The Married Mistress (4 page)

‘Sarah?’

Damon must have been watching her every move because he stepped forward, reaching her before she had even realised herself that she was no longer steady on her feet.

‘Sarah!’ he said again, his voice rough with some emotion that she couldn’t begin to name.

There was anger in there, but at who? And it was blended with a whole range of feelings that made her head whirl just trying to separate them.

But she was weak enough not to resist when he gathered her into his arms, held her close against him, her cheek resting on his shirt, one hand cradling the back of her head.

‘Sarah, the bastard isn’t worth it! Don’t waste your tears on him.’

Tears?

Somehow Sarah edged a hand up to touch her face and find that Damon had spoken nothing less than the truth. Her skin was wet with tears that she had been unaware of letting escape, her eyelashes spiked into damply clinging clumps.

They were the tears that had been threatening ever since she had pushed open the bedroom door a crack and seen
Jason—the man who had said that all he wanted was to heal her broken heart—naked in bed with another woman. She would feel better if she could let them fall. If she could simply give in to her feelings and, abandoning all restraint, weep her heart out on Damon’s supportive shoulder.

It was a dangerously tempting prospect and one she was having to struggle fiercely against, because if she did start crying then she knew the interpretation that Damon would put on it. The only interpretation that he believed was possible.

He would think that she was crying for Jason.

He would believe that the other man had callously broken her heart by being caught in her bed with his mistress in the middle of the afternoon.

He would curse him, call him every name under the sun, possibly even threaten vengeance on him. In fact, if she knew this husband of hers, estranged or not, he might actually try to take off after Jason and then she would have to hold him back, beg him to stay.

And if she did that then she knew it would destroy her.

There could never have been a good moment for Damon to reappear in her life, but this afternoon had to be the worst one possible.

At last she had thought that she was finally growing a new, protective skin over the wounds that this man had inflicted on her in their short marriage. Only this morning she had told herself that she was gradually starting to get her life back under her control again, get things in order, consider the prospect of beginning again without dissolving into total misery. She had a good job as PA to Rhys Morgan, an international art dealer and owner of a hugely prestigious gallery here in London. Jason seemed to have set himself to charming her out of the black depression into which she had fallen since her return from Greece. And, most important of all, the husband she had adored, and who
had taken her love and used it for his own totally selfish ends, was thousands of miles away, on the Greek island he called home.

The only reason Jason had been in the house at all today was because she had been expecting an important delivery. The freezer in the kitchen had died with a spectacularly dramatic waste of food, and she had had to buy another. But when she had been asked to go in to the gallery to cover for a sick workmate, she’d thought she would have to cancel the delivery until Jason, who had recently been made redundant from his own job, had stepped in and offered to wait for it instead. They had been out on a couple of what he called dates but in her eyes they were little more than friends.

‘I’m not doing anything important,’ he’d said. ‘Only checking the jobs pages—I can do that as easily at your place as I can at home.’

But then she had come home unexpectedly early, having been given the afternoon off by an unusually preoccupied Rhys, who had clearly wanted to be anywhere but in the office, and she had seen Jason’s car parked outside as she had walked up the street towards the house. Some instinct had kept her silent as she opened the door, crossed the hall. A faint noise from the first floor, the sound of laughter—another woman’s laughter—had drawn her to the stairs, and she had mounted them in silence.

‘This is the life, Jace! I could really get to like this!’ The woman’s voice had floated out clearly to her as she reached the top, and set foot on the thick blue carpet of the landing.

‘Well, don’t get too comfortable, honey.’ Jason’s drawling, upper-class tones had been unmistakable. ‘The prissy Ms Meyerson will be home by five—and you’ll have to get your pretty little butt out of here well before then.’

‘I wish I didn’t have to! I don’t like sharing you with her, Jacey. I really don’t.’

‘And I don’t like wasting my time with her either, sweetie,’ Jason had hastily assured her. ‘But the lady is loaded! Look at this house for a start. It’s huge, and in this part of London it must be worth a fortune! She has to be worth millions. And she’s almost mine. She’s already given me a key so that I can come and go as I please. Another couple of weeks and I’ll have her eating out of my hand…’

And it was then that she had known. Known that whoever it was who had said that lightning didn’t strike twice had been absolutely right.

Because even as she had listened to Jason and his witchy girlfriend planning to play on her emotions simply to use her, she had realised that she just didn’t care. That in spite of her barely formed hopes, her dreams of starting again, Jason didn’t mean a thing to her, and his greedy, grasping plans even less.

