Legally His Omnibus (22 page)

White-faced, she confronted him across the small space that now divided them.

His face was in the shadows, so that she could not see his expression, only sense his hunting immobility and know that he was watching her, making her feel vulnerable and exposed. She waited for him to voice some cutting put-down, but instead of retaliating in any way he simply turned from her and went to unlock the front door.

All the way up the stairs Imogen expected to hear him if not following her then at least commanding her to stop, but there was only silence. She didn’t turn round to see why, though. She did not dare.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
MOGEN
WAS
DEEPLY
asleep, lost in the most wonderful dream.

‘Mmm.’ Languorously she reached up to curl her hand against the firm, smooth skin at the nape of Dracco’s neck. She could feel the silky thickness of his hair as she burrowed her fingertips into it, firmly drawing his head closer to her own.

‘You know this is very dangerous, don’t you?’ Dracco was warning her in a sensually raw whisper, the sound caressing her skin with deliciously rough male warmth.

‘I like danger,’ Imogen responded provocatively as she looked up into the deep sea-green depths of his eyes. ‘And I like it even more when that danger is you,’ she added.

A small bubble of laughter gurgled in her throat as she saw the way Dracco was looking at her. It felt so good to be so at ease with him, so intimately aware of the special relationship they shared. At ease, and yet at the same time... A tiny thrill of wanton excitement shivered across her skin as she watched his eyes darken. Her own closed, her lips parting in eager anticipation of his kiss.

When it came the hot sweetness of it melted right through her body, touching every single nerve-ending, reaching into the deepest core of her, so that suddenly what they were doing was no longer a teasing game that she controlled, but a fierce, elemental need that controlled them both.

‘Dracco!’ Hungrily she reached out to drag him down against her naked body, driven to feel him against her, skin to skin, lips to lips, breath to breath! Helplessly her nails raked the firm flesh of his back as her body arched up against his, drawn into a tight, aching bow of longing.

As Dracco responded to her body’s hungry demands he groaned her name against her lips. Imogen opened her eyes. Sunlight streamed in through her bedroom window, glinting on the gold of her wedding ring.

Dracco was holding her tightly now, his hands roving wantonly over her naked body with the powerful touch of a hungry sensualist, dipping lingeringly into her most secret places of delight, drawing from her a need to arouse him in the same way. Each kiss, each touch was taking her closer and closer to the shatteringly climactic culmination she knew was waiting for her, but as they did so somehow her joy was being overtaken by a fear that her happiness was about to be snatched away from her. A fear that made her cry out in anguish as she clung frantically to Dracco, desperately afraid that somehow she might lose him, lose his love.

‘No!’

The sound of her own sharp moan of panic brought Imogen immediately out of her dream. For a few seconds she was still so wrapped up in it that it took her several deep breaths to realise just where she was. When she did she sat up in bed, reaching for her bedside light, illuminating the bedroom in a soft peachy glow. But nothing could warm the cold tentacles of dread reaching out to wrap themselves around her heart. She had been dreaming about Dracco, dreaming that he...that she...that they... Closing her eyes, Imogen hugged her arms around her body in an instinctive gesture of protection.

‘Imogen, what’s wrong? I heard you cry out.’

The sound of Dracco’s voice as he thrust open her bedroom door and strode into her room made Imogen open her eyes immediately.

‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong,’ she denied tensely.

There was no way she could disclose to Dracco the content of her dream, nor exactly why she had given that anguished moan of distress.

‘I heard you cry out,’ Dracco persisted.

He was walking towards her bed as he spoke, and he was still fully dressed, although he had unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt and on the flesh they exposed Imogen could see the tangled criss-crossed darkness of his body hair.

Unable to drag her gaze away from it, she felt her stomach lurch. In her dream he had been totally naked. In her dream she had touched his skin, drawn her fingertips through that silky male covering of fine dark hair whilst her whole body quivered in thrilled sensual pleasure... Imogen shuddered.

What was happening to her? It had been years since she had fantasised about touching Dracco like that. She had been a mere girl then, sleeping in this very same bedroom. Was that it? Was it because she was sleeping in the room that had been hers as a girl that she had dreamed so inappropriately of the kind of intimacy with Dracco she most certainly no longer wanted? She was just beginning to relax into the security of finding a logical explanation for what had happened when she suddenly remembered how in her dream she had seen sunlight shining on her wedding ring.

