“Not my concern?” she repeated, voice rising. “Listen, you blackguard, Srinagar is not a hotel where you can come and go at will without a word to anybody!”
“Since when have I been required to report my comings and goings to you?” he asked insolently. He straightened, looking directly at her at last.
Anna spluttered. “I want you out of my house. Permanently. Today!” It was the culmination of all the furious things she wanted to say.
For a moment he said nothing as he finished drying himself. Then, instead of wrapping the towel strategically around his waist as any decent man would, he draped it over his shoulder. So casual was his attitude that it was an insult in itself. Anna kept her eyes on his face and resolutely refused to notice anything else. His nakedness was neither embarrassing nor enticing. It had no effect on her whatsoever, and so she meant it to be if it killed her!
“Just in time for the wedding, I take it.”
“What wedding?” Anna was momentarily all at sea.
“Forgotten already? Poor Charles!”
“Oh, that. I—I’ve refused him. For now. Not that it’s any of
your
concern.” Anna’s voice rose. “Anyway, that’s beside the point. I want you out of my house!”
“Then it seems you’re destined to want what you can’t have. Must be your lot in life.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means I’m not going anywhere until I’m good and ready. And if you don’t like it, then so be it.”
Anna blinked. He was as angry as she. It was clear in the darkening of his eyes to near black and the hardening of his voice. But for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what he had to be angry about. She was the one who had been callously used and discarded, not him!
“Tell me,” Julian continued with false cordiality, “does Dumesne realize you’re not interested in him at all, but in finding a man to replace Paul?”
Anna stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“You and Dumesne certainly looked cozy. Have you bedded him yet?”
“That’s a foul thing to say!”
“I’m feeling foul. So foul that I suggest you leave me the hell alone.”
He turned his back and reached for his breeches. Anna, incensed, tapped him sharply on his arm.
“Don’t you turn your back on me! I have a few things to say to you!”
“Do you now?” He faced her, slowly, a peculiarly satisfied expression on his face. “Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned.”
With that he reached out, caught her shoulders, and yanked her against him. There was no longer any ignoring the fact that he was naked—and fully aroused. She could feel the unmentionable part of him stabbing at her belly through her dress and petticoat. His body was still slightly damp, she discovered as she pushed furiously against his chest with both hands, and warm and hairy—and as unyielding as the stone wall behind them.
“Let me go! Take your hands off me! Do you hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you all right,” he said, his tone ugly. His mouth sneered. His hands on her shoulders tightened, then shifted. All at once, Anna felt herself being scooped off her feet.
“Don’t you dare! Put me down! Put me down!”
He was carrying her, both her wrists imprisoned in one of his hands, ignoring her furious kicking and squirming as if she were no more than a spitting kitten he could control with ease.
“I said
put me down!”
Anna practically shrieked the command, her eyes blazing as they raked his dark face. Those obsidian eyes glittered with what she could have sworn was satisfaction, and his mouth curled into a mocking parody of a smile.
“Your wish, of course, is my command,” he murmured.
Then, without so much as a word of warning, Anna found herself tossed from his arms to go sailing through the air. She barely had time to close her eyes before she hit the pool with a tremendous splash.
XXXIII
S
he sank like a stone. The water closed, cool and wet and all-enveloping, over her head as she hurtled straight to the bottom. Still in a semisitting position, she felt her posterior touch first, then she was clawing for the surface, fighting, flailing in an effort to rejoin the world of light and air. But the pool was too deep; she couldn’t touch the bottom and reach the surface at the same time. Bouncing, trying not to panic, she bobbed up and managed to get her face out of the water and gulp some air before she sank again.
It occurred to her, as she found the bottom with her toes and again thrust upwards toward the light, that she could drown. Surely Julian would not leave her.…
But he could swim. Had the swine stalked off before realizing that she could not?
