The Brooding Stranger

In two strides Gray was in front of her, his dark face just inches away from hers, his warm breath fanning her face, making little clouds of steam in the rain. ‘My mother took her own life when I was three. Maybe having me was to blame? Who knows? But whether it was me or my father I’ll never know, and I have to live with that every day. So my advice to you, Karen, would be to think twice before you make such a throwaway comment again, damn you!’

The impact of the bitter words made Karen go rigid. Then, hardly realising what she was doing, she slowly raised her hand tentatively to touch his lips with her fingertips. They were infinitely soft to the touch—soft, but inherently stubborn. Velvet clad in iron. But right then she saw past the anger of the man, past the torment of the grown-up who didn’t know where to go with his pain, and instead saw the small three-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his mother and ultimately abandoned by his father, too. Grief twisted her heart.

Gray grabbed her wrist to wrench her hand roughly away. Before she could react he wove his hands through the damp tresses of her hair to crush her lips beneath his mouth in a bruising, destroying kiss that made her body go limp with dazed reaction and turned her blood into a river of seething, molten desire so hot she thought she would be consumed by the sheer, staggering ferocity of it.

His tongue mercilessly swept the soft warm recesses of her mouth, taking brutal hostage of her flesh and her senses with all the insatiable relentless hunger of a man who’d gone without meat or drink for days—tearing into her with passion, demanding everything, sparing her nothing, until her heart pounded in her chest as if she was riding in a speeding car bent on crashing. When his hands left her hair and moved downwards to drag her hips hard against his, his manhood surged like steel against the giving flatness of her belly, leaving Karen in no doubt of the heat and the hardness in him. A kind of drugging sensuality rolled over her like a wave, robbing her of the power to think, to rationalise, to remain sane.

‘Was it like this with your husband, Karen?’ As he tore his mouth from hers Gray’s eyes burned down at her as though in the grip of a fever. He ignored the rain that was soaking them both as though it didn’t even exist. His midnight lashes blinked the moisture away temporarily.

It took several moments for Karen even to register the question. Her lips were aching and bruisingly tender from his passion, her body crushed against his hard, lean length as his arms held her captive, and it was hard to even remember who she was. Tragic Karen Ford from suburban England—a woman who wrote lyrics about passion, who sang songs all about the kind of love that consumed body and soul but had never personally experienced herself.

The shocking realisation was both a revelation and a trauma. It was as though she was utterly betraying Ryan’s memory by even contemplating it. A sudden vision of her husband’s tender smile imposed itself on her mind, cutting through the sensual fog that enveloped her. It made her twist urgently out of Gray’s embrace to call a halt to the madness. Disgusted with herself for almost succumbing to nothing more than base lust, Karen wiped the back of her hand across her still throbbing lips.

Moving several steps away from the man who had only moments ago taken her body hostage, she anxiously straightened her sweater, pushed back her hair to tidy herself, and tried desperately to summon back the woman who always strove to do the right thing, who didn’t give way to wild, uncharacteristic impulses that threatened to land her in a cauldron of hot water that would scar her for ever and play havoc with her soul.

‘My husband was a good, kind man.’

‘But it’s plainly not kindness you want from me, Karen—is it?’

Gray’s lips twisted mockingly, and Karen felt a shaft of pain pierce her heart like a hot red spike.

‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’ he demanded derisively, hands either side of his hips, an imposing dark figure dressed in black, his sombre face a pale, startling contrast in the eerily atmospheric light of the moon. ‘You’ve got to decide, Karen. Either you’re just a girl or you are a woman. When you know the answer perhaps we can come to some mutually satisfying arrangement?’

‘I don’t want—I mean I’m not interested in—’