Hannah struggled to her feet imagining the headlines. ‘Don’t hurt him!’
The plea caused Kamel’s attention to swivel from the man he held to Hannah.
‘Please?’
A muscle along his jaw clenched as he stared at her. Then, with a nod that caused two invisible figures to emerge from the trees, he stood aside and the trio walked away.
‘Sure you don’t want to go and hold his hand?’
‘I wasn’t protecting him. I was protecting you.’ Why are you explaining yourself to him? she wondered. It’s not as if he’s going to believe you and it’s not like you care what he thinks.
A look of scowling incredulity spread across his face. ‘Me? You are protecting me?’ He had no idea why her caring about someone who was clearly an abusive loser bothered him so much, but it did.
Her eyes moved slowly up the long, lean length of his muscle-packed body. It was hard to imagine anyone who looked less like he needed looking after.
‘The press could dub you something worse than The Heartbreaker Prince.’ She paused and saw him absorb her comment. His anger still permeated the air around them but it simmered now where it had boiled before. ‘Rob likes to play the victim. I can just see the headlines now...’
‘I wasn’t going to hit him, but if I had he wouldn’t have been running to any scandal sheet,’ he retorted, managing to sound every bit as sinister as Rob had implied he was. While Hannah believed Rob’s comments were motivated by malice, there was no escaping the fact that she knew very little about the man she had married and what he was capable of.
Unwilling to release his image of her as a cold-hearted, unapproachable ice bitch, he asked, ‘What the hell were you thinking of meeting him out here?’
What the hell had she been thinking about getting involved with him to begin with? The man had been mentally filed in his head as a victim. Stupid, but a victim, and now he turned out to be a... His fists clenched as he found himself wishing he had not shown restraint.
Temper fizzed through her body, sparking wrathful blue flames in her eyes. ‘Are you implying that I arranged this? Rob followed me!’
‘And I followed him.’ It was an impulse that he had not checked even though it was a situation that had not required his personal intervention. In fact his abrupt departure had probably caused more speculation than Hannah’s.
‘Why? I thought you delegated all that sort of thing.’
‘There are some things that a husband cannot delegate.’ She might not be wife material but she was definitely mistress material. She might be the sort of woman he would normally cross the road to avoid, but there was no denying that physically she was perfect.
‘So you thought it was your duty to rescue me.’ She had about as much luck injecting amusement into her voice as she had escaping his dark, relentless stare. It was becoming harder to rationalise her response to his strong personal magnetism, or control the pulse-racing mixture of dread and excitement whenever he was close by.
‘Little did I know you had it all under control.’
Her clenched teeth ached at the sarcasm. ‘My hero riding to the rescue yet again.’
‘I thought I was rescuing your...’
‘Victim?’
He dragged his smouldering glance free of her cushiony soft lips and found himself staring at her heaving bosom. ‘The man is...’ He said a word that she didn’t understand but it was not hard to get the drift. ‘What is your ex doing at our wedding party?’
The accusation made her blink. ‘The word party suggests celebration. Tonight has felt more like a punishment. And yes, we all know this is my fault, though I have to tell you that line is getting a bit boring. I’m willing to take my medicine and make nice and pretend you’re almost as marvellous as you think you are, but if this marriage is going to last, and I’m talking beyond the next few seconds, it won’t be on a speak-when-you’re-spoken-to, walk-two-steps-behind-me way. I am not willing to be a doormat!’
She released a shuddering sigh and warmed to her theme. ‘So from now on I expect to be treated with some damned respect, and not just in public!’ Oh, God! Overwhelmed with a mixture of horror and exhilaration, she could not recall losing control of herself quite so completely in her life. Hannah brought her lashes down in a protective veil as she gulped in several shallow breaths while her heart rate continued to race.
The ice queen is dead! Long live the princess of passion! His mental headline tugged the corners of his mouth upwards, but the curve flattened out as he felt his body stir lustfully. It wasn’t the physical response that bothered him; it was the strength of it and the fact it kept intruding.