Legally His Omnibus (24 page)

‘I take it that on this occasion you won’t want to celebrate a successful conclusion to our activities at the Soda Fountain,’ Dracco drawled as they left the store with half a dozen large carrier bags.

For some reason, his reference to a favourite rendezvous for her schoolgirl treats on her visits to her father’s office filled her with a welling sense of emotion. So much so that she stopped dead in the street, causing Dracco’s smile to change to a frown as he watched her.

Imogen felt as though she wanted to run and hide.

Just for one betraying millisecond of time she had caught herself actually wishing that things could be different, that she and Dracco were genuinely making an attempt to start afresh with one another and that the planned conception of their child, her father’s grandchild, was an event they were undertaking in a mutual mood of love and joy.

What on earth was happening to her? Did it really only take the mention of the Soda Fountain to wipe away the betrayals that lay between them? Surely she wasn’t really so foolish and so vulnerable?

Her head lifted, her pride responding to the challenge she had given it. Managing a valiant smile, she told Dracco coolly, ‘Somehow I doubt that indulging in calorie-laden snacks and these clothes—’ she swung her carrier bags meaningfully ‘—go together.’

‘You could do with putting a bit of weight on,’ Dracco informed her, still frowning.

Of course he would think that! Lisa was far more voluptuously shaped than she was. ‘Well, if you have your way I expect I soon shall be,’ Imogen returned, and then caught her bottom lip in her teeth, her face burning a hot, self-conscious pink.

For a moment Dracco said nothing, simply studying her with a hooded gaze whilst more than one woman passer-by paused to look interestedly at him.

‘If that’s meant to be an invitation—’ he began.

Immediately Imogen stopped him, shaking her head vigorously as she denied any such intention. ‘The day I invite you to take me to bed,’ she told him furiously, ‘is—’

‘Be careful, Imo,’ Dracco told her softly. ’I’ve already warned you about challenging me.’

CHAPTER FIVE

A
LMOST
CHILDISHLY
I
MOGEN
kept her eyes tightly closed, even though she had been awake for well over ten minutes, knowing already what she would see the moment she opened them.

Outside the bedroom window she could hear a blackbird carolling noisily. Fighting to ignore the sensation of despair in the pit of her stomach, Imogen opened her eyes and stared across her pillow to the one that should have borne the imprint of Dracco’s dark head. But, just like the huge double bed itself, it showed no evidence of Dracco’s presence.

It was five days now since they had returned from London, almost a week, and still nothing had happened; still Dracco had not...they had not...

All right, so he had been away on business for three of those nights, but she had moved into the master suite the evening of their return from the shopping trip filled with trepidation. Dracco had never come anywhere near the room, or her, preferring instead to sleep downstairs on the sofa in his study, apparently because he was in the middle of a very important business deal which necessitated him making and receiving calls from other continents.

‘There was no point in me coming upstairs and disturbing you, not when I knew I’d got these calls coming through,’ he had explained carelessly to her the next day when she had eventually seen him. ‘You weren’t disappointed, I hope?’

Imogen had not known what to reply. And she had told herself that she was only too pleased to hear that he would be going away for a few days.

But in his absence, no doubt because she had had the unfamiliar luxury of time to think about such things, she had found herself questioning just why he had not as yet made any attempt to ensure that she gave him the child he wanted; the child that was, after all, the reason for them being here together.

Yesterday, when he had returned without warning late in the afternoon, she had been convinced that the event she was dreading was imminent, but once again Dracco had left her to sleep alone.

Because he didn’t want her? Because he only wanted the child she could give him? Because in reality the woman he truly wanted was Lisa?

The pristine pillow next to her own began to blur. Wrathfully Imogen told herself that she didn’t care and blinked away the tears. She was not going to cry!

No, instead of wanting to cry she ought to be asking herself why she was being so illogical. After all, by rights she should have been pleased.

* * *

Once she had showered and dressed, Imogen made her way downstairs. She had grown up in this house. Absently she ran her fingertips along the smooth rich wood of the carved banister rail. Hidden in its carving were tiny little animals; Imogen could remember her mother showing them to her. When her mother had been alive this house had been a home, the kind of home she would have wanted to give her own child, but her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage had changed that and had turned it into a place she had needed to seek refuge from.

And the person she had sought that refuge with most often had been Dracco! Dracco. Where was he? The study door was closed. Tentatively Imogen hovered outside it and then, taking a deep breath, she reached for the handle and turned it.

Inside the room the computer hummed softly, its screen illuminating the semi-darkness. Frowning, her housewifely instincts aroused, Imogen started to make her way towards the window to release the closed blind and let the sunlight in, but then, abruptly, she stopped as she saw Dracco’s sleeping form sprawled uncomfortably on the narrow sofa.