No, the shock that had ripped through her, shattering her composure and destroying all that hard-won peace of mind, was the realisation that it had all been just a delusion. That her hopes of a new life, of a new beginning, putting behind her the pain and the betrayal of the past, were built on the shaky foundations of self-deceit. She was no more ‘over’ Damon than she was capable of flying to the moon.

And if she had any room for doubt, any hope of being wrong, that hope had been totally destroyed in the moment that she had blundered into Damon’s arms and into the feeling that she had come home.

She had fallen totally, blindly and irrevocably in love with Damon Nicolaides in the first seconds that she had ever seen him, and nothing that had happened had changed that. He had taken her heart prisoner and he still held it captive in his strong, powerful hands. All the dreaming of a future, of a new life, had been just a fantasy, one that had evaporated like mist before the sun at the first touch of reality.

The reality was that she loved Damon desperately and she always would, while he had never felt anything for her but the searing passion that had driven him to take her to his bed. And even that had been a complication he hadn’t looked for, hadn’t wanted in his campaign to use her to get what he wanted.

It was for that reason and that alone that she now wanted to weep. To try to wash away the savage pain in her heart under the rush of tears.

And of course she could do nothing of the sort for fear of betraying herself totally to the man who was responsible for that anguish in the first place.

W
HAT
the hell was he doing? Damon asked himself furiously, suddenly convinced that he had made the worst move possible since he had come into this house.

Getting hold of Sarah like this had to have been the dumbest, the craziest, the most ill-judged thing he could have done. And he was regretting it savagely.

Or was he?

His thoughts might be screaming the need for caution, but in his senses it didn’t
feel
like regret.

It had been bad enough when she had blundered into his grasp downstairs and he had let his arms close around her, holding her tight. He had known exactly what he was doing then. He’d been supremely conscious of Jason the rat standing there in the hallway beside them, watching every move. And those moves had been deliberately calculated for their maximum effect on the other man.

But they had had plenty of effect on him too. It had been impossible to hold this woman, to feel the satin warmth of her skin, inhale the sweet, clean scent of her body, and not react in the most primitively masculine way. Even now, his body still ached with the memory of the instant, savage hardening, the tightness that had twisted at his guts. The thought of how it had once been.

How easy it would once have been simply to fold her in his arms, lift her from the floor, carry her over to the bed. He could lower her to the mattress, come down beside her…

‘Damon?’

There was a hesitation in Sarah’s voice, a questioning
note that asked, without any more words being needed, just what he thought he was doing.

What
did
he think he was doing?

What
was
he doing?

He was holding Sarah in the way that he had dreamed of, hungered for, over the past six months. He had her in his arms again and her hair was like silk under his cheek, her breath a warm whisper across his skin. When she spoke, her soft mouth came dangerously close to the strong muscle that corded his neck. If he moved—just an inch—then her lips would touch, would caress, would entice…

‘Damon—please!’

It was the note of breathless protest on the words that told him how, unthinkingly, his hold on her had tightened, driving the air from her slender body, almost crushing the delicate bones of her ribcage.

‘
Sighnomi
—I’m sorry…’ he murmured, but he still couldn’t let her go.

For a second he eased his hold on her, then almost immediately tightened it again, so fiercely that her head came up sharply, wide, startled green eyes looking up into his in an expression of shock.

‘No, I’m not sorry,’ he muttered, the words rough and thick. ‘Do you know how long I’ve wanted this? Dreamed of it?’

The nights had been the worst. The nights when once he had lain awake, the pulsing throb of sexual satisfaction slowly, gradually ebbing from his satiated senses. He had never been able to sleep, because even when he had just experienced the wild, primal explosion of the fiercest climaxes he had ever known he had still been unable to surrender to the weary satisfaction that engulfed his body.

Instead he had always had to lie there; to prop his head up slightly on the pillow so that he could watch her drift
into sleep. And even just watching her had been a sensual act in itself.

His gaze had drifted from the high, smooth forehead, down over her softly closed eyelids, where the long, thick lashes lay like feathered crescents on the pale skin of her cheeks. He had traced the warm, sensual curve of her mouth, the sweet line of her jaw and chin, the length of her throat. And when his eyes had moved to the rich curves of her body, to the swell of her breasts and hips, still stained with the afterglow of their passion, then his body had hardened all over again, threatening to throw off the satiated sense of fulfilment in a second and start to clamour all over again for something more. For the renewal of the pleasure his senses had known; to climb once again to the peak of ecstasy that he had experienced during the night. He always ended up wanting her again with even more hunger than he had felt the very first time.

