A negotiated surrender by Jayne Castle Page A

concluded with absolute conviction.
    "No man has any rights over a woman except those she chooses to grant!"
    But even as she voiced her defiance, her fingers, which had been trapped against his lower chest, trembled as they moved fitfully and encountered the warm skin of him where one of his buttons had come undone. She tried to pull them away as if she had touched a live flame.
    "I guess I'm old-fashioned then," he chuckled huskily, closing his teeth with incredible gentleness around the aroused tip of her breast. "I believe in things like husbandly rights and privileges!"
    "Will you stop talking that nonsense!" she rasped, aware of an unfamiliar twinge in her loins. A twinge that, although it was very mild, immediately sent shock waves through her system. No! It wasn't possible!
    Not even with Drew had she known the ultimate plateau in lovemaking. She told herself that her senses deceived her; that she couldn't recognize the first stirrings of an impending sensation she had never experienced in her husband's arms! How could her body recognize what it had never known?
    "It's not nonsense," Slade gritted as he moved his head down toward her navel, trailing biting little kisses in a path of fire. The path culminated when his tongue dipped into the sensitive depression in her stomach.
    "I'm going to make you mine, Calla Nevin. Completely mine!"
    "No!" It was a protest compounded of feminine fear and angry rejection. But in that moment Calla couldn't honestly have said what it was she was rejecting. It could have been Slade's sensuous attack on her body or it could have been her reaction to the assault.
    He didn't bother to argue against her denial. Instead he shifted both his weight and her own, settling her flat onto the carpet and stretching himself alongside until he partially covered her body.
    "Can you even imagine how I've longed to see you like this?" he demanded with rough savagery as his hand spread out across her vulnerable stomach. "I've wanted you from the first day we met. I took one look at those beautiful eyes, saw the way you moved as you came forward to greet me, and I knew!"
    Calla met the heated amber gaze and tried to struggle back from the edge of the yawning pit that stretched before her. Summoning all the discipline, both mental and physical, for which she had fought so hard during the past four years, she refused to give way before the dominant maleness in him.
    "You knew what, Slade? That you'd found another woman to add to your string of conquests?" she asked steadily.
    He put his hand over her mouth, his eyes meeting hers over the edge of his palm. "I've told you, I'm going to marry you, woman! Will you stop talking about conquests?"
    "I doubt if I'll ever marry again, Slade York," she managed when he allowed her to speak. "But if I decide to risk it again it sure as hell won't be with a man who has no idea of how to go about creating an enduring relationship! Never again will I tie myself to a man who has to dominate a woman in order to prove his own masculinity to himself! A man who is incapable of accepting a woman as an equal because to do so threatens his ego. And most of all I wouldn't choose a man who shows all the hallmarks of the kind of male, who, when he fails to dominate his own woman, turns to another!"
    He stared at her with a suddenly unreadable expression. "So that's it," he finally observed slowly. "He couldn't handle you so he went off to find a woman he could handle."
    "Several of them!" she acknowledged forcefully, not pretending to misunderstand his reference to her ex-husband. "Just as you seem to have done since you left your wife!"
    For a moment she thought she'd gone too far. She felt him tense, as if he were coiled to retaliate with physical punishment and regardless of her resolve, Calla shivered. In spite of her dancer's strength, there was no denying that he was far more powerful than she and if he chose to use that power against her…
    "You know nothing about my divorce