Surrender To Love. Rosemary Rogers

body backward while twisting her head wildly from side to side at the same time, she managed to inch one hand free at least. The lying, cheating reprobate! She’d show him! Like a maddened wildcat Alexa tore at him with her nails, wishing only that they had been knives as she ripped furiously at his shirt until it tore and she was clawing at his flesh now; feeling it catch under her nails until the blood flowed. She told herself that had she been able to reach his face instead of his back, she would have slashed it to ribbons! But at least she’d made sure that he’d bear some scars to remind him another time not to mistake the kind of quarry he thought to trap so easily.

      They were both panting by now, he with the grim determination to keep her captive and she with an even greater determination to fight herself free. Whatever he had expected when he had yielded to a sudden impulse, it had not been a battle with a female mountain cat with a supple, athletic body that would not stop twisting and turning almost frenziedly—a cat with sharp claws she used with a vicious ferocity he could hardly believe, even when he first felt them gouge and rip at the flesh of his back. Christ! The damned little bitch-cat was liable to rip his flesh to ribbons if he couldn’t get her calmed down enough to listen to him.

      Had he but known it, Alexa was in such a desperate white heat of fury that she could not have heard, let alone understood, anything he might have said over the pounding of blood in her temples that drummed against the roaring in her ears. She was, in fact, not even herself at that moment—not the Alexa Howard who could behave like a lady if she had to—but a purely primitive creature who would use tooth and claw to kill or maim. Even the stifled noises of protest she made under the gag of his mouth had begun to sound more like growls of rage and hate; and when he lifted his head for a moment to say something to her, she gathered what spittle there was in her mouth and spat into his face with a hiss that reminded him even more forcibly of a cat. And when he would have attempted to silence her wild and almost incoherent cries once more, she drew her lips back from her teeth and tried to bite him. Dammit! Something had to be done with her, and quickly too, before she got the best of him.

      Alexa had started to kick at him wildly again when suddenly—too unexpectedly for her to be able to keep her balance—she felt herself released; only to fall sprawling backward onto the hard-packed sand with enough of a jar to shock her into momentary silence. Blinking her eyes back into focus again, she saw a dark, menacing figure loom over her and tried to push herself into an upright position without being aware that she was panting out loud; each indrawn breath sounding almost like a sob.

      “Oh for Christ’s sake! You couldn’t have hurt yourself falling back onto the sand…. Not that you don’t deserve much worse, you vicious little hellcat, all claws and teeth! I’ve begun to wonder why in hell I troubled to come out here and wait a good hour at least, just to make sure that you… And now what the devil ails you?”

      “Ohhh! Oohhh!” As her initial feeling of shock was replaced by renewed fury, Alexa found herself incapable of coherent speech for some moments while her mind adjusted itself to what she had belatedly discovered. Not the Viscount Deering at all but him! The Spaniard—her saturnine, cynical bête noire, of all people! Why hadn’t she guessed right away?

      And now, after his insultingly cavalier treatment of her, he had the supreme effrontery to pretend some concern for her, even to the extent of offering her his hand while he said condescendingly in that drawling accent of his that she detested: