LIGHT AFTER DARK

           Liza had been totally useless, absolutely hysterical somewhere in the background. Lara had found herself in a private ambulance, accompanied not by her friend but by Christophe.“She will follow in my car,” he had asserted, getting in the way of the paramedics while simultaneously telling them what to do.           Lara just hadn’t had the strength to fight Christophe Moreau off that day. Her head had been aching fit to burst and her stomach churning with nausea. She had shut her eyes to escape, telling herself that this explosive and domineering stranger was simply attempting to make amends for an accident that hadn’t been his fault in the first place.          She had been taken to a clinic, subjected to an alarmingly thorough examination against her will, and tucked into a bed in a very expe

“Never!”          Lara gasped breathlessly, searing his dark, savage visage with all the tortured fury of her discomfiting and powerless position.“The very image of you touching me again makes me feel physically sick!”“One lesson wasn’t enough for you, was it?” Christophe murmured huskily, narrowed eyes raking over her outraged features. “Don’t you remember how it was like when I made love to you?”“That wasn’t love!” Lara vented fiercely. “That was pure, unadulterated lust! Nothing more!”“And you have a problem with that... I don’t,” Christophe confided in a silky-smooth voice.          And then, with a sardonic laugh, he released her when she was least expecting the gesture and thrust her carelessly back from him. Lara was trembling in cons

          She kept the car waiting an hour. Lara packed as though she was going away for the weekend. In the back of her mind, a voice kept on talking… scolding her…            ‘You can’t be doing this... You can’t have agreed…’“Three months… This is going to be pure hell,” she whispered and lifted a photo of Randall off the nightstand and stared at it tautly.          It had been taken the day he opened the photo studio. He was wearing a suit… so unusual. A slim, fair man of medium height with gentle brown eyes.“It doesn’t matter to me... That sort of thing isn’t really important,” Randall had soothed when she sobbed out her shame and despair after that dreadful afternoon when she had almost ended up s

          Lara woke up from a long, dreamless sleep, wonderfully relaxed. And then she opened her eyes. Christophe was less than six inches away. Dark golden eyes raked mockingly over her startled face. And so, the relaxation vanished and tension took its place.“I don’t think a woman has ever fallen asleep waiting for me before. You could be seriously bad for my ego…”          With a falsely bright smile on her lips, she sat up.“Good gracious, is that the time?” she gasped. “Why didn’t you wake me?”          Christophe dealt her a genuinely amused smile that quite transformed his powerful dark features. He anchored one hand in the tumbled fall of her blonde hair before she could take evasive action and pulled her head closer to his.“Don’t worry

          Lara sank back to the present and found her fingers shakily touching her lips. She saw more clearly now than she had seen then. Just as Christophe had, ironically, seen more as an outsider looking on.          Christophe alone had registered the lack of sexual tension between her and Randall. But Christophe had cynically misread her behavior. He had believed she was using Randall as a weapon against him, using Randall and her fast-approaching wedding to pressure him into offering her more. And in return, Christophe had used her father’s company to balance the equation.          Taking the cellphone from the table, Lara called Dr. Elliott to ask about her father and was relieved to hear that her father was still angrily insisting that he had had no thought of harming himself but that he was, nonetheless, greatly pleased