Read Online Constantinou's Mistress by Cathy Williams - Free Book Online Page B

fast dance evaporated as the band began playing a slow tune and she found herself pulled against him and held in place by one large hand pressed into the limp groove of her back. She could smell the exotic undertones of whatever aftershave he was wearing, mingled with his natural masculine scent, and her nostrils flared slightly.
    â€˜Did you come here to spy on me?’ Lucy asked tightly. The palms of her hands were resting lightly on his shoulders, as though she might take flight at any moment and he was prepared for the eventuality. As if sensing the inclination, he raised one hand to the back of her head so that she was nestling into the nape of his neck.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said bluntly, not bothering to disguise the truth. He hadn’t intended to. He had dutifully sat through his six o’clock meeting with his financial director, in fact had spent two solid hours going through the accounts of the Tradewinds, noting when profits had begun to decline, working out theories, and thinking with irritableregularity about his secretary and what she was doing with her mystery date.
    â€˜You did?’ Lucy asked incredulously. ‘Why?’
    â€˜Curiosity.’ Nick shrugged. ‘I wanted to meet this date of yours for myself and I knew that if I asked you to bring him along to one of our social functions you would have declined. Politely but decisively.’
    â€˜That’s…that’s despicable!’ Lucy sought for an adequate expression of outrage.
    â€˜Yes, I suppose it is,’ Nick agreed. ‘But curiosity can be a very powerful lure.’ He himself had not known how powerful until he had found himself hailing a cab to bring him to the restaurant.
    â€˜What were you curious about?’ Lucy asked tightly. ‘Did you think that I might have been lying? Making him up?’
    â€˜Now, why on earth would you think that I would imagine that?’
    â€˜Because I don’t advertise my private life all around the office!’ she snapped in self-defence.
    Instead of answering, he pulled her even closer so that she could feel the hardness of his thighs pressed against her. His dancing, she thought wildly, was positively indecent. She tried to manoeuvre herself so that she could see what Robert was up to, guiltily aware that, whatever prim outrage she was expressing, her body was reacting in quite a different manner to the man she was dancing with.
    â€˜Well, now you’re being ridiculous.’ Nick could feel her itching to get away from him and back to the blanketed safety of her date, but aligned to that he could also feel her body, which was singing a completely different tune, and he felt a spurt of irrational satisfaction.
    He had spent two years locked up in a debilitatingmarriage, one in which the joy of sex had gradually been replaced by the dull acknowledgement that he had somehow become a man whose appetite was satisfied with loveless coupling. He and Gina had continued to share the same bed and their bodies had still met with a certain amount of physical need, but that had been it. For the last six months of their married life they had not made love at all. He had buried his normal red-blooded urges in his work, always intending to finish their marriage once and for all, never expecting the hand of fate to do the job on his behalf.
    And since then he had thrown himself into the fast world of sophisticated women and physically satisfying but emotionally empty sex.
    Except, he was discovering, most of the time the sex was not physically that satisfying. It sated him temporarily but still left him with a hollow suspicion that he had somehow missed something, something vital.
    Only one instance sprang to mind when every pore in his body had been held in a trance, when lovemaking had fulfilled every nerve, muscle and fibre. That one time with the woman he was now holding. Or was that just an illusion?
    He didn’t know. He just knew that when she had mentioned