Lovers Not Friends. HELEN BROOKS

      When she emerged from the warm, cosy interior of the restaurant just over an hour later she thought for a moment that Blade hadn’t come, and her stomach lurched churningly, whether in relief or disappointment she wasn’t sure. And then she heard her name at the same time as he emerged from the shadows across the other side of the road.

      ‘Where’s your car?’ she asked weakly, as he reached her side. He was dressed casually in jeans and black leather jacket and he’d turned her legs to water.

      ‘Quite safe.’ His voice was mocking with a hard bite of cruelty. ‘I thought we would walk the short distance to your lodgings.’

      ‘You know where I live?’ she asked in alarm.

      ‘Of course.’ He looked down at her, slender and waiflike against his hard masculine bulk. ‘The private detective I hired to find you is both thorough and discreet and excellent at his job.’

      ‘He would be,’ she answered dully. Blade only tolerated the best.

      ‘Come along.’ He took her arm in a firm grip as he turned her in the direction of Mrs Cox’s little guest house, and although the contact was brief the heat from his fingers seemed to burn her arm. She had jerked away before she could check herself and as his body stiffened at her side she cursed the gesture. It would only make him angrier. It did.

      ‘I’m not a disease that’s fatal on contact,’ he said cuttingly, ‘and another little move like that and I warn you now I won’t be responsible for my actions. Understand?’

      ‘I didn’t mean—’

      ‘I know what you meant.’ The hard voice was inflexible. ‘And I’m quite aware that I’m not the person you wish to be with, but as I’m here and he isn’t I suggest you act accordingly.’

      They walked the length of the street in silence and she began to feel almost faint with a mixture of terrified foreboding and lack of food. She hadn’t been able to force anything past the huge lump in her throat all day and she hadn’t eaten her evening meal last night. He had eaten the meal at lunchtime with every appearance of relaxed enjoyment, she thought resentfully as they turned into the quiet unlit lane that led eventually to the small row of cottages in which her lodgings were situated. But then, why shouldn’t he? she asked herself honestly. What a mess this was, what a hopeless, terrifying mess.

      ‘Now then.’ As he swung her round she had no idea of his intention, but as his arms closed round her in an embrace that had her arms pinned at her sides and her head thrown back he took her lips in a brutal punishing kiss that spoke of his fury more eloquently than any words could have done.

      She tried to move her head, to break the hold of his mouth on hers, but his force was relentless and she was trapped as effortlessly as a tiny mouse between the paws of a big black cat. The familiar smell of him filled her nostrils and in spite of the knowledge that this was intended as a cruel exercise in submission she found herself responding to his touch in the old way, her body eager for any contact with the man she loved beyond life. He sensed her capitulation immediately, his mouth softening fractionally as his hands moved up and over her straining breasts, caressing her thoroughly and completely before he moved away in a hard movement that almost threw her from him. The whole embrace couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of minutes but as she stood swaying in the darkness, her eyes fixed on his in mute appeal, she felt as though they had made love for hours.

      ‘I don’t believe it.’ There was contempt and raw scorn in his voice along with something else she couldn’t recognise, something almost bordering on pain. ‘You can kiss me like that after all you’ve done. Who the hell are you, Amy, what are you?’ His eyes were dark and glittering in the single shaft of moonlight filtering down between the newly leafed branches of the huge oak trees bordering the lane. ‘I expected you to fight me, to object—something!’ He was furiously, bitterly angry, she reflected dully as she watched his contorted face in the shadows, more angry than she had ever seen him. ‘I thought I’d met the lot in my time but you sure as hell take the biscuit! Even the trashiest whore wouldn’t …’

      He was still speaking as she slid into a dead faint at his feet, her hair fanning out in a golden halo under her head and her face deathly white in the still night.

      She came round slowly, her head jangling with a thousand nightmarish images, to find herself held close to his chest as he knelt beside her on the thick grass of the small verge. ‘Blade …?’ She couldn’t speak very well; her brain seemed to know what it wanted to say but her tongue wouldn’t obey.

      ‘Keep still.’ There was a look on his face that caused the blood to pound violently in her ears, a piercing, haunting cry of burning hunger, unmitigated rage, dark fear and a terrible expectation of she knew not what. ‘You fainted. Keep still.’

      ‘I fainted?’ Her lips seemed wooden she reflected dazedly. ‘I’ve never done that before.’

      ‘No.’ He seemed about to speak and then the words were stilled as he surveyed her through veiled eyes in which all emotion was suddenly blanked. ‘Have you got something to tell me, Amy?’

      ‘Tell you?’ She tried to move away but his arms were rigid. ‘I don’t understand.’

      He swore, softly but with deadly intensity, before lifting her up into his arms as he stood upright. ‘Let me put it like this,’ he said grimly as he stood for a moment before striding down the lane in the direction of the lights in the distance. ‘It is not unusual, in certain circumstances, for a woman to pass out round about the time of three months. Do I have to go on?’

      ‘What?’ She twisted so sharply in his hold that he almost dropped her. ‘You think I’m—you do, don’t you?’

      ‘It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman has left her husband for another man and in the first flush of unbridled passion got a little more than she had bargained for,’ he said, with a terrible lack of expression in his voice and face.

      ‘Put me down, Blade.’ Her voice was faint, more from the intoxicating sensation of being held in his arms again than the import of his words. Her head was muzzy and her legs felt like jelly but she knew she had to stand on her own two feet again before she disgraced herself a second time. The temptation to wind her arms tightly round his neck and kiss his face and throat was fast becoming too strong to resist, and she could just imagine his reaction. It was clear from what he had said that he had intended the kiss as a punishment and lesson in obedience; he hadn’t expected her either to enjoy or tolerate it. He was probably very disappointed his chastisement hadn’t worked as he’d envisaged, she thought miserably.

      ‘Can you walk?’ Even as he spoke he had placed her on terra firma again, moving back a pace swiftly as though the contact with her body had repelled him.

      He loathed her, she thought painfully. Loathed and hated her. ‘I’m not expecting a baby, Blade.’ How she kept her voice steady she would never know. ‘There is no possibility of that at all.’

      ‘I see.’ He surveyed her coldly, eyes narrowed and hands thrust deep in the pockets of his jacket. ‘Well, at least you kept enough sanity to take care of that side of things.’

      ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’ As she went to walk he stepped forward abruptly to block her path, his eyes icy.

      ‘Don’t you indeed?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘You know, your sheer effrontery amazes me. What happened to the happy innocent girl I married, Amy?’

      ‘She’s dead.’ The words passed her lips before she had even thought about them, coming straight from the heart, and something in her tone of voice must have set the antennae buzzing again because his eyes searched her face slowly and consideringly, their inky depths thoughtful, before he took her arm and indicated that they continue walking.

      ‘Now what makes me think that the course of true love is not running as smoothly as you would have liked?’ he asked coldly, with bitterly raw cynicism. ‘What’s the problem, Amy? Did lover-boy prefer having you as an extra little titbit