CHAPTER 4

“Never!”

          Lara gasped breathlessly, searing his dark, savage visage with all the tortured fury of her discomfiting and powerless position.

“The very image of you touching me again makes me feel physically sick!”

“One lesson wasn’t enough for you, was it?” Christophe murmured huskily, narrowed eyes raking over her outraged features. “Don’t you remember how it was like when I made love to you?”

“That wasn’t love!” Lara vented fiercely. “That was pure, unadulterated lust! Nothing more!”

“And you have a problem with that... I don’t,” Christophe confided in a silky-smooth voice.

          And then, with a sardonic laugh, he released her when she was least expecting the gesture and thrust her carelessly back from him. Lara was trembling in considerable distress.

          She had lost control. Physical and mental control. And that terrified her. Three years ago, Lara had been twenty, barely out of the teen years and considerably more naive and foolish than she considered herself to be now.

          The last few minutes were like a blackout inside her mind. She didn’t want to examine them. He had made her so angry she had become violent and that knowledge literally filled her with shame and horror.

          Her body felt peculiar. Her heartbeat was still madly accelerated. Her breasts were suddenly extraordinarily sensitive. Lara was maddeningly aware that the lace cup of her bra was chafing her nipples and that her skin felt stretched and tight.

          Horrified by what had happened to her body, she studied the floor, fighting to relocate her composure.

“Let’s get down to business,” Christophe suggested drily. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

“Business?”

          Her eyebrows furrowed.

“I invited you here for one reason only. I think you can be useful to me. I need a woman to play a role. A woman I can trust to play that role to the best of her ability and do exactly what I tell her to do without blinking or talking back. And I think that woman could be you, chérie.”

          Her lashes fluttered in bemusement.

“I don’t think I follow…”

“If you are prepared to place yourself without question in my hands for a period, not exceeding three months, I will consider treating your father’s offense with sympathy, understanding… forgiveness, even...” Christophe stated quietly.

          Sympathy, understanding, and forgiveness…

          Those were strange words coming from Christophe Moreau. Her temples were throbbing. Her concentration was blown. Lara studied him with perceptible incomprehension, temporarily drained of all emotion. She just didn’t know what he was talking about.

“This role,” Christophe added smoothly, letting champagne foam into another glass, “it would entail considerable intimacy.”

“Intimacy…” she whispered shakily.

          Christophe slotted the glass into her nerveless fingers. He surveyed her with immense satisfaction.

“Yes, chérie, intimacy,” he repeated lazily, making a sexual banquet of the word and the long-drawn-out syllables were like a set of taunting fingers on her spine.

“What... Uh… What exactly are you offering me?” Lara framed jerkily.

“You would have to agree before I told you the details.”

          He dealt Lara a cool, steady glance, silky black lashes low over hooded, very dark eyes.

“That’s ridiculous!”

“Not so much, when it comes to you,” he said coldly. “I don’t trust you, Lara. Why should I? And it’s not as though you have moral scruples, is it? And even if you had,” Christophe pointed out, “you do have your father to consider.”

          Lara tensed, forcing herself to concentrate.

“Are you talking about some kind of job?”

          Christophe’s mouth curved wryly.

“Mhm… You could call it that.”

“And would it entail breaking the law?” Lara continued flatly.

“What do you take me for, chérie?”

“Well, Christophe… Would it?” she persisted.

“No.”

          Lara cleared her throat.

“You mentioned… intimacy. Were you talking about… sexual intimacy?” she pursued, tight-lipped and rigid. “Or was that just your idea of a joke?”

          His strong jawline hardened.

“There would be nothing remotely humorous about this, that I can assure you. And yes, I was referring to sexual intimacy. The part you would play would not be credible without it.”

          Oh, God, why was she actually standing here listening to this nonsense? Her oval face was set with distaste and rejection as her imagination ran absolutely rampant. Was he suggesting that she become some sort of business spy, sleeping with some competitor to gain information? An insane idea, but why else the secrecy?

          A kind of job that would last no longer than three months which would entail sex. How utterly revolting! A hysterical laugh clogged up her throat though. Her level of sexual experience lifted such a proposition to the heights of a tragicomic black joke... But then Christophe wasn’t to know that. 

“So… You need a hooker,” Lara said and threw back her shoulders. “Am I to understand that?”

          Christophe shot her a black glance of naked hauteur.

“Are you crazy? I need a woman who can at the very least, behave like a lady.”

“A lady… You don’t have such… lady amongst your many female friends?” Lara cut in. “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? And how many beds are you expecting this lady to climb into at your request?”

          Dark golden eyes narrowed.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked coolly.

          Lara reddened, suddenly uncertain.

“The only bed you would perform is going to be mine,” Christophe spelled out very drily.

          She went white and looked back at him in disbelief. Setting down the untouched champagne, Lara reached for her coat with an unsteady hand.

