Modern Romance - The Best of the Year. Miranda Lee
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closed the door quietly in his face.
She had donned one of her slinky new nightdresses before the door opened again. She scrambled hastily below the top sheet and looked across the room enquiringly.
‘What bloody rules?’ Acheron slung at her, poised hands affixed to his lean hips, his hard-muscled abdomen prominent.
‘One,’ Tabby enumerated. ‘Any relationship we have has to be exclusive and if you plan to stray you have to tell me and finish it decently. No secrets, no sneaking around on me.’
Acheron surveyed her with wild golden eyes of increasingly wrathful incredulity. ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’
‘Two,’ Tabby continued unconcerned. ‘You treat me with respect at all times. If I annoy you, we have it out but not around Amber.’
‘You’re absolutely out of your mind,’ Acheron breathed with unsettling conviction while he studied her with seething, dark golden eyes. ‘And I married you.’
‘Three,’ Tabby pronounced woodenly, although her colour was high and her hands clenched into fists by her side. ‘I’m not a toy you can pick up and put down again whenever you feel like it. I’m not the entertainment when you’re bored. If you treat me well, I will treat you equally well, but if you don’t...well, all bets would be off then.’
‘Na pas sto dialo!’ Acheron murmured wrathfully. ‘It means, go to hell, and take your precious rules with you!’
Tabby didn’t breathe again until the door had snapped closed behind him and then she lay back in bed, her body feeling heavy as a stone dropped from a height, her tummy rolling like a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Well, that was one way of getting rid of Acheron without losing face, one way of ensuring he was forced to see her as an equal. What else could she have said? Sliding willy-nilly into a casual sexual affair with no boundaries was not her style and with a man as volatile as he was it would be a sure recipe for disaster. But now that the ultimate womanising, free-spirited man knew that she would make major demands, he would be careful to avoid her from now on.
And what sort of idiot was she to feel sad about that fact? She would get over her silly notions about him—of course she would, because there was really no other option open to her. He wanted one thing, she wanted another, so it was better to end it before it got messy and painful and humiliating. Better by far...
* * *
In the middle of the night, Acheron went for a cold shower. His erection wouldn’t quit and he was still in an unholy rage. Rules, blasted rules. Was he suddenly back at school? Who did she think she was dealing with? Even more crucially, what did she think she was dealing with? Did she assume he had got into that bed and somehow signed up for the whole relationship charade? Trust a woman to take a concept as simple as sex and complicate it!
Even so, he was as furious with himself as he was with her. He had suspected that her naivety would lead to problems and he knew he should have listened to his misgivings. But just as the hot blood pulsing through his tense, aching body wouldn’t stop, his desire for her had proved unrelenting. He’d had to know what she was like and he’d found out and, even worse, she had been amazing and no sooner had he stopped than he wanted to go again...and again...and again. His even white teeth clenched hard. That fast he was recalling the hot clenching of her tight little body around him, an explicit memory that did nothing to cool his overheated libido.
* * *
‘So, who’s the cutest little baby in the world?’ Tabby chattered the next morning while Amber waved her spoon in the air, cheerfully responding to the warm, loving gush of Tabby’s appreciation.
Acheron suppressed a groan and slung himself down into a chair by the dining table on the terrace. Baby talk at breakfast time, one more thing she had brought into his life that was not to his taste. First thing in the morning he liked sex and silence and since he had had neither he could not be expected to be in a good mood, he reasoned impatiently. The sight of Tabby in a little red strappy top and shorts that exposed far too much bare creamy skin for his delectation didn’t help. Even a glimpse of the tattoo on her arm as she swivelled in her seat failed to switch off the ever-ready pulse at his groin.
Tabby tried to scan Acheron without being obvious about it, sending little flips of her eyes in his direction with her lashes quickly dropping again. He was so beautiful; it was surely a sin for a male to be so beautiful that she was challenged to stop staring at him. Even the awareness of the lingering tenderness between her legs couldn’t dull her appreciation of that long, lean, powerful frame of his, gracefully draped in the chair like a work of art to be admired. The sunlight glittered over his black springy curls, and she wanted to run her fingers through his hair, stroke that stubborn jaw line set like granite until she awakened that wonderful smile again. Disconcerted by her treacherous thoughts, Tabby twisted her head away, resisting temptation.
Amber extended both arms in Acheron’s direction and beamed at him. ‘Not right now, koukla mou,’ he murmured. ‘Have your breakfast first.’
That he had acknowledged Amber’s presence but not hers aggravated Tabby. Last night she had only been a body but this morning she was evidently invisible into the bargain. ‘Good morning, Acheron,’ she said curtly.
‘Kalimera, yineka mou,’ Ash murmured silkily, noting the fiery brightness of her extraordinary violet eyes as she settled her gaze on him. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Like a log,’ Tabby lied, wondering why he brought out a mean streak in her that she had never known she had.
A maid poured his coffee, and the rich aroma flared her nostrils, inexplicably reminding her that Sonia had become preternaturally sensitive to certain smells when she first fell pregnant with Amber and an edge of panic suddenly sliced through Tabby’s surface calm. ‘Last night...’ she prompted abruptly, waiting with a rapidly beating heart and hot cheeks for the maid to retreat. ‘You did use protection, didn’t you?’
Magnificently nonchalant in the face of that intimate question, Acheron widened lustrous, dark golden eyes in mocking amusement. ‘You think I would be stupid enough to neglect such a precaution?’
‘I think in the heat of the moment if you wanted something enough you would take risks,’ Tabby admitted tautly.
Acheron lifted a winged ebony brow and cocked his handsome head in Amber’s direction. ‘Not if it meant risking the acquisition of one of those,’ he declared. ‘Passion doesn’t rule me.’
‘Or me,’ she echoed half under her breath. As she leant forward to help Amber clear her plate, her breasts stirred beneath her tee with the movement, pushing her unbearably sensitive nipples against the fabric, and made her think that a bra would have been a better idea than going without. Particularly in Acheron’s radius.
The same view was not wasted on Acheron either, who recalled the precise pout of her delicate flesh and his almost overpowering desire to eat her alive. While the smouldering silence at the table stretched, the nanny entered and removed Amber from her chair to bear her off for a bath.
Acheron dragged in a deep, cooling breath of the sunshine laden air, knowing that, for the sake of peace and better understanding, he had to challenge Tabby’s misconceptions. ‘Your rules?’ he mused with a dismissive shrug of one broad shoulder. ‘My rules? I never ever get involved with clingy, needy women.’
Coming at her out of nowhere, that statement crashed down on Tabby like a brick dropped on glass and her head flew up, violet eyes wide. ‘Are you calling me clingy and needy?’
‘What do you think?’
Tabby sprang out of her chair, the feet of it slamming back noisily across the tiles underfoot as she stabbed her hands down on the table for support. Anger had gripped her in a stormy surge. ‘How dare you? I’ve never been clingy or needy in my life with a man!’
‘Yet your first move is to try and hedge me round with rules. You want reassurance and promises about a future that is unknown to both of us,’ Acheron