Wedding Night with a Stranger (6 page)

That morning was racing towards her like a black horror. She
felt a deep dread, like an offender staring prison in the face for the first time. With a little shiver, she rose from the table.

The terrace hugged the hotel like the deck of an ocean liner, the sea lapping at its sides. In one direction Circular Quay was a blaze of activity, while far and wide lights twinkled all around the foreshore. As she gazed across at the opera house, its luminous pale shells rendered magical by moonlight, Ariadne could almost have believed she was on one of her uncle’s cruise ships, heading for some romantic destination.

Perhaps she wouldn’t mind living here, once she’d settled with a job and a place to live. Once she got over the hurt.

They moved out of the spill of light from the restaurant, and she felt grateful for the shadows, not having to keep her smile on.

She could sense a tension in Sebastian, too. The intensity of the mood had ratcheted up to a higher gear, as if the looming goodbye had brought her uncle’s deal back to scream silently between them. The suspense that he was about to ask her to reconsider marrying him kept her nerves jangling.

As they strolled the terrace, though, chatting about tastes in books and music, he didn’t mention it, or touch her. Maybe she was being super-sensitive, but it seemed to her he tried extra hard not to let his hand or any part of his clothing brush hers.

Like Demetri, only not like Demetri. With Demetri, she’d never had this taut, smouldering awareness. Never felt so feminine and desirable.

Sebastian eyed her profile and wondered what devil had tempted him to suggest strolling out here in the dark. As soon as he had her away from the crowd, it was hard not to think about her breasts, and how long it had been since he’d kissed a woman.

It must have been the power of suggestion. If it had never been suggested to him that she could be his, he probably wouldn’t need to keep looking at her. He wouldn’t be itching to smooth his hand over her shoulder, or be so achingly aware of the creamy
rises swelling the black fabric of the dress. And there was the explosive fact lurking in the nether regions of his mind that she had a room upstairs, and a bed.

His loins stirred and he willed his flesh not to react to his luscious imaginings any further. She was so slender and petite, he had to wonder if she’d be large enough to take him.

He sighed. As if she’d read his mind she sent him a quick, searching glance, and he made a resolute attempt to keep the conversation on the straight and narrow.

‘Do you remember much about Australia?’ he said.

She looked up. ‘I have some images of our house, and the school I went to. Children I played with. When I drove in from the airport I saw some trees that looked familiar. You’ll probably think this sounds silly, but seeing them made me get all misty.’

‘No. I don’t think that’s silly. I guess this must be quite an emotional time for you.’

Ariadne lowered her glance. ‘You could say that.’

She felt surprised. There’d been sensitivity in his observation, almost like a friend. How ironic that, having dreaded meeting him almost to the point of nausea, as he was the only person she knew in the whole country she now dreaded the moment of saying goodbye to him.

That poignant song wafted from inside, winding its way in among her emotions. As she fielded Sebastian’s questions about her life in Naxos the singer brought the melody to a crescendo of yearning that tore at her heart like a cry from across the sea.

The silver moon, the evening tide…
how they evoked Naxos. She was swamped by a flood of homesickness, made worse by the knowledge she could never go back there now. Not now she’d sinned and they’d packed her off to the other side of the globe. Not now they’d hurt her.

Sebastian leaned beside her, caught a faint whiff of some enticing flowery perfume, and moved a safer distance away. Her blue eyes were dark and unreadable, with an occasional glitter
that came from within. He realised with a slight shock that a vein of sadness ran beneath her volatile mood.

Desire was singing a siren song in his veins, but he kept a tight rein on it. Beauty mixed with emotion and moonlight could tempt a man to do and say things he’d regret. If he didn’t maintain strict control he’d be dragging her against him and kissing her, tasting her sensuous mouth, caressing her soft curves…

‘So what do you plan to do on your holiday?’ he said.

‘I might travel around. See some of the country.’

‘Do you have any relatives here from your mother’s side? Grandparents?’

She gave a shrug. ‘My Australian grandma died a couple of years ago. There are a few cousins I’ve never met. Just a great-auntie Maeve who lives somewhere on the coast. Well, used to. My parents took me to stay with her once for a holiday when I was very small.’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘It might have been called Noza. Nootza. Something like that. Is that a place?’

