And she was back to jumping to order, she tagged on grimly as her fingers snapped away from her collar. And instead of taking the dress off she gave her reflection a final, helpless glance before forcing her shaky legs across the bedroom floor and into the other room, hoping to God that he wouldn’t see what she’d seen when she looked at herself.
He did, or at least something very like it, because his silver-grey eyes raked angrily over her and he muttered a string of muffled curses beneath his breath.
But all he actually enunciated clearly, was, ‘Can we leave now?’ He said it grimly, tightly—so damned sarcastically she wanted to hit him.
Her tiny black patent evening bag clutched tightly in one hand, she spun stiffly towards the suite door. She heard him let out another strangled curse, and realised with stinging, helpless, wretched despair that her back view was no less provocative than the front view owing to the way the centre back split in her skirt showed more leg than it had a right to do.
But—what the hell? she told herself angrily. It was Rafe who had helped choose the damned dress in the first place! He who’d created this new monster called Mrs Shaan Danvers, who was such a complete antithesis of the old Shaan!
So he could jolly well put up with her, she decided mutinously as her nerve-ends began screaming as he came up behind her.
But all he did do was reach around her and swing the door open so she could precede him out into the corridor.
She swept past, head high, angry defiance sparking in her ebony eyes. By the time he’d closed the door and joined her, she was already standing at the wall of lifts.
‘Where did you go?’ he demanded.
‘Go to hell,’ she said tightly. ‘You had your chance for an explanation and missed it. There won’t be another one.’
‘At least tell me who you went with!’ he bit out
‘No.’
The lift doors opened. Shaan stalked inside, turned and kept her eyes glaring directly ahead, completely ignoring Rafe as he stepped in beside her and stabbed at the lift console as if it were one of her eyes.
The doors closed. They were alone and the tension was sizzling. ‘All your note said was that you’d gone sightseeing with some new friends you’d met,’ he snapped.
Your note said even less, she thought, but kept her lips clamped tightly shut.
‘What new friends?’
No answer.
‘Where did you meet them?’
No answer. But her senses began to buzz warningly because she could feel the angry frustration in him reaching out towards her.
‘Was it a man?’
‘Yes!’ she flashed at him. ‘It was a man! An American: wonderfully mannered, attentive to a fault! And he smiled a lot!’ she tagged on with a sting to her tone. ‘Which was a darn sight more pleasant than being scowled at!’
His hand, hitting the ‘stop’ button on the lift console, set her heart hammering and her eyes blinking as he spun round angrily to face her.
‘Now listen,’ he muttered, clamping hard hands on her shoulders. ‘You’re angry. I’m angry. We need to talk, but we can’t do it now because we’re already late for dinner, and it’s very important to me that we give a good impression of married bliss—got that?’
‘Yes.’ She refused to look at him, her eyes flashing all over the place rather than clashing with his.
She was pulsing inside with a desire to break free of something—all of it, she suspected. Giving in to that bout of weeping last night had only been the tip of the iceberg. Now it was all beginning to bubble up inside her. Outrage at the cavalier way Piers had jilted her. Resentment at the way Rafe had so gallantly stepped into his brother’s shoes like some white knight to the rescue of the poor heartbroken maiden! Then had come the sex. ‘Incredible sex’, Rafe had called it. ‘Mind-blowing sex’! So she must not forget the sex, must she?
Or Madeleine, come to that—dear, sweet, blue-eyed, blonde-haired Madeleine must not be left out of this carnage her life had become.
‘Shaan—’
‘Stop doing that!’ she snapped, letting her eyes clash with his for a brief second before flicking them away again.
‘Doing what?’ He was taken aback, which was very gratifying.
‘Saying my name like a teacher who is about to reprimand a child,’ she said, almost dancing on the spot with her need to let it all blow now.