His to Claim (3 page)

Now that the cooling drink had restored some of her vitality drained from Henry’s probing questions, water still in hand, she sauntered to turn on the lights.

Sighing in the dark Elaine extended an arm, feeling for a switch on the cool wall. But in a flash, her hand retracted as though jumping off a hot plate.

What she had truly felt under her touch rendered her heart beating a mile per second.

Her breaths were weighed by her growing dread. Her eyes roved unfocussed, sweat beaded on her forehead. She didn’t need sight to know what her touch had sensed.

There was a man standing right in front of her. A big, tough man. Her soft, feminine fingers hadn’t missed the corded strength bridled beneath the wide, hard masculine chest they had come into contact with.

Rooted to her spot, Elaine remained unmoving, caught like a hare in a trapper’s snare. She could feel the heat emanating from his body like biting incisions of a scalpel.
Had he just moved closer?

A whistled blow of heated breath glided down to caress her face. Its electric intensity validating his lethal proximity instantly galvanised her from a paralysis induced by an icy fear.

Her mind and body rocked out of a horror of finding herself in such an inconceivable scenario. The glass of water shaking in her nerveless hand finally slipped to the floor, sound of it crashing reared an instinct to live in her.

And Elaine bolted.

Her feet scrambled zigzag towards the main door avoiding the general clutter of furniture she knew was there. But the man didn’t have her advantage. From behind her, she heard a thump followed by a muted curse.

Elaine hoped that gained her the precious seconds she needed to escape from the house and the vile clutches of this dangerous intruder. Once outside, she would bring the whole block down on him with her ear splitting screaming!

She reached the door, turned the knob, pulled at it.

A slice of light from the hallway streamed in.
Yes!

Bang!

The door closed in her face, and she, slammed against it.

No…! No. No!

Hopes dashed, fear hammered against her breast. She grappled to draw back the air that had left her at the impact. It seemed to her as though the intruder had pitched his entire weight after her to cut her flight.

Hands barred to her sides, Elaine tried fighting his hold with her meagre strength–all useless.

She was jammed between the door and this large man twice her size. To top it all off, this unproductive tussle was putting a serious constraint on her lungs already depleted of air.

She would have to say something, somehow try to persuade this man to let her go.

“Please.. Y..You wouldn’t find anything here. There’s nothing of va..value.”

A hard thrust of his lean hips against the plush rounds of her soft buttocks stole a gasp from her.

“I beg to differ.” A hoarse whisper wafted over her ear, its barely restrained anger evident.

And with terror, she found he was dangerously aroused. The brand of his burning erection, large and threatening, unmistakable behind her.

Oh, God, was she going to be raped?

*****

CHAPTER 4

A
bsolute alarm was taking her over at the thought of rape. She could feel every line and length of the man behind her.

Standing where he had her pinned, Elaine ceased all movements. Waiting.. dreading..

The contrast from the cool surface of the door in front, and the heat swirling from his body behind, was striking dense fright in her.

The possibility of his stealing from her was no longer a threat, the probability of his raping her was.

“It is. What I value
is
here.” When he spoke, the words as noxious fume lit a frisson of disquiet along her nape. “It’s right here, before me.”

Her heart drummed in her ears.
Was he talking about her? Value, as in his victim?

“And I want it bad.” His hands on either side tightened over hers. “I want you bad, Elaine.”

He
was
talking about her!
And he knew her name!

He knew her name?
The thought clunked her over the head.

Now, there’s every likelihood that he would have made inquiries about her, intending as he had to rob the apartment, or rape her. But.. the way he said her name..

It sounded familiar. As though he had known her for long,
she
had known him..

The fog of alarm and fear cleared to thrum a cord of recognition in her. And then pure fury charged her.

“You bastard!” She fought his tenacious grasp with renewed spirit.

It might have been pitch black, but there was no doubt in her mind as to the identity of this intruder.

Elaine flailed like mad. And all that thrashing rewarded her with an arm slipped free. She didn’t waste a moment cashing on this golden chance with a deadly elbow rammed in his ribcage.

The sound of his
Umph
satisfied her as nothing else. Longing for an encore of it, she swung once again. But her leverage of surprise gone, he detained that wayward arm and nailed both her wrists to the door, high over her head in one hand, with ludicrous ease.

“Stop it, Elaine.” He growled out.

“Never! Get away from me.”

She tried to get him at the shin with her kicking, or perhaps stamp his instep. But the invasive proximity of his wouldn’t allow her the required leeway to accomplish such a stunt with any measure of success.

“You have a knack for scurrying out of tight spots, don’t you?” Trevor shook her wrists. “Let’s see you get out of this.” The superior weight of his body pressed further into her.

