InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Husband Hunters ❯ Married to a Mistress ( Chapter 3 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

CHAPTER THREE
What had possessed her, what on earth had possessed her? Kagome asked herself feverishly over and over again as she walked. The rain came heavily—long, lazy June days of sunshine finally giving way to an unseasonably torrent which drenched her to the skin within minutes. Since she was too warm, and her temples still pounded with frantic tension, she welcomed that cooling rain.

Something had gone wildly off the rails in that office. Inuyasha had prevented her quick exit. He had withstood everything she threw at him with provocative poise. In fact, just like yesterday, the more out of control she had got, the calmer and more focused he had become. And he zipped from black fury to outrageous cool at spectacular and quite unnerving speed.

Melodramatic, yes, Kagome acknowledged. She had been. Inexplicably, she had gone off the deep end and hurled recriminations that she had never intended to voice. And, like the shrewd operator he was, Taisho Inuyasha had trained those terrifyingly astute eyes on her while she recklessly exposed private, personal feelings of bitter pain and insecurity.

It was stress which had done this to her. Toutosai's heart attack, the sudden resulting upheaval in her own life, the dreadful publicity, her godmother's death. The pressure had got to her and blown her wide open in front of a male who zeroed in on any weakness like a predator. Low self-esteem... she did not suffer from low self-esteem!

A limousine drew up several yards ahead of her in the quiet side-street she was traversing. Alighting in one fluid movement, Inuyasha ran exasperated eyes over her sodden appearance and grated, "Get in out of the rain, you foolish woman...don't you even know to take shelter when it's wet?"

Swallowing hard on that in-your-face onslaught, Kagome pushed shaking fingers through the wet strands of hair clinging to her brow and answered him with a blistering look of charged defiance. "Go drop yourself down a drain!"

"Will you scream assault if I just throw you in the car?" Inuyasha demanded with raw impatience.

A kind of madness powered Kagome then, adrenaline racing through her. She squared up to him, scarlet dress plastered to her fantastic body, the stretchy hemline riding up on her long, fabulous legs. She dared him with her furious eyes and her attitude and watched his powerful hands clench into fists of self-restraint—because of course he was far too clever to make a risky move like that.

"Why are you following me?" she breathed.

"I'm not into railway sets...too slow, too quiet," Inuyasha confessed.

"I'm not into egocentric dominating men who think they know everything better than me!" Kagome slung back at him, watching his luxuriant ebony hair begin to curl in the steady rain, glistening crystalline drops running down his hard cheekbones. And she thought crazily, "He'sgettingwetforme", and she liked that idea.

"If this is my cue to say I might change... sorry, no can do. I am what I am," Inuyasha spelt out.

Stupid not to take a lift when she could have one, Kagome decided on the spur of the moment, particularly when she was beginning to feel cold and uncomfortable in her wet clothing. Sidestepping him, enjoying the awareness that she was rather surprising him, she climbed into the limousine.

The big car purred away from the kerb.

"I decided to make you angry because I want you to leave me alone," Kagome told him truthfully.

"Then why didn't you stay away from me? Why did you get into this car?" Inuyasha countered with lethal precision.

In answer, Kagome made an instinctive and instantaneous shift across the seat towards the passenger door. But, before she could try to jump back out of the car, a powerful hand whipped out to close over hers and hold her fast. The limousine quickened speed. Golden eyes clashed with hers. "Are you suicidal?" Inuyasha bit out crushingly.

Kagome shakily pulled free of his grasp.

The heavy silence clawed at her nerves. Such a simple question, such a lethally simple, clever question, yet it had flummoxed her. If she had truly wanted to avoid him, why had she let something as trivial as wet clothes push her back into his company?

Inuyasha extended a lean brown hand again, with the aspect of an adult taking reluctant pity on a sulky child. "Come here," he urged.

Without looking at him again, Kagome curled into the far corner of the back seat instead.

