‘That you’re willing to risk my father’s life to make a cheap score!’
‘What?’
He suddenly stopped, pushed open a door that was slightly ajar and nudged her into a small room lined with crowded shelves. So distracted was she by his outrageous claim that she didn’t realise what was happening until it was too late.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she screeched as he kicked the door shut behind them. Her shoulder bumped against a shelf of folded sheets as she hastily tried to widen the distance between them in the narrowly confined space. The overhead light threw Matthew’s grim face into harsh relief as she protested shrilly, ‘This is a supply cupboard!’
‘I stand in awe of your powers of deduction,’ he sneered, leaning back against the door as he tore open the envelope in his hand.
‘That was addressed to your father, not you!’ she accused.
‘And what is it you’re so keen for him to see? Ahh, what have we here? Another episode of the Lifestyles of the Sick and Shameless?’ He flashed her a familiar set of images and she sucked in an appalled breath.
‘Oh, my God!’ She raised her bewildered gaze to his.
‘You bitch!’ He exploded away from the door. ‘You had to keep turning the screws, didn’t you? Even when you knew it wasn’t going to get you what you wanted!’
She cracked her elbow on a ledge as he backed her into the nest of shelves in the corner. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
He brandished the photographs under her nose. ‘You were trying to foist these on a sick man—’
She shook her head in confusion. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘The hell you weren’t!’ He slammed his hands flat down on the s
helves on either side of her hips, his breath hot on her face. ‘I saw you handing them to Mum. If I hadn’t stopped you she’d probably have taken them in and opened them in front of Dad.’
‘But I had nothing to do with those.’
His eyes flamed behind their twin shields of precision glass. ‘So you’re a liar as well as being malicious!’
The slap resounded as a sharp echo in the small room and Rachel watched in awful fascination as the white outline of her palm on his lean cheek filled up with blood. For a moment there was no sound but their mutually quickened breathing.
‘You looking to get physical with me?’ he growled, leaning closer.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next his anger ripened into a different kind of passion.
‘I thought you only did that with men who were tied down…’
Rachel’s body throbbed in recognition of his excitement, her skin drawing tight over her flesh, her breasts aching with the memory of what it felt like to be fondled in his eager hands. She remembered the smooth glide of his glossy skin, the hard flex of his muscles, the soft abrasion of hair on his thighs, the way his hips had surged between her spread legs. A soft, liquid warmth burst inside her belly and she shuddered.
‘Take your hands off me!’
‘I’m not touching you,’ he pointed out hoarsely, and she realised to her mortification that it was true. The tension that had underpinned their every encounter was suddenly laid starkly bare.
She flushed.
‘How dare you get all self-righteous with me?’ she panted. ‘You were the one who opened up this particular Pandora’s box. You can’t blame me if the evils you let loose have come back to haunt you!’
He was studying her mouth as it moved, and she knew from the sultry, bitter-chocolate gaze that it wasn’t her words in which he was interested.
‘The only thing that’s been haunting me is you,’ he murmured. ‘The memory of the touch and taste and smell of you…so real and yet so elusive. If it wasn’t for the pictures I might have believed it was all some wild dream…like the ones that I’ve been having nightly ever since…’
His meaning sank like warm honey into her bones. She thought of all the nights that she had woken, hot and sweaty, from a faceless demon lover’s embrace; but faceless only because she had resolutely refused to see.
‘Stop looking at me like that!’ she demanded weakly, her bag sliding unnoticed off her shoulder to slump limply to the floor.
‘Like what?’