“Whether I will or no?” she asked, still endeavouring to speak lightly. “My feelings in the matter don’t appear to concern you at all.”
“I’d rather you came willingly—but, if you won’t, I swear I’ll marry you, willing or unwilling!”
He was standing close to her now, staring down at her with sombre, passion-lit eyes, and instinctively she made a movement as though to elude him and slip back again into the room. In the same instant his arms went round her and she was prisoned in a grip from which she was powerless to escape.
“Don’t struggle,” he said, as she strove impotently to release herself. “I could hold you from now till doomsday without an effort.”
There was a curious thrill in his voice, the triumphant, arrogant leap of possession. He held her pressed against him, and she could feel his chest heave with his labouring breath.
“You’re mine—mine! My woman—meant for me from the beginning of the world—and do you think I’ll give you up?... Give you up? I tell you, if you were another man’s wife I’d take you away from him! You’re mine—every inch of you, body and soul. And I want you. Oh, my God, how I want you!”
“Let me go... Geoffrey...”
The words struggled from her lips. For answer his arms tightened round her, crushing her savagely, and she felt his kisses burning, scorching her face, his mouth on hers till it seemed as though he were draining her very soul.
When at last he released her, she leant helplessly against the woodwork of the window, panting and shaken. Her face was white as a magnolia petal and her eyes dark-rimmed with purple shadow.
A faint expression of compunction crossed Burke’s face.