In disbelief she watched as he closed her office door and came towards her, half dragging her out of her chair and holding her against him as he demanded roughly, ‘Tell me that again.’
Tell him what?
He must have recognised her confusion, because he said, half impatiently, like a man trying desperately to exercise restraint, ‘Tell me that you love me, dammit!’
When she flinched, unable to endure his cruel mockery of her, trying to break free of him, he shifted his weight so that she was trapped between his body and her desk, and then cupped her face, forcing her to look back at him.
‘Miranda, what is it?’ he demanded rawly. ‘What the hell have I done to make you act like this? When I ask you to tell me that you love me, you flinch away from me as though I’m threatening to torture you.’
‘Aren’t you?’ she demanded achingly, shuddering as her body registered the heat and intimacy of his.
‘That wasn’t my intention, no,’ he told her drily. ‘I recognise that an independent career-minded woman might not relish the knowledge that a man loves her and wants her love in return, but I hadn’t realised it would cause her so much revulsion that it would make her physically cringe away from him. I’m only human, Miranda,’ he told her rawly. ‘I can’t help it. If my love for you makes me want to elicit the same response from you, makes me ache to hear you say that you love me, and I can’t help feeling bitter… cheated almost that your need to remain independent means that you’d rather deny what you feel.’
He felt her tension and gave her a tired look.
‘What did you think I was going to do—use the fact that you loved me to force you into some kind of permanent commitment.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t deny that’s what I want from you, but only if it’s given freely. I’m not going to pretend I don’t want you as my wife, that I don’t want to share the rest of my life with you, but I love you too much to force that kind of situation on you. Don’t you understand? I love you enough to accept that you want your freedom.’
Tears were sliding down her face. He trapped one with his thumb, stroking her skin, watching her with loving, concerned eyes.
‘You don’t understand,’ she managed to tell him. ‘I didn’t know you loved me. I thought it was just… just sex.’
His mouth twisted as he looked at her.
‘Just sex… my love… just sex is never, could never come anywhere near being like what we shared.’
‘But you didn’t say anything. Didn’t tell me.’
‘I may not have given you the words, but my love for you was in every touch, every kiss. I thought you must surely know that. I thought that was why you left me… why you wrote me that callous, chilly little note, because you were rejecting that love.’
She shook her head.
‘No. I just didn’t want to burden you with mine.’ She shivered and asked him anxiously, ‘Do you really love me? I’m not sure any of this is actually real.’
‘It’s real,’ he assured her softly, ‘and what’s even more real is the fact that just as soon as your father and Helen get back, you and I are going to be married.’ He paused and looked at her, hesitating for a second before asking her uncertainly, ‘You do want to marry me, don’t you?’
This time it was joy that made her tremble as she wound her arms around his neck and whispered tremulously, ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
* * *
‘MM. ALONE AT LAST,’ Ben teased, as Miranda sat down on the bed of their honeymoon hotel, easing off her shoes.
It had been a long flight from Heathrow to this remote tropical island and the privacy of their own private bungalow in the spectacular grounds of the island’s single hotel.
‘Yes. I couldn’t believe it when Susan Charlesworth turned up at the wedding on her own, could you? She’s going to divorce Ralph, so she told Helen. Helen even suspects that she might have found someone else. Well, good luck to her if she has. I must admit, I never thought she’d find the will-power to leave him.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Ralph Charlesworth or anyone else,’ Ben told her positively, taking hold of her, and adding softly, ‘In fact, I don’t want to talk about anything at all. Mm… you taste good,’ he added thickly as his lips teased her throat.
Miranda felt her body begin to soften and ache.
‘I’m all hot and sticky,’ she protested. ‘I was going to have a shower.’
‘Good idea,’ Ben agreed, smiling at her with a look in his eyes that made her muscles tighten and her heartbeat quicken.
‘It frightens me sometimes how easily we might not have met,’ she told him breathlessly as he drew her to her feet, and reached behind her for the zip of her dress. ‘If I hadn’t bumped into you by accident. If we had simply walked past one another…’ She snuggled up to him blissfully.
