Ruthless Reunion

He was waiting. Giving her a choice, she realised in that split moment of breathless silence. Go or stay.

Something urged her to pull free from this reckless path she seemed to have carved out for herself. But she knew she had relinquished all choice downstairs in the bar.

She wasn’t aware of actually walking to his door, or of his using a card-key to open it. She was only aware, as his arms came round her again, that she had invited this, and that she couldn’t prevent what was going to happen any more than she could stop the boilers breaking over the reef beyond the coral-crushed beaches of the South Shore.

Their mouths melded, hot and hungrily—even before he had slammed the door behind them—in desperate imitation of the act that was to follow.

It was an act that Alex knew he couldn’t have denied himself even if he had wanted to.

He was using her—heaven help him! Using her to rid himself of the demons that were plaguing him. In the same way, he strongly suspected, that she was using him.

But for all that he couldn’t get enough of her. Of her sweet moist mouth, her perfume, the earth-shattering promise of her body. He couldn’t get enough of her, and to relieve himself of the deep ache of wanting he lifted her up, so that he could feel her luscious legs as well as her arms around him, his mouth plundering hers as he moved urgently through with her into his bedroom.

I can’t get enough of him! Sanchia thought, burning for him, inhaling the scent of his aftershave as though it was vital oxygen, excited by his strength, unbearably aroused by the grazing texture of that impeccable suit against the soft flesh of her inner thighs.

His suite was in darkness, though French doors stood open to the scents and sounds that filled the bedroom from a private roof garden, and the whistling of frogs and lizards in the softly illuminated foliage was a sensuous song that heightened the eroticism of the warm Bermudian night.

The big bed yielded beneath them as they toppled down onto it together.

I want you! she thought, glorying in his actions as he pushed back the flimsy barrier that separated her from him and claimed her full, responsive breasts as his own.

She gave a small strangled cry, her breath shuddering through her from the ecstasy of those marauding hands, the sudden heat of his mouth on one swollen tip bringing her straining towards him in a wild frenzy of need.

Oh, please…! She didn’t want to wait, couldn’t wait. She wanted him now!

Alex groaned from the heat of desire that was throbbing through his body. He had never felt so out of control in his life. He was far too hot—too hard, he realised, mentally flaying himself for getting himself into this situation, wondering how, if he let things run their natural course, he was ever going to last. He couldn’t even protect her—or himself. Gone were the days when he’d gone out equipped with a young stag’s hope of getting lucky. He was thirty-six years old. A leading barrister, for goodness’ sake! With responsibilities, common sense… Except that it seemed to have deserted him in his need for this girl.

He knew he should love her as she should be loved. With care and consideration, after a quiet, romantic evening, with all the skill and mastery of a long-perfected technique. Not like this, like some callow youth…

He hesitated for the briefest moment, dragged back from the edge of a precipice from which there could be no return. But then she arched her back and her writhing hips collided sensuously with his, shaking his very foundations from beneath him, and in that moment he knew he was finished.

He was doing this, Sanchia thought, as though he was seeking respite from something. She guessed that he wasn’t usually so rough or possessive as he caught her wrists above her head and ground his lower body against hers in hard domination, but whatever unknown entity was driving him, she didn’t want to know or care. He was dark and dangerous, and she needed the excitement he offered to obliterate her savage misery.

He made little work of dispensing with her white lacy string, his hands hard and uncompromising, but when his fingers slid into her softness, checking her readiness to receive him, they were unexpectedly gentle.

She whimpered her need, her body contracting around his fingers in a way that made Alex groan with frustration. He heard her moan softly in protest as he withdrew them, clenching his teeth in throbbing anticipation as he moved, adjusting his position before plunging into her, hard and deep.

She uttered a deeply choked sound that was lost beneath the chorus of the night creatures in the luxuriant foliage, and started to climax immediately, each deepening thrust of his body bringing her bucking and sobbing beneath him through the agonising ecstasy of his own release.