Fear exploded like a bomb in Anna’s brain just as she felt something grab one of her flailing hands and haul her toward the surface. Her head broke the water, her shoulders too. Julian was lifting her into his arms, his face both pale and grim. Nothing and nobody had ever looked more wonderful to Anna in her life. Choking and spluttering, gasping for air, she locked her arms around his neck as if she meant never to let him go. He waded from the pool with her in his arms as she wheezed and trembled and clung to him. Once they had attained the safety of the bank, he still held her, his body warm and hard against the shivering chill of hers.
Anna was sopping wet, her hair straggling in dripping rat’s tails around her face and down her back, her gown pouring water. Even her shoes were soaked. She was trembling in the aftermath of fear, and for a few minutes it felt wonderful to be held in his arms. Then she remembered how she had come to be in the pool in the first place.
“You—swine,” she hissed on her first steady breath. She pulled back to glare at him, sweeping the soaking strands of hair from her face with one hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said tightly.
“Sorry! I could have drowned!” It should have been difficult to quarrel with a man who was both naked and holding her cradled in his arms, but Anna was too angry to care.
“I didn’t realize you wouldn’t be able to touch bottom.”
“You don’t realize all kinds of things! You’re an unprincipled blackguard, a womanizing cad, an untrustworthy, shameless—”
“Whoa!” he said, and to Anna’s fury she saw that her insults had brought a faint smile to his mouth. “That’s—”
Red rage burst inside her. Before she even realized that she meant to do it she had doubled up her first and punched him right in the eye.
He yelped, jumped back, and dropped her. Anna landed painfully on her hip on the slippery carpet of vines and scrambled to her feet with scarcely a wince. Her sole desire was to kill him with her bare hands. The hurt and humiliation she had suffered over the past week combined with her recent fright to make her so angry that she seemed to view the world—and him—through a red fog. He had clapped a hand to his eye and was regarding her with such astonishment that it would have been comical had she been in a mood to laugh. But she was not. She wanted to scratch and bite and claw and punch.… With a wordless cry she flew at him, fingers curved into claws.
“Anna! Stop!” He retreated before her onslaught, his hands outthrust to hold her off. To her absolute fury she saw that he was beginning to smile again. Soaked or not, her feet were clad in sturdy leather shoes, and he was as bare as the day he was born. Drawing back her foot, she kicked him as hard as she could in the shin. He yelped, hopping on one leg, and made the ultimate mistake of bending down to massage the aching shin.
Her next blow caught him squarely on the temple.
“Enough!” he roared, straightening, and grabbed her upper arms to give her a rough shake. “Stop, you little hellcat, or I’ll turn you over my knee and beat the temper out of you!”
“Just you try it!” Anna dared, panting, and aimed another kick at his shin.
He dodged it. His hands tightened on her arms as he held her carefully at arm’s length, and for a moment the same fury that blazed in Anna was reflected back at her from his eyes. But even as she glared at him, chin outthrust and head thrown back so that her hopelessly loosened hair streamed down her back, his eyes softened. Anna saw that sudden glint of blue where only black had been before, and felt an unexpected clenching in the pit of her stomach.
“Oh, Anna,” he said in an odd voice. Then those eyes went black again, and his hands moved up to close over the neck of her gown. Before she had the least inkling what he meant to do he gave a tremendous yank, and her gown split to the waist with a loud rip.
Anna gasped, screeched a protest, and tried to jerk away. He would not let her go, but continued to rip at her gown despite her struggles.
“Have you gone mad? Stop it! What are you doing? Julian!”
“I’m sick of your bloody black dresses,” he growled, giving the gown a final mighty yank that rent it clear to the hem.
“Stop it!” she screeched again even as he jerked the dress clean off her. Futilely she tried to catch the soaked panels of shredded black silk as he snatched them away from her. He eluded her clutching fingers with a grim smile. Wadding the ruined cloth in both hands, he strode for the pool. He stopped only to scoop up a rock, which he placed in the center of the parcel. Then he heaved the bundle into the middle of the pool. Speechless, Anna could only watch what had once been her dress disappear beneath the surface.
Only then did he turn back to her. His eyes moved over her with fierce satisfaction.
