The Blackmail Marriage. PENNY JORDAN
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that nothing could ever erase them.
Her lips softened and parted, her brain clouded by a dizzying swarm of disempowering pleasure. A feeling like an electric shock jolted through her, heightening every one of her senses.
Desire, pain, anger—she could feel them all, and could have wept tears of aching anguish for the girl she had been and the memories Luc was forcing on her. It wasn’t fair that he should do this to her—but then, when had Luc ever been fair? When had he ever done anything that wasn’t motivated entirely by self-interest? He had taken her to his bed because he had desired her and then he had rejected her, dismissed her from his life like a toy he had grown bored with.
‘No!’
Frantically, Carrie tried to pull away, but Luc was too powerful for her. His mouth possessed hers with an easy strength, his tongue reinforcing his control of the situation, snaking between her lips, thrusting powerfully into the tender, vulnerable warmth she was trying to withhold from him.
The fog clouding her brain became a white-out of sheeting panic. She should not be feeling like this. She lifted her hands and pushed against Luc’s chest, at the same time wrenching her mouth from beneath his. Abruptly he released her, freeing her to drag air into her aching lungs.
‘Odd. You still kiss like an innocent.’
The way he was looking at her made Carrie’s stomach lurch with anxiety. That steely grey gaze was far too sharp and penetrating.
Defensively she snapped back at him, ‘Actually, I wasn’t doing any kissing. But of course it’s typical of you, Luc, that you were too intent on doing what you wanted to notice. You are the last man I would ever want to kiss. In fact, you are the last man I would ever want in any way at all.’
‘Really?’ His tone was even more sardonic than the look he was giving her. ‘That’s not what this says,’ he told her mercilessly, and he reached out and very deliberately ran his finger down the curve of her breast, to where her nipple jutted tightly against the fabric of her tee shirt.
Carrie’s face flamed in angry humiliation.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ she told him fiercely, pushing his hand away. ‘I—’
‘You what?’ Luc challenged her ‘You react to every man who touches you in that way? Well, let me warn you, Carrie, that from now on, for as long as our marriage lasts, there will be no other men in either your life or your bed.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do—’ Carrie began, but Luc stopped her immediately,
‘You have no option other than to do as I say, Carrie,’ he said gently, but there was no gentleness in his eyes, just a hard, implacable determination that warned her he meant every word he was saying. ‘Because if you don’t, both you and your brother…’
She couldn’t allow him to carry out his threats against Harry, Carrie acknowledged, no matter how strong her feelings of outrage and disgust towards him were.
‘Very well,’ she told him through gritted teeth. ‘As you say, it seems that I have no option, Luc. But I promise you that I shall hate every single day, every single minute, every single second I spend shackled to you, and I shall do my utmost to make sure that you hate them too.’
‘My charming wife-to-be…so loving, so tender, so complaisant.’ Luc taunted her. ‘I am sure that ours shall be a match made in—’
‘Hell,’ Carrie supplied savagely for him.
‘So much passion! But then, you always were…passionate.’
The look he was giving her was an open insult, but somehow Carrie managed to bite back the words she was longing to throw at him.
CHAPTER THREE
THE soft swish of her bedroom curtains being opened followed by a bright shaft of morning sunlight woke Carrie from the sleep she had only finally fallen into a couple of hours previously. For most of the night she’d been kept awake by a turbulent inner warfare in which her instinct for self-preservation had battled with her lifelong elder sister instinct to protect her younger brother—and lost! She had eventually fallen into an exhausted sleep, knowing that she could not expose Harry to Luc’s diabolic cruelty!
Her mouth compressed now as she was dragged back into the dilemma which had tormented her all through the previous evening and into the soul-searching long night.
Nothing would have given her a greater sense of satisfaction or…or fierce justification than to expose Luc for what he was: to state publicly the contempt she held him in and to give him a taste of just how it felt to be helpless within someone else’s power, devoid of pride and self-respect. But how could she, knowing the power he had to destroy her younger brother?
It was not the farce of marriage itself that bothered her; she knew Luc well enough to know that he meant exactly what he had implied by that throw-away comment about modern marriages being of short duration. Once Luc’s purpose was served their marriage would be brought to a very swift and uncompromising end, and of course it would not be a marriage at all, merely a pretence to suit Luc’s own ends.
No, it was the fact that he had the power to force her to do as he wished that she hated, the fact that once again she was allowing herself to be used and manipulated to suit him!
The maid had finished opening the curtains and was standing at a respectful distance from her bed.
‘My name is Benita. I am to be your maid. If you wish to have breakfast here in your suite…’
Her English was perfect, if slightly stilted—it had been Luc who, during the years of his minority, had insisted that S’Antander’s schools taught all its pupils English as a second language. Even then he had been strong-willed enough to oppose the old-fashioned views of the Regency of Ruling Elders, who had felt that such a course was an unnecessary expense.
‘S’Antander is a very small country,’ he had told them. ‘It is only to be expected that many of my people will want to go and live and work in the wider world, and when they do it is only right that they should be equipped with the means to do so. They must have the opportunity of learning a second language!’
Carrie remembered sardonically now how much she had admired him for his stance when her father had related the episode to her! But at that time, of course, she had been only too inclined to admire anything and everything that Luc did. As well as admiring Luc himself. Admiring? She had adored him, worshipped him…’
‘Thank you, Benita. Breakfast would be—’ she began, and then stopped speaking as the door to her bedroom was thrust open and Luc strode in.
The maid, round-eyed and pink-cheeked, took one look at him, dipped a nervous little curtsy and fled, leaving Carrie to glare unwelcomingly at him and to curse the fact that she had not seen fit to pack something to sleep in!
The beautifully soft towelling robe she had found in her bathroom and left last night on the chair beside the huge six foot square bed she was now occupying had already been removed—no doubt by the attentive maid!
A little unexpectedly Luc was wearing a body-hugging white tee shirt, a pair of easy fitting jogging bottoms and running shoes.
She remembered that he had always been insistent on adopting a healthy lifestyle. His own private suite of rooms included its own indoor swimming pool, and he was a virtually championship class skier and an Oxford Blue.
Carrie well remembered the intoxication of crewing for him on board his racing yacht, and recalled that he had even played polo for a while, whilst at university in England.
But though he might work to keep healthily fit, it was Mother Nature who had originally given him his superbly muscled and even more superbly male body, Carrie decided grimly. She was the one who was responsible for the havoc that Luc created, the desire and wanton longing he aroused so easily in Carrie’s own sex.
Put Luc in any kind of clothes and any kind