The Married Mistress

With Valentine’s Day, February is always a romantic month. And we’ve got some great books in store for you….

The High-Society Wife by Helen Bianchin is the story of a marriage of convenience between two rich and powerful families…. But what this couple didn’t expect is for their marriage to become real! It’s also the first in our new miniseries RUTHLESS, where you’ll find commanding men, who stop at nothing to get what they want. Look out for more books coming soon! And if you love Italian men, don’t miss The Marchese’s Love-Child by Sara Craven, where our heroine is swept off her feet by a passionate tycoon.

If you just want to get away from it all, let us whisk you off to the beautiful Greek Islands in Julia James’s hard-hitting story Baby of Shame. What will happen when a businessman discovers that his night of passion with a young Englishwoman five years ago resulted in a son? The Caribbean is the destination for our couple in Anne Mather’s intriguing tale The Virgin’s Seduction.

Jane Porter has a dangerously sexy Sicilian for you in The Sicilian’s Defiant Mistress. This explosive reunion story promises to be dark and passionate! In Trish Morey’s Stolen by the Sheikh, the first in her new duet, THE ARRANGED BRIDES, a young woman is summoned to the palace of a demanding sheikh, who has plans for her future…. Don’t miss part two, coming in March.

The Married Mistress

Kate Walker

All about the author…

Kate Walker

KATE WALKER was born in Nottinghamshire, England, and was the middle child in a family of five girls. She grew up in a home where books were vitally important, and she read anything she could get her hands on. Even before she could write she was making up stories.

But everyone told her that she would never make a living as a writer, so she decided that if she couldn’t write books, at least she could work with them by becoming a librarian.

It was at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, that she met her husband, who was also studying there. They married and eventually moved to Lincolnshire, where she was a children’s librarian until her son was born.

After three years of being a full-time housewife and mother she wanted a new challenge, and turned to her old love of writing. The first two novels she sent off to Harlequin were rejected, but the third attempt was successful. She can still remember the moment that a letter of acceptance arrived instead of the rejection slip she had been dreading. But the moment she really realized that she was a published writer was when copies of her first book, The Chalk Line, arrived just in time to be one of her best Christmas presents ever.

Kate is often asked if she’s a romantic person because she writes romances. Her answer is that if being romantic means caring about other people enough to make that extra special effort for them, then, yes, she is.

Kate loves to hear from her fans. You can contact her through her Web site at www.kate-walker.com or e-mail her at kate@kate-walker.com.

To all my special friends in the Teahouse and Gonnabeez from the Queen Bee.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

SARAH stepped back from the partly open door as smoothly and as silently as she could.

It wasn’t easy. The thought of disturbing the occupants of the room, of making them realise that she was here, and that she had seen them, made her heart race and her head swim.

Beneath the bright red-gold hair, her face had lost colour, the brilliant emerald-green of her eyes standing out dramatically against the pallor of her cheeks.

She felt sick—sick with anger and betrayal—and she needed a minute or two to pull herself together before she faced the inevitable. She had to get downstairs again. Had to get away from the scene that had met her shocked eyes as she had first opened the door, taking with it that little peace of mind that just lately she had thought she had finally reached.

Peace of mind. Huh!

That was a laugh! she told herself as she reached the top of the stairs. Peace was something she hadn’t known in a long, long time. Not true peace. Not the wonderful soul-rooted peace that came from knowing you were truly happy, deep, deep down. Truly happy and contented with your world. As she had been once, she’d thought, in a time that now seemed so long ago.

No, she wouldn’t think of the past now. Couldn’t think of it. She had to concentrate on the here and now. The past was what would destroy her ability to handle this.

‘Sarah?’

Jason’s voice: thick and rough with shock.

Sounds of the bed creaking. Of the thud of heavy masculine feet on the carpeted floor. He had heard her and was coming after her.

The man in the hallway heard the sounds too. Heard the voice—a very male voice that made his heart kick sharply and something like disgust twist painfully in his gut.

She had a man. Here. In this house they had once shared. Clearly she hadn’t believed his threat to come back—and soon.

But not soon enough, it seemed. His sweet Sarah had been busy during his absence. She had found herself another man. Found him, and lost him too, if the haste with which the slim auburn-haired figure in the smart pale green shirt and darker pencil skirt was coming down the curving staircase was anything to go by.

Sarah was not happy. She was so unhappy that she didn’t see him standing well back, where his black hair and dark leather jacket blended with the deep shadow of the door. And, that being so, it told its own story of just what she had discovered up in that first-floor bedroom.

The bedroom that had once been theirs.

It was a thought of dark rage, one that brought a red mist rising before his eyes, cutting off his vision completely, and destroying his ability to think rationally. To think at all.

