Ruthless Reunion. Elizabeth Power

to be met. She didn’t know how she could feel such a barrage of conflicting emotions. Excitement slashing through grief. Desire riding side by side with pain. The weight of it was almost unbearable.

      ‘So you prefer anonymity?’ That masculine voice throbbed with sensual amusement, and yet suddenly she recognised some raw and personal anguish behind the formidable strength in that face. ‘Most intriguing.’

      ‘Why not?’ Her fingers curled painfully into her palms from the urge to reach up and touch him, touch the elemental heart of whatever was causing him to suffer. ‘We aren’t going to see each other again.’

      ‘Aren’t we?’

      The determination in those two words sent a little frisson through her. She wanted to challenge them—challenge that glaring authority—but words wouldn’t come.

      ‘Well, now that’s settled, let me tell you what I—’

      She wasn’t aware of lifting her fingers to that firm, communicative mouth, only of its sensual warmth beneath their gentle pressure to silence him.

      For a fleeting moment she stared at him, shocked by her own temerity. Mouth parched, breath coming quickly, blood pumping through every stimulated vessel, her hungry amber eyes were drowning in the incandescent heat of smouldering grey.

      She had crossed a line, she realised hectically—stupidly! And if she stayed there would be no turning back.

      Grabbing her camera off the bar, she jumped off the stool and, without a word, twisted away from him, out of the ballroom into the quiet lobby and into the haven of a waiting lift.

      Slipping her camera strap over her shoulder, she stood breathless, trembling, wanting only for the lift to swallow her, when an impeccably sleeved arm sliced between the closing doors.

      They yielded, allowing her pursuer entry, and whirred shut again, locking them both in a bubble of screaming intimacy that was swelling with each straining second.

      They stared at each other like combatants, chests heaving, mouths turning almost savage.

      There’s no way out, Sanchia thought, and felt the white-hot tide of desire pool in a molten heat in her loins.

      And then the bubble burst and he was dragging her against him. Or had she reached for him first? She wasn’t sure. Only that that savage mouth was devouring her, just as hers was devouring him, responding to the fierce heat of his demands with throbbing, driving needs of her own.

      His hands were twisting in the gleaming swathe of her hair with an almost painful pleasure, while hers revelled in the thick dark strength of his even as she sagged against him, weakened and clinging to him for support. Hungrily, she brought her fingers clawing down over his face, over the hard, exciting texture of his cheek and jaw, sinking her nails into his broad shoulders with a little cry of pleasure when one arm moved to catch her hard against his powerfully aroused body.

      Her breasts ached for his hands, craving their warmth against their full, aching sensitivity, and like an extension of her own thinking he seemed to know. She felt the moist heat at the very heart of her as his hand slid easily inside her dress, the hard contraction of her body’s crying out to have this man possess her, to lose her pain and misery in the torturous rapture he could provide.

      The whirr of the lift moving upwards was drowned by their laboured breathing. It whined to a halt, opening into a private corridor. A route merely to the penthouse suite.

      It registered with Sanchia only numbly as the man lifted his head, his features flushed from the hunger that rode him—rode them both. She hadn’t even been aware of him pressing the indicator button.

      There was no one about. Only the two of them and the thick silence that came with the luxury he had paid for.

      He was waiting. Giving her a choice, she realised in that split moment of breathless silence. Go or stay.

      Something urged her to pull free from this reckless path she seemed to have carved out for herself. But she knew she had relinquished all choice downstairs in the bar.

      She wasn’t aware of actually walking to his door, or of his using a card-key to open it. She was only aware, as his arms came round her again, that she had invited this, and that she couldn’t prevent what was going to happen any more than she could stop the boilers breaking over the reef beyond the coral-crushed beaches of the South Shore.

      Their mouths melded, hot and hungrily—even before he had slammed the door behind them—in desperate imitation of the act that was to follow.

      It was an act that Alex knew he couldn’t have denied himself even if he had wanted to.

      He was using her—heaven help him! Using her to rid himself of the demons that were plaguing him. In the same way, he strongly suspected, that she was using him.

      But for all that he couldn’t get enough of her. Of her sweet moist mouth, her perfume, the earth-shattering promise of her body. He couldn’t get enough of her, and to relieve himself of the deep ache of wanting he lifted her up, so that he could feel her luscious legs as well as her arms around him, his mouth plundering hers as he moved urgently through with her into his bedroom.

      I can’t get enough of him! Sanchia thought, burning for him, inhaling the scent of his aftershave as though it was vital oxygen, excited by his strength, unbearably aroused by the grazing texture of that impeccable suit against the soft flesh of her inner thighs.

      His suite was in darkness, though French doors stood open to the scents and sounds that filled the bedroom from a private roof garden, and the whistling of frogs and lizards in the softly illuminated foliage was a sensuous song that heightened the eroticism of the warm Bermudian night.

      The big bed yielded beneath them as they toppled down onto it together.

      I want you! she thought, glorying in his actions as he pushed back the flimsy barrier that separated her from him and claimed her full, responsive breasts as his own.

      She gave a small strangled cry, her breath shuddering through her from the ecstasy of those marauding hands, the sudden heat of his mouth on one swollen tip bringing her straining towards him in a wild frenzy of need.

      Oh, please…! She didn’t want to wait, couldn’t wait. She wanted him now!

      Alex groaned from the heat of desire that was throbbing through his body. He had never felt so out of control in his life. He was far too hot—too hard, he realised, mentally flaying himself for getting himself into this situation, wondering how, if he let things run their natural course, he was ever going to last. He couldn’t even protect her—or himself. Gone were the days when he’d gone out equipped with a young stag’s hope of getting lucky. He was thirty-six years old. A leading barrister, for goodness’ sake! With responsibilities, common sense… Except that it seemed to have deserted him in his need for this girl.

      He knew he should love her as she should be loved. With care and consideration, after a quiet, romantic evening, with all the skill and mastery of a long-perfected technique. Not like this, like some callow youth…

      He hesitated for the briefest moment, dragged back from the edge of a precipice from which there could be no return. But then she arched her back and her writhing hips collided sensuously with his, shaking his very foundations from beneath him, and in that moment he knew he was finished.

      He was doing this, Sanchia thought, as though he was seeking respite from something. She guessed that he wasn’t usually so rough or possessive as he caught her wrists above her head and ground his lower body against hers in hard domination, but whatever unknown entity was driving him, she didn’t want to know or care. He was dark and dangerous, and she needed the excitement he offered to obliterate her savage misery.

      He made little work of dispensing with her white lacy string, his hands hard and uncompromising, but when his fingers slid into her softness, checking her readiness to receive him, they were unexpectedly gentle.

      She whimpered her need, her body contracting around his fingers in a way that made Alex groan with