‘In a fight when I was a teenager,’ he murmured.
‘That does not surprise me somehow—though I am surprised anyone managed to cut you.’ She smiled, letting her gaze roam with feminine appreciation over the width of his shoulders and the muscular biceps of his strong arms. ‘Who was it?’ she asked.
‘I can’t remember his name now. I fought so many.’
Sally was intrigued. ‘You mean you actually got into so many fights you can’t remember what they were about? That is terrible.’
‘No, I fought professionally until I was twenty. That is how I made the money to start my business empire.’
She looked at him with big, soulful eyes. He truly was a remarkable man. He had actually fought physically to enable him get where he was today. How many punches, how much pain must his magnificent body have had to suffer as a teenager? The thought of anyone hurting him horrified her.
‘Zac, you are amazing.’
‘Thank you,’ he responded with a rogue smile. ‘You are pretty amazing yourself.’ And he kissed her, then let his fingers run down the length of her hair. ‘I love your hair.’
Sally’s heart stopped for a second. She had actually thought he was going to say I love you, and her mellow mood was broken. How foolish was that? They had made love for hours and it had scrambled her brain, she swiftly told herself. She didn’t want Zac to love her. She didn’t believe in love. And yet she could not dislodge the fear that assailed her…
‘Thank you,’ she responded in kind, and hoped Zac had not noticed her brief hesitation. She shook her head to free his hand from her hair. ‘Now, what has a girl got to do to get fed around here?’ she asked, with an attempt at a smile. Conveniently her stomach rumbled.
‘Okay, I can take a hint.’ Zac lifted her by the waist and laid her down on the bed. ‘And you have already done it—quite spectacularly,’ he told her with a devilish smile. ‘What would you like to eat? Meat? Fish? Game? Name it and it is yours.’
‘Fish—but can you actually cook?’
‘Yes,’ he said, turning to sit on the edge of the bed, his back to her. ‘But I have no intention of doing so.’
And a moment later he was ordering a meal over the telephone—conveniently part of the stupendous headboard.
‘We have forty minutes before the food arrives,’ he told her, replacing the phone. ‘Enough time to share a shower.’ And he plucked her off the bed and carried her into the bathroom.
A lot later Sally, with her hair wringing wet, a broad smile on her face and the sound of Zac’s laughter ringing in her ears, collapsed into a plastic cushioned chair that looked like something out of the fifties, a towel wrapped around her body.
Zac had slipped on jeans and a top and gone to collect the food when it arrived. Sally, on the other hand, barely had the strength to move. The man actually was insatiable, she decided…and she would not have him any other way. She loved every minute spent with him in bed—or anywhere else, for that matter.
She now freely acknowledged the disappointment she had felt and tried to deny last night, when he had left her naked and alone in bed. But he had certainly more than made up for it this evening. Not only great sex, but she felt she understood him better since he had told her about his fighting career. No wonder he appeared hard sometimes, when he had had to physically fight to survive as a teenager.
Then again, maybe it was because sex was new to her that she enjoyed it so much. she tried to reason with herself. But she knew in her innermost being it had everything to do with the man himself. She could not imagine sharing such intimacies with any man but Zac.
The huge shower, with its jets shooting out all over, had been a novel place to make love, she thought, a dreamy, reminiscent smile on her face. Zac had soaped her all over, kissed and caressed her, and she had returned the favour. She had stroked and soaped every part of his magnificent body and then, dropping to her knees, she had done what she had been longing to do but never had the confidence before.
She had let her slender fingers examine every inch of his thickened length in minute detail, in awe of the source of so much pleasure. She had felt him tense when her tongue had swept out to taste the velvet tip, and heard him groan as she’d continued further.
‘No more,’ he had finally grated, and, reaching under her arms, he had jerked her high in the air and thrust up into her in an explosion of need. She was convinced only a man of Zac’s strength and vigour could possibly have supported her, locked to his great body, as he had driven them both to yet another mind-blowing orgasm.
Against all the odds, her own innate honesty was forcing her to admit she was halfway to falling in love with him, and strangely she was no longer so afraid—it did not worry her at all.
Carpe diem—live for the moment. That was her new motto, she decided. And there was no guarantee in life as to how many moments one had left…
With a carefree grin she got to her feet and, picking up the conveniently wall-mounted hairdryer at one side of the first of the twin white porcelain basins, she began methodically to dry her hair, running her fingers through it over and over again.
She looked at her refection in the mirrored door of the cabinet that stretched the length of the wall. Her face was flushed, her lips were swollen, and Zac’s roughened jaw had left a few telltale marks. She looked what she was: a thoroughly loved-up woman, but a bit of a mess. Maybe Zac had a brush she could borrow, to try and style her wayward mass of hair into some kind of order? She could impress him with her smooth, elegant locks…
She pushed at the cabinet and a door in front of her sprang open. There was all the equipment one would expect to find in a man’s bathroom, including a box of condoms, and, spying a brush, she picked it up. It was then she noticed there was also a half-used bottle of Dior perfume—definitely not male—a few black hairpins and a thick black elastic hairband.
Her carefree mood evaporated like smoke in the wind. It did not take a genius to work out that the last woman to share his bed and bathroom had been Margot, the raven-haired model from Tuesday night. Sally stumbled back in shock. Just the thought of Zac sharing with Margot the same intimacies he had shared with her was enough to make her feel sick to her stomach.
She sank back onto the plastic chair and drew in a choked breath as pain pierced like a knife in her heart. Her head fell forward, her hair forgotten as she blinked back the bitter tears that threatened. Despairingly she realised that, against her long-held belief in her immunity to love, she had done the previously unthinkable and fallen in love with the man.
No…It wasn’t possible, her brain told her, but her heart didn’t want to listen…Conflicting thoughts were tearing her apart. She had only known Zac a week, been intimate with him for only three days. It could not be love…She would not, could not, accept such weakness.