“Don’t tempt me,” he said, but his voice was like silk, and he reached out and slid his hand along the side of her neck, up under her hair. “I could break your neck, and make it look like a fall. The stairs are winding, the floor is slate, and you’re recovering from a concussion. Not to mention that convenient amnesia. It wouldn’t take much to arrange.”
She swallowed. His skin was warm, rough and oddly erotic against her neck. “Wouldn’t the police get suspicious?”
“I imagine I could handle them,” Ire said in a dreamy voice. “No one likes you very much, you know.”
“Why not?” She swallowed, and his thumb stroked the front of her throat, gently, with only the faintest hint of pressure.
“They don’t like the way you treat me.”
“And what about the way you treat me?” she countered, fighting the need to bat his hand away. Fighting the need to sway closer to him.
“They don’t care, Molly.”
She was too close to him. She looked at him then, directly into his dark, stormy blue eyes, and a little frisson of fear danced down her spine. Followed by something else.
He could kill. She believed that of him. He could have killed the man she’d supposedly run away with, out of jealousy or something else. He could have tried to kill her, but something stopped him from making the blow fatal. Or maybe he’d run them off the road, she’d been knocked unconscious by the accident, and he’d quickly and efficiently killed his rival.
But why hadn’t he finished her? Did he still want her? Or just her money?
He was stroking her, slowly, with erotic intent. His head dipped toward hers, blotting out the light. He was going to kiss her, she knew it. He had every right to kiss her—he was her husband.
So why did it feel as if it were going to be her first kiss?
She held herself very still, waiting for the touch of his mouth against hers, letting her eyes drift shut, aware of the danger, the draw of the man, and no longer caring if she was playing with fire.
And then be pulled back, abruptly. “That’s enough questions for now, Molly,” he said in a bored drawl. “This marital togetherness wears thin pretty damned fast. Go away.”
She opened her eyes and stared at him in confusion. He wanted her. She knew that, with a sudden sureness that left her curiously triumphant. He wanted her, but he was half afraid of her.
It was a small consolation. He scared the hell out of her. She didn’t bother arguing with him. She simply rose, taking her mug of undrinkable black sludge. “Pleasant dreams,” she said sweetly.
His response was a growled obscenity. The dog lifted his head, looking at the two of them questioningly before lumbering to his feet, preparing to follow her.
“Beastie!” Patrick spoke sharply, and with an air of reluctance the dog returned to his side. Molly went slowly up the stairs, feeling oddly, doubly forsaken.
She lay awake for hours, listening to the rain beat down on the slate roof. The queen-size bed with its voluptuous satin sheets was too soft, and before an hour of tossing and turning had passed her back began to ache. The clinging nightgown, so revealing and provocative for a nonexistent lover, was obviously made to be discarded early in the night. It made her itch.
The room was stuffy and suffocating, and the heavy formal drapes kept out any trace of moonlight. She lay there and hated that room, hated it with a passion. If she was going to be a prisoner there she would have to change it, despite her husband’s likely objections. Surely he couldn’t approve of the lavish style of it. How had he managed to put up with it when he used to visit his wife?
Or had she gone to his room?
She stiffened uncontrollably. Slow, measured footsteps were mounting the stairs, and she could hear the clicking of the dog’s nails as he followed his master up to bed. She lay there, tense and unmoving, scarcely breathing, as she waited for him.
She hadn’t imagined the look in his eyes earlier, the slow, sensual heat that he’d deliberately banked. He wanted her. And be seemed to be a man who took what he wanted.
He stopped in the ball, and she could almost hear his breathing. After a moment he went into his own room and closed the door.
She felt a stinging dampness in her eyes, and she wiped it away angrily. Molly Winters, who never cried, had wept three times in one day. She wasn’t going to keep giving in to some maudlin weakness, she told herself firmly. She was glad be hadn’t come to her room, that cool, angry stranger, she was absolutely delighted. As a matter of fact, the nurse had been right.
She hated Patrick Winters with his cold heart and his cold blue eyes, hated him more than she had hated any person in her entire life. She knew that hurt and hatred—it was a familiar companion in the old stone house.
Patrick wasn’t quite sure how he was going to stand this. He told himself there was no way he could hear her breathing through the thick old walls, no way he could smell the faint trace of perfume that clung to her hair.
But he could. The scent, the sound, the feel of her followed him into his bedroom, teased him unmercifully. The last few weeks had been the first peace he’d known in more than a year. He hadn’t wanted her back, and he didn’t want her sleeping two doors away from him, totally immune to him.
He wanted to be immune to her. Oblivious. To be able to ignore her, and the way she crawled beneath his skin, danced in his blood. His feelings for her should have been over long ago. They were never very sensible—she was a decade younger than he was, a sixteen-year-old child when he’d first seen her, a twenty-three-year-old child when he’d made the very dire mistake of marrying her.
And he couldn’t blame anyone but himself. Sure, his damned autocratic father had set things in motion, determined to get his way, even beyond the grave. But Patrick had never danced to his tune. And marrying Jared Winters’s chosen one should have been the last thing he’d do.