“That’s better,” he said.
Anna gasped. “Better?” Her voice rose shrilly as she looked down at herself. Clad in a muslin chemise that left most of her décolletage and the entirety of her arms bare and clung to her bosom with immodest tenacity, a single petticoat, garters, stockings and shoes, every single item of which was dripping wet and clinging, she was positively indecent. Certainly she could not return to the house in such a state!
“Better?” she wailed. “How dare you do that? What am I going to do now?”
He was approaching her, a determined expression on his face. Something about the gleam in those blue-black eyes made Anna take several hasty steps backward.
“Make love with me,” he said, and reached for her.
“What? No!” She yelped as his hands closed over her upper arms. “Let go of me, you …”
“You know you want to. And I want to. I mean to love you till you can’t think of anything else. Or anybody else. Just you—and me.…”
He dragged her close and bent his head to find her mouth despite her struggles. Anna tried to resist the hot allure, but in the end she could not. All her instincts shouted a warning, reminding her to consider how he had used and left her before, but her body wasn’t listening. It responded to the hard demand of his with a single-minded surge of longing that washed away every obstacle in its path. Like an addict in desperate need of opium, she was helpless in the face of her craving. Her arms went around his neck, her fingers curled in the coarse strands of hair at the back of his head. She let him draw her up on tiptoe, pressed her body against his, and clung.
His hand was on her breast even before his tongue entered her mouth. Swirling away on a whirlwind of desire, Anna felt her breast swell against the abrasive heat of his palm. Her nipple hardened, thrusting upward, begging for his touch. He obliged, running his thumb over the aching nub, his other hand supporting her back as he lowered her to the ground.
His mouth never left hers. His tongue explored the eager wetness of her mouth, greedy in its demands. Anna, trembling and nearly mindless with passion, answered as best she could, shyly venturing to enter the hot cave of his mouth with her tongue, exploring there, licking his lips as he licked hers. So enraptured was she with this game that she scarcely felt the coolness of the vines beneath her back, or the hardness of the ground beneath that. The roar of the waterfall, the chattering of the birds, the rustling of small creatures in the undergrowth nearby might have been a heavenly chorus for all she heard of them.
She was deaf, dumb, and blind to everything but Julian and the way he was making her feel.
His hands were trembling as he yanked the straps of her chemise down to bare her breasts. For just a moment he lifted himself away from her, staring at the bounty he had uncovered. The fire in those eyes as they feasted on her breasts made Anna whimper with wanting. Instinctively she arched her back in a gesture of offering as old as woman. Then she cried out as he bent his head to take an aching nipple into his mouth.
The straps of her chemise were tight just above her elbows, binding her arms to her sides. He suckled first one breast than the other as she struggled to free herself from the constrictions of the undergarment so that she could touch him as she was longing to do. But her arms would not come free; she could only lie there, squirming, as he tormented her breasts with teeth and lips and tongue, setting her body afire.
Then his hands were at her waist, untying the tapes of her petticoat with fingers that fumbled. When at last the knot came free, he lifted himself off her just long enough to yank the skirt away from her, tossing it aside to land crumpled at the base of a bush. He was kneeling beside her, and for a long moment he stayed that way, looking down at her. His eyes touched on the drying strands of her silvery hair, spread in a tangled fan shape that framed her body against the background of deep green vines. His eyes moved over her face with its passion-drugged eyes and parted lips that were rosy and swollen from his kisses. His eyes slid down to her small naked breasts with the tiny nipples that were distended now and the color of strawberries. His eyes drank in the soft creaminess of her skin, then registered the chemise, which still imprisoned her arms and was twisted around her waist, leaving her lower body as bare as her breasts. He made no move to free her from this remaining garment, or even to release her arms. Instead his eyes flared, darkened, then wandered farther, lingering over the gentle curve of her hips, the hollow of her belly button, the ash-brown tangle of curls between her thighs. Finally his gaze moved down her slender thighs, pale above the black cotton stockings that ended in ribbon garters inches above her knees.