Theos!
He felt that way now. His body was on fire; he had never felt so viciously hard, so brutally hungry. If she moved against him, it was blissful agony, making him grit his teeth hard against the groan of tortured response.

‘Damon—you’re hurting me.’

‘Huh?’

Jolted from the fever of his memories, he looked down at her through passion-glazed eyes, struggling to focus. Her face was turned up towards his and her eyes were huge and emerald-brilliant against her pale skin.

‘Sighnomi…’
he began, then broke off violently. His hands clenched on her arms again, giving her a small, reproving shake.

‘Maybe I want to hurt you—I want you to know how I feel. To understand what it’s been like…’

‘I do…I do…’

Kristos!
Had he put those tears into her eyes? Had he made them spill out from under her lids until they soaked
the fine skin of her cheeks? They didn’t run down her face, but simply lay, like a soft sheen, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, a silent but eloquent reproach.

‘Sarah!’

Her name escaped his lips like a sigh in the same moment that his proud, dark head bent, his mouth coming down, making her jump like a startled deer.

It was his gentleness that was shocking. It was so totally unexpected and so much at odds with the hard, heated pressure of the fiercely aroused body that was crushed so tightly against hers.

But his lips were soft and gentle, tenderly kissing away the tear stains from her face, pressing her eyelids shut and brushing the lingering salt drops from her lashes. And it seemed to Sarah that with them went her fury and distress, the need to fight seeping from her like air from a pricked balloon.

‘Oh, Damon…’

Her breath caught in her throat, escaping on a small, choking cry, a sound of surrender. She subsided softly against him, feeling the need of his support, deeply grateful for his strength holding her when she couldn’t stand alone.

Overwhelmed by all that she had just realised, she buried her face in his shirt, not knowing whether she needed to hide or simply to get much closer to him, burrowing into security like some small, vulnerable creature. She felt his mouth drift over her tumbled auburn hair, the warmth of his breath on the delicate curl of her outer ear. The clean, faintly musky scent of his skin tormented her with the memories it evoked, the heat of his body surrounding her like a protective cloak.

And with the memories came the awakening of need, the savage burn of hunger.

‘Damon…’

Even in her own ears, the sound of his name had changed
totally. It was no longer the soft, submissive surrender, but a sharpened sound of longing, of demand. And as she spoke she drew in her breath on a sobbing gasp, turning her face to him once more.

‘Damon, please—kiss me. Kiss me properly.’

‘Kiss you—’

It was raw and thick, hopelessly roughened at the edges.

‘Oh, lady…’

She didn’t know who moved first, whether his dark head came down hard and fast or her own lifted to his as swiftly. She only knew that in the space of a swift, thudding heartbeat, their mouths had met and clashed and crushed so fiercely that she almost expected to see sparks fly up into the air from their joining.

All the loneliness, all the yearning, all the misery of the past six months was in that kiss. All the memory of the long, empty days and the cruel, bleak nights swelled up inside her, rose, and spilled out fiercely like red-hot lava erupting from a volcano and surging, wild and unstoppable, down the slopes of the mountain.

They snatched at each other’s mouths, nipped, bit, came apart to draw in deep, ragged breaths, then rushed together again, unable to stay apart. It was like a fight for survival more than any sort of caress. Like a wild, primal mating ritual that had nothing of the civilised or of courtship in it, only raging need, uncontrollable craving, the desperation of having lost once and the terrible fear that it could happen all over again.

‘I want you,’ Damon muttered harshly against her mouth. ‘Want you—want you…’

His command of language seeming to desert him, he broke into Greek, alternating the words of his native tongue with his suddenly roughened and disjointed English in a raw and incoherent litany of desire.

And Sarah could do nothing but nod again and again,
her own mouth only capable of forming the word ‘yes’, repeated with the gathering intensity of a growing thunder storm, a counterpoint to his harsh declaration.

‘Yes, Damon, yes, yes, yes…’

This was all she would ever have of Damon,
was the phrase that ran through Sarah’s head. If she could only have today and this elemental, primitive passion that had flared between them, then she would take it and welcome it and enjoy it for as long as she was able.

No,
enjoy
was not the right word. It came nowhere close to describing this starving hunger, this aching, desperate need.

