Bittersweet Passion

by Lynne Graham

  Max suddenly loosed her hands and backed off. Abstractedly she turned her head to see what had stolen his attention from her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘YOU’VE got guests to take care of,’ Dane murmured with a brilliant and quite terrifying smile. ‘Though I do hate to break up such a touching scene.’

  The blaze of fury in his sapphire eyes was visible only for a second before his thick lashes cloaked their expressiveness. ‘Move, Claire,’ he added softly.

  And leave Max to his tender mercies? Was he joking? Hot-cheeked, she bit her lip, unable to understand why he was so angry. ‘I’ll just see Max out,’ she dared.

  For a moment she thought he was going to object. He flung Max, who was standing behind her, a cruelly amused appraisal. ‘I wasn’t going to lay a finger on him, Claire!’ And with that, he swung on his heel.

  ‘Does he usually talk to you like that?’ Max muttered, fiddling with his collar as if it was strangling him.

  ‘When he’s angry … he—–’ Distressed by Dane’s behaviour, she spun again. ‘I’m sorry. You’d better go. I do wish you well, but …’

  ‘He doesn’t love you,’ Max jeered, reacting to what he read in her eloquent face. ‘He just looked at you like you crawled out from under a stone. He’s a decadent, womanising …’

  ‘I might have liked you better if you’d said that to his face,’ Claire retorted crushingly.

  Max departed in high dudgeon in the wake of several other guests. If Carter hadn’t already gone, Claire would have given him a piece of her mind. Balked of her prey, infuriated with Dane, she stayed out of his path none the less. Why should she throw Max out, just for visiting? Dane had probably slept with a dozen different women during their separation and—why didn’t she face it?—since their reconciliation. His sexual uninterest in his wife was self-explanatory. He was clearly finding physical satisfaction outside their relationship, and she’d been cravenly burying her head in the sand sooner than meet that sordid truth head on.

  Ironically, Max’s hypocritical comments on Dane’s reputation had plunged her back to hard reality. Dane had chipped away at her self-respect until she had no backbone left at all. She loved him more than it was healthy to love anybody. Perhaps it was sick of her to have compromised to such an extent.

  Dane appeared to be politely ignoring her when she returned to the party. It was Randy who hissed in her ear. ‘What’s wrong with Dane?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Claire murmured tautly.

  ‘Gil said he’s furious about something,’ her friend confided rather tipsily. ‘Not that I can see it. He’s smiling.’

  Why should he be furious? She hadn’t asked Max to come! But Dane still believed she loved Max—the admission slunk into her disordered thoughts. She had never disabused him of the notion. He had never brought it up. She shot a less defiant glance down to the foot of the room where Dane was calmly chatting to friends. How much of their conversation had he heard?

  The last of their guests departed mid-evening in a sudden, dismaying clump. Claire headed away from the hall at a steady rate of knots. A hand fell on her shoulder and spun her back.

  ‘Going somewhere? If it’s your bedroom, I’ll join you. But first—–’ Dane enunicated shortly, his supple hands easing slowly down over her taut spinal cord to cup the swell of her hips and weld her intimately into the hard cradle of his thighs, bringing her into full, forceful contact with his rawly masculine body. ‘This.’

  Caught totally by surprise, her own body’s needs and wants rushed uncontrollably to the fore when he drove her lips apart with a hard, very sexually orientated kiss. His effect on her after so long was explosive. He lifted his silvery head and she read the purpose in the hot glitter of his eyes. Shock winged through her in waves. She was shaking all over, a gnawing ache of need she despised now, making its dissatisfaction felt inside her.

  ‘I was going to wait for ever if I was going to wait for an invitation,’ he said roughly. ‘What was he doing here?’

  Trying jerkily to detach herself from his fierce hold, she snapped, ‘It was just a social call.’

