‘What do you think I mean?’ He stretched the arms behind his head languidly, expanding the impressive structure of his chest as he murmured tauntingly, ‘Are you wondering whether those sexy emerald-green panties are a tribute to my gentlemanly honour…or to my sexual ingenuity?’
Since it happened to be exactly what she was thinking, Vivian reacted furiously. ‘In the circumstances, I hardly think the question of honour arises,’ she said scathingly.
‘You may be right,’ he stunned her by replying. He came up on one elbow and Vivian reflexively jerked the covers more securely around her.
Unfortunately, her hasty movement tugged the coverings away from the other side of the bed, exposing Nicholas’s long, muscled left flank, lean hip and rippling abdomen. The skin was slightly darker on his half-raised leg and thick torso than on his hip, the naked swimsuit line jolting her with the knowledge that, while she might be semi-nude, he was totally naked!
Thankfully his modesty was preserved by a vital fold of sheet, for Vivian’s wide-eyed attention lingered for a startled moment before being hurriedly transferred to his face.
‘Some parts of me are fortunately still extremely functional,’ he purred, his undamaged eye glinting with a predatory amusement. ‘Especially in the mornings…’
‘Mornings?’ Vivian’s hot face swivelled gratefully away from him towards the soft yellow-pink glow at the window. ‘But…it’s sunset,’ she protested in weak confusion. ‘It’s just getting dark…’
‘Actually, it’s getting light,’ he corrected. ‘That window faces east, not west.’
Vivian sucked in a sharp breath as the full implication of what he was saying hit her. She hadn’t just lost a mere hour or two. She had already spent half a day and a whole night entirely at his mercy!
‘Quite so,’ he said softly. ‘This is the morning after, Vivian. Which, given the fact that we’re in bed together, naturally poses the deeply intriguing question: the morning after what?’
Vivian stared at the thin, sardonic curl of his mouth that hinted at depths of degradation she hadn’t even considered.
‘Oh, my God, what have you done?’ she whispered fearfully, her body shivering with the disgraceful echo of a half-remembered thrill.
‘More to the point, what haven’t I done?’ he murmured wickedly, pivoting on his elbow in a fluid flow of muscle to retrieve something from the bedside cabinet behind him.
He offered it to her and, when she refused to let go of her flimsy shield of bedclothes, let a cascade of coloured rectangles spill on to the rumpled fabric between them. Her back glued protectively against the wall, Vivian frowned stiffly down, afraid to move, and frustrated that the surface of the bed was just beyond the range of her near-sighted focus.
‘Here, perhaps these will help.’ He sat up in a flurry of bedclothes, ignoring her automatic cringe as, moments later, he pushed her spectacles on to her wrinkled nose. ‘Better?’
It was a hundred times worse! Vivian stared, appalled, at the photographs scattered like indecent confetti over the bed.
‘Oh, my God…!’
‘It’s a little too late for prayers, Vivian. Your sins have already found you out. Quite graphically, too, wouldn’t you say?’
‘How…? I… You—’
He interrupted her incoherent stammering smoothly. ‘I would have thought that the how was self-evident. There’s this clever modern invention called photography, you see…’
The sarcastic flourish of his hand made Vivian utter a soundless moan as she saw that what she had myopically mistaken for a clothes-horse was in fact a tripod, topped with a fearfully sophisticated-looking camera, its lens pointing malevolently at the bed.
‘And as for the I and you, well—we appear to be pretty brazenly self-evident, too, don’t we? Here, for instance…’
Vivian’s hypnotised gaze followed his pointing finger. ‘See the way you’re arched across the bed under me, your arms thrown over your head in abandoned pleasure…’
Vivian clamped the blankets rigidly under her arms, freeing her trembling hands to try frantically to push his away as he sorted through the collection and selected another.
‘But this one is my own personal favourite, I think. So artistic…so erotic…so expressive. Don’t you agree that we make a sensuous contrast of textures and patterns? With your ginger-dappled skin and my deep tan, and the way our bodies seem to flow over and around each other…’
Vivian tuned out his honeyed taunts, transfixed by the searing image suspended from his fingers.
She had seen raunchy advertisements for perfume in glossy women’s magazines that were more physically revealing, but it was impossible to be objective now. The couple in this photograph weren’t anonymous models posing for public display. That was her caught in an attitude of utter abandon, that was his nude body aggressively crushing her to the bed. She went hot and cold at the idea that he had somehow tapped into her forbidden desires.
Even as a tiny, clinical voice of reason was pointing out that the alignment of Nicholas’s fingers on her hip conveniently covered the precise area where the thin strip of her bikini panties would be, Vivian was shattered by a sickening sense of betrayal. The pictures lied; they depicted an act of violation, not of love!
She tried to grab the photograph out of his hand and, when he laughed jeeringly and held it out of her reach, she fell desperately on the others, tearing them into meticulously tiny pieces, all the while trying to protect her threadbare modesty with the slipping covers.
He laughed again, making no attempt to stop her wild orgy of destruction beyond retaining safe possession of his avowed favourite. ‘There are plenty more where those came from, Vivian. It was a very long, exhausting night…’