The Gold Collection. Maggie Cox

to him by a magnetic force. His face was a rigid mask, his skin stretched taut over the knife-edge of his cheekbones while his eyes gleamed with sensual promise beneath his heavy lids.

      She stared up at him in desperation, silently daring him to comment as his lip curled into a slow, mocking smile.

      ‘You are hungry, chérie,’ he drawled softly. ‘If I’d known I would have followed my instincts when I first saw you in that dress tonight and cancelled dinner.’

      Freya swallowed her retort as he led her back to their table, aware that she was not in a position to say anything when her body had behaved so abominably. To her utter relief no one else in the room seemed to have noticed her making a spectacle of herself, but Zac would never let her forget her moment of weakness, she thought on a wave of panic. He knew now she was his for the taking whenever he chose. But somehow she would have to resist him before he damaged her self-esteem permanently.

CHAPTER FIVE

      IT WAS almost midnight when they bid Chester and Carolyn Warren goodnight and drove back to the penthouse. Freya wished she were tired but to her dismay she felt wide awake and filled with a wild, reckless energy. Those few moments of madness on the dance floor with Zac had inflamed her senses and left her body aching for his full possession—but it was going to be disappointed.

      She intended to go straight to her room the moment they entered the apartment, but Zac’s butler, Laurent, greeted them with a tray of coffee and petits fours that he had prepared specially for their return. ‘I’d really like to go to bed,’ she muttered to Zac as he ushered her into the lounge in the wake of the butler.

      ‘And upset Laurent?’ His eyebrows raised a notch. ‘You’re a brave woman.’

      Stifling a groan, she dredged up a smile and accepted a cup of frothy cappuccino from the butler. The last thing she needed right now was the additional stimulation of caffeine, she thought gloomily as she watched Zac drain his cup in two gulps before he crossed to the bar and poured himself a cognac.

      ‘Would you like a nightcap with your coffee?’

      ‘No, thank you,’ she replied hastily. What she needed was something to knock her senseless for the next twelve hours and prevent her disturbing fantasies about Zac, but, although getting blind drunk was tempting, she decided that her loss of control tonight had been embarrassing enough to last her a lifetime.

      She stirred her coffee and glanced up at Zac, who was standing at the window staring out into the darkness. ‘When did your father die?’ she asked him quietly, recalling her conversation with Chester Warren. ‘Chester said it was two years ago, which was when we met, but you never said anything and I had no idea you were grieving.’

      Zac shrugged dismissively. ‘My father died nine months before I met you and my grief was a private matter which was nothing to do with you or our relationship.’

      He sounded so cold, so clinical, that Freya shivered. Zac kept his life compartmentalised into separate boxes and had clearly never considered allowing her into the box marked personal. ‘But if you’d told me I might have been able to…I don’t know—’ she broke off helplessly ‘—help in some way.’

      ‘How?’ he demanded tersely. ‘You couldn’t have brought him back and I did not need help. I dealt with my grief.’ He had neither looked for, nor wanted, sympathy, he brooded grimly, and he had been determined to deal with the loss of his father in his own way, which for the most part had been to block it out of his mind and get on with his life.

      After his twin sisters had died a few months after birth, his mother had sunk into a deep depression that had lasted for most of his adolescence. He had been shocked by the power of love and had viewed it as a destructive emotion that had wreaked havoc on his parents’ lives, and he had decided that he would never be held hostage to his emotions.

      When his father died, his mother had been distraught and once again he had felt helpless in the face of her overwhelming grief. But Freya’s soft smile and unashamedly eager sensuality had been a welcome relief from the surfeit of Yvette Deverell’s emotions. He hadn’t wanted to talk about grief or loss; he had wanted to forget everything and enjoy her glorious body—until he’d discovered that she hadn’t been giving herself exclusively to him.

      Zac’s shuttered expression warned Freya that he did not welcome her intrusion into an area of his life that he had never spoken of before, but she pushed on doggedly, determined to learn more about this man who was to all intents and purposes still a stranger to her. ‘Chester told me that you felt you had to work particularly hard to prove to the Deverell board that you would be a worthy successor to your father. If you had explained why you practically lived at your office, I would have understood,’ she insisted.

      ‘But instead you grew bored of waiting for me and looked elsewhere for sex.’ Zac gave a harsh laugh. ‘Mon Dieu, I satisfied you every night, but it wasn’t enough, was it, chérie? You were insatiable, you wanted me on hand morning, noon and night, and when I didn’t give you enough attention you acted like a spoilt brat.’

      ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Freya defended herself. ‘I wanted us to have a normal life like other couples, to spend weekends together and the occasional evenings rather than you coming home at midnight and taking me to bed like I was a…a whore you paid to pleasure you.’ She set down her coffee-cup with a clatter, her whole body tensing in rejection when Zac strode across the room and stood, towering over her.

      ‘But that’s exactly what you were,’ he said savagely. ‘I kept you as my mistress and paid for every conceivable luxury you could want, in return for your…services.’ The withering contempt in his eyes as he stared down at her made her feel sick and she shook her head wildly.

      ‘I never asked you to buy me clothes and jewellery. I never asked you for anything, apart from your time. I wanted you, Zac, not the things you could give me,’ she whispered, but he snorted impatiently and dropped down onto the sofa next to her, trapping her against the cushions.

      ‘I know exactly what you wanted, and when you decided that you weren’t getting enough from me, you slept with your foppish artist.’

      ‘I did not sleep with Simon.’ Hurt and frustration exploded inside her and she lashed out at him, only to have him capture her hands and drag her across his lap.

      ‘The bodyguard saw you,’ he said with a steely calm that alarmed her more than if he had shouted at her. His eyes were hard and utterly implacable and she gasped in shock when he caught hold of the straps of her dress and dragged them down her arms with such force that the material ripped. The bodice of her dress instantly slipped down, leaving her breasts exposed, and when she fought manically to free herself from his hold he pushed her so that she was lying flat on her back.

      ‘Zac, don’t,’ she pleaded fearfully, terrified not of him but of herself and the certainty that she would not be able to resist him. His barely leashed savagery only added to her feverish excitement and, although she hated herself, she could feel her body’s treacherous response when he skimmed his hands over her ribcage and cupped her breasts in his palms.

      ‘Don’t deny that you want me, Freya,’ he warned softly. ‘Not after what happened on the dance floor tonight. You don’t know how close I was to spreading you across the nearest table and taking you in front of a room full of onlookers,’ he growled, his voice thick and his accent heavily pronounced as he relived those few seconds when she had trembled in his arms. The shocked confusion in her green eyes had driven him to the edge and since then his arousal had been a throbbing force that he was impatient to assuage.

      ‘That shouldn’t have happened,’ she muttered, her face flaming. ‘It was just a horribly embarrassing physical reaction. I haven’t dated anyone since we split up. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t when I had Aimee to care for. But I have the same urges as anyone else.’ Although it seemed that only Zac could satisfy those urges, she conceded bleakly. If he could bring her to a climax simply by dancing