath hitched as he caught her face between his big hands and bent his dark head. She saw a glimpse of the hunger in his eyes and refused to allow her heavy lids to close. She would not surrender her control.

The alternative to losing control was taking charge, so she did. Bringing herself up on her tiptoes, she placed her hands around his face, feeling the rasp of light stubble, and she took control, fitting her lips to his.

For a split second he did nothing as he inhaled her scent and then he was kissing her back with a blind, relentless, consuming hunger. Little husky sounds of desperation escaped her throat and were lost in his mouth as the combative contact grew rougher and less disciplined, all heat and hunger.

Then it was over and they were looking at each other—glazed shock duplicated... She saw the moment the shutters came down in his black eyes and decided it was a good thing.

The last thing she wanted was some sort of post-mortem, not that the frustration thrumming through her body needed much analysis.

Draco had always been able to turn her into a person she hardly recognised. It had once felt like freedom; now it felt like loss.

‘Well, that was stupid.’

She never allowed herself to wonder what would have happened if her doctor’s appointment had fallen after they had married, because she knew. His life since then had proved he was a man who played the field and got bored quickly.

She was aching for something that had never existed, which made her angry, mostly at herself. He had never said he loved her, just that he wanted her, and by now that lust would have turned to boredom. Idiot, she chided herself, focusing on the reality, which was that he had lost no time replacing her in his bed and she was no longer the woman who was seduced by a man telling her he needed her, he wanted her... Even if that man did have a voice that ought, if there was any justice, to be illegal.

‘Pleasurably stupid.’ He looked down. She barely came up to his shoulder, so fierce, so hot, she did more with a kiss than he had ever imagined possible. ‘That’s why I proposed,cara.’

In other words, just sex.

It was really hard at that moment to remember that she needed more than sex. Actually she didn’t even need sex; she needed a quiet, neatly ordered life.

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