“This is absolutely out of the question,” she told him with bitter clarity. ‘You are absolutely out of your mind. I have no intention of selling my body to keep my father out of prison! Why the cloak and dagger approach, Christophe? A sweet-talking Greek/French man such as yourself could’ve just asked me to be his mistress without beating so much around the bush. Well, the answer is no... no, no, no! I’d sooner sleep under a bridge for the rest of my life!”

          Brilliant dark eyes raked over her impassively.

“Alrighty then... Go now, I have nothing more to say to you.”

“Oh, but I do! I’m not finished yet,” Lara asserted with venom. “Three years ago, you came into my life like a dark shadow and you tried to destroy it. There is no human being alive whom I hate more than you! And why did you set out to wreck my life? Out of nothing more than arrogant vanity, selfishness, and lust. It didn’t matter to you that I was engaged to another man or that I loved that man. It didn’t matter that you might hurt him as much as you hurt me.”

“You hurt him, chérie, not I,” Christophe returned without emotion.

          Lara shuddered with the force of her own teeming emotions.

“You set out to ruin our relationship…”

“If you had truly loved him, I would have been without power. The power I had you gave it to me...”

          Hot pink flushed her slanted cheekbones.

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did. With every look, with every breath you took when I was near you, in front of you. Your hunger drew me,” he condemned without conscience.

“No!”

          She stared back at him in stark distress and reproach, her father’s problem forgotten as he plunged her back into the past, heaping her with more guilt and an even greater sense of responsibility for all that had gone wrong.

“Did it boost your ego up? Did it made you feel like a real man?”

          Christophe sent her a look of blazing contempt.

“You play with fire, chérie, you get burned.”

          Her knees felt like cotton wool. She was shattered by Christophe’s view of what had happened between them. He was accusing her of having encouraged him when she had fought his ruthless pursuit every step of the way. In the end, her strength abandoned her, so she failed.  

“I came here and I shouldn’t have come.”

          White and drawn, she turned away.

“We hate each other, Christophe. I don’t think you realize the extent of the damage you did three years ago… Well, even if you did you wouldn’t care…”

“You walked away from me…”

          It was still there… That intensity of disbelief and banked-down fury was still there. She couldn’t understand the strength of his emotion after all this time. It wasn’t as though Christophe Moreau had… fallen in love with her.

          No… Right from the beginning, it had been a rawly sexual wanting on his side. The way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way he talked to her. A predator and his victim.

          Passion and pain. That was what he had offered her. And she hadn’t walked away... She had run as if the hounds of hell were on her tail.

“Even so… I still don’t think I deserve to be treated this way,” Lara breathed not quite steadily. “You sit there in your ivory tower, wrapped in all your money, and you learned nothing about mercy, and common sense, or even selfless love. You have the sensitivity of a butcher as far as feelings are concerned.”

          Tears stung her sad, blue eyes but she held her head proudly high.

“You couldn’t be further from the truth,” Christophe slashed back at her rawly.

“This is the truth. You walk over people. You manipulate them. You push them around. My father really liked you three years ago. You see, he couldn’t see through you as I could. Oh, yes, he thought you were God’s gift to men!” Lara proffered in a choked voice of distaste. “But you don’t give a damn for what he’s going through now, do you? All you can see is an opportunity to humiliate me even further. And I won’t give you that power… chérie. You might see me like a whore, but I’m not. I have my pride too.”

          He was pale beneath his naturally olive skin tone but Christophe wouldn’t give an inch. And Lara hadn’t expected him to. He silently seethed, presumably thinking it beneath his dignity to defend himself against her charges. Eyes as flaming gold as the heart of a fire burned her face.

“Were you happy with him?”

          On her passage to the door, Lara froze and slowly turned. He hadn’t absorbed a thing she had said. Pain dug lines of stress into her face. Christophe was asking about Randall. She looked away.

“Randy was my best friend,” she said finally.

“And this... this being a best friend is your idea of a perfect marriage?” Christophe demanded.

          ‘No, but it was what I have ended up with,’ she reflected sadly.

          Her troubled eyes slid back to him and collided with questioning gold and something twisted tight deep down inside her stomach. The atmosphere fairly throbbed with undertones.

          She stopped breathing, every bone in her body pulling taut. For a split second, Lara experienced the most extraordinary physical pull in his direction and resisted it with every last remaining drop of self-discipline. But that split second shook her inside out.

“I would’ve been your lover, your soul, your everything,” Christophe gritted, and the anger was there, the anger she had feared, suddenly flaring up at her without warning and she stepped back.

          Burnished golden eyes alive with derision and fury bit into her with a look as physical as a blow.

“Get out of here!” Christophe told her roughly. “Get out of here before I lose my temper and show you just how sensitive I can be!”