A second shudder, even more apparent than her first, galvanised her body, bringing Dracco to the side of her bed, where he frowned down at her.

‘Perhaps we should get Dr Armstrong to take a look at you,’ he told her. ‘You felt sick earlier on; now you’re shivering.’

Imogen could feel her self-control starting to slip.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me. Apart from the fact that I’m being blackmailed into having sex with a man I don’t want so that he can have the son he does want. But,’ she added with angry sarcasm, ‘I’m sure you aren’t going to tell Dr Armstrong that. You’re very good at not telling people things they ought to know, aren’t you, Dracco?’

‘And just what the hell do you mean?’ he demanded.

‘Work it out for yourself,’ Imogen challenged him. When he continued to frown at her she flung at him bitterly, ‘Somehow I don’t imagine you’ve told Lisa about your plans for me. For the child you want me—
us
—to have,’ she emphasised savagely. ‘And...’

She took a deep breath, intending to remind him that he had also neglected to tell her, when he had originally proposed marriage to her, that he was already in love with her stepmother, but before she could do so he was interrupting her, exclaiming, ‘No, I haven’t. Why should I?’

How could he stand there and say that? Furiously Imogen confronted him.

‘Why?’ Imogen repeated in disbelief. Shaking her head, she changed tack slightly, unable to trust herself to say what she was really feeling and settling instead for a quietly contemptuous, ‘She’s bound to find out, you know. Miranda will tell her.’

To her own shock she discovered that she was holding her breath, waiting, almost as though she was hoping that he would tell her Lisa was nothing to him now, that it was over between them. Was she really so frighteningly stupid, so crazily vulnerable?

‘Our marriage, our relationship and the plans we make within it have nothing whatsoever to do with Lisa.’

‘And you don’t care what she thinks or feels about the situation?’ Imogen challenged.

‘My desire to have a child with your father’s genes doesn’t impact in any way at all on Lisa’s life.’

‘Nor on your relationship with her?’ Imogen couldn’t stop herself from persisting. There was a brief pause before Dracco answered.

‘I know how you feel about Lisa, Imo, but you’re an adult now. My relationship with her, as you term it, is what it is and cannot be changed. My feelings towards her haven’t changed either, you know,’ he told her as gently as he could.

Dracco frowned as he watched the look of anguished disbelief darkening Imogen’s eyes. He knew how bitterly unhappy her stepmother had made her, and, as he had just told her, he liked Lisa as little now as he had done when John had first married her. In Dracco’s eyes she was a shallow, selfish, greedy woman, but that did not alter the fact that, just as he had a responsibility towards Imogen, he also had a responsibility as one of the executors of Imogen’s late father’s will to ensure that Lisa received the biannual allowance she was entitled to. It was obvious, though, that Imogen was in no mood to listen to such logic.

Imogen felt as though someone was squeezing her lungs in a frighteningly painful grasp, making it almost impossible for her to breathe, but not impossible for her to feel. Oh, no, she could still do that! But why could she, when for the last four years she had believed that she no longer cared, that Dracco no longer had the power to hurt her, that her love for him had died along with her trust and respect?

‘I think I hate you, Dracco,’ she whispered savagely, correcting herself to tell him, ‘No, I know I hate you.’

He was turning away from her and going to stand in front of her bedroom window, looking out into the darkness beyond it.

‘Fine, you can hate me all you like,’ he told her coolly, ‘but you will still give me my son, Imo.’

Without giving her the opportunity to retaliate, he strode through her still open bedroom door, pulling it shut behind him.

As she glared at it, Imogen was not surprised to discover that she was shaking from head to foot—with burning hot rage. How could he; how dared he stand there and tell her he expected her to bear his child when he had just admitted that there was another woman in his life? And not just any ‘other’ woman, but her stepmother Lisa!

* * *

Of course, it was impossible for her to go back to sleep. A glance at her watch told her that it was only just gone midnight and she realised that Dracco must have heard her cry out on his own way to bed. How could she have allowed herself to dream about him like that? What part of her subconscious had produced those treacherous images? And why was the discovery that Dracco still loved Lisa making her feel not just that she wanted to hurl her furious contempt at him for his betrayal of her own youthful adoration, but also so filled with pain and despair?