‘Sarah?’ Jason called again, his voice thick with echoes of things she didn’t even want to consider. ‘That you?’

Jason sounded angry now, and before she could find a way to answer, or even make any sort of sound to indicate her presence, he had stumbled out onto the landing and was leaning over the banisters, staring down at her.

His longish fair hair was still ruffled, his cheeks distinctly flushed. But at least he had taken the opportunity to pull on a pair of jeans, even if his chest was still bare, as were his feet.

‘So it is you? Didn’t you hear me calling? Why the hell didn’t you answer? What are you doing back this early?’

It was a technique she recognised only too well. A way of firing questions at an opponent in rapid succession, and so disorientating them that they didn’t know which one to answer first. It meant he was rattled. Because he wasn’t sure just how long she’d been there or whether she’d only stayed downstairs.

‘I can come and go as I please, Jason. This is my house!’

My house, technically, the man in the shadows corrected in the privacy of his thoughts. The big London house had always been the property of the Nicolaides family. He had let her continue to live in it because it suited him that way, but she didn’t own it. Even if she was still, technically, his wife.

But only technically, it seemed.

A moment ago he had been severely tempted to step forward, out of the concealing darkness, and confront the pair of them. But from the moment that the blond man had appeared on the landing outside the bedroom he had changed his mind. Watching and waiting seemed a much better idea. Because if ever he had seen evidence of an illicit assignation, a sexual romp unexpectedly disturbed, it was right there on that bastard’s guilty-looking face. If he was any sort of judge, the other female involved was still right there in the room behind this Jason.

‘Sarah, don’t get so huffy about nothing!’

Jason was descending the stairs now, smoothing his hair back with a hurried hand, belatedly fastening his jeans as he came down.

‘Nothing!’

The freezing note in Sarah’s voice made the watcher grin sharply. He knew that tone well. Too well. Oh, yes, he’d been subjected to just that icy note of indignant reproof more than once. He was still mentally smarting from the impact of the last time.

‘Nothing?’

‘Well, OK, so I took a nap in your bed.’

Clearly the blond man thought he could bluff his way out of this.

‘What’s so terrible about that? We’re going to be sharing it from now on anyway.’

‘I haven’t actually agreed to you moving in.’ To anything, if the truth was told.

‘No, you haven’t said the words, but we both know it’s only a matter of time.’

He sounded so sure of himself, Sarah thought, anger warring with hurt and betrayal and producing a highly explosive combination in her mind. So sure that it was obvious he believed she hadn’t been upstairs; that she wasn’t aware of what had been going on inside that bedroom.

He still thought that he could worm his way out of this. He truly believed that she was so simple, so gullible, that she would swallow everything he tossed at her. And what infuriated her most was the thought that, lonely and unhappy, she must have given him that impression.

‘But we both know it was on the cards.’

‘Jace? Jacey, baby…’

A third voice, a light, petulant, feminine voice, interrupted what Sarah had been about to say. And as Jason whirled, another violent expletive escaping his lips, the bedroom door opened and a small, curvaceous female sashayed out onto the landing. She was wrapped loosely in a deep red silky gown that Sarah recognised instantly. Made for her own slender height, it swamped the other woman’s shorter frame and was too long for her on her legs, falling almost to the floor instead of mid-calf.

‘Are you ever coming back?’ she pouted, peering over the banisters and down at where he stood, frozen to the spot in the hall. ‘I’m missing—’

‘Andrea, I told you to wait!’ Jason cut in furiously. ‘To stay where you were and—’

‘I was bored!’ the woman addressed as Andrea protested. ‘I got tired of waiting for you to come back.’

“‘Don’t get so huffy about nothing”!’ Sarah repeated bitterly. ‘I wonder what your—friend feels about being described as nothing!’

Her outburst silenced Jason temporarily in the same moment that it drew Andrea’s frowning gaze towards where the other woman stood in the hallway.

‘And who are you?’

‘Me?’

To her amazement, Sarah managed it with only a trace of a shake in her voice, though anyone who knew her would have recognised in the stiffness of her tone the struggle she was having to maintain control. The man who was listening to everything knew it only too well.

‘I’m just the owner of this house—of the bed you’ve just got out of, the robe you’re wearing…’

And Jason’s girlfriend, she supposed she could have added, but the words stuck in her throat.

‘The robe you’re—almost wearing!’

She was tight-lipped against her emotions, stiff as a board.

The watcher in the shadows saw how the colour had ebbed from her cheeks, the muscles in her jaw clenching tight, and he was struck by a sudden and distinctly unwelcome attack of something close to compassion.

Dangerously close.

Compassion was a mistake with this woman—a bad mistake—because it left him vulnerable. Once he had given his heart completely and willingly to her and she had smashed it into pieces and tossed it back at him like so much rubbish. He wasn’t likely to risk that happening again.