  ‘Like hell it was a social call!’ You standing there weeping apology for the trap you were in, mumbling about the twins like they had a stranglehold on you!’ Dane gritted, smouldering down into the flushed triangle of her now bemused face. ‘If you go, you go without them, but if you stay, you share my bed. I’m damned if I’m putting up with this any longer. Maybe it’s time you remembered that you’re my wife and that wives have certain obligations …’

  ‘No,’ Claire said flatly, unequivocally. As she understood his intent, a seething, bitter anger was rising tempestuously within her slim frame. Dane was never again going to use sex to subjugate her with, and that was evidently his aim. It stung his pride that Max had come here and that she had seemed upset. She couldn’t forget how indifferent Dane had been to her physical attractions out in the Caribbean or since their reconciliation. It was a base insult for him to invite her to his bed now, and a tragic irony that had he invited her yesterday or the day before she would have fallen eagerly into his arms, convinced their marriage finally had a future. But not this way, not when he was angry and his desire was motivated purely by the lowering suspicion that his homely little wife might actually still prefer another man to him.

  ‘And my goodness, things must be getting desperate when you have to come down to making a move on me!’ she threw in helpless bitterness. Even the sound of her own sharpened voice pained. She sounded all that she despised in herself. A violently jealous and insecure wife.

  ‘Claire,’ Dane breathed.

  ‘I prefer things the way they are,’ she interrupted shakily. ‘It’s healthier.’

  ‘Excuse me, Mr … Mrs Visconti.’ Their nanny’s icy, rigidly disapproving voice fell into the pool of silence. Dane’s arms dropped from her but the cold threat in his eyes hadn’t dwindled.

  Before he could utter a further upsetting word, Claire took advantage of their audience to flee, crimson-faced, to her room. She turned the key in the lock and hurled herself on the bed. Right at this moment she hated him for being capable of making love to her only out of anger, when she had been pathetically suppressing her own need for him every hour of every day and telling herself that she could cope with a platonic marriage as long as he still lived with her.

  ‘Open this door, Claire!’ The brass handle rattled.

  ‘Get lost,’ she mumbled into the pillow. If only he’d been jealous. She had forgotten how cruel Dane could be and how damnably unpredictable. She had forgotten that he looked on her as a possession, and she was suddenly so grateful that he didn’t know that she loved him. That was the one defence that enabled her to stand up to him. Shorn of it, Dane would get away with murder.

  There was an awesome crash and a splintering squeal as the door crashed back drunkenly on its hinges, framing Dane on the threshold. ‘Don’t you ever lock a door against me again!’ he warned.

  The atmosphere was explosive. Claire coiled back cravenly against the headboard. For the count of ten soul-destroying seconds, Dane studied her. An expression of angry distaste hardened his bronzed features. ‘You want him that badly, go to him,’ he said very quietly. ‘I’m an ungrateful bastard, aren’t I? You didn’t put a foot wrong with him. You told him you were in love with me. You’d stay because you promised me you’d stay, and for the twins. And the only damned thing you can’t control is your response to me sexually and you’re terrified of that now. It doesn’t go with the martyred image.’

  His first words literally paralysed her. A confrontation that frankly petrified her had sprung up out of nowhere. Dane was inviting her to leave. ‘Dane, you … you misunderstood.’

  He stared at her with unholy contempt. ‘Oh, I haven’t misunderstood anything,’ he contradicted savagely. ‘Until Max showed today I actually thought things were good between us. But what the hell, you can lie back and think about another guy in anybody’s bed as long as it’s not mine. The little j
erk wasn’t even faithful to you. Whereas I was goddamned crazy enough to subject myself to a year of celibacy! Well, that’s at an end. You can do whatever the blue blazes you like, Claire, but I’m getting laid tonight by a warm, willing woman!’

  His candid promise sent her off the bed like an electrified eel. ‘You do that and you needn’t bother coming home! Do you …?’ Her lips worked convulsively, her brain working on reverse mode. ‘A year of celibacy,’ she whispered dazedly. ‘Dane, I don’t love Max!’

  But she was talking to thin air. She heard Thompson at his most expressionless, saying, ‘Shall I contact a joiner in the morning, sir?’

  Where he got the nerve to rebuke Dane in the mood he was in, she could not begin to guess and Dane’s reply was masked by the sob of her own tortured breathing. In the space of an evening their carefully rebuilt relationship had fallen apart at the seams. She had let her emotions overpower her judgement. She had hugged her pride zealously to herself and called it self-respect. What kind of marriage had she expected to have when she had let Dane believe that she still loved Max? It didn’t matter that he didn’t love her. He had always been honest. She hadn’t been. She had been hiding behind the truth as if it was something to be ashamed of, and in doing so she had driven Dane away.

