The Married Mistress

‘I don’t need you!’

Just the thought of having this man, the man who had been her husband for such a brief time, follow her into her bedroom spoke of an intimacy that she was totally unwilling to allow herself to recall. I don’t want you, she should have said. But the words had other, much more disturbing implications that meant her voice would not actually speak them with the conviction she needed.

‘It’ll be easier with two,’ Damon returned, and just kept on coming so that she was obliged to skip backwards hastily up the stairs if she was not to have him collide with her.

‘I’ve done it by myself many times…’

‘I’m sure you have.’

Another step upwards necessitated another couple of hasty jumps back and away to avoid a crash.

‘But I’m here now, so there’s no reason for you to have to do it alone today.’

‘Damon, it’s my room!’

Exasperation, a touch of breathlessness from the undignified scramble up the staircase, and a shockingly sensitive awareness of the man below her put a betraying shake into her voice. The physical strength of his chest and shoulders was emphasised from this angle, the gleam of the sunlight on the dark waves of his hair made it shine like glossy silk, and the flash of white teeth as he grinned up at her was startling against the olive skin of his face.

‘Sarah, it’s my house!’ he retorted, with an infuriatingly deliberate echo of her own tone, her own emphasis.

And what could she say in response to that? There was no answer she could give him. At least not one that he would accept, pay any heed to. It was his house, and that was the fact. She hadn’t wanted to take anything from him, but she had desperately needed a roof over her head. And for all she knew Damon had already built on her disputed land. He was perfectly capable of ignoring any morality in the case and just going right ahead.

With inelegant haste she hurried up the remaining stairs and arrived safely on the landing, facing him with determined defiance.

‘You said I could live here!’ she protested, and shivered as she saw a dark tide of change cross his face, shadowing his eyes.

‘I said you could live here,’ he acceded. ‘Not you and sundry assorted hangers-on.’

Now was the time to tell him the truth, Sarah knew. The time to point out that, no matter how it had seemed, Jason had had neither her agreement nor her permission to be in the house. At least not in her bedroom, and certainly not in her bed.

So why did the words stick in her throat? Why could she not just fling them in his face and be done with it?

Because he had no right to interfere in her life. He had given up any rights to that when he had betrayed her trust and treated her as a thing, a chattel, something to be used for his own ends, not as a true wife of his heart.

Wife of his heart!

Hah! That was a joke. A very sick, very black sort of joke. One that slashed at her heart, her soul, like a rusty knife, reopening old wounds that had barely even begun to heal.

She had never really been Damon’s wife, not in the truest sense of the word—not in any sense of the word, except perhaps the sexual one. She had been his wife in bed and nowhere else. He had wanted her physically. There was no way he could have hidden, or faked, the passionate desire he had felt for her. And that must have made the rest of his scheme so much easier for him to carry out.

The pain that came along with the rush of memory drove all thought of common sense from her mind and instead had her spitting at him in blind rage.

‘And I suppose that you’ve been living a pure and celibate life for the last six months!’

He actually looked taken aback by her attack. It even silenced him, and she watched him withdraw into himself, shutters coming down behind the gleaming jet eyes, hiding his thoughts from her.

‘Nothing to say, Damon? I thought not. Ever heard of the saying about pots calling kettles black?’

‘I know the saying, yes. But I do not see its relevance to the current situation.’

He had the nerve to look innocent—and it was unnerving just how innocent he could appear, with his deep, dark eyes wide open in apparent ingenuousness.

For a brief second Sarah closed her own lids against the pain of memory. Against the hated recollection of the moment that Aristotle Nicolaides had revealed the truth about his son’s relationship with Eugenia Stakis. About the marriage that had been planned for so long and that would unite the fortunes of the two Greek dynasties as well as the two lovers. In a moment, he had explained just why Damon had insisted that this pragmatic, purely business deal of a marriage should be kept secret from everyone.

