Sharon Kendrick Collection. Sharon Kendrick

be forced out only with the most intense effort. ‘Do you want me to stop?’

      She could not see his face, but the softness underlying his words destroyed all the doubts which she was stubbornly refusing to heed anyway. She opened her mouth to speak, but words simply refused to come, and by now her body was starting to react in the most extraordinary way as he began to touch her again.

      She felt a hot, trembling ache building up inside her, orchestrated by the expert caress of his finger as it continued to stroke her so intimately—with tantalising little sweeps which took her closer and closer to unimaginable heights. She was poised on the edge of something so beautiful that she hardly dared acknowledge it, for fear that it was all a figment of her fevered imagination.

      ‘Do you?’ he repeated, and then again, ‘Do you?’ but much more urgently this time.

      Stop? The word seeped into her passion-befuddled brain, but barely registered. Through a bone-dry throat, Romy tried and failed to speak. Stop? The world would surely cease spinning if he stopped now. She tried to shake her head, but whether or not he observed the movement Romy had no idea, because he seemed to have taken the decision for himself.

      The delicate rhythm of his finger quickened and changed. The something too beautiful once again beckoned, only this time it was deliciously close, dangerously close—and as it came into focus Romy clutched his shoulders convulsively, her head falling back.

      ‘Oh, no!’ she gasped in disbelief as the waves of pleasure began to engulf her. ‘No!’

      He smiled as he saw the tell-tale dilating of her eyes, and watched with rapt interest as her back arched and her limbs froze. He heard her frantic little cry of fulfilment, and a wave of desire so strong that it completely obliterated every sane thought washed over him.

      ‘Was that good?’ he whispered against her ear as he tightened his arms possessively around her.

      She revelled in the way he tenderly stroked her hair once more as the spasms faded and she somehow found her way back to reality. ‘You know it was,’ she murmured with sleepy delight.

      ‘So why don’t you climb on top now?’ he suggested silkily, and Romy’s eyes widened as she realised exactly what he wanted her to do.

      Quite how she would have answered his sexy proposal Romy never knew, because from somewhere above them came the sound of machinery creaking into life, and anxious voices shouting as the lights blazed unwelcomely down on them.

      It was both a highly erotic and extremely damning sight.

      Romy was lying sprawled over the floor, her pose one of rapturous abandonment, while the dark-haired man was hurriedly pulling her skirt down over her naked thighs.

      Someone shouted again.

      Dominic swore in a language that Romy had never heard before.

      She sat up. ‘What did you say?’ she managed, her voice all slumbrous with the aftermath of passion.

      He threw her a rueful glance. ‘You wouldn’t want to know. I just thoroughly cursed our rescuers.’

      ‘Funny language,’ yawned Romy.

      ‘It’s Cantonese.’ He smiled into her eyes and Romy smiled back—until the meaning of his word hit her like a savage blow to the solar plexus.

      ‘Cantonese?’ she breathed faintly.

      ‘That’s right.’ He deftly did up her bra and pulled her T-shirt down to cover it. ‘They speak it in—’

      ‘Hong Kong.’ Romy supplied in a broken voice as the full, ghastly horror of the truth hit her.

      ‘Yes. How on earth did you...?’ He stared, and then his face froze, and Romy could tell the exact moment that the awful truth hit him.

      ‘No!’ he declared savagely, and slammed the door of the lift with the flat of his hand. ‘Please tell me it’s not true!’

      Romy could not do that, but she needed to tell him something else. That whatever had happened to her back then had been way beyond her control. And that she had done something so outrageously out of character that she was at a loss to understand it.

      ‘Please listen. I just want you to—’

      But he silenced her with a brutal glare of distaste. ‘You are Romy Salisbury and I’m Dominic Dashwood,’ he said, in the kind of voice which made him sound as though he was about to be physically sick. ‘And tomorrow I’m due to be best man at your wedding to Mark Ackroyd.’

       CHAPTER THREE

      THE chinking of ice in glasses brought Romy back to the present and it took a moment for the shivering horror of her memories to disappear. Swallowing down the distaste which soured her mouth, she looked up to see Dominic placing a tray of drinks on a small table.

      He handed her a frosted glass brimming with juice and subjected her to a brief, hard scrutiny. ‘Taking a pleasant trip down memory lane, were you, Romy?’ he mocked.

      ‘Pleasant?’ she retorted, almost choking on her mango juice. ‘Are you kidding?’

      He sighed. ‘So you’re one of those people who rewrite history to suit themselves, are you?’

      ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

      He sat down in a vast armchair directly opposite her, giving Romy an uninterrupted view of his seemingly endless legs. He treated her to a hatefully smug smile. ‘I assume that you were remembering our brief encounter?’

      Why bother denying it? The rise of colour to her cheeks gave her away in any case. ‘And what if I was?’

      ‘Then you surely won’t be hypocritical enough to deny that it was pleasurable?’

      There was a moment of stunned silence. ‘How on earth have you got the gall to say that?’ Romy demanded, outraged at his persistence in talking about it, and at his own remarkable lack of embarrassment.

      ‘Easy,’ he drawled. ‘I was there, remember? I held you in my arms, watched you as you moved beneath my fingers—’

      ‘Don’t! Just don’t!’ Romy slammed her glass down on the table and glowered at him, though her anger made no impression on that infuriatingly detached expression on his face. ‘Is this why you wanted to employ me?’ she demanded. ‘Well, is it? So that you could gloat outrageously over a one-off incident—an incident I’d much rather forget?’

      ‘But was it?’ he mused, in a voice all the more dangerous because it was deadly soft. ‘A one-off?’

      All the colour drained from Romy’s face and she swallowed down the acrid taste of humiliation. ‘Are you really suggesting,’ she said heavily, ‘that I behave like that all the time?’

      ‘Allowing total strangers free access to your body, you mean?’ he clarified insultingly.

      It made what had happened seem all the worse when he described it in that brutal way. ‘Yes.’ She put her hand out to lift the glass of juice, but her fingers were trembling too much so she left it.

      ‘Why wouldn’t I believe that?’ He raised dark, arrogant brows in query. ‘Surely that would be the natural assumption to make? After all, I wouldn’t dream of flattering myself by thinking that you would make an exception just for me,’ he mused.

      ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence with false modesty!’ challenged Romy.

      ‘Oh?’ He rubbed the faintly blue shadow of his chin thoughtfully. ‘Then that does rather imply that you did make an exception in my case, doesn’t it, Romy?’

      For a moment, Romy was lost for words. Because what if she admitted that she had made an exception in his case? And had allowed him intimacies which she had allowed no other man—not even her fiancé—to take?