‘Very nice,’ he says softly, and bringing them to his lips kisses them.  It is a mocking gesture, but at the touch of his cool lips I tremble with anticipation.  I remember them smiling with sexual invitation.  He lets his fingers run up the skin of my wrist.  ‘Pure fucking silk.’  His eyes rise up to meet mine.  Between the thick lashes they are potent, compelling.  ‘Have you missed me even a little, Lana?’

For an instant, I forget myself and respond to the emotion I see simmering in his eyes.  ‘There is not a day that has gone by where I have not longed for you,’ I whisper.

As if I have slapped him, he snatches his hand away and begins to laugh bitterly.  He shakes his head as if in wonder.  ‘I see now why I was fooled by you.  You’re downright lethal.  A very, very dangerous seductress indeed I have caught in my net.’

He drains his glass and, looking away from me, gestures to a waiter for another.  When he turns back to face me, his eyes are glittering.  ‘So how much did my father pay you?’

I pause.  I am in dangerous territory.  My contract with Victoria does not allow me to reveal the sum or even tell anyone that I have been paid by her.  The waiter arrives with his whiskey and sets it down in front of him.

‘Another,‘ Blake barks.

The waiter nods discreetly and clears his empty glass in one smooth movement.  Blake does not take his eyes off me.

Billie is right.  My position is untenable.  In his eyes I must be the worst kind of slut.  Ahead lies only more misunderstanding and pain for both of us.  The pain has already begun, a physical ache.  It fills my chest.  I can never tell him the truth.  In his mind I will always be his bad romance.  Lady Gaga singing, ‘I want your ugly.  I want your disease.’

‘I’m sorry, but I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement,’ I say, with the full knowledge that without the truth he will always despise me.  I lean back in my chair feeling soiled.  I will never again be clean in his eyes.  And there is not a damn thing I can do about it.  The waiter returns with more whiskey.

‘I know you’re angry but—’

‘Shut the fuck up.  You have no idea,’ he grates through gritted teeth.

I close my mouth.  I have never seen him so openly angry.  He is always so controlled, so smooth.  Even when he was once angry with someone on the phone his fury was so tightly leashed, so frighteningly quiet that I stood stock still behind the door listening.

He shoots his whiskey aggressively, and turning the empty glass on its edge rolls it on the tablecloth.  ‘Do you want more food?’

I shake my head miserably.  This is turning out to be nothing like I imagined.

A muscle in his jaw twitches.  He calls for the bill.

Someone in a suit comes rushing to his side.  ‘Is anything the matter?’ he enquires worriedly.

‘Everything is fine.’  He looks at me hard and deep.

‘But your main course…’

Blake does not take his eyes off me.  ‘I have unfinished business to take care of, Anton.’

I flush badly and Anton slips away with impressive speed from that which has nothing to do with him.  Another waiter, his face schooled into impassive professionalism, comes bearing the bill.  Blake signs for it, unfolds himself out of his chair and comes to stand by me.  I get to my feet and he leads me out of the restaurant.  We do not touch except for his hand splayed on the small of my back.  Possessive, the way only a husband’s hand should be.

Not a word is spoken by either of us in the car, but every cell in my body is responding to his nearness.  My desire for him is such that my hands are clenched tight against my thighs and my sex is actually throbbing.  In fact, the need is so excessive it is almost violent.  I sneak a look at him.  He is staring ahead, the chiseled cheekbones like stone, but that muscle in his throat is ticking like a time bomb.  I know that tick.  It tells me what he cannot, how hard and deep he wants to fuck me.  He is well and truly snared inside his bad romance.

‘What happened to all the clothes I left behind?’ I ask in the lift.

‘You enquire about last season’s fashions?  What about the people you left behind, Lana?  Why don’t you enquire about them?  Me for instance.’

‘How have you been, Blake?’

‘You’re just about to find out,’ he replies with a nasty grin.

Nine

I hear the soft, thick click of the door behind me, and turn around to face him.  He stands there, tall, dark and throbbing with sexual tension.  God!  How I want this man.  A rough sound rumbles in his throat.  I recognize it.  Blind, earth-shattering desire.  It has been a long time since I heard it.  Makes me rock on my feet.  He shoots out a hand and pulls me hard towards him.  My body slams into his.

I have the impression of stone—unmoving.  It will break, but it will never bend.  But I can bend.  I mold my hips into his.  His erection is thick and hot against my stomach.  The rawness of it awakens that great beast inside me.  Greedy, relentless thing.  It wants more, it wants it all, and it wants it right now.  Intoxicated by the smoldering fire in his eyes my hands snake up his chest and twine around his neck, but his strong hands come up and untangle mine.  He catches them in his and takes them behind my back.  His clasp is a firm handcuff.

Very deliberately he holds me away from him and lets his half-lidded eyes rove my parted mouth, my breasts—thrust out towards him and heaving, down my body, to my legs.  His eyes lift again to meet mine.  I am impossibly aroused.

‘I had half a dozen fantasies of what I wanted to do to you when I got you naked.  Tame sex is not one of them,’ he says, as he plucks out the pins in my hair and flings them away.  Released, my hair falls all around my face and shoulders.

‘My beautiful whore.  Once I was good to you and you kicked me when I was down; now you get what you deserve.’

Without warning he grips the two sides of the high collar of my lovely dress and rips it into two.  I clutch the torn ends of my ruined dress together and stare at him in shock.

He looks down at me, breathing hard.  Strangely, he is as cold as ice.  My mind is in unbelievable chaos.  I have misjudged the extent of his fury.  Underneath the façade of calm he is seething with anger at what he perceives to be my duplicity.  I want to cry at the wanton destruction of something so beautiful, but in fact I am too shocked to cry.

‘Dress only in what’s in the box and meet me in the bedroom,’ he commands curtly, and walks away from me.

I stand there a little longer, too dazed to move.  I glimpsed the fierce hunger, and need; now all I see is the iron control in his tense shoulders.  He stops in front of the bar and pours himself a whiskey.  I pick up the box by the side table and go to the bathroom.

Quickly, I take off the torn dress and stuff it into the chrome bin under the sink.  As the lid closes over it a sob escapes my lips.  I had never owned anything so fine before.  It had suggested curves where there were jutting bones and made me feel so elegant and sophisticated.  I could still see Fleur grinning with delight and Madame Rêgine rasping, ‘One of a kind.  You will not find another like it.’

I press my hand to my mouth and avoid my reflection.  I will not cry.  I will be strong, I tell myself while, another part of me stands appalled by his violence.  I know what is in the box.  I pull the satin ribbons and lift the cover of the box.

And frown.

It is not white lingerie and shoes.

As if in a trance, I pick up the familiar velvet box and open it.  Under the yellow lights of the bathroom the diamonds in the sapphire necklace glitter like the bling on a rap singer.  The next thing I find in the box is even more surprising.  Billie’s shorts, the ones I borrowed to wear to the party.  I must have left them behind.  I had totally forgotten them.  I remember that night again.  What did it mean?  That he himself has gone through all my stuff and kept these?  That this item of clothing means something to him?  I open the last item—a shoe box.  A pair of snake skin orange Christian Louboutin shoes, but startlingly similar to the ones I wore the first night we met.