His larger-than-life image was already engraved inside her head. She didn't know what was happening to her, why she was reacting so violently to him. Her own increasing turmoil and the suspicion that she was adrift in dangerously unfamiliar territory frankly frightened her. Taisho Inuysha was bad news in every way for a woman like her.

Avoiding him like the plague was the only common sense response. And she should've been freezing him out, not screaming at him.

With a languorous sigh, Inuyasha shrugged fluidly out of his suit jacket. Without warning he caught her hand and pulled her to him. Taken by surprise, Kagome went crazy, struggling wildly to untangle herself from those powerful fingers. "Let go! What are you trying to…?"

"Stop it!" Inuyasha thundered down at her, and he released her again in an exaggerated movement, spreading both arms wide as if to demonstrate that he carried no offensive weapon. "I don't like hysterical women."

"I'm not...I'm not like that." Kagome quivered in shock and stark embarrassment as he draped his grey jacket round her slim, taut shoulders. The silk lining was still warm from his body heat. The faint scent of him clung to the garment and her nostrils flared. Clean, husky male, laced with the merest tang of some citrus-based lotion. She lowered her damp head and breathed that aroma in deep. The very physicality of that spontaneous act shook her.

"You're as high-strung as some of my racehorses," Inuyasha contradicted. "Every time I come close you leap about a foot in the air…"

"I didn't yesterday," she muttered with sudden lancing bitterness.

"You didn't get the chance...I crept up on you." With a tormenting sexy sound of indolent amusement, Inuyasha reached out his hands and closed them over the sleeves of the jacket she now wore, tugging on them like fabric chains of captivity to bring her to him.

"No!" Kagome gasped, wide-eyed, her hands flying up, only to find that the only place she could plant her palms was against his broad, muscular chest.

"If you like, you can bail out after the first kiss…no questions asked, no strings attached," Inuyasha promised thickly.

Even touching him through his shirt felt so incredibly intimate that guilty quivers ran through her tautening length. He was so hot. Her fingers spread and then shifted over the tactile silk barrier, learning of the rough whorls of hair below the fabric and enthralled. She was used to being around male models with shiny shaven chests. She shivered deliciously, appallingly tempted to rip open the shirt and explore.

Heavily lidded golden eyes lambent with sensual indulgence intercepted hers. "You look like a guilty child with her hand caught in the biscuit tin," he confided with a lazy smile. At the power of that smile, the breath tripped in Kagome's throat, her pupils dilating. His proximity mesmerized her. She could see tiny gold lights in his eyes, appreciate the incredible silky length and luxuriance of those black lashes and the faint blue shadow on his strong jaw line. The potency of her own fascination filled her with alarm. "You're all wrong for me," she said in breathless panic, like a woman trying to run through a swamp and inexplicably finding herself standing still and sinking fast.

"Prove it," Inuyasha invited in that velvet-soft drawl that fingered down her spine like a caress. A confident hand pushed into her drying hair and curved to the nape of her neck.

"Prove that anything that feels this good could possibly be wrong for either of us." He was so stunningly gorgeous, she couldn't think straight. Her heartbeat seemed to be racing in her tight throat. The insidious rise of her own excitement was like a drowning, overwhelming wave that drove all before it. He dropped his eyes to the pouting distended buds clearly delineated by the clinging bodice of her dress and her face burned red.

Slowly Inuyasha tilted her back, his arms banding round her spine to support her, and, bending his dark, arrogant head, he pressed the mouth she craved on hers to the thrusting sensitivity of an aching nipple instead. Her whole body jumped, throat arching, head falling back, teeth clenching on an incoherent whimper of shock.

Inuyasha lifted her up again, black eyes blazing with primal male satisfaction. "It hurts to want this much. I don't think you were familiar with the feeling...but now you are."

Trembling, Kagine stared at him, sapphire eyes dark with shaken arousal. Cold fear snaked through her. He was playing with her just as he might have played with a toy.

Using his carnal expertise he was taunting her, winding her up, demonstrating his sexual mastery.