This feeling was as essential to her as each raw, painful breath she dragged into her burning lungs between each hungry kiss. Without it she could never live, only exist. And yet at the same time she felt each moment of contact, each desperate caress, as torment in her soul, ripping and shredding, increasing the emptiness in her heart in the same second that it appeased the hunger in her body.

‘I want you too, Damon. I’m desperate for you…desperate…’

Her hands spoke for her when she could no longer string two coherent words together. Grabbing at the soft white cloth of his polo shirt, she wrenched it free of the waistband of his trousers, roughly pushing it aside so that her greedy hands could have free access to the bronzed skin she sought, her fingers almost scrabbling his clothing out of the way in her rush to touch him.

‘Sarah—sweetheart—angel…’

There was a shaken, rough note of laughter threading through Damon’s vain attempt at a protest, and the hands he brought up to try and catch at hers, to still them, or at the very least to slow their frantic, urgent movements, were as unsteady as his words.

‘There’s no need to rush—we have all day, the night…’

But even as he spoke, his own actions denied the muttered restraint, the urge to caution.

His movements mirroring Sarah’s, he pushed her blouse up and away from her skirt. The ominous wrenching, tearing sound told of the fact that he had completely forgotten that hers was not a stretchy T-shirt, and a second later there were several soft thuds as broken buttons flipped away and bounced on the dressing table, the window sill, the floor.

‘Forgive me…’

He sounded only vaguely apologetic. If anything, he was even more distracted than before, his attention on the few remaining fastenings that still needed undoing.

‘I will buy you…
Theos…
’

The words died on his lips, and he froze into a sudden stillness. His silence tugged on her nerves, forcing her eyes to his face, to see the absorbed, intent expression there as he stared down at what his impatient movements had exposed.

The wrenched and torn shirt lay askew and gaping over her chest. Below the pale green material, the creamy flesh of her breasts was lifted up and forward by the pink satin and lace of her bra, openly displayed for his gaze to feast on.

‘I had forgotten how lovely you were. Or, rather, I had remembered, but feared that my memory had played tricks on me. I told myself that you could not be so beautiful…’

Jet-black eyes, in which the golden flames of desire burned savagely, lifted and blazed into her hazy green ones. And Sarah felt her heart flip over inside her as she saw the hunger and the need he didn’t trouble to disguise.

‘But I was wrong…’

‘You’re—you’re not so bad yourself.’

Sarah’s tongue stumbled over the only words that would form in her mind.

‘You’re beautiful too. Quite beautiful, but…’

‘But…’ Damon echoed ominously, dark eyes narrowing swiftly, straight black brows drawing together in a frown at that impertinent and provocative ‘but’.

‘But you have too many clothes on.’

‘Is that so?’

His quick, flashing grin was almost her undoing. The wide brilliance of it took her breath away, but there was something disturbingly triumphant in it that made her heart flutter in uncertainty.

‘Well, that’s easy to deal with.’

In one swift, efficient movement, he pulled the white polo shirt up and over his head, exposing the bronzed and muscled torso, shadowed with curling black hair, that lay beneath.

Sarah drew in her breath sharply then swallowed it down, her thoughts hazing swiftly. She half lifted her hand then dropped it to her side again, losing her nerve.

Standing there like that, half-naked, only inches away, he was pure sensual temptation. She wanted to touch, wanted desperately to feel the warm, satin texture of his skin under her fingertips, longed to trace the powerful lines of the straight shoulders, the muscles sheathing the strong bones, the broad ribcage. But she didn’t dare. She felt like a child drawn to stick her fingers into a golden fire, yet knowing that she had been warned that to do so would bring devastation down on her head.

‘Go ahead,’ Damon murmured softly. He had caught the look on her face, the longing in her eyes. ‘Go ahead and touch. I won’t bite.’

Sarah closed her eyes against the temptation. But in the same moment she knew she was going to give in to it. She couldn’t stop herself; couldn’t resist it.
He
might not bite, but she couldn’t help thinking that her own hunger, her own need would. She had been starved of the sight, the feel, the
taste of him for six long months. And now she was presented with a feast that only a fool would resist.

Or was it just forbidden fruit like the tree in the Garden of Eden?

But she couldn’t hold back all the same.

Slowly she reached out, still keeping her eyes closed. The moment that her fingertips made contact with hot, smooth skin it had the same startling, fizzing effect as making contact with a live electric current. She almost snatched them back, but then her eyes flew open, looking straight into the deep, opaque gaze of the man in front of her.