He was still wearing the clothes he had arrived home in the previous afternoon—a lightweight suit, the jacket of which was lying on a chair. At some stage he had obviously started to unbutton his shirt, and as her eyes adjusted to the half-light of the room Imogen could see the deep dark ‘V’ of exposed flesh stretching from his throat all the way down to where his trousers lay low on his hips.

Her muscles contracted in helpless reaction, a silent, tortured contortion that sliced through her body. She made an involuntary movement towards him and then stopped. In the shuttered heat of the room his fine, silky body hair lay in damp whorls against his flesh; his chest rose and fell with his breathing. Even relaxed, his muscles had an imposing male tautness that drew and held her gaze. Once, as a girl, she had yearned to touch Dracco’s body, her imagination, her senses, her deepest self driven crazy with excitement and longing.

In Rio, whenever she had fallen into the trap of thinking about Dracco, or remembering how she had felt about him, she had told herself sternly that her imaginings had been those of a hormone-fevered adolescent with no bearing whatsoever on reality. She had assured herself too that as an adult she would look scornfully on the reactions of the girl she had been, that she would be safely beyond such foolish feelings.

She had been wrong, Imogen recognised dizzily. Right now the effect the sight of Dracco was having on her was—

‘Imo?’

Imogen jumped as though she had been stung as Dracco suddenly said her name. How long had he been awake, watching her watching him? Guilty heat stained her skin and she started to back towards the door.

‘I...I wasn’t sure if you were in here,’ she began huskily.

‘I had some work to do,’ Dracco told her casually as he sat up and grimaced slightly as he flexed his body. ‘I remember feeling tired.’

‘It can’t have been very comfortable for you, sleeping on the sofa,’ Imogen told him.

She barely knew what she was saying; all she could think about was the extraordinary and very definitely unwanted surge of feeling that had filled her whilst she had been looking at him.

‘Mmm...it could have been worse,’ Dracco responded.

For some reason the way he was looking at her made her face burn even hotter. What exactly was he implying? That sleeping on the sofa was preferable to sleeping with her? He was the one who had insisted that he didn’t want their marriage annulled! Imogen turned round and reached for the door handle.

She was opening the door when Dracco said abruptly from behind her, ‘If you like we could go out later. Drive to the coast?’

Once such an invitation would have filled her with incandescent joy, and no power on earth would have prevented her from accepting it. Perhaps it was because she could remember that feeling so vividly that she felt she had to punish herself. Imogen didn’t know, but she could hear the anger and the pain in her voice as she replied pointedly, shaking her head, ‘No, I don’t like. There’s only one reason I’m here, Dracco, and it doesn’t have anything to do with trips to the coast.’

She was gone before he could retaliate, closing the door behind her as she hurried into the kitchen.

* * *

A solitary morning followed by an afternoon deadheading roses had not done anything to improve her mood, Imogen recognised as she sucked irritably on her thorn-pricked thumb while hurrying upstairs.

‘Imo.’

She froze as Dracco suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs. He was virtually naked, a towel wrapped casually around his hips whilst he rubbed absently at his wet hair with another.

‘I saw you coming in from the garden from the bedroom window,’ he began, ‘and I thought—’

‘That you ought to warn me that you were wandering around half-naked, just in case I got the wrong idea?’ Imogen supplied grittily for him. ‘You were the one who threatened to seduce me, Dracco, not the other way around,’ she couldn’t resist pointing out.

‘Actually, what I wanted to discuss with you is the fact that you’re going to need some form of transport. I was thinking perhaps of a small four-wheel drive. They seem very popular with mothers.’ His voice dropped to a dangerous softness that brought up the hairs on the nape of Imogen’s neck in sensual awareness as intensely as though he had physically reached out and touched her, when he added smoothly, ‘However, since you have raised the subject...’

‘I have not raised anything,’ Imogen objected immediately, and then went bright red, whilst Dracco continued to look at her with that detached hooded gaze of his that was so unreadable.

‘And am I to take that as an indication that you do want to raise...something?’ Dracco queried dangerously gently.

‘You’re the one who insisted that our marriage was to continue and that...you wanted me to...that you wanted a child,’ Imogen told him wildly.

‘And if I remember correctly you were the one who said that there was no point in me attempting to seduce you,’ Dracco pointed out. ‘However, if you’re trying to tell me that you’ve changed your mind...?’

Changed her mind? No! Never! She would die before she did that! But for some reason Imogen found it impossible to voice that fierce denial. Perhaps, she decided, it was because her attention was concentrated not on her own thoughts but on the precarious way in which Dracco had wrapped the towel around his hips, so loosely that...

