“Warned me?” He shook his head, and he was so close that the movement fanned her face. “That’s a good one.” The skin over the bridge of his nose was stretched taut, and his nostrils flared. Little white lines etched the corners of his mouth. He was furious—his eyes flared with savage fire, but she couldn’t let him know that he frightened her at all.
“I trusted you,” he said quietly.
“So that’s why you had to keep me prisoner? Because of your ‘trust’?” she tossed back at him.
His lips compressed. “We made love, damn it!”
“I—I know.”
“And it meant nothing to you!” he charged, his rage exploding.
“No, Zane, I—”
“You slept with me, toyed with me, then the minute I let down my guard, you took off in the night, like some cheap…” He let the sentenced dangle between them—unspoken accusations cutting deep.
“Like some cheap what?” she threw back at him.
“Oh, the hell with it!” His arms surrounded her suddenly, crushing her against him as he kissed her angrily, passionately, desperately. When he lifted his head, some of the fury had faded from his gaze. “What kind of a game are you playing with me, Kaylie?
“Me? Play a game with you?” she whispered as he searched her face.
“I thought last night meant something.”
“It did.”
“What?”
“That—that—there’s still something between us,” she admitted.
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t know, Zane!” she said in exasperation, her nerves stretched tighter than piano wires as he held her so close that she was all wrapped up in the warm feel and smell of him again.
“You deliberately tricked me!”
“And you deliberately seduced me!”
His lips twisted at that. “If I remember correctly, you seemed to enjoy yourself. And there might be some argument about who seduced whom?”
That much was true, she thought, wrenching herself free so that she could think clearly. Her heart was knocking painfully in her chest, her ears rang with the rush of her own blood. When she reached upward to push a strand of hair from her eyes, her fingers trembled so, that she balled her fist and crammed it into her pocket. “How did you get back here?”
His eyes narrowed. “A helicopter. Less than a mile from the cabin,” he said, clipping his words. “I was back in the city hours ago!”
“I told you I’d escape—”
“Ahh! But you didn’t warn me that you’d sleep with me to lull me into trusting you, did you?”
“You must have expected—Ohh!”
Snagging her wrist in his strong fingers, he pulled her roughly against him. “I didn’t expect to be used, Kaylie. I didn’t think you’d stoop so low as to go to bed with me just to get what you wanted.”
“I didn’t!” she declared furiously.
“You couldn’t prove it by me.”
She stared into his eyes and saw a flicker of pain, a shadow of just how deeply she had wounded him. Her heart wrenched painfully, and she wondered if all love were this agonizing.
“I trusted you,” he whispered, his breath caressing her face.