But of course Damon didn’t even know that his poor deceived wife had any knowledge of his machiavellian behaviour and so he still thought he could get away with pretending he was blameless.

‘Of course you don’t.’

Opening her eyes again, but carefully avoiding meeting any lying glance that Damon might send in her direction, she swung away, turning her attention to the rumpled bed before her.

‘I didn’t give Jason free run of my house!’ she said abruptly, covering the savage bite of misery with a sudden rush into action as she snatched up a pillow and shook it roughly out of its pale gold case. ‘And I certainly wouldn’t even have given him a key if I’d known the use he was going to put it to.’

‘But, as you’ve made only too plain, the way you’ve lived your life this past six months is no business of mine.’

Damon’s voice had grown colder by the second. Now it sounded positively glacial, sending icy shivers sliding down Sarah’s spine.

She managed some unintelligible murmur that he could take as agreement or not as he wished and dumped the denuded pillow on the floor, flinging the cotton case after it. It was as she reached for the crumpled sheet that a sudden recollection of how she had felt as she’d stood outside on the landing and heard the sound of Jason’s voice attacked without warning, making her sway weakly, fingers clenching on the bedding until the knuckles showed white.

‘Sarah?’

Damon must have been watching her every move because he stepped forward, reaching her before she had even realised herself that she was no longer steady on her feet.

‘Sarah!’ he said again, his voice rough with some emotion that she couldn’t begin to name.

There was anger in there, but at who? And it was blended with a whole range of feelings that made her head whirl just trying to separate them.

But she was weak enough not to resist when he gathered her into his arms, held her close against him, her cheek resting on his shirt, one hand cradling the back of her head.

‘Sarah, the bastard isn’t worth it! Don’t waste your tears on him.’

Tears?

Somehow Sarah edged a hand up to touch her face and find that Damon had spoken nothing less than the truth. Her skin was wet with tears that she had been unaware of letting escape, her eyelashes spiked into damply clinging clumps.

They were the tears that had been threatening ever since she had pushed open the bedroom door a crack and seen Jason—the man who had said that all he wanted was to heal her broken heart—naked in bed with another woman. She would feel better if she could let them fall. If she could simply give in to her feelings and, abandoning all restraint, weep her heart out on Damon’s supportive shoulder.

It was a dangerously tempting prospect and one she was having to struggle fiercely against, because if she did start crying then she knew the interpretation that Damon would put on it. The only interpretation that he believed was possible.

He would think that she was crying for Jason.

He would believe that the other man had callously broken her heart by being caught in her bed with his mistress in the middle of the afternoon.

He would curse him, call him every name under the sun, possibly even threaten vengeance on him. In fact, if she knew this husband of hers, estranged or not, he might actually try to take off after Jason and then she would have to hold him back, beg him to stay.

And if she did that then she knew it would destroy her.

There could never have been a good moment for Damon to reappear in her life, but this afternoon had to be the worst one possible.

At last she had thought that she was finally growing a new, protective skin over the wounds that this man had inflicted on her in their short marriage. Only this morning she had told herself that she was gradually starting to get her life back under her control again, get things in order, consider the prospect of beginning again without dissolving into total misery. She had a good job as PA to Rhys Morgan, an international art dealer and owner of a hugely prestigious gallery here in London. Jason seemed to have set himself to charming her out of the black depression into which she had fallen since her return from Greece. And, most important of all, the husband she had adored, and who had taken her love and used it for his own totally selfish ends, was thousands of miles away, on the Greek island he called home.

The only reason Jason had been in the house at all today was because she had been expecting an important delivery. The freezer in the kitchen had died with a spectacularly dramatic waste of food, and she had had to buy another. But when she had been asked to go in to the gallery to cover for a sick workmate, she’d thought she would have to cancel the delivery until Jason, who had recently been made redundant from his own job, had stepped in and offered to wait for it instead. They had been out on a couple of what he called dates but in her eyes they were little more than friends.

