Kiss an Angel(10)

Their gazes locked. In a moment that lasted forever, he wordlessly demanded that she submit to him. His eyes seemed to burn through her, dissolving her clothes, her skin, until she felt naked and open, with all her weaknesses exposed. She wanted to run away and hide, but the force of his will held her in place.

His hand moved across her throat, then brushed the boxy satin jacket down on her arms. It fell to the floor with a whisper. He touched the lacy gold strap of the dress beneath and slipped it over her shoulder. She wore no bra—the dress wouldn’t allow it—and her heart began to pound.

With the tip of his finger, he drew the lace down on her breast until it caught on her nipple. Then he bent his head and put his teeth to the soft flesh he had exposed.

Her breath caught as she felt the nip. It should have been painful, but her nerve endings registered the small bite as pleasure. She felt the brush of his hand in her hair, and then he turned away, having left his mark on her, just like a wild animal. That was when she knew what his eyes had reminded her of. A creature of prey.

The trailer door swung on its hinges. He stepped outside and gazed back at her, dropping the white gardenia he had stolen from her hair.

It burst into flames.





3




Daisy slammed the door against the burning flower and pressed her fingers to her breast. What kind of man had the power of fire under his command?

As her heart thudded under her hand, she reminded herself that this was a circus, a place of illusion. He must have picked up a few magic tricks over the years, and she wasn’t going to let her imagination run wild.

She touched the small red mark on the curve of her breast, and her nipple beaded in response. Gazing at the unmade bed, she sank down on one of the chairs by the trailer’s built-in kitchen table and tried to absorb the irony of what had happened.

My daughter is saving herself for marriage. Lani used to toss out the statement as dinner conversation to amuse her friends while Daisy swallowed her embarrassment and pretended to laugh right along with the rest of them. Lani had finally stopped her public announcements when Daisy had turned twenty-three for fear her friends would think she’d raised a freak.

Now that she had reached the age of twenty-six, Daisy knew she was a throwback to the Victorians, and she also understood enough about human psychology to realize that her resistance to premarital sex had its roots in rebellion. From the time she was a small child, she’d watched the revolving door on her mother’s bedroom and known she could never be like that. She craved respectability. Once, she’d even thought she’d found it.

His name was Noel Black, and he was a forty-year-old executive in a British publishing firm who she’d met at a house party in Scotland. He was everything she admired in a man: stable, intelligent, well-educated. It hadn’t taken her long to fall in love with him.

She’d always been a woman who’d craved touch, and Noel’s kisses and expert caresses had inflamed her to the point where she’d nearly lost her mind. Even so she hadn’t been able to set aside her deeply entrenched principles and go to bed with him. Her refusal initially irritated him, but gradually he’d grown to understand how strongly she felt about it, and he’d proposed marriage. She’d eagerly accepted and floated through the days until the ceremony could take place.

Lani had pretended to be overjoyed, but Daisy should have known that her mother was terrified of being alone, to the point of desperation. It hadn’t taken Lani long to embark on a carefully calculated plan to seduce Noel Black.

To Noel’s credit, he’d managed to resist for nearly a month, but Lani always got her man, and in the end, she’d gotten him.

“I did it for you, Daisy,” she’d said when it was over, and a heartbroken Daisy had discovered the truth. “I had to make you see what a hypocrite he is. My God, you’d have been miserable if you’d married him.”

They had quarreled bitterly, and Daisy had packed up her possessions to leave. Lani’s suicide attempt had put a stop to that.

Now she pulled the lacy strap of her wedding dress up over her shoulder and sighed. It was, a deep and hurtful sound, the sort of sigh that came from the bottom of her soul because she’d lost the words to express her feelings.

For other women, sex seemed to come so easily. Why not for her? She’d promised herself she would never have sex outside of marriage, and now she was married. But, ironically, her husband was more of a stranger to her than all the men she’d refused. The fact that he was brutally attractive didn’t change anything. She couldn’t imagine giving herself without love.

Her eyes wandered to the bed. She rose and walked toward it. Something that looked like a piece of black rope peeked out from beneath the pair of jeans tossed carelessly onto the rumpled blue sheets. She reached down to touch the soft, worn denim, then ran her finger along the open teeth of the zipper. What would it be like to be loved by a man? To wake up every morning and see the same face staring at you over the pillow? To have a home and children? A job? What would it be like to be normal?

She set the jeans aside, then abruptly stepped back as she saw what lay beneath them. Not a piece of rope at all, but a whip.

Her heart began to pound.

We can do this easy or we can do it rough. Either way I’m going to win.

Her husband had told her there would be consequences if she disobeyed him. When she’d asked him what they were, he’d said she’d figure it out for herself by tonight. Surely he hadn’t meant that he intended to beat her?