She felt the small explosion that shook her body and looked at him suspiciously.
‘What are you laughing at?’ she demanded.
‘You didn’t bump into me “by accident”, my love.’
She withdrew slightly from him, giving him a narrow-eyed accusatory look.
‘If you think that I deliberately—’ she began indignantly, but he stopped, placing his finger against her lips, his eyes full of laughter as he shook his head.
‘No… not you.’ When she stared at him, he told her wryly, ‘I’d already walked round that corner and seen you coming towards me, head down, hurrying, oblivious to my existence, while I… while I,’ he continued softly, ‘had taken one look at you, and known… known immediately that you were the one, my other half.’ He shrugged as she stared at him in silence.
‘Oh, I know it sounds theatrical… dramatic. It shook me, I can tell you. Half of me couldn’t really believe it, didn’t really want to believe it… but the other half… the other half had turned me round, walked me back round that corner, made me wait and then…’
‘And then I walked into you,’ Miranda said slowly. ‘And all this time I’ve thought… I felt…’ She swallowed. ‘I thought it was just me,’ she told him huskily. ‘That I must be going crazy, to take one look at a man, and to feel about him as I’d never, ever felt about anyone in my whole life… to think about him so obsessively that within hours of meeting him I was imagining… wanting… And then those dreams…’
‘Yes, I know,’ he told her sombrely. ‘It was hard for both of us. You were so antagonistic towards me that I could not, dared not, let you see you affected me.’
‘I wasn’t antagonistic towards you when you kissed me to save me from Ralph,’ she pointed out slyly.
‘No, not then, and I clung to that small seed of hope, willing it to take root, to grow… and at the same time everywhere I went I kept on hearing about how determined you were to remain single, how important your career was to you. How everyone who knew you had heard your views on marriage and motherhood. How you’d avoided both as though they were dangerous as lime pits.’
‘I’d already recognised that my views were starting to change before I met you,’ she confessed, leaning her head against his shoulder. ‘Each time I held a baby… played with a child, something ached inside me, although it took me a long time to admit to myself that that ache was caused by a need I’d refused
to acknowledge I could feel, never mind fulfill. How could I have a child when I didn’t have a husband… didn’t have a lover? And then I met you.’
‘Ah-ha! I see, so it wasn’t really me you wanted, just my—’
She silenced him, shaking her head at him as he laughed at her.
‘It most certainly was you,’ she corrected him. ‘I took one look at you, and all those feelings, all those needs I’d heard so much about but never experienced were suddenly there.’
‘Are they still there?’ he asked her teasingly.
‘We can discuss that after I’ve had my shower.’
‘Mm. I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we discuss it while we’re having our shower?’
* * *
LATER, fulfilled and drowsy, curled up next to him, when he touched her mouth with his fingertip and asked her what she was thinking, she turned towards him and said seriously, ‘I was just wondering about our bathroom at the house.’
He had purchased the house from the trustees of the estate the week before they were married, although it was going to be many months before they could move into it. In the meantime they were going to live in her cottage.
‘What about it?’
‘I’m glad we decided to include a shower as well as a bath,’ she told him sleepily, cuddling up to him while he laughed and kissed her and told her he loved her.
‘I love you too,’ she whispered sleepily into his skin. ‘I love you too.’
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Dani Collins’ next book,
THE MAID’S SPANISH SECRET
For sweet maid Poppy Harris, her one and only passionate experience was scorching and absolutely forbidden. She shouldn’t have succumbed to Spanish aristocrat Rico Montero’s tantalizing seduction, but his touch was all consuming…and had a nine-month consequence! Poppy believes they could never be anything more. Until Rico appears on her doorstep demanding his hidden daughter—and determined to make Poppy his wife!
Read on for a glimpse of
THE MAID’S SPANISH SECRET
PROLOGUE
RICO MONTERO ARRIVED at his brother’s villa, two hours up the coast from Valencia, in seventy-three minutes. He’d been feeling cooped up in his penthouse, hungry for air. He had pulled his GTA Spano out of storage and tried to escape his own dark mood, not realizing the direction he took until he was pulled over for speeding.