He frowned. ‘Could you be thinking of Noosa?’

Her brows lifted. ‘Could be. That sounds right, doesn’t it? Oh, it was heavenly there. I remember the beach, and Mummy and Daddy being really happy.’ After a second she said lightly, ‘Is it far from here?’

Something in her voice made him turn to examine her face. ‘Noosa’s up north. In Queensland. About a day’s drive from here, perhaps a couple of hours by air. It’s a fairly popular tourist resort.’

‘Oh, good, good.’ After a second she cast him a veiled glance. ‘Do you think Queensland has art galleries?’

He lifted his brows. ‘Bound to, of some sort. But if you want to visit art galleries there are plenty right here in Sydney.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ She lowered her lashes. ‘Of course. There would be.’

‘Are you interested in art? Your father was an artist, wasn’t he?’

She looked quickly at him. ‘How do you know that?’

‘My grandmother remembers who’s who in everyone’s family.’

‘Oh.’ Even in the soft light from the restaurant he saw her flush. ‘You checked up on me. They know.’ Her voice grew hoarse, as if she was stricken with the news. ‘Your—your family
know.
About the—the deal you made with my uncle.’

Shocked by the raw emotion in her voice, for a moment he couldn’t answer, words were snatched from him. Then he said, ‘No, no, they—They don’t know anything. And I haven’t signed anything.’

‘Oh, you haven’t signed. Great.’ She gripped the rail as if to steady herself. ‘So tell me, then, what did he offer you? Honestly, please.’

‘You.’

Her flush deepened, then she covered her face with her hands. The strangled words were almost a cry. ‘In exchange for what?’

Her pained mortification wrenched something deep in his guts. With shame he recognised he’d never once properly considered the transaction from her point of view. He’d always assumed she was compliant. Even when she’d told him she didn’t intend to marry him, he’d assumed it had been out of pique and anger.

How had the uncle presented the deal to her? It was clear now it hadn’t been her initiative at all, and she knew nothing about the blackmail. He tried to remember what she’d told him in the lobby. A holiday to see if they suited each other, wasn’t that what she’d said? Was that how it had been sold to her?

Never mind that the deal was all but sewn up a week before she’d left home. She deserved to know the truth, but how much truth about her uncle could she take?

He said carefully, ‘Peri has offered a contract to my company—Celestrial. We design satellite systems for all sorts
of uses, including marine navigation. Your uncle wants to upgrade his fleets’ equipment.’

‘I see.’ She held herself rigidly. Shadows under her eyes gave them a bruised look, but she maintained a stiff dignity, trying so hard not to betray her distress he felt moved. ‘So—so what will happen now the deal’s off? Without a wedding? Will that matter to your company?’

Again he felt ashamed. Here she was struggling with her own situation, and she was worrying about his. He had no right to place any more anxiety on her head, he saw now.

He gave an easy shrug, easier than the grim reality warranted. ‘We have other clients.’

‘Oh.’ She expelled a breath. ‘Good. Well, that’s a relief, anyway.’

‘So…’ He glanced searchingly at her. ‘When you said you came out here for a holiday, you were telling the truth?’

She glanced at him and he saw with a further shock that the sudden glitter in her eyes was a wash of tears. She lowered her gaze as if she couldn’t face him and turned sharply away. ‘Yes,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘That was it. A holiday.’

A few strands of her hair were ruffled by the breeze. The sight of her vulnerable neck in the moonlight caused something to twist in his chest. He took her shoulders and turned her gently back to face him. ‘Ariadne, listen…There’s no need to…’

A ray of light caught the sparkle of a tear on her lashes, and he felt a dismayed, incoherent wave of tenderness, but how was he, a man and a virtual stranger, to comfort her? Unable to frame the appropriate words, he bent to brush her mouth with his. It was only the briefest of touches, but the contact to his starved lips was sizzling dynamite.

She didn’t pull away. She stood absolutely immobilised as though poised on a heartbeat, her sweet face still turned up in the kiss position, her lashes fluttering down in languid expectation. For an instant the planet held its breath.

God, it had been so long. Unable to resist such enticement, he kissed her properly.