‘I’m not doing anything important,’ he’d said. ‘Only checking the jobs pages—I can do that as easily at your place as I can at home.’

But then she had come home unexpectedly early, having been given the afternoon off by an unusually preoccupied Rhys, who had clearly wanted to be anywhere but in the office, and she had seen Jason’s car parked outside as she had walked up the street towards the house. Some instinct had kept her silent as she opened the door, crossed the hall. A faint noise from the first floor, the sound of laughter—another woman’s laughter—had drawn her to the stairs, and she had mounted them in silence.

‘This is the life, Jace! I could really get to like this!’ The woman’s voice had floated out clearly to her as she reached the top, and set foot on the thick blue carpet of the landing.

‘Well, don’t get too comfortable, honey.’ Jason’s drawling, upper-class tones had been unmistakable. ‘The prissy Ms Meyerson will be home by five—and you’ll have to get your pretty little butt out of here well before then.’

‘I wish I didn’t have to! I don’t like sharing you with her, Jacey. I really don’t.’

‘And I don’t like wasting my time with her either, sweetie,’ Jason had hastily assured her. ‘But the lady is loaded! Look at this house for a start. It’s huge, and in this part of London it must be worth a fortune! She has to be worth millions. And she’s almost mine. She’s already given me a key so that I can come and go as I please. Another couple of weeks and I’ll have her eating out of my hand…’

And it was then that she had known. Known that whoever it was who had said that lightning didn’t strike twice had been absolutely right.

Because even as she had listened to Jason and his witchy girlfriend planning to play on her emotions simply to use her, she had realised that she just didn’t care. That in spite of her barely formed hopes, her dreams of starting again, Jason didn’t mean a thing to her, and his greedy, grasping plans even less.

No, the shock that had ripped through her, shattering her composure and destroying all that hard-won peace of mind, was the realisation that it had all been just a delusion. That her hopes of a new life, of a new beginning, putting behind her the pain and the betrayal of the past, were built on the shaky foundations of self-deceit. She was no more ‘over’ Damon than she was capable of flying to the moon.

And if she had any room for doubt, any hope of being wrong, that hope had been totally destroyed in the moment that she had blundered into Damon’s arms and into the feeling that she had come home.

She had fallen totally, blindly and irrevocably in love with Damon Nicolaides in the first seconds that she had ever seen him, and nothing that had happened had changed that. He had taken her heart prisoner and he still held it captive in his strong, powerful hands. All the dreaming of a future, of a new life, had been just a fantasy, one that had evaporated like mist before the sun at the first touch of reality.

The reality was that she loved Damon desperately and she always would, while he had never felt anything for her but the searing passion that had driven him to take her to his bed. And even that had been a complication he hadn’t looked for, hadn’t wanted in his campaign to use her to get what he wanted.

It was for that reason and that alone that she now wanted to weep. To try to wash away the savage pain in her heart under the rush of tears.

And of course she could do nothing of the sort for fear of betraying herself totally to the man who was responsible for that anguish in the first place.

CHAPTER THREE

WHAT the hell was he doing? Damon asked himself furiously, suddenly convinced that he had made the worst move possible since he had come into this house.

Getting hold of Sarah like this had to have been the dumbest, the craziest, the most ill-judged thing he could have done. And he was regretting it savagely.

Or was he?

His thoughts might be screaming the need for caution, but in his senses it didn’t feel like regret.

It had been bad enough when she had blundered into his grasp downstairs and he had let his arms close around her, holding her tight. He had known exactly what he was doing then. He’d been supremely conscious of Jason the rat standing there in the hallway beside them, watching every move. And those moves had been deliberately calculated for their maximum effect on the other man.

But they had had plenty of effect on him too. It had been impossible to hold this woman, to feel the satin warmth of her skin, inhale the sweet, clean scent of her body, and not react in the most primitively masculine way. Even now, his body still ached with the memory of the instant, savage hardening, the tightness that had twisted at his guts. The thought of how it had once been.