‘So might I suggest that you go and get back into your own clothes and get yourself out of here? And take your cheating fancy man with you!’

‘But Sarah—’

‘Out!’

She might be able to hold herself together if he went now, she told herself. If he turned and walked out immediately, then she might be able to forget just how foolish she had been over the past couple of weeks. Foolish in that once again she had stumbled into a relationship that had been all wrong from the start.

It had been a relationship in which she had been looking for nothing but comfort and a hiding place, and that had led her to the mess she was in right now.

‘Sarah—please. It meant nothing—honest! It was just a fling.’

‘A fling? You were prepared to betray my trust—to risk our relationship—for something that didn’t even matter! Nothing more than an itch you had to scratch!’

At least Damon had had the honour to really care for his ‘bit on the side’. His mistress had been the woman he wanted as well, and she had only been the wife of convenience.

Jason’s expression was every bit as hangdog and spuriously repentant as she had expected, and he had actually taken a step or two towards her, coming much closer. Too close.

‘Oh, come on, Sarr! You have to understand.’

Another step forward, and this time his hand came out. He had almost reached her, almost touched her, and it was too much.

‘No!’

Her own hands came up, knocking him away as her nerve broke completely, and she whirled, unable to think of anything beyond getting away. She couldn’t even bear to be in the same space as him any longer. She wanted only to be away and clear and free. Free to forget about Jason and all he had ever meant to her.

Free to think of the man who had once meant everything. Free to—

‘Ooof!’

The cry of shock, confusion and near-panic escaped her on a violent expulsion of breath as she blundered, blind and disorientated, straight into an unexpectedly hard and solid mass that was where no mass should be. A hard and solid mass that blocked her path, barring the way.

A hard, solid and warm mass.

A hard, solid, warm, living and breathing form.

A form that was so intensely masculine, lean and hard and forceful, that it could only belong to a man. A tall, strong man, very much in the prime of life.

A man whose arms came out instinctively, folding round her immediately, supporting her, holding her when she swayed off balance and might have fallen. A man whose chest was wide and strong where it supported her head, her cheek resting against his immaculate white polo shirt. She could hear the heavy, regular thud of his heart, echoing the pulse of blood through her own veins. In her nostrils was the heady, sensually intoxicating mixture of clean skin, the subtle tang of some spicy cologne, and the purely individual aroma that was his alone.

A scent that Sarah knew as well as that of her own body. It was one that she recognised so instantly and so completely, not needing to see the man’s face or hear a word spoken in his voice to confirm her immediate and horrified suspicion. Try as she might, she had no hope at all of denying the truth, or escaping from the forceful impact of it.

And if she had needed any further proof, then the instant reaction that flared through her, burning away all other thoughts, all other hopes, provided it in the space of a heartbeat. It licked along every nerve path, obliterating any doubt even before it had a chance to form.

‘Da…’

The single broken syllable was choked from her, impossible to hold back even though her voice didn’t have the strength to complete the name.

Only one man had ever made her feel this way. Only one man had ever been able to stimulate her feelings and her senses so instantly and so furiously.

‘Damon…’ she whispered. ‘Damon!’

Above her head she sensed rather than saw the sensual mouth break into a wide, wicked grin of pure triumph, and felt the faint rumble of amused laughter under her cheek. She knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was glorying in the fact that he had had such an impact on her, and at such speed, evoking the instant effect that she had been unable to hide.

Only the realisation that she had given him the weapon to use against her, putting it almost into his hands herself, kept her silent in mortification, and she had to grit her teeth against the flurry of angry rejection that nearly escaped her. Damon Nicolaides needed no encouragement at all to feel instantly and infinitely superior to any other human being. His head was already swollen wide enough, and he would only take her hurried protestations as an indication of exactly the opposite of what she said.

‘Damon…’ she tried again, aiming for a very different tone. ‘Let me go this minute!’

Once more she felt the chuckle echo in his chest.

‘You know you don’t mean that, sweetheart.’

It was the first time in over six months that she had heard his voice, and the bitter-sweet sensation of its tug at her emotions, the memories it revived in the space of a heartbeat, almost undid her totally.

‘Oh, but I do!’

Gathering together all that was left of her tattered strength, she twisted in his arms and flung back her head so that she could look up, straight into his dark, shuttered face.

And instantly regretted her action desperately.

If letting him feel her immediate response to his presence had been a mistake, then this was definitely error number two—and a far worse, potentially far more dangerous move than anything she had done yet.

