Miranda Lee - Mistress Of Deception

All he knew was that he had to have her naked beneath him, have her tremble as only she could tremble, have her take him to those places no other woman had ever taken him before.

‘Alan, no,’ she groaned again.

But it sounded like a yes to his impassioned ears. He had no mercy for her protests or her tears. He kept up the kissing and the touching till she gave one last shudder and whirled in his arms. Only then could he perhaps have seen the despair in her eyes, if he’d been capable of seeing anything beyond his own excruciating need. As it was, all he saw was that ripe red mouth, soft and swollen and seductive. He wanted to lose himself in that mouth, to have those pouting lips kiss him all over, to have them tease and torment his flesh till he could stand it no longer.

So that when she swept her arms up around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers in a kiss far more brutal than any she’d ever sought before, his only thoughts were of what awaited him behind her bedroom door.

‘I hate you,’ she choked out when he scooped her up into his arms and carried her into that bedroom.

His blue eyes glittered in the semi-darkness. ‘I love the way you hate, Ebony. Keep it up.’ And with that, he dropped her on the bed and started stripping off her clothes.

EBONY woke the next morning knowing that she finally hated Alan Carstairs.

It had been a long time coming.

At fifteen, she had hero-worshipped him. At sixteen, she’d developed a full-blown schoolgirl crush. By seventeen, she was constantly fantasising about him, till finally, at eighteen, she’d made an utter fool of herself over the man.

She cringed at the still sharp memory of her throwing herself at him in the library that night four years ago, gushing with adolescent stupidity that he must love her if he’d paid for her out of his own pocket all these years. He hadn’t known what had hit him when she’d upped and kissed him. How ironic that it had probably been his momentary but stunning response to that foolish kiss that had been responsible for what had happened three years later.

Oh, he’d stopped the kiss soon enough, well before he could have been accused of tampering with her morals. But the memory of his tongue thrusting deep into her mouth, of his arms tightening like steel bands around her even for a split-second, had been enough to keep fuelling her fantasy that underneath his bluster he loved her and wanted her.

And she’d naively told him so.

Of course, he’d torn strips off her at the time, telling her she was acting like a silly little fool, that his paying for her had been his way of showing gratitude to her father who’d once lent him money when no one else would, that he considered her guardianship a sacred trust that could not and would not be sullied by him, that his briefly kissing her back had been meant as a savage lesson on what could happen if a hormone-filled teenager like herself fell into the wrong hands.

She’d finally believed him that night, shame and embarrassment making her flee his presence. How she had cried and cried! Nothing Mrs Carstairs said—and the dear woman had tried everything— could make her stop. All Ebony had been able to think of was that she couldn’t stay in that house, seeing Alan every day, reliving her moment of humiliation, living off his charity. She had seized on this last reason as an excuse to flee him, and his house, as soon as she could.

But she hadn’t been able to forget him, no matter what she’d done. Hard work and a busy and varied social life had filled her hours, but not her heart.

Gary Stevenson had come into her life when she’d been a very vulnerable twenty. Still a virgin, despite her physical beauty attracting many admirers, Gary had become first her photographer, then her friend, and finally her lover.

Why had she given in to him and not the others?

He’d been good to her. Sweet. Kind, And one night he had caught her at a very weak moment. Afterwards, there had seemed to be no going back. And in truth, she’d found much comfort in the human closeness of their affair, in having Gary hold her and tell her that he adored the ground she walked on. Oh, he hadn’t pretended to really love her, which had been a relief in a way. His being in love with her might have made her feel guilty. But he’d liked her and desired her and, in the end, had even asked her to marry him. They would go to Paris together, he’d said, and become a raging success.

She had had to refuse, of course, and, though disappointed, Gary had not been heart-broken, taking himself off to Paris anyway while she had gone on with her modelling here in Sydney. For a while, she’d been very depressed and lonely, thinking she’d done the wrong thing. But then the unexpected had happened. Alan had become her lover, and she’d quickly found that what she’d experienced in bed with Gary had not prepared her for the intoxicating excitement and wickedly irresistible rapture of being in Alan’s arms.

Which is why I’m here now, she groaned silently, and threw a pained look across at Alan’s sleeping form.

God, why do I let him do this to me—take my self-respect and pride and grind it into the dust, make me say and do things when I know he doesn’t love me? He told me the morning after the first night I slept with him. He loves Adrianna. What he feels for me is nothing but lust, an uncontrollably mad lust.

Ebony could still recall the horror she’d felt when he’d told her that, and then added that he wanted to keep their relationship a secret from the world, and especially his mother. Their passion for each other would pass, he’d claimed. No need to hurt anybody with the knowledge of their liaison when it was only a fleeting thing.

Yet all the while he’d been saying this, she had been hurting. More than hurting—breaking into little pieces. She’d argued with him on this last score, wanting him at least to recognise in public that she was his woman. But no…People would not understand, he’d said. They’d talk.

So he’d kept her as a hole-and-corner mistress, to be visited in the dead of night, to be used for his pleasure in private while the world at large saw them as almost enemies.

And she had gone along with it, despising herself while counting the days till he came to her again, then vainly trying to salvage some pride by never showing any affection or special consideration towards him, by reducing his visits to nothing more than raw sexual encounters, with no love or warmth involved. There was a perverse pleasure in taunting him with her cold indifference to whether he came or not, in letting him think that there were plenty of other fish in the sea to fill her empty bed if he wasn’t in it, in feeding his crazed jealousies that she might actually do some of the things she did with him with other lovers.

As if she would. Not even Gary had been able to coax such intimacies from her, or such abandonment. Only Alan…

Tears filled Ebony’s eyes, but she dashed them away with the backs of her hands. The time for tears was long gone. Now it was time for action.

Last night had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that she had no strength against Alan’s sexual power over her. No matter how angry with him she was, he only had to touch her and she was lost.

And it would always be that way, she agonised. Love him or hate him, she was his for the taking whenever he wanted her. It was this mortifying realisation that propelled her not to change her mind from what she had already decided she must do— go to Paris with Gary.

Shivering a little, she slipped out of the warmth of the bed and dragged on her white bathrobe over her naked and vaguely aching body. She flushed guiltily to think it had been herself—and not Alan— who had been the insatiable one last night. Was it because she had known this would be the last time?