‘I did warn you not to involve me in your brother’s problems again,’ he said harshly. ‘I also remember warning you that my—penance for hurting you had almost run its course.’ He let out a sharp sigh as he watched her wrap her arms tightly around her trembling body as if she was protecting herself from his very words. ‘It is time to break this—foolish deadlock we are both stuck in, Marnie!’
‘But I don’t belong to you any more!’ she cried.
‘You have always belonged to me!’ he snapped, moving at last to come and stand over her, his anger so palpable that she could actually feel it throbbing out of him. ‘All you have done here today is save me the trouble of finding my own way to get you back!’
‘By using Jamie?’ she jeered. ‘Using the weak to aid the strong?’
Guy nodded curtly, taking no offence at the accusation. ‘Just as Jamie uses your strength to prop up his own weaknesses, Marnie. It works both ways, my dear.’
‘And Clare?’ she demanded.
‘Clare is your weakness, Marnie,’ Guy stated. ‘Not mine. Not even Jamie’s. I wonder why that is?’
Marnie looked away from the probing thrust of his hard black eyes, not willing—never willing to confess just why she held such a vulnerable spot in her heart for her sister-in-law.
‘So, in what capacity am I to become your property this time, Guy?’ she enquired bitterly, finally conceding the point that she was indeed entirely in his power. She lifted her gaze to show him an ice-cold contempt that held his own face taut and grim. ‘Wife or mistress?’ she posed. ‘Not that one has any precedence over the other in your life,’ she acknowledged cynically, ‘but your father will condone nothing less than a legal marriage between us, you must already know that.’
‘Then for my father’s sake, of course—’ he shrugged as if it mattered little to him either way ‘—we will be man and wife again—not that I have considered us anything less during the last four years,’ he added drily.
Marnie’s mouth took on a contemptuous line. ‘If we’re to take into consideration your behaviour over the last four years as well as the one we were actually married, Guy, then the adultery charge can be laid at your feet a dozen times over.’ Her eyes leapt to spit accusation at him. ‘Or is it two dozen—or four?’
‘Bitch!’ he growled, reaching down to grasp hold of her. ‘That is for me to know and you to wonder about! A wife’s place is at her husband’s side, warming his bed and keeping his body content! Your desertion of those duties leaves you with no right to question how I quenched my needs, and nor ever will it in the future!’
‘I see,’ she sneered, ‘then what is good for the goose is most definitely good enough for the gander—remember that, Mr God’s-Gift-to-Women Frabosa, when you carry on your little affairs. I may be back in your power again, but only for as long as it takes me to prove what a worthless rat you really are!’
‘Be careful what you say to me, Marnie!’ he warned, the anger vibrating from every pore as he took hold of her shoulders in a rough grip. ‘I have taken the bitterness from your vicious tongue for long enough—paid for my crimes a thousand times over, and will pay no longer!’
Flushed and trembling with hurts which went back years, and quivering with a hated, hot searing sense of awareness at his physical closeness, Marnie glared at him with contempt. ‘So get thee behind me, woman!’ she scorned his arrogance. ‘For I am your lord and master!’
‘Yes!’ he hissed, almost lifting her out of the chair with the hard grasp of his hands. ‘That is exactly it! Now stop riling me to anger.’ He threw her away from him, to straighten up. ‘And accept the inevitable with the kind of grace I know you to possess. It is over, at last and with deep relief on my part. You and I are as one from this moment on and I will hear no more of your malice—understand?’
She understood only too well, sliding from anger to depression with a speed that spoke volumes about her defeat.
He remained standing over her for a long time, staring down at her bent head until her nerves began to fray beneath the tension she was putting on them. Then, with a sigh which came from somewhere deep and dark inside him, he moved away, slamming out of the door without another word.
CHAPTER FOUR
SIGHING, Marnie let her head sink back into the soft-cushioned sofa and closed her eyes.
So, she thought heavily. After four years of relative peace and contentment, she was back with a man who could only make her life hell for a second time. Living with Guy the first time had been no picnic. He possessed too volatile a temperament to make him a comfortable person to be around. And she was just too spirited to be anything but a spark to his fire. The only place they had ever found any mutual accord had been in bed, and even that had proved itself inadequate in the end.
Did he believe that forcing her to come back to him would automatically heal all that had gone before? she wondered cynically. Or was it just that
he did not care so long as he had her back where he considered she belonged. He possessed a colossal pride, and she had dented it badly when she walked out on him. Having her back would mend that dent, show him to be the irresistible Guy Frabosa everyone always thought him to be.
He came back into the room, and Marnie stirred herself enough to stand up. ‘I need to use the bathroom,’ she said coolly.
‘Of course.’ His dark head dipped, a new stiffness entering the atmosphere now the main battle was over. He opened the sitting-room door again and waited for her to precede him out of it, then indicated another door in the tiny hall. A bedroom, she discovered as she stepped inside. ‘There is a bathroom en suite through that door opposite.’ He informed her. ‘While you freshen up, I shall go and order us something to eat.’ With another nod he was gone, closing the door behind him on Marnie’s wretched sigh of relief.
When she came back to the sitting-room Guy was talking on the telephone, his tone that brisk, clipped, arrogant one he used when issuing orders to his minions; she smiled at it, hoping it was that frosty-voiced woman she had come up against earlier. It gave her a real sense of satisfaction to know that that was one tone of voice Guy had never used with her—thank God, because it sent ice-cold shivers up and down her spine just listening to it.
He hadn’t noticed her return, his dark head bowed to study the shiny leather of his hand-made shoes as he leaned against the edge of the huge desk which had always been an essential requisite for any hotel room he stayed in. And she paused on the threshold of the room, the artist in her drawn to follow the long, lean length of him.
He hadn’t altered much in the last five years, she noted wryly, sliding her eyes along the full length of his powerful legs encased in their usual expensive silk-wool mix with creases so sharp, they accentuated the flatness of his taut, narrow hips.
She had once painted Guy in many guises. The dynamic racing-car driver decked out in a silver space-suit, his head lost beneath a big crash helmet which left only his eyes, gleaming out from the gap where the protective plastic visor would be flicked into place the moment he climbed behind the wheel. But, while he waited, those eyes would spark and glitter with all the fevered impatience for what he was about to take on. Then there was the mocking painting she’d done of him when he looked like a sloth, lazily stretched out in an armchair wearing nothing more than a loosely tied robe about his naked body, hair ruffled and his square chin roughened by a twelve-hour shadow, attention fixed on the Sunday newspaper like any ordinary mortal man. As studies, they were almost ridiculous in their stark contrast to each other, yet both held a kind of magic that could set a thrill of excitement tingling up and down her spine, because nothing could ever disguise the latent power of the man himself. Not the all-encompassing space-suit or the unkempt sloth—or even this elegantly clad, super-dynamic tycoon she was looking at now, she added as her eyes lifted to take in the muscled beauty of his torso beneath the crisp white shirt he was wearing. In every persona, Guy always managed to exude what was the sheer male essence of the man—that hot, pulsing core of raw sexuality which could still make her body react violently, even while her heart remained coldly unimpressed.
He muttered something, and her eyes flicked up to clash with his, heat crawling up her cheeks because he had caught her staring so blatantly at him. She stiffened slightly, her chin coming up in defiance of the expression he had managed to catch on her face before she blanked it out, but his own eyes mocked her as they stared back, his hand slow in setting the telephone receiver back on its rest.