Because as soon as she saw him, saw the dangerously handsome face, with the broad, defined cheekbones, the flashing dark eyes and the sensually warm mouth, it was as if he had never been away. In those few, shaken moments, the hundred and eighty days of his absence from her life slid away like so many seconds, and she was jolted back once more to the appalling, devastating moment in which she had learned the truth. When his own father had forced her to see how her love for this man was built not on the strong, sure foundations she had believed it to be, but instead on slippery, shifting sands that had slid away from under her feet, leaving her reeling and lost without any support.

‘I do…’ she tried again, only to hear the words disintegrate as soon as they hit the air, splintering into tiny pieces that had none of the emphasis she aimed for.

And none of the impact she needed, she admitted to herself as she looked into her husband’s deep, dark eyes, and saw there only as much response to her protest as he might have shown if a fly had landed on the olive-toned skin of his arm and he had wafted it away idly with one hand. Instead his smile grew, becoming a broad, fiendish grin as he looked down at her.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he drawled in his softly accented tones. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

Before she could register just what the grin meant, before she had time to realise that she had also made mistake number three as well as one and two, the proud head had lowered swiftly and his mouth took hers in a searing kiss.

A kiss that swept away all pretence at resistance. One that slashed through her defences before she even had time to think about building them, sweeping them aside as a torrential flash-flood might deal with a few weakly rooted saplings it had found in its way, carrying them before it on its relentless, savage path.

Sarah was completely in the power of that storm force. Under attack from a bewildering, devastating array of emotions, she simply closed her eyes and went under, surrendering to the deepest, most elemental demand of all. That of total sensuality.

It was like the first kiss she had ever experienced and yet it was like no other she had ever known. It started hard and fierce and demanding, but instantly gentled as in spite of herself she opened up to him, her mouth softening under his, her lips parting, allowing the arrogantly knowing invasion of his tongue.

She was lost, drowning in sensation, losing all sense of substance, of strength, of reality. The ground was unsteady beneath her feet, the hallway in which she stood just a haze of blue, pale and dark, and the hum of the traffic outside, always present in any part of London, a blur of noise, the buzzing soundtrack to the frantic racing of her heart.

She wanted none of this, her mind screamed at her. Wanted nothing—and yet she wanted everything. She longed desperately for him to release her and in the same thought she prayed that he would hold on to her forever, never letting her go. Letting her go would mean that she was once more cast adrift into the emptiness of being alone, the devastation of loneliness that was all her life had been since their brief marriage had broken up. And, having endured it once, she knew it was something she could not go through again.

‘Excuse me.’

The cold, clipped words vaguely penetrated the heated haze that enclosed Sarah’s thoughts, reaching her only as a tone, not any sort of meaning. But that tone was a million miles away from the ostensibly polite phrase, carrying with it a load of barely controlled fury and cold disbelief.

‘Excuse me,’ Jason repeated, with cutting emphasis.

That at least had some effect on Damon. It made him pause, stilling his mouth on Sarah’s, lifting it slightly away from her.

‘Yes?’

It was curt and disdainful, insultingly so. If Jason’s interjection had been cool, then Damon’s response was nothing short of icy.

‘What is it?’

He was still so close that she could feel the whisper of his breath over her skin as he spoke, still taste him on her lips and her tongue. His scent still lingered tantalisingly in her nostrils. It took a shocking effort to crush down the instinctive, weakly betraying murmur of protest that almost escaped her, and to her horror her hands had actually lifted to pull him back to her before she realised what was happening and determinedly forced them back down again. Only by curling her fingers into tight, defensive fists at her sides, nails digging into her palms, did she feel that she had regained enough control not to give herself away completely.

‘What can I do for you?’

Damon’s words were addressed to Jason, tossed at him with arrogant contempt, so that for a moment or two the other man floundered, knowing that he had definitely lost ground, but not really sure how to go about regaining it.

‘I…I’d like to know…’

The fool was definitely rocked, clearly knocked off balance, Damon thought privately, allowing himself a small, grim smile of satisfaction at the sight of Jason’s uncomfortably flushed face, the look of angry confusion in his eyes. And that was exactly how he wanted it. It fitted perfectly with the plan he had come up with while standing by the front door, watching the little drama that had unfolded before him.

He wanted Jason—and Sarah—off balance and unsure of what to do next. Unsure of themselves—and of him.

He wanted them totally on edge and wondering just how he was going to react.

And so he forced himself to smile into Jason’s belligerent face, clearly taking the other man even more by surprise.

‘Yes?’ he enquired politely, not lessening his grip on the woman in his arms for a moment.

It wasn’t purely for display. Wasn’t just part of the image he wanted to present to this other male—the intruder into his territory, the alien who threatened the peace of his domestic set up.

The truth was that, having once got Sarah back into his arms again after the length of time without her, he simply couldn’t let go. He had waited so long for this, dreamed of it, imagined it in the long, dark silences of the night. And now that he’d finally achieved his aim, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—relinquish it without a fight.