Anyone would think that she still loved him, she derided herself warningly. And of course she did not!

If only she were back in Rio. There she had been safe; there she had been far too busy to think about Dracco. She made a small restless movement in her bed as her conscience prodded her for the lie she was telling herself. ‘All right, then,’ she muttered beneath her breath, ‘so I did think about him occasionally.’

You thought about him and you dreamed about him, that same voice reminded her relentlessly. You know you did.

‘Yes, yes, all right,’ she conceded, ‘but those were not dreams, they were nightmares, and I had quite definitely stopped loving him. Quite definitely!

* * *

‘You’ve got half an hour to have breakfast and then we’re leaving for London.’

As she heard what Dracco was saying to her for a moment Imogen’s hopes rose. Had he changed his mind after what she had said to him last night? Was he taking her back to London in order to put her on a plane to Rio?

Oh, please...please! she begged fate fervently as she told Dracco automatically, ‘I don’t eat breakfast. I’ll go up and pack.’

‘Pack?’ Dracco’s eyebrows lifted as he drawled the single word laconically, shaking his head as he did so. ‘We’re going to see our solicitor, Imo, and it won’t involve an overnight stay, although I dare say you might want to wear something a little more formal,’ he added as he flicked a disparaging glance at her well-worn outfit.

Immediately Imogen was on the defensive. ‘If you don’t like my clothes, Dracco—’ she began, and then was forced to stop, as without allowing her to finish Dracco cut in smoothly,

‘I can buy you some new ones? My feelings exactly, Imo, and that’s what I intend to do, once our business with David is concluded. I don’t doubt that you trust me, just as I do you, but I thought it might give you some degree of reassurance if I committed myself legally to our...agreement. I intend to take your adherence to your part on trust. What do you mean, you don’t eat breakfast?’ he suddenly questioned her with a frown.

The lightning speed with which he changed subjects threw Imogen into total confusion. And distracted her from the shock of discovering that he intended to put the proposal he had made to her on a legal footing.

The proposal he had made to her? The blackmail he was forcing on her, she corrected herself fiercely as she heard him saying, ‘No wonder you’re so slender. Have some of these.’

Imogen’s eyes widened as he reached out and picked up a packet of cereal from the table, shaking some into the bowl in front of her.

‘Fruit Munchies with chocolate chips,’ he told her humorously. ‘You used to love them.’

‘That was when I was thirteen,’ Imogen reminded him, but Dracco wasn’t paying any attention.

Instead he poured milk onto her cereal, before warning her, ‘We don’t leave this house until you have eaten, Imo.’

‘Why? Are you afraid that people will think you’re starving me as well as blackmailing me?’ she demanded acerbically.

‘Blackmailing you?’ He gave her a sharply incisive look, but before he could continue the telephone started to ring. ‘Excuse me,’ he told her. ‘This is probably a business call I was expecting. I’ll take it in the study. I shan’t be long.’

After he had gone Imogen stared at the bowl in front of her. She wasn’t going to eat the cereal, of course she wasn’t, but somehow she was dipping her spoon into it. In Rio she had eaten sparingly, knowing how little food the children they were dealing with had to eat.

She was over halfway through by the time Dracco returned, and, although she pushed the bowl away from her without finishing its contents, she had to admit that she had rather enjoyed the cereal.

* * *

Dracco’s solicitor had an office in the same block that housed the offices which had originally been her father’s and which were now, of course, exclusively Dracco’s.

A sharp pang gripped Imogen as she remembered how often she had visited the office with her father. She still missed him, not with the savage intensity she had suffered immediately after his death any longer, but with a sadness that had become a small, familiar shadow in her life.

As he guided her towards the lift Dracco said quietly to her, ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve thought about moving. I still expect to see your father here, coming out of the lift, opening the office door. I still miss him and I dare say I always will.’

His words were so in tune with her thoughts that Imogen couldn’t speak without betraying her emotions. Instead she turned her face away from Dracco so that he couldn’t see it. How could he speak so about her father and yet at the same time have betrayed him by falling in love with his wife?

Imogen continued to ignore Dracco as the lift bore them upwards. When it stopped and the door opened he touched her arm, and immediately Imogen flinched.