Prisoner Of Passion. Lynne Graham

mouth crashed down on hers. Electric shock sizzled through every skin cell. Nothing that intense had ever happened to her before. His tongue stabbed between her lips and heat surged between her thighs. She quivered, letting him splay his hands intimately to the swell of her hips, lifting her to him, melding every inch of her screamingly willing body to the hungry threat of his. It still wasn’t close enough to satisfy. A moan escaped huskily from the back of her throat—a curiously animal moan that she did not recognise as her own.

      Abruptly he broke the connection. He broke it with such force, thrusting her back from him, that momentarily she slumped back against the cold wall, surveying him with unseeing eyes glazed by confusion. The lift doors suddenly glided back, letting in a rush of cold air, bringing her to her senses.

      Every instinct Bella had was urging her to run. She took off through the doors, the blurred images of parked cars assailing her on all sides. A car park, an underground car park. Two large men were standing just beyond the lift, both of them moving forward, then hesitating, twin expressions of stunned incredulity freezing their faces.

      ‘Get the hell out of here!’ Rico da Silva roared at them.

      ‘But Mr da Silva—?’

      ‘Out!’

      Seconds later Bella’s run was concluded. She made it about halfway down the shadowy aisle of cars before she was intercepted by a hand hauling her back as if she were a rag doll. As he spun her round she kicked him in the shin, and would have kicked him somewhere that hurt even more if she had had the time to aim better.

      ‘You pervert!’ she sobbed with rage.

      ‘You loved it,’ he slung at her, grimacing with pain as he hauled her back to him with remorseless determination.

      ‘Don’t move... If you don’t move, nobody will get hurt,’ a completely strange male voice intoned flatly in a startling interruption.

      ‘What the—?’ As Rico’s head spun round he fell silent, his entire body freezing with a tension that leapt through Bella as well like a lightning bolt.

      Following the stilled path of his gaze, Bella looked in turn at the two men standing there. They were wearing black Balaclavas. Both of them had guns. Her jaw dropped, a sharp exhalation of air hissing from her.

      ‘Keep quiet... Now back away from him slowly.’ The taller one was addressing her. Her! Bella blinked, paralysed to the spot, unable to believe that the men weren’t a figment of her imagination, and yet, on some sixth-sense level, accepting them, fearing them, sensing their cold menace. ‘Move... What a clever girl you’ve been, getting rid of his guards, but frankly you’re surplus to requirements. Is she worth anything to you?’

      The scream just exploded from Bella. She didn’t think about screaming, didn’t even know it was coming. The noise just whooshed up out of her chest and flew from her strained mouth—a long, primal wail of terror. And the taller man flew at her, knocking her to the ground so hard that he drove the breath from her lungs and bruised every bone in her body. A large hand closed over her mouth and then something pricked her shoulder, making her gasp with pain... and she was plunging down into a frightening, suffocating tunnel of darkness.