Page 43 of One Bridegroom Required!

‘Don’t be so disgusting!’ she snapped.

‘Oh, I can get a lot more disgusting than that, sweetheart!’ he vowed, and Holly wondered how his pitiless words had managed to produce the tantalising excitement which was currently tiptoeing its way up her spine.

‘But you probably like it that way, don’t you?’ he persisted. ‘Isn’t that what you got up to at art school? Threesomes? Perversions are all the rage, surely—and it would be so incredibly bourgeois not to join in, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to this!’ she snapped, making to pull away from him, but he caught her other arm to pull her against his chest. His mouth descended on hers and all his anger and frustration and pent-up desire exploded in a fever of need which only matched hers.

One touch and she was lost.

She knew it and he knew it, and there didn’t seem to be a damned thing she could do to stop it.

‘Now kill the lights,’ he growled.

And like a willing puppet she did as he told her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE darkness clothed them like black velvet. Holly stood immobile by the light switch, knowing that it was not too late to change her mind, but then she heard Luke behind her, felt his warm breath on her neck and realised that she had no resistance left.

He slowly turned her round to him, his shape becoming a pale blur before her as her eyes began to gradually accustom themselves to the gloom of the room. He imprisoned her face in the warm cradle of his hand and she held her breath in fearful longing as she waited for him to speak. And when he did, the last of her foolish dreams crumbled like dust around her.

‘You owe me, Holly,’ he told her grimly. ‘You owe me this.’

Her heart jerked with a judder of pain, but at that moment she vowed that he would never know the hurt he had caused her. And all the hurt to come...

‘In lieu of rent?’ she questioned smartly.

His mouth hardened. ‘No.’

‘Or for decorating the shop so nicely, perhaps?’

He laughed, but it was the bitterest laugh she had ever heard. ‘Trying to shock me into leaving, are you? Well, it won’t work, sweetheart. You decided to play this game, Holly—but maybe the stakes were higher than you imagined.’

‘Luke—’

‘No,’ he whispered against her ear, and that deep velvet voice tugged relentlessly at her heartstrings even as she tried to steel herself against his words. ‘You told Caroline what you pretty damned well pleased. You led her to believe we’d slept together and now she’s gone. Well, you can’t play God with people’s lives and expect to get away with it. So now it’s time to pay your dues, Holly, and I’ve come to collect.’

As he spoke he began to caress her, his hand moving expertly down the side of her body, sculpting the curves there as though he were fashioning her from damp clay, and Holly felt a shiver of longing ripple over her skin as despair sharpened her hunger instead of blunting it. She had waited her whole life to feel this kind of response to a man—so why in God’s name did that man have to be Luke Goodwin?

All those books she had read, the paintings she had seen, every statue and film depicting the supposedly mindless passion which accompanied the act of love—hadn’t she sometimes wondered whether it was a conspiracy and it was a figment of everyone’s imagination?

But now she had discovered the power of desire for herself, and Luke was bringing it to life in her. Breathing passion and fire into her blood with his touch, until it blazed from every pore ‘Oh, Luke,’ she sighed brokenly, as his fingers brushed negligently over the swell of her breasts. ‘Oh!’

‘Come over here,’ he said softly, taking her hand and leading her towards the back of the shop.

She couldn’t bear to resist him. At that moment if he told her to walk naked into the street she honestly thought she might give it serious consideration. ‘W-where?’

‘Here.’

Here? Oh, my God, he was taking her into one of the changing rooms, where a bolt of silk dupion lay stacked on one side, like a giant ivory cylinder. The light was dim, but she saw his eyes glitter at the sight of the material, and he tugged at one end of the bolt, rolling it out so that it covered the entire floor of the cubicle in a great creamy, silken carpet. ‘A bed for my beauty,’ he mocked.

Holly’s heart was thundering, her mouth so dry with excitement that she could barely articulate a word, let alone a sentence. ‘We c-could always go upstairs?’

He swept a slow, possessive hand through the unruly tumble of her hair. ‘I know we could,’ he agreed softly. ‘But I don’t want to. Upstairs is yours, but this is no one’s. I want to take you here, on this sumptuous covering in this anonymous room where no one has ever made love before, nor ever shall again. I want to see the apricot tones of your soft skin contrasted against the pale sheen of silk. I want to finish what I should have finished earlier...’

He began to swiftly unbutton her burgundy velvet bodice, and, even as her heart pulsed beneath his touch, she forced herself to close her mind to the matter-of-fact cruelty of his words—and of one word in particular.

Finish.

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