How easy it would once have been simply to fold her in his arms, lift her from the floor, carry her over to the bed. He could lower her to the mattress, come down beside her…

‘Damon?’

There was a hesitation in Sarah’s voice, a questioning note that asked, without any more words being needed, just what he thought he was doing.

What did he think he was doing?

What was he doing?

He was holding Sarah in the way that he had dreamed of, hungered for, over the past six months. He had her in his arms again and her hair was like silk under his cheek, her breath a warm whisper across his skin. When she spoke, her soft mouth came dangerously close to the strong muscle that corded his neck. If he moved—just an inch—then her lips would touch, would caress, would entice…

‘Damon—please!’

It was the note of breathless protest on the words that told him how, unthinkingly, his hold on her had tightened, driving the air from her slender body, almost crushing the delicate bones of her ribcage.

‘Sighnomi—I’m sorry…’ he murmured, but he still couldn’t let her go.

For a second he eased his hold on her, then almost immediately tightened it again, so fiercely that her head came up sharply, wide, startled green eyes looking up into his in an expression of shock.

‘No, I’m not sorry,’ he muttered, the words rough and thick. ‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted this? Dreamed of it?’

The nights had been the worst. The nights when once he had lain awake, the pulsing throb of sexual satisfaction slowly, gradually ebbing from his satiated senses. He had never been able to sleep, because even when he had just experienced the wild, primal explosion of the fiercest climaxes he had ever known he had still been unable to surrender to the weary satisfaction that engulfed his body.

Instead he had always had to lie there; to prop his head up slightly on the pillow so that he could watch her drift into sleep. And even just watching her had been a sensual act in itself.

His gaze had drifted from the high, smooth forehead, down over her softly closed eyelids, where the long, thick lashes lay like feathered crescents on the pale skin of her cheeks. He had traced the warm, sensual curve of her mouth, the sweet line of her jaw and chin, the length of her throat. And when his eyes had moved to the rich curves of her body, to the swell of her breasts and hips, still stained with the afterglow of their passion, then his body had hardened all over again, threatening to throw off the satiated sense of fulfilment in a second and start to clamour all over again for something more. For the renewal of the pleasure his senses had known; to climb once again to the peak of ecstasy that he had experienced during the night. He always ended up wanting her again with even more hunger than he had felt the very first time.

Theos! He felt that way now. His body was on fire; he had never felt so viciously hard, so brutally hungry. If she moved against him, it was blissful agony, making him grit his teeth hard against the groan of tortured response.

‘Damon—you’re hurting me.’

‘Huh?’

Jolted from the fever of his memories, he looked down at her through passion-glazed eyes, struggling to focus. Her face was turned up towards his and her eyes were huge and emerald-brilliant against her pale skin.

‘Sighnomi…’ he began, then broke off violently. His hands clenched on her arms again, giving her a small, reproving shake.

‘Maybe I want to hurt you—I want you to know how I feel. To understand what it’s been like…’

‘I do…I do…’

Kristos! Had he put those tears into her eyes? Had he made them spill out from under her lids until they soaked the fine skin of her cheeks? They didn’t run down her face, but simply lay, like a soft sheen, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, a silent but eloquent reproach.

‘Sarah!’

Her name escaped his lips like a sigh in the same moment that his proud, dark head bent, his mouth coming down, making her jump like a startled deer.

It was his gentleness that was shocking. It was so totally unexpected and so much at odds with the hard, heated pressure of the fiercely aroused body that was crushed so tightly against hers.

But his lips were soft and gentle, tenderly kissing away the tear stains from her face, pressing her eyelids shut and brushing the lingering salt drops from her lashes. And it seemed to Sarah that with them went her fury and distress, the need to fight seeping from her like air from a pricked balloon.

‘Oh, Damon…’

Her breath caught in her throat, escaping on a small, choking cry, a sound of surrender. She subsided softly against him, feeling the need of his support, deeply grateful for his strength holding her when she couldn’t stand alone.

