Powerful and Proud: Beneath the Veil of Paradise / In the Heat of the Spotlight / His Brand of Passion

He wasn’t going to back down.

‘Get on the bed.’

She gave him a little smirk, almost as if he were being so predictable, and lay on the bed. She even put her hands behind her head as if she were incredibly relaxed, but she was trembling.

Damn.

Again Chase hesitated. Don’t do this. He didn’t want to ruin what they had by losing her trust, affection, everything, in a bout of absurdly unsexy sex. Except who was he kidding? They didn’t have anything.

This was all they had—this, right here on the bed.

‘Let me tell you,’ Millie drawled, her hands still laced behind her head, ‘this is turning out to be the worst sexual encounter of my life, and forget about mind-blowing.’

Chase saw that she still trembled.

He sat on the edge of the bed and slowly ran his hand from the arch of her foot along her calf to behind her knee, his fingers instinctively seeking further, finding the soft, smooth skin of her inner thigh. More softness. He felt her muscles tense and quiver beneath his touch. Her breath hitched.

‘I’m not going to play this game,’ he said quietly and she stared at him, her whole body going rigid.

‘This was your idea.’

‘Yeah, I’ll grant you that. But you went for it because this is what you want.’

‘You think this is what I want?’

‘There’s no emotional intimacy or getting to know you in this scenario, is there?’ He slid his hand higher, savouring the sweet softness of her thigh. Another couple of inches would be even sweeter.

She stared at him, mesmerised, trapped. He stilled his hand. ‘You know I’m right, Millie.’

In answer she reached up, lacing her fingers behind his head, and pulled him down for a hungry, open-mouthed kiss. Her tongue delved inside and she arched upwards, pressing her body against him.

Shock short-circuited Chase’s brain for a second. Then his libido ramped up and he kissed her back just as hungrily with an instinct he was helpless to repress—even as he acknowledged this wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t even think it was what Millie wanted, not deep down. She was trying to stay in control, seizing it desperately, and he couldn’t let her.

But then her hand wrapped around him and he stopped thinking about what he couldn’t do. His body was telling him what he could.

‘Millie.’ Her name was a groan against her mouth and he reached up to try to remove her death grip on the back of his head. ‘Wait...’

But she didn’t want to wait. She was all over him, eager, urgent, desperate, making him feel the same way. His self-control was slipping away. How did a man argue for a more emotional experience when the woman beneath him was determined to drive him wild? For the feel of Millie’s hands on him, her legs hooked around his hips as she angled upwards, was making him crazy. Through the fog of his own lust he tried to remember where he’d put the condoms.

‘Quickly...’ Millie whispered, her voice a ragged whimper, and Chase stilled. He heard too much desperation and even sadness in her voice, and he didn’t want that. No matter how much his body screamed otherwise.

‘Millie.’ He pushed away from her a little bit, enough to see her pale, dazed face. ‘Let’s hold on a moment, shall we?’ he said unevenly, even though his greatest desire at that point was to forget emotion and sensitivity, and even a condom, and just drive right into her.

‘No, I don’t want...’ Her face went a shade paler, and then she lurched upwards. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ In one abrupt movement she rolled off the bed and raced to the head. Chase listened to her retching into the toilet in a kind of stunned disbelief.

This was starting to feel like the worst sexual encounter of his life too. He reached for his shorts and pulled them on, grabbed a spare tee-shirt from the drawer and waited on the edge of the bed.

A few minutes later a pale and shaky-looking Millie emerged. From somewhere Chase found a smile. ‘I don’t think that was because of the conch.’

She gave him a rather wobbly smile back, although her eyes were dark with pain. ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Somehow the anger, tension and even the desperation of moments before had evaporated, but Chase didn’t know what was left. He felt bewildered, like someone had skipped ahead in the scene selection on a DVD. He was clearly missing some plot points to this story.

‘Here.’ He handed her the tee-shirt and she slipped it on. Her hair was tousled, the shirt falling to mid-thigh. With a little sigh she sat on the edge of the bed, about as far away from him as possible.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘To which part of the evening are you referring?’ he quipped, parroting her own words from last night back to her.

Millie gave a tiny, tired smile and leaned her head against the wall. She closed her eyes and with a pang of remorse Chase saw how exhausted she looked. Today had been quite the rollercoaster.

‘To the part where I threw up in your bathroom a few minutes ago.’

‘On a boat it’s called a head.’

‘Whatever.’ She opened her eyes. ‘That was another buzz-kill, I suspect.’

‘To say the least.’ They stared at each other, unspeaking, but Chase was surprised at how un-awkward it seemed. Maybe you got to a point with a person where things didn’t seem so embarrassing or strange. If so, he’d got to that point pretty quickly with Millie. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Remember the no-talking clause?’

‘That clause was voided when you threw up. I was about six seconds from being inside you, Millie.’

She bit her lip and he reached over and gently touched those worry marks. ‘You’re going to get a scar from doing that if you don’t cut it out.’

She sighed and shook her head. ‘Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea, Chase.’

He felt a lurch of what could only be alarm. He didn’t like feeling it. At this point, he should be agreeing with her. This was a bad idea. Neither of them needed the kind of mind games this week seemed to play on them. He’d convinced himself he wanted intense, but this? This was way too much.

Yet even so he heard himself saying, ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because I’m not ready.’

She’d felt pretty ready beneath him. With effort Chase yanked his thoughts from that unhelpful direction. ‘Ready?’ he repeated.

‘For this. A fling, an affair, whatever you want to call it. I wanted to be ready, I wanted to move on, but I don’t know if I can. I can’t stop thinking—’ She stopped abruptly, shook her head.

It was no more than he’d already guessed, yet he didn’t like hearing it. Didn’t like thinking that some guy still owned her heart and mind so much he couldn’t even get a toe-in. Jealousy. That was what he felt, pure and simple. Determinedly Chase pushed it away. ‘We went about this all wrong, Scary,’ he said. ‘And that was my fault. I’m sorry.’

Surprise flashed across her features, like the first beam of sunlight after a downpour. ‘For what?’

‘For getting angry. I didn’t like the fact that you were thinking of whatever guy did a number on you when I was kissing you.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s kind of an insult to, you know, my masculinity.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s OK. I should have got over it. Instead I pushed you—and myself—in a direction I had no intention of going.’

Her mouth curved in the faintest of smiles. ‘Angry sex, huh?’

‘It’s really not that great.’