Imogen discovered that she couldn’t drag her fascinated gaze away from it. And nor, it seemed, could she resist allowing that same gaze to skim helplessly over the flat muscular plane of Dracco’s belly with its dark arrowing of hair that disappeared beneath the soft whiteness of his towel. She found that, as badly as she wanted to swallow, for some reason she could not.

‘Imo.’

There was a smooth, liquid sensuality in the way Dracco mouthed her name, a spellbinding dark magic that somehow paralysed her so that she couldn’t move until his fingers curled round her wrist as he firmly tugged her towards him.

‘You smell of fresh air and sunshine,’ she heard him whisper against her hair. ‘And roses.’

‘You smell of...you,’ Imogen whispered helplessly back. Her eyes, already huge in the delicate triangle of her face, widened even further when she saw the look that leapt fiercely to life in Dracco’s own eyes. The look of a hunter, a male animal, aroused, dangerous, silently waiting to pounce.

‘Have you any idea just how provocative that remark is?’ he asked her with a soft savagery that made her whole body shudder.

As she shook her head he mouthed her denial for her, questioning, ‘No?’ His hand moved to hold the side of her neck, tipping it back, his thumb rimming the shape of her ear, sending a shower of pleasure darting over her skin. The warmth of his breath as he bent his head towards her scorched her senses. His fingers, stroking the delicate, sensitive flesh just beneath her hairline, made her tremble wildly without knowing why she should do so.

‘You don’t know just what it does to a man when you tell him that you can recognise his personal scent? Shall I tell you? Show you?’

He had closed the distance between them, enclosing her with his body, so that she could feel its heat—and more. Automatically she tensed against her awareness of his arousal, a virgin’s shocked reaction to a man’s sexuality, but beneath that reaction, running hot and wild, was a river of flooding sensation.

‘No.’ Her denial slid from her lips into the infinitesimal space between them, and was lost for ever as Dracco’s mouth brushed hers—the briefest of touches, and yet somehow so sensual and commanding that Imogen automatically felt her toes starting to curl.

‘More? You want more?’ she heard Dracco murmuring, even though she could have sworn she had said nothing. Perhaps it was her body that had given her away, her lips? ‘Like this, Imo?’ Dracco was asking her, his voice so soft and low that she had to strain to hear it, just as she was having to strain to reach out for the feel of his mouth against her own. ‘Your mouth should taste sweet and virginal and not all dark enchantment, the mouth of a sorceress no man can resist. Are you a sorceress, Imo?’

Dizzily Imogen tried to listen to what he was saying, but there was a sharp, fierce ache in her body. Beneath her thin top she could feel her breasts swelling, her nipples tight, hurting with the need to have Dracco touch them, stroke them, suck them.

She shuddered wildly, her eyes suddenly wantonly feral as her female instincts overwhelmed her. It was as though time had telescoped backwards, as though somehow she was feeling once again what she had felt as a teenager, only now she was feeling those desires and needs with all the authority and power of a truly mature woman.

Somehow, too, her body considered Dracco to be its mate, a mate from whom it had been parted for far too long! Denied far too long!

Urgently she wound her arms around Dracco’s body, holding him to her, her gaze smouldering passionately into his.

‘Do you want me?’ he asked her softly. ‘When, Imo?’ he demanded when her body shuddered in response. ‘Now?’

Imogen felt her body jolt against his as though it had received a charge of electricity. ‘Yes,’ she responded hoarsely. ‘Yes, now,’ she told him. ‘Now, Dracco!’ she repeated urgently, raising herself up on her tiptoes and pressing her mouth passionately against his.

For a second there was no response, and then Dracco opened his mouth on hers, the fierce drive of his tongue into the intimate sweetness she was willingly offering shattering all her teenage preconceptions about what such a kiss would be.

It was like drowning, dying, being turned inside-out, giving something of herself so intimate that she felt as though he was totally possessing her, and yet at the same time filling her with such an aching hunger that she felt as though she would die unless he satisfied it. And she knew only he, only Dracco alone, could satisfy her.

Beneath her hands she could feel the sleek, hard warmth of his bare skin, the breadth of his shoulders tapering down into the narrowness of his waist. The barrier of his towel frustrated her and beneath the increasingly demanding thrust of Dracco’s seeking tongue she made a small, angry sound of protest.

Immediately he released her, staring down into the desire-hazed darkness of her eyes with a gaze so green and luminous that it made her heart turn over.

‘What is it?’ he asked her rawly. ‘Too much—too soon?’

He was holding one of her hands in his own, and as she turned away, unable to answer his question, his fingers suddenly tightened almost painfully on hers, causing her to look quickly back at him.