The victorious note in his tone scored Elaine. Solid bars of his powerful thighs flanking her, she was imprisoned as surely as a hapless mouse trapped in a cat’s paw–immovable despite her best efforts to spring free.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, nor do I have any inclination to play your silly games with you.” Elaine kept tugging at her arms over her head. “Let go of me, Trey!” She bawled, frustrated with her repeated failure to pry his grip.

“I’ve been fucking fighting a battle with myself to let go of you since the day I laid eyes on you!” Trevor’s whiplash admission reverberated in the darkened room, having Elaine flinching away from it.

But a groan fuelled with uninhibited, potent craving followed her. When it made contact with her bare nape, the lone action sent tide of battering waves through her body, curling her toes, her high-heels long since lost in the fray.

He spoke again, as if the ardent admissions were being wrenched out from him. “Every time I think I’ve shaken myself loose, you show up and I see I’m still as damned as a fly caught in a shiny web. Reduced to hanging tied year after year in the same mouldy old corner.”

Trevor felt her stiffen, but recounting of her sins against him had opened a dam on his wounds, and he couldn’t stop the aspersions from inundating. “Do you know how it feels to have your pride shredded to pieces conceding that for years, like a fool, you have been fighting a losing battle?”

Elaine was amazed by the depth of pain his words could still cause her.

How much clearer would he have to be for her to finally accept that Trevor McBain never, nor would he ever consider her worth more than the dust beneath his shoes. He knew her to be trash, and was ashamed of wanting her.

“You have the nerve to lob accusations when your one mission in life has been to torment me.” She hurled at him. “And right now you’re no better than a common burglar the way you entered my apartment. How did you get in?”

“That’s not the question I wanted asked.”

“Really? Fine, then O’ Mighty Despot, what’s that you need ask?” Elaine quipped with complete saccharine sweetness.

“You, wining and dining with Henry Whitler,” Trevor spat with unconcealed menace from between his gritting teeth. “Why?”

To say he was furious was understating, Trevor was raging. It was taking everything in him to keep his head. Seeing her in the restaurant with that rat, Whitler, had thrown him over an invisible brink.

And to make the matters worse, Elaine’s scent, her body struggling–writhing–against his, that silken bared back of hers grazing his chest through the thin fabric of his white shirt, were all courting the bulge straining in his twill pants, driving him insane.

“How.. How do you know where I was and with whom?” Disbelief clear in her question.

“That’s not the answer I want.”

“Well, you can’t always have what you want.”

“Don’t play with me, Elaine. Why?!” He snarled, his rickety patience was near ending.

“Why do you think?” She hissed back at him.

“Dressed as you are, like an expensive whore,” Trevor paid no heed to the outraged noise she made. “There isn’t much room left for speculation.”

His crudity riled Elaine’s pride. She chucked caution for the satisfaction of inflicting him a vicious sling of her own. “Then you wouldn’t want to be too close to me just yet. Are you sure you can’t smell him on me?”

“Shut that little mouth of yours.”

Elaine twisted her neck as far back as she could to directly lay the words in his face. “You mean the mouth he-”

Trevor seized that insulting mouth of hers with a cruel crush of his own, wanting to quash the flay of her caustic jibes.

There was something explosive driving him since the day he found her gone from the mansion. She couldn’t just pitch him in a labyrinth of confounding signals and then disappear on him!

Raging with fury, he had put an entire private detective agency to keep tabs on Elaine’s every passing minute. Then as soon as his business commitment was delegated to his Chief Officer, Trevor boarded his private plane and flew back.

Though upon arrival in States, the news of her dating another man slithered gelid knives over him.

As it were, Elaine had him in ten kinds of knots. But tonight he planned on undoing every one of them.

No longer would his ego keep on taking hits for bearing a torch for a lass who didn’t give a damn for him.

He was done playing to her whims. It’s time the piper got his dues. He would make that viperous tongue of hers spew honeyed cures for every bleeding gash it had scored on his heart.

Elaine fought to wrest her will back. Trevor’s kiss, if a blatant, boorish attack could be called that, was laying siege on her. And all the wriggling on her part to get away from him only succeeded in arousing his lust.

The hardness jutting into the cleft of her butt-cheeks was chasing her thoughts random, while his hips kept all her escape routes well and truly choked.

His tongue delving and taking possession of her mouth usurped even the remnants of her logic that were floundering to bring her to her senses.

As his damned hand held Elain’s chin unmoving, the darkness in the room conspired along.