  It took her thirty seconds to reach the front door, but the lift had already gone. By the time it got back and she got down to the underground car park there was only a curious security guard in view and Dane’s Ferrari was gone. Distraught she hurried back into the lift.

  He had actually heard her telling Max that she loved him and he hadn’t believed it. In dismay she saw the barrier she herself had raised between them. Dane had been very unlikely to make love to her while he imgained she was dreaming of another man … only in anger had he turned to express his dissatisfaction, his frustration. Yet to credit that there had been no other women for him all these months in addition, demanded, to her mind, a degree of certifiable insanity. Dane had thought she was living with Max.

  If Dane went to someone else tonight, she had only herself to thank. Her stupid pride had ruined everything. In her room she got ready for bed. Whatever he did tonight was her fault. She wouldn’t hold it against him. It was time she practised honesty with him even if it hurt. After driving herself half-way to distraction imagining where he might be, she went in to look at the twins.

  In the dim glow of the nightlight it was Dane’s tall, lean figure she focused on first. He was tucking Matthew back into his cot. Her breath snarled up in her throat in a tide of aching relief. ‘When did you get back?’ she asked prosaically.

  ‘I got to the end of the block and I came back just in time to see our nanny packed and departing.’ He shot her a curiously evasive glance. ‘Seems she told Thompson she wasn’t staying in a household lacking in moral tone. It must have been the door and the fight that riled her. You can blame me. I started it all.’

  ‘I didn’t like her very much anyway,’ Claire answered without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I’d prefer someone younger and not so regimented.’

  ‘Thompson’s already mentioned a niece. He was mortally offended by the suggestion that we lacked moral tone.’ Dane’s dark-timbred drawl trembled revealingly, and then steadied when he gazed down at her anxious face. His hand curved over her shoulder, inexorably guiding her towards the door. ‘You know, I was talking to Matthew before you came in. He makes a great uncritical audience but he couldn’t seem to think of a face-saving excuse for me only getting to the end of the block, either.’ He thrust open his own bedroom door. ‘We’ve got to talk and Thompson’s still rustling about the lounge.’

  She lodged awkwardly in the centre of the carpet and gave up on the eye-to-eye contact, recognising its inhibiting effect on her ability to articulate. ‘I should have told you ages ago …’ she began.

  ‘If you’re about to apologise for something, I may just strangle you,’ he interrupted ruefully. ‘I came on to you like a sex starved adolescent tonight. I just lost my head when I saw you with him. I couldn’t stomach the idea that you wanted to be with him instead of me. It sounds pretty damned childish.’ He gave a ragged sigh. ‘But it didn’t feel childish at the time. I didn’t feel at all grateful for the fact you were lying to him because that was the right thing to do. Mind you, if you’d encouraged him I’d have thrown him down the lift shaft. What I’m trying to say, not very well … is that I’m sorry.’

  He was eyeing her levelly when she looked up, still reeling from the apology. ‘I didn’t encourage him because …’

  ‘Because you wouldn’t behave that way,’ Dane cut in on her again, his mouth sardonically set. ‘You’re too loyal.’

  And dull as ditchwater, she almost added. He was being so logical in explaining exactly why he had behaved as he had, and he wouldn’t let her get a word in edgeways because he was presupposing her replies in that maddening fashion of his.

  ‘You’re not thinking of going anywhere, are you?’

  Claire shook her head in dismay.

  Dane actually smiled. ‘If I’d gone for him, you’d have been all over him like a rash. I’m not that dumb,’ he reflected cheerfully. ‘He won’t be here again, will he?’

  Again she shook her head, rather flummoxed by his calm. ‘I love you.’ It came out as a mutter rather than a dignified announcement.