Overwhelmed by all that she had just realised, she buried her face in his shirt, not knowing whether she needed to hide or simply to get much closer to him, burrowing into security like some small, vulnerable creature. She felt his mouth drift over her tumbled auburn hair, the warmth of his breath on the delicate curl of her outer ear. The clean, faintly musky scent of his skin tormented her with the memories it evoked, the heat of his body surrounding her like a protective cloak.

And with the memories came the awakening of need, the savage burn of hunger.

‘Damon…’

Even in her own ears, the sound of his name had changed totally. It was no longer the soft, submissive surrender, but a sharpened sound of longing, of demand. And as she spoke she drew in her breath on a sobbing gasp, turning her face to him once more.

‘Damon, please—kiss me. Kiss me properly.’

‘Kiss you—’

It was raw and thick, hopelessly roughened at the edges.

‘Oh, lady…’

She didn’t know who moved first, whether his dark head came down hard and fast or her own lifted to his as swiftly. She only knew that in the space of a swift, thudding heartbeat, their mouths had met and clashed and crushed so fiercely that she almost expected to see sparks fly up into the air from their joining.

All the loneliness, all the yearning, all the misery of the past six months was in that kiss. All the memory of the long, empty days and the cruel, bleak nights swelled up inside her, rose, and spilled out fiercely like red-hot lava erupting from a volcano and surging, wild and unstoppable, down the slopes of the mountain.

They snatched at each other’s mouths, nipped, bit, came apart to draw in deep, ragged breaths, then rushed together again, unable to stay apart. It was like a fight for survival more than any sort of caress. Like a wild, primal mating ritual that had nothing of the civilised or of courtship in it, only raging need, uncontrollable craving, the desperation of having lost once and the terrible fear that it could happen all over again.

‘I want you,’ Damon muttered harshly against her mouth. ‘Want you—want you…’

His command of language seeming to desert him, he broke into Greek, alternating the words of his native tongue with his suddenly roughened and disjointed English in a raw and incoherent litany of desire.

And Sarah could do nothing but nod again and again, her own mouth only capable of forming the word ‘yes’, repeated with the gathering intensity of a growing thunder storm, a counterpoint to his harsh declaration.

‘Yes, Damon, yes, yes, yes…’

This was all she would ever have of Damon, was the phrase that ran through Sarah’s head. If she could only have today and this elemental, primitive passion that had flared between them, then she would take it and welcome it and enjoy it for as long as she was able.

No, enjoy was not the right word. It came nowhere close to describing this starving hunger, this aching, desperate need.

This feeling was as essential to her as each raw, painful breath she dragged into her burning lungs between each hungry kiss. Without it she could never live, only exist. And yet at the same time she felt each moment of contact, each desperate caress, as torment in her soul, ripping and shredding, increasing the emptiness in her heart in the same second that it appeased the hunger in her body.

‘I want you too, Damon. I’m desperate for you…desperate…’

Her hands spoke for her when she could no longer string two coherent words together. Grabbing at the soft white cloth of his polo shirt, she wrenched it free of the waistband of his trousers, roughly pushing it aside so that her greedy hands could have free access to the bronzed skin she sought, her fingers almost scrabbling his clothing out of the way in her rush to touch him.

‘Sarah—sweetheart—angel…’

There was a shaken, rough note of laughter threading through Damon’s vain attempt at a protest, and the hands he brought up to try and catch at hers, to still them, or at the very least to slow their frantic, urgent movements, were as unsteady as his words.

‘There’s no need to rush—we have all day, the night…’

But even as he spoke, his own actions denied the muttered restraint, the urge to caution.

His movements mirroring Sarah’s, he pushed her blouse up and away from her skirt. The ominous wrenching, tearing sound told of the fact that he had completely forgotten that hers was not a stretchy T-shirt, and a second later there were several soft thuds as broken buttons flipped away and bounced on the dressing table, the window sill, the floor.

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