He felt the shock ripple through her slender frame. Her mouth quivered under his, and he felt the leap of response ignite in her deliciously soft, fiery lips. He pulled her hard against him, his own lips ablaze, wild to feel her breasts in friction with his chest, greedy to have all of her at once with every part of him.

He urged her lips into parting, then slipped his tongue into the intoxicating seduction of her wine-sweet mouth. The scents and flavours of champagne, freshness, flowers and sweet, primitive woman rose and mingled in his senses, binding him in eternal, erotic enslavement. Stroking her mouth into arousal with his tongue was his own delicious torture.

He heard her make a small involuntary sound in the back of her throat, so evocative of passion the thrill of victory roared through him.

He deepened his demand on her mouth. And she responded, clinging to him and kissing him back with all the fire and fervour a man could dream of igniting in a woman.

All at once she leaned into him like a collapse, her soft curves so yielding and pliant it was another total seduction. He was swept with a purely masculine triumph as he recognised the slight loss of traction in her ability to stand upright. The more boneless and giving she felt in his arms, the harder and more focused was his lust to possess her.

With the strongest effort of will he fought to hold back his erection, but could anything be more irresistible than a desirable woman on the verge of surrender? Like a molten torrent the hot blood surged to harden him unbearably.

The wild notion stormed his fevered brain that he could take her, right there and then, up against the wall of the Park Hyatt.

But he wasn’t altogether lost to reality. His desire filled him to bursting point but he restrained his yearning to grind his aching
rod into the cleft between her thighs, though he was fast approaching the moment of barely being able to draw a line in his mind between imagining the rapturous pleasure and experiencing it.

He kept his lustful hands from plundering her ripe breasts, though his palms ached for their lushness.

He was a civilised man, and, though no one else was close by, they were in a public place. She must have become alive to that fact at the same time, because she suddenly stiffened in his arms, broke the kiss and shoved at his chest.

Regretfully he fell back, the feel of her warm, fragrant body lingering in his arms, in thrall to her fresh sweetness to the depths of his being.

She gazed at him, her eyes dark and stormy with that voluptuous, erotic knowledge women’s eyes possessed when they’d just been thoroughly kissed. He could see her panting, her breasts heaving alluringly beneath the confining dress.

‘Shall we go somewhere for coffee?’ he managed to say, smooth as ever under pressure.

She stared at him for a second as comprehension clicked his meaning into place, then blue fire flashed from her eyes. ‘We shall do no such
thing.
You listen to me, Sebastian Nikosto. That—
that
was a mistake. You shouldn’t have done that.’

Her sultry mouth was even more swollen. It was so damnably seductive, it took his brain a moment to register her displeasure.

‘You had no
right,
’
she gasped. ‘Just because my uncle offered me to you, doesn’t mean
I
have. I’m not freely available to you. I’m not a—a—a goat or a donkey you can just-just
use
for your pleasure.’

‘What?’ He felt so rocked by the accusation his own voice sounded like a growl from the pit. ‘That’s not what I…Look, I
know
that, Ariadne. I wouldn’t try to…I’m not the sort of guy who—who…’ Anger, pride and masculine honour sprang bristling
to his defence, but he damped down the bitter, blistering words that could have risen to his tongue.

With as much dignity as possible for a man in the grip of a hard-on, he said, his voice crackling with the effort, ‘In case you didn’t recognise it, what you just experienced was a kiss. A genuine kiss. The sort of kiss a man gives a woman he feels some sort of—
Admires,
for God’s sake. And I’m pretty well certain you were appreciating it as much as I was. Sorry if you feel guilty about it.’

He waited to hear what she would say, but she’d turned her back on him and was smoothing herself down and tidying her hair, brushing down her dress with her hands as if she’d just been in the jaws of a wild foaming beast and needed to remove all traces of him.

He gave her an extra moment to lessen the charges, but nothing came of it. Sebastian Nikosto wouldn’t wait for ever, however desirable the woman.

‘Goodnight, then.’ He clipped his punishingly polite words to give them maximum bite. ‘Sleep well.’

He turned rigidly and walked back into the restaurant, a boiling chaos thundering through his veins of outrage, astonishment, guilt and bloody, bloody desire.