LITMIR.BIZ

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his mouth to hers.

      “Babe.” His voice caught and broke; he clasped her face in his hands and kissed her, deep and hard. “Oh, my sweet babe.”

      Her hands swept under his jacket, her palms spreading across his chest. She felt the race of his heart, knew it matched the galloping beat of her own.

      “Yes,” she said, “oh, yes, please. Please…”

      She groaned when he dragged down the straps of her dress. The swell of her breasts above the lacy filigree of her bra shone like fresh cream in the moonlight. She cried out when he buried his face in her neck. Her head fell back; he cupped her breasts, bit lightly at her skin, slipped his hands beneath the bra and touched the eager flesh that awaited him.

      Her answering cry tore away whatever thin veneer of civilized behavior that remained to him. He made a sound deep in his throat, drew her further into the darkness, pressed her back against the wall.

      She whispered something he couldn’t understand as he thrust his hands up under her skirt. Her hips tilted towards his; he brushed his palm over the scrap of lace that covered her. She was hot, wet enough so he could feel the slickness of her through the lace; she burned like molten lava against his questing fingertips.

      He groaned, and ripped the lace away. “Come to me,” he whispered…

      “No!”

      Her cry rose into the night, sharp and piercing as the gust of wind that had suddenly come from the sea. Gage didn’t hear it. He was lost, blind to everything but the feel of her in his arms, the taste of her on his lips. It had been so long. So long…

      “No.” Her hand clamped over his; she twisted her face away from his seeking mouth. “Stop it,” she panted, “Damn you, I said stop!”

      The urgency in her voice, the combined anger and fear, snapped him back to reality. He went still, his body numb as he became aware of her struggles. He blinked his eyes, like a man who has gazed too long at the sun, and looked down into her face.

      “What?” he said. “What?”

      She was trembling and she hated herself for that, hated herself almost as much as she did for having succumbed, for having let herself be caught up in one blind, foolish moment of passion.

      “Let go of me,” she whispered.

      Let go of her? Let go of her, when she’d just been coming apart like a falling star in his arms?

      “Let go,” she said again, and what he heard in her voice now vanquished whatever dream had held him. Reality was her cold voice, her cold eyes…

      Her contempt.

      The fire inside him died. He stepped back, adjusted his tie, smoothed down his shirt. She fixed her shoulder straps, tugged down her skirt.

      “That’s a dangerous game you were playing, lady,” he said, when he could trust himself to speak.

      Her eyes flashed. “You were the one playing games, not me.”

      “Dancing a man to the edge and then telling him to behave himself might win you applause in some quarters, babe, but sooner or later, you’re liable to do that to a man who doesn’t give a damn about the rules.”

      She wrapped her arms around herself. It was hot out here in the garden, but the wind carried a chill in its teeth, or maybe the chill was inside her; it was impossible to tell and she didn’t much care. All that mattered was how close, how dangerously close, she’d come to falling into the trap again.

      “I suppose you think I was the one who stalked you.”

      “Stalked?”

      She heard the growl in his voice, knew he was angry, but so what? She was angry, too, dammit, angry and hurt.

      “Stalked,” she said. “Followed me, even though I made it perfectly clear I was trying to get away from you.”

      Gage gave a bark of laughter. “Give me a break! You wanted me to come after you. I saw the way you looked at me. I understood what it meant.”

      “It’s just a good thing you finally figured out what ‘no’ meant. Otherwise—”

      “Otherwise, what?” A slow smile crept across his mouth. He reached out, traced a finger over her parted lips. “Be honest, baby. If I’d ignored that ‘no,’ I’d be inside you right now and you’d be—”

      The crack of her hand against his cheek echoed through the silence of the night.

      “You no good bastard!”

      Her voice trembled. She despised herself for it, for the weakness that had sent her into his arms…and for the knowledge that he was right. For all those reasons and a thousand more, Natalie Baron lifted her chin, met her husband’s angry glare and spoke the words she’d once never imagined herself saying, the words she’d bitten back over the last endless months.

      “Gage,” she said, “I want a divorce.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE sound of a lawnmower woke Natalie from a fitful sleep.

      She blinked her eyes open, then shut them against the bright sunlight that poured into the room. That was a surprise. Hadn’t Gage remembered to close the blinds before he’d come to bed? It was something he always did, for her. The light didn’t bother him but she…

      “Oh, God.”

      Natalie’s whisper rose into the still morning air. Of course Gage hadn’t closed the blinds. This wasn’t their bedroom, this was the guest room. She and Gage hadn’t shared a bed last night.

      Her throat constricted.

      For the first time since the night they’d eloped, she and her husband had slept apart.

      Well, no. Not exactly. Slowly, she sat up and swung her feet to the carpeted floor. Actually, they’d slept apart lots of times. More and more times, in fact, over the past year and a half. Gage was always off on business trips, exploring new sites for Baron Resorts, talking high finance with bankers from Bangkok to Baltimore, checking out the competition…

      Or so he said.

      Natalie pushed a fall of dark hair back from her face. She rose and made her way into the attached bathroom, trying to avoid seeing her reflection, but it wasn’t easy. The interior designer who’d “done” the bath had covered the walls with mirrors. Since the room was the size of the first apartment she and Gage had lived in, that meant lots of mirrors. Acres, or so it sometimes seemed. It wasn’t what she would have done—what woman in her right mind really wanted her reflection beaming back at her from every angle, first thing in the morning? But Gage had given the designer carte blanche.

      “Everything subject to my wife’s approval, of course,” he’d said, standing there with his arm around Natalie’s shoulder.

      “Of course, Mr. Baron,” the designer had replied, casting a fawning smile in her direction.

      “Just don’t bother her with details,” Gage had added, with a just-between-us-guys grin. “My wife has enough to do without worrying about chips of paint.” He’d beamed down at her. “The country club tennis tournament, her charities…isn’t that right, darling?”

      “Absolutely,” Natalie had answered. What else could she have said, with her husband and a complete stranger beaming at her as if she were some clever new wind-up doll?

      Natalie brushed her teeth, rinsed her mouth, and winced when she looked up and saw a universe of Natalies watching her.

      “Ugh,” she said to the straggly hair, the pale face, the smudge of mascara beneath one eye that was all that remained of the makeup she’d never taken off last night. She could have: the guest suite was well-equipped. The designer had seen to that. Cotton sheets so soft they felt like silk, Unisex pajamas, fluffy white bathrobes, disposable slippers, sample sizes of

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