A Price Worth Paying - By Trish Morey Page 0,52

her lips, his hands hot on her breasts and fingers tight against her nipples and his hard cock thrusting deep inside her. It was all … impossible.

And like a cough suppressed because you were in polite company, but that refused to be suppressed, so that when it was unleashed it was ten times greater than the original would have ever been, her release came upon her with the relentless force of a tornado, picking her up and spinning her effortlessly into its whirling spout, drawing her higher, ever higher in its never ending spiral until she came in a flash of colour and heated sensation and felt herself spat out of the tornado’s spout. She drifted down to the earth, or maybe that was just her legs as he let them down, her fight gone as she rested limply under the weight of his body against hers.

And she hated that he could do this to her—turn argument into a storm, turn anger into passion.

She hated him because he could reduce her to a whimpering mess of nerve endings.

She hated him because she loved him.

Oh God, where had that come from?

She tried to wish the unwanted thought away. She tried to deny it. But the truth of it refused to be wished away or denied. It floated like a balloon let loose, flying high, freed of the shackles that could pull it down.

She loved him.

The concept was so foreign. So unexpected. And yet it explained so much of why she wanted to be with him and why at the same time she feared it so.

She loved him because of what he could do to her and how he made her feel.

She loved him and she hated him because at any moment he would look at her smugly and declare himself the victor of this particular encounter.

Except not this time, it seemed. ‘Mierda!’ he cursed, and pulled himself free, pulling himself away as if she was poison. ‘You’re not on the Pill.’

She blinked, still in recovery mode, not sure why it was an issue. ‘You know I’m not.’

‘I didn’t use protection.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘OH MY GOD!’ She was still reeling from her discovery. The last thing she needed was that. She put a hand to her head, recovery mode short-circuited by a panic that unfurled with a vengeance as she remembered another time, another fear that things had come unstuck, even after protection had been used.

But this time there had been no protection. No defence.

Oh God, was she destined to live her life making love to the wrong men, narrowly escaping disaster with one, only to hurtle headlong into catastrophe with the next?

She’d known from the very beginning that having sex with Alesander was a bad idea. Why had he not realised the complications that could result? Had he not realised how serious they could be?

Her panicked brain morphed to anger. ‘How could you do that?’ she cried. ‘How could you be so stupid?’

Her answer was the thwack of the flat of his hand high above her head against the beam supporting her. ‘Did you ask me to put on a condom?’

‘And so it’s my fault—?’ even though she hadn’t given protection a thought, and she knew she hadn’t, but damned if she was going to accept the blame ‘—because you can’t control yourself?’

‘And you didn’t want it?’

‘Did I ask for it? Did I ever ask for sex from you, or did you simply demand it, as you always did?’

‘You enjoyed it. You know you did.’

‘That’s not the same thing and you know it.’

He turned away from her then, his shoulders heaving, and she sensed the loss of him even as she celebrated the relief that came from the distance between them, and she wondered at the tangle of those conflicting emotions and wondered if love made sense of it all.

Ever since that first day in his apartment it had been the same, the relentless push and pull confusing her thoughts and tangling her intentions.

But now there was something else to confuse her thoughts and add to the tangle in her mind.

What if she were pregnant?

She’d lived this nightmare once before—the overwhelming fear of being pregnant to a man who didn’t want her—the fear, the terror of thinking that she was, the utter helplessness at not knowing.

But beyond that, the endless soul-searching at being tempted to do something she knew she could never do. She wasn’t a religious woman, her parents had brought her up with no particular belief systems that told her she