When Sanchia started to think again, she couldn’t believe what she had allowed to happen.

Why had she done it? she berated herself mercilessly. She had never been so stupidly reckless in her life!

She groaned a protest under his pinioning weight, so that he moved away from her immediately.

She couldn’t look at him as she readjusted her dress over her virtual nakedness, then groped for her errant string on the crumpled bedspread.

‘Are you looking for this?’ He was on his feet on the other side of the bed, amazingly in control again. Not as she felt. Shocked by her actions. Cheapened by them. Ashamed.

She grabbed the scrap of lace from his tanned hand, unable to meet his eyes.

Dear heaven! He hadn’t even undressed! Such had been their urgency for each other. Grief and betrayal had driven her into his arms, she realised bitterly, but it had been a purely animal coupling, nothing more.

Now pangs of self-disgust, and one Martini too many after days of too little food, had her rolling off the bed and stumbling instinctively towards his bathroom, where she was physically sick.

What type of man took a woman without any preliminaries, she wondered, groping for a towel. Just out of pure need to sate his lust? But she knew she had been a willing participant, and she had shrugged off his attempt at those preliminaries, craving only the oblivion from her screaming emotions that she knew she would find in his arms. So what type of woman did that make her?

‘Are you all right?’

Her eyes hurt from the light he had snapped on.

She didn’t look at him, grateful for the hair that fell forward, hiding the mess of her make-up and her blotchy face as she wiped her mouth on a towel that smelled too keenly of his aftershave lotion. ‘Fine.’ It came out flat and muffled.

‘I hadn’t realised you’d had that much to drink. I thought you were in total control of what you were doing. I’d never have brought you up here if I had.’

He was blaming himself. That deep note of remorse in his voice told her all too chillingly that he didn’t normally give in to his animal urges with such basic disregard. And now he regretted it.

‘Don’t feel too bad about it.’ Unable to unload what had driven her to behave in a way that was grossly out of character with this total stranger—because he was still a stranger, for all the intimacy they had just shared—she didn’t even bother to explain that she hadn’t been drinking to excess, that she wasn’t proud—any more than he was—of what she had allowed to happen. He must think her a promiscuous, half-inebriated fool, and the quicker she got away from him, the better.

Matter-of-factly, he said, ‘It shouldn’t have happened like that.’

‘No.’

‘I should have put you in a cab and sent you home.’

She looked at him squarely at last, her stomach turning over even now from the impact of his devastating looks, that mouth that had kissed her senseless, his dominating, hard-edged masculinity.

‘Yes.’ What had she imagined? she wondered, feeling the pangs of a wounded injustice that seemed to anaesthetise all her other emotions. That a man like him would have wanted her in any other way than for her body?

‘I’ll get you some coffee,’ he said.

When he came back a few minutes later to check up on how she was, the bedroom was deserted. So was the bathroom, and the light that was still on illuminated his way as he strode purposefully back into the sitting room.

The door to the suite was ajar, he noticed, and quickly stepped out into the quiet corridor. The lift was in use, the illuminated buttons indicating its occupation, its movement on a lower level of the hotel.

It could be her, he realised, knowing he stood a cat in hell’s chance of catching her. Brow furrowing, his attention slid automatically to the Emergency Exit door at the end of the corridor, just past his own.

Something other than his five basic senses drew him towards it. The night-scented air greeted him with a rush of humid warmth as he pushed it open, bringing with it the continuous whistling of lizards and the restless surge of the sea.

He saw her then, some way off in the distance—a shadowy figure, illuminated by the beach lamps, sandals hanging from her fingers, racing away over the soft pink sand.

She had been so keen to get away from him she hadn’t waited for the lift. She had used the fire escape instead.

Inside, Alex felt numb. He knew he’d never catch her. She’d be lost to him even if he sprang after her now, jumped the steps below him two by two.

She had come to his bed and then left, unable, he felt sure, to face him. To face anyone, he suspected now. Which could be another explanation for her not using the lift.

But she could be carrying his child…