With nothing to distract her other senses, she was forced to focus on what he was doing to her. This worked as nothing else in breaking the barriers she had raised against him, as easily as blowing a bastion of cards.

Steam built inside her in effect, igniting a glow of heat between her legs that was proof of her wakened desires.

Shamelessly, her back began imitating the tune of his grinding on her.
I have to stop this from happening again.
Elaine was screaming inside, but no sound penetrated the erotic haze he had swathed her in.

A moan resonated in the air. Was it hers?

The force of his kiss was fatally demanding. His teeth digging in on the tender flesh inside, his marauding tongue jabbed deep within her throat. Yet, as if far down in her subconsciousness, this was what she had been waiting for. Trevor to lose his cool. To know that he burnt as much for her, as she had burnt for him. And this knowledge rendered her heady enough to forget all else.

There was no holding back Elaine’s response. In that moment, years of wanting to be in Trevor’s arms, once again, surged in her as more than mere need.

The rate of his breaths picked up, drowning hers. His splayed hand releasing her chin dropped to her hip, exerting pressure, then gradually tracing its path down reached the hem of her dress. When skin met skin, the finesse of that hand turning ungainly on its way back up her thigh wasn’t missed on her, just as the tinge of heat growing denser at her special place wouldn’t be ignored.

Trevor nearly blew in his pants when he realised Elaine was wearing a thong. He couldn’t resist the roweling urge goading him to savour a gluttonous squeeze on those bountiful cheeks with an appreciative groan.

Though right after it, tearing his mouth from hers, he proceeded to issue a warning. “If I ever again catch this sweet arse wearing a string for anyone else but me-”

“Wha..what would you do?” Uncouth as they were, her heart soared at his words–trawling for the thoughts that lay beneath. She wanted to hear so much more.

“I’ll throw hell after fucking hell in that feckless sucker’s miserable life until he cuts all routes that lead to what’s mine. Then, I’ll see
you
..”

“Yes?” Her breath hitching, she could feel his gaze narrow on her.

“You, Elaine, I’ll fill with me so far deep in, again, and again, and again, till you see, know, hear and breathe only me.”

Trevor freed her arms. But drained of fight, she let them slowly slip down, placing her hands on the door to keep herself from spilling on the floor like hot wax.

The
‘string’
she had been wearing was without warning torn from her. Before the implication of it could hit her, she was lifted to the tips of her toes with legs spread farther apart.

“Wha..” She gasped at a sharp intrusion.

“And that’s a promise.” Trevor growled wading into Elaine with the right of a man over a woman awaiting him in his bed.

The mix of piercing discomfort and biting desire was too much to take all at once when this was the first time in five years for Elaine.

“Christ,” Lodged deep inside her, Trevor stilled. His hands planted at the door on either side next to hers. “You’re so..” Her tight passage clasped his manhood in a vice grip. “No one’s been in here but me. You were always mine, Elaine.”

The caveman pride and arrogance of his avowal washed Elaine with mortification. She longed to deny; lie! But then he began pulling out of her, and with a whimper she nearly reached her hands back to hold him from it–cruelly brought to the truth of how great her own need for him was.

However, her fear was for nothing. Trevor returned, returned with a glorious thrust, setting her aflame.

When he undid her delicate coiffure, her hair cascaded in a luxuriant bounce at her back. His breath sieved through wisps of them to feather at her nape. Its warmth grazing her skin sent streaks of heat bellowing in her breasts. And with the heave of her each new scarlet breath, their negligible presence turned into precious weights.

“Elaine..” The need in his voice was naked for her to feel.

Her eyelids grew heavy with sensory bonanza. And when his mouth nipped at her ear, she tripped from a lazy fever to a frenzy of passion. Her nails raked against the door like a cat’s in sassy heat.

He was soothing his bites with embered licks and her mouth parted imperceptibly to let loose the tendrils of searing want mounting out of proportion in her.

Trevor could smell in her aroused abandon both his victory and his defeat, for he might have succeeded in having her succumb to her passions, but he too would be hewn to cinders in its volatile combustion.

Did he care?
Not one Goddamned bit!

He gave a coaxing kiss at the corner of her mouth. The feel of her bare back, a fiery beacon he found impossible to leave alone. His clever fingers sneaked in from the gaping edgings, shaping the wreath of her ribcage to lurk just below her throbbing breasts.

Elaine quivered in maddening anticipation, but the touch of his hands searing her skin first slipped down over her taut belly. One finger dipped its head into her navel and her breaths came out broken. The systematic abuse of that button was affecting a nub a lot lower.

Her nipples protested for a share in that abuse. And when Trevor at last took possession of her aching breasts, she thawed down below. “Oh.. Trey..”