  Dane was surveying her almost absently. ‘Do you know what hit me at the end of the block? That you might go. I haven’t given you enough time, but it’s a hell of a strain living with you and not touching you. Maybe I should have made that clearer sooner, but when I got you back I didn’t much care how I did it,’ he admitted, studying a point to the left of her. It sank into her then that not only had he not heard what she had said but that he wasn’t demonstrating calm but uncertainty of her response.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I love you, so I don’t know what you’re worrying about me leaving for. I love you quite obsessively really. I can’t bear you out of my sight.’ A rueful little giggle escaped her dried lips. ‘I should have told you a long time ago and then you wouldn’t have misunderstood about Max, but I didn’t want you feeling sorry for me and then … later, well, it was pride,’ she completed simply.

  She had got through this time. Although he hadn’t moved he was looking directly at her. ‘Well, you could say something,’ she continued in a stiff little voice that concealed her hurt. ‘I don’t expect you to love me back, but we have other things …’ The jerky flow of her words came to a halt under the shockingly uncool onslaught of Dane’s heated scrutiny.

  ‘How long have you been in love with me?’ he demanded as he yanked her bodily into his arms, crushing her breasts against the hard wall of his chest.

  ‘Probably most of my life!’ She attempted a watery smile. ‘Only I didn’t realise I hadn’t got over you until we were on Dominica. I think I was fond of Max, and of course I was lonely.’

  ‘You were telling him the truth tonight when you said you loved me?’ he prompted, not quite levelly. His long fingers framed her cheekbones fiercely, painfully.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You crazy woman!’ There was a laugh and a twisted agony in his hoarsened voice as he gave her a little shake. ‘Don’t you know how I feel about you? Do I have to hire the Red Arrows to blaze it in the sky? God knows, everybody else knows! I love you. If I hadn’t loved you I wouldn’t have bullied you into coming back,’ he breathed roughly. ‘Your pregnancy gave me all the ammunition I needed. I had a line of tearjerking arguments I didn’t even get to use because you agreed. If you’d forced me to the last ditch, I’d have told you I loved you then.’

  His hold on her was so tight her ribs hurt. She made no complaint. Had she died and gone to heaven she could not have been more devastated. A vaguely floaty feeling was interfering with her thought processes. ‘You really missed me after I left Dominica?’ she pressed.

  He groaned, lifting her easily up in his arms and folding her down with him in a comfortable heap on the bed. ‘I rea
lised I loved you the day you were ill. It tore me inside out watching you cry. I’d been telling myself I was just fond of you ever since I brought you down to London, and there were so many things I blanked out. That morning at the Dorchester when you were in bed—–’ He half-smiled. ‘I was trying to work out how you could look so sexy in that ghastly nightgown and then I didn’t like the way I was thinking so I got out. So when I went to bed with you I was really just giving myself the excuse to do what I wanted to do deep down inside, and then I couldn’t keep away from you. I was always possessive of you,’ he murmured ruefully. ‘I never questioned that until you talked blithely about moving in with another man and I didn’t like the idea.’

  Claire looked up at him dazedly. ‘But you asked me about Max that day, you told me …’

  ‘I was flattened when I saw those bloody photos. I guess in a way it was funny. I deserved it. But I’d promised myself that after all the damage I’d done, I’d put everything right again for you if I could,’ he confessed tautly. ‘And if you wanted Max, then I didn’t have any right to foul that up again. I nearly went out of my mind when I thought you were living with him.’

  Her tongue suddenly unglued from the roof of her mouth. ‘But you let me go. You even smiled at me when you saw me on to the plane!’

  ‘I thought you loved him, and I had spent all that time on Dominica trying to court you.’ A winged brow elevated at the old-fashioned term. ‘But, dammit, I didn’t get anywhere with you.’

  Claire, who had never played the temptress in her life, was busy unbuttoning his shirt. Her fingers were clumsy at her self-appointed task, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Everything I did on Dominica seemed to turn out wrong.’ Lines of strain grooved between his narrow-bridged nose and hardened mouth as he relived his frustration then. ‘Hell, I didn’t know … don’t know the first thing about showing a woman I love her. I didn’t want to scare you again so I gave you space, but you couldn’t even bear me to touch you … and that hurt,’ he confided. ‘That hurt one hell of a lot because I wasn’t trying to get you into bed. I did learn one lesson early on. You had to care about me first or it was going to be the hairshirt and the mute look of distaste at dawn again.’