"Don't touch me!" Her hand whipped up and caught him across one hard cheekbone, and then she froze in dismay at what she had done.

With striking speed Inuyasha closed his fingers round that offending hand, and slowly he smiled again. "Frustration should make you angry."

Beneath her strained and bemused gaze, he bent his glossy dark head and pressed his lips hotly to the centre of her stinging palm. It was electrifying. It was as if every tiny bit of her body was suddenly programmed to overreact. And then, while she was still struggling to comprehend the incredible strength of his power over her, he caught her to him with indolent assurance and simply, finally, kissed her.

Only there was nothing simple about that long-awaited kiss. It blew Kagome away with excitement. It was like no kiss she had ever received. That hard, sensual mouth connected with hers and instantly she needed to be closer to him than his own skin.

Pulses pounding at an insane rate, she clutched at him with frantic hands, reacting to the violent need climbing inside her, craving more with every passing second.

And then it was over. Inuyasha studied her with burnished eyes of appreciation, all virile male strength and supremacy as he absorbed the passion-glazed blankness of her hectically flushed and beautiful face.

"Come on," he urged her thickly.

She hadn't even realized the limousine had stopped. Now he was closing his jacket round her again with immense care, practically lifting her back out into the rain and the sharp fresh air which she drank in great thirsty gulps. She felt wildly disorientated. For timeless minutes the world beyond the limousine just hadn't existed for her. In confusion, she curved herself into the support of the powerful arm welded to her narrow back and bowed her head.

Without warning, Inuyasha tensed and vented a crushing oath, suddenly thrusting her behind him. Kagome looked up just in time to see a photographer running away from them.

Simultaneously two powerfully built men sprinted from the car behind the limo and grabbed him before he could make it across to the other side of the street.

Inuyasha untensed again, straightening big shoulders. "My security men will expose his film. That photo of us will never see the light of day."

In a daze, Kagome watched that promise carried out. As a demonstration of ruthlessness it took her breath away. She had often wished that she could avoid the intrusive cameras of the paparazzi, but she had never seen in action the kind of brute power which Inuyasha exercised to protect his privacy.

And it was his privacy that he had been concerned about, she sensed. Certainly not hers. Why was it that she suspected that Inuyasha would go to great lengths to avoid being captured in newsprint by her side? Why was it that she now had the strongest feeling that Inuyasha was determined not to be seen in public with her?

Shivering with reaction at that lowering suspicion, she emerged from her tangled thoughts to find herself standing in a stark stainless steel lift. "Where are we?" she muttered then, with a frown of bewilderment.

The doors sped soundlessly back on a vast expanse of marble flooring.

"My apartment...where else?"

Kagome flinched in dismay, her brain cranking back into sudden activity. If that paparazzi had escaped, he would've had a highly embarrassing and profitable picture of her entering Tashio Inuyasha's apartment wrapped intimately in his jacket. No prizes for guessing what people would've assumed. She just could not believe how stupid she had been.

"I thought you were taking me back to Sango's," she admitted rather unsteadily.

Inuyasha angled up a mocking brow. "I never said I was...and, after our encounter in the car, I confess that I prefer to make love in my own bed."

Kagome could feel her teeth starting to chatter, her legs shaking. Like a whore, that was how she would've looked in that photo, and that was exactly how he was treating her.

"Kagome..." Inuyasha purred, reading her retreat and switching channel to high-powered sensual persuasion as he strolled with animal grace towards her, strong, hard-boned face amused. "You think I'm likely to respect you more if you suggest that we should wait another week, and other month? I have no time for outdated attitudes like that…"

"Obviously not." Agreement fell like dropped stones from Kagome's tremulously compressed lips.

"And I cannot credit that you should feel any differently. We will still be together six months from now," Inuyasha , forecast reflectively. "Possibly even longer. I burn for you in a way I haven't burned for a woman in a very long time."

"Try a cold shower." Ice-cool as her own shrinking fleshy Kagome stood there, chin tilting as high as she could hold it even though she felt as if she was falling apart behind her facade. She shrugged back her shoulders so that his jacket slid off and fell in a rejected heap on the floor. "I'm not some bimbo you can bed before you even date me…"

"The original idea was only to offer you lunch..." A dark rise of blood accentuated the tautening slant of his bold hard cheekbones as he made that admission.

"But why waste time feeding me?" Kagome completed for him, her distaste unconcealed. "In my time I have met some fast movers, but you have to qualify as supersonic. A kiss in the limo and that was consent to the whole menu?"

Inuyasha flung his arrogant dark head back, golden eyes thudding like steel arrows into a target. "The desire between us was honest and mutual and very strong. Do you expect me to apologise for a hunger you answered with a passion as powerful as my own?"

Kagome flinched. "No...I don't think you make a habit of apologising."

"I'm very straight...what you see is what you get. You put out conflicting signals and then back off. You have the problem," Inuyasha informed her in cool condemnation. "Don't put it on me. When I became an adult, I put childish games behind me."

Although every strained muscle in her taut length ached, Kagome remained as outwardly poised as a queen surveying a less than satisfactory subject. But violent loathing powered her now. It took its strength from her shame that she had allowed him to touch her at all.

"1 won't say it's been nice getting to know you over the past twenty-four hours, Inuyasha...it's been lousy," Kagome stated, and turned in the direction of the lift.

"Goddamn you...don't you dare walk away from me!" Inuyasha slashed across the distance that separated them. "Who are you, Kagome Higurashi, to speak to me like that?"

"No more...I don't want to hear it," Kagome muttered shakily.

"This time you will listen to me," Inuyasha raked at her in wrathful forewarning. In one powerful stride he imposed his intimidating size between her and the lift. His lean, strong face hard as steel, bold golden eyes hurled a ferocious challenge. "Do you think I don't know you moved in with Toutosai between one day and the next? You hardly knew him. You came out of nowhere into his life. Do you think I didn't notice that you weren't remotely attracted to him?" Quite unprepared for that angle of attack, Kagome stammered.

"I... I.."

"In fact, Toutosai bored you to death and you couldn't hide it. You could hardly bear him to touch you but you stuck it for three years all the same. Does that strike you as the behavior of a sensitive woman with principles? You sold yourself for a wardrobe of designer clothes…"

"No, I didn't!" Kagome gasped strikingly.

"At no stage did you wake up and say to yourself, "I could do better than this. I'm worth more than this. This isn' the way I should beliving!"' Inuyasha roared at her in a rage of shockingly raw derision. "So don't tell me I got the wrong impression. I trust the evidence of my own eyes and senses. You felt nothing for him. But you put yourself on the market and he was still able to buy!"

Nausea stirring in her stomach, Kagome was retreating deeper into the penthouse apartment, her hands coming up in a fluttering movement in front of her as if she could somehow ward him off. "No...no," she mumbled sickly.

"And I was the bloody fool who, even knowing all that, still wanted you!" Inuyasha slung, spreading his arms in an extravagant gesture of outrage at her, at himself. "I didn't want to buy you...or maybe I wanted the cozy pretence that it didn't have to be like that between us...that because you lusted after me too I could gloss over the knowledge that my immense wealth might have anything to do with your presence in my life!"

Kagome was like a statue, terrified to risk a step in case she cracked and broke into shattered pieces. He had forced her into cruel confrontation with the image he had of her. Like an explosion of glass, countless shards pierced her cringing flesh as every painful word drew blood.

"I'll never forgive you for this," she whispered, more to herself than to him. "But Toutosai was never my lover. We had an agreement. It was a charade we played.."

Inuyasha spat something guttural in Greek. "Don't talk to me like I'm stupid!" Kagome looked through him then, and despised herself for even attempting self-defense. It suggested a weakness inside her, a need for this-arrogant Greek's good