‘I don’t believe you’re real!’ she gasped out shrilly. ‘I really don’t believe you come from this planet at all!’ Her blue eyes stared at him through a glaze of utter incredulity. ‘I wouldn’t marry you if you got down on your knees and begged me to!’ she seared at him. ‘I wouldn’t even be standing here giving you this much of my time if you hadn’t incarcerated me on this bloody island of yours!
‘My God!’ she choked, a hand flying haphazardly up in the air then landing bewilderedly on the top of her head. ‘You’re sick, do you know that? You ought to see a doctor—the kind who looks inside your head to see what the hell went wrong with it to make you what you are! Or, better still,’ she rattled on furiously, ‘refer him to me and I’ll tell him exactly what’s wrong with you, César DeSanquez! You are the result of too much interbreeding from your vengeful Spanish side, that’s what you are!
‘Marriage? Babies?’ she shrieked. ‘I would rather rip this hypothetical child out of my womb myself than be party to bringing another of your kind into this w—!’
The stinging slap issued to the side of her face silenced her. The hands suddenly gripping her shoulders and pulling her hard against him made her gasp. The eyes, when she managed to focus on them, were aflash with rage. He looked bigger, darker, more alien than he’d ever managed to look before. And he was throbbing with enough barely leashed violence to knock her down to the ground if she so much as provoked him a fraction of an inch further.
‘You will take that back,’ he breathed furiously. ‘Every word of it. Every filthy, bitter word!’
/> ‘You go to hell,’ she whispered, shaking with a wild combination of fear and fury.
‘I am already there,’ he rasped, and dropped his mouth down onto hers.
And she couldn’t believe it but it was there—that strong and that quick!—a volcanic eruption of all those feelings that he had so brutally set free the night before!
With a whimpered groan of surrender she weakened at the knees, that tidal heat of wild pleasure sending her melting helplessly against him, jaw slackening, lips parting to allow him angry entry into her mouth.
When he stopped being angry and became aroused himself she wasn’t sure. But the kiss did change, turning to something deep and intense, his tongue coiling sensually with her own while his hands slackened their grip enough to slide caressingly beneath her top, shrouding her in fine, pleasurable shivers as he stroked with excruciating lightness across her fine white skin.
She groaned again, her body arching instinctively, and he encouraged her with the deep, drugging urgency of his kiss. Then one hand was moving to her behind, splaying and pressing, drawing her into the braced arch of his thighs where the pulsing evidence of his arousal throbbed through the thin covering of her shorts, shocking and exciting her with the blatant power of his need.
Then suddenly he was breaking the kiss on a fierce intake of air, whistling it in through his teeth as he threw his dark head back in an effort to snatch back control, muttering tight words in Spanish to himself while his hands maintained that pressure against his pulsing thighs.
‘No,’ he gritted tensely while she waited, panting, frightened, weirdly excited by this effect that she seemed to have on him. ‘No,’ he said again, sounding hoarse with desperation, then lowered his head and opened his eyes.
They were eyes she found herself drowning in—eyes the same colour as the glittering jade water further out in the bay, eyes that yearned and hated and fought a battle that held her in absolute thrall.
‘I will take you now, here on this rock in broad daylight, if I have to,’ he enunciated rawly through the trauma of emotion running rife within him. ‘And I will go on taking you until you agree to marry me, Angelica Lacey. Marry me and let me lock you away where you can never harm a child of mine. Do you understand?’
Understand? ‘And how do you think your wonderful family would react to that?’ she flashed bitterly back at him. ‘Their gallant knight marrying the enemy!’ She made a sound of scorn. ‘My God, your sister would die at the horror of it and Susie would expire with chagrin!’
‘And what do you think it will do to you if we do not marry?’ he flashed right back. ‘Or don’t you care that carrying a child without a wedding ring will only help to confirm the notorious Annie Lacey’s whoring ways?’
She went white, her hand snaking up to make vicious contact with his face—only it never made it. He caught her wrist in a manacle-like grip and held it suspended two inches from his cheek.
‘They see what they want to see,’ he quoted back at her quite ruthlessly. ‘And they will see a woman who eats, sleeps and lives for sex. They will probably decide that you could not even give the father a name!’
‘I could,’ she spat at him. ‘Yours! That wonderful genius Adamas, no less!’
‘And the moment you use my name I will slap a court order on you demanding all rights to my child on the grounds that you are not a fit person to take care of it!’ he vowed. ‘Who do you think will win in a court of law, Angelica?’ he challenged brutally. ‘The whore or the genius with the blameless past?’
‘My God—’ She swallowed tensely on the hot ball of fury blocking her throat. ‘Luis Alvarez has nothing on you, does he?’
That hit him on the raw, tightening that arrogant face until the tanned skin lay stretched taut across his lean cheeks. ‘I want your agreement,’ he bit out.
Annie gave a sound of angry bewilderment. ‘There may not even be a child!’ she cried. ‘So why the hell are we having this crazy confrontation?’
‘Because if there is,’ he clipped, ‘I want to be sure—damned sure—that no one will have cause to question its parentage. And with your track record—true or otherwise,’ he put in at the bitter flash from her eyes, ‘the poor child is destined to grow up being known only as Annie Lacey’s bastard! Is that what you want?’
She flinched, sickened to her very depths because no matter how she tried to refute that insult she could not and knew she could not. Annie Lacey’s reputation was set.
The tension she was maintaining in her captured wrist died along with the rest of her ability to fight, and her head lowered, the slow burn of wretched, self-contemptuous tears pressing against the backs of her eyes.
‘We could at least wait a couple of weeks to find out if it’s worth all of this grief!’ she choked out wretchedly.
But he was already shaking his dark head. ‘I want this child’s hapless beginnings to be blameless, Angelica,’ he stated grimly. ‘And if that means us taking a risk and marrying now then we will do it. For the child’s sake,’ he punctuated forcefully. ‘Not our own.’
‘Oh, God. I hate you,’ she whispered thickly. ‘I hate you so much!’