A Price Worth Paying(49)

‘Listen to yourself! Do you really think I care about something that happened more than a hundred years ago? Do you honestly believe I set out with the intention of banishing the Otxoas from their land?’

‘What am I supposed to think, when the land is the one thing you expressly demanded? And now my grandfather thinks I’ve saved this family from some kind of curse and all I know is that I’ve made it happen. I’ve brought it down upon us. How do you think I feel about that? How do you think I feel?’

She broke down, her knees collapsing beneath her, sending her limp and sagging into the ground.

His hands caught her at her shoulders, pulling her up, pulling her towards him. ‘What do you care about the land anyway? You’re going home. You said yourself you don’t belong here.’

She pushed with all her might against him. ‘And that makes it okay? That’s your defence?’ She lashed at him with her fists, pounding at his unyielding chest, but he did not let her go and so she punched harder. ‘Don’t touch me!’

He held her at arm’s length and still she managed to lash out at him. He grabbed her wrists, locking them within the iron circle of his own and pulled her in close. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

‘You knew,’ she said, angling her face and her accusations higher. ‘You knew all the time about the land and the curse. That land means everything to him and now you’ve taken it.’

His dark eyes gleamed dangerously down at her, his hot breath fanning her face, the cords on his neck standing out in rigid lines. ‘And you made a deal, remember! You were the one who turned up on my doorstep begging.’

Fruitlessly she wrenched against the prison of his hands. ‘But you knew! All the time you knew!’

‘So what? The damned curse means nothing to me!’

‘But it does to him!’ She was so rigid she felt she might snap. She glared up at him. ‘It does to him and I hate you for what you’ve done!’

He growled and shook his head slowly from side to side, his dark eyes like magnets, their pull insistent and strong. ‘Oh no, you don’t. You don’t hate me at all.’

His slow words and his rich accent stroked her like a slow velvet hand, and she felt the first unmistakable frisson of fear.

And the first unmistakable frisson of excitement.

No! That would be to let him win. She tugged desperately at her wrists. ‘Let me go.’

He tugged her back so she ended up even closer to the hard wall of his chest, his mouth turned up at the corners, his eyes never deviating from hers, and she knew what he intended and there was no way …

‘Let me go!’

He stepped closer. She stepped back. He took another step and this time her step was more of a stumble, until she found the old support she’d been clinging to before against her back. She’d welcomed it for its solidity then. Now she cursed it for preventing her escape, leaving her sandwiched between it and him.

He let her hands go then, to frame her face in his hands, his fingers deep in her hair, and she reached back, clinging to the support, keeping her hungry fingers away from him.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her heart beating too fast, too frantically, already knowing the answer.

So that when his mouth crashed down on hers it came as no surprise. His vehemence did. There was no remaining unaffected—his hot mouth and tongue seemed to want to plunder her very soul.

What had he done to her? she wondered as his tongue licked like a trail of flames across her throat. What had he reduced her to?

Feelings, the answer came back, as she gave herself up into his kiss and gave him back all he was offering her.

Feelings.

He had awoken her to feeling and she was a slave to it. Slave to him.

Her hands abandoned the support behind her. She was pulling at his clothes as fast as he was pulling at hers. The zip of her dress was undone, the tail of his shirt was tugged free. Her breasts exposed to his mouth, his chest was bared to her seeking fingers.

And his hands were at the hem of her dress, sliding the fabric up her legs, sliding down again once he’d hooked his fingers into her underwear and swept them away.

Air brushed the sensitive folds of her flesh. Cool air against hot torrid flesh.

‘Alesander,’ she cried, half plea, half protest as she battled to release him, a battle made harder because he was so hard.

‘I know,’ he muttered against her throat, her jaw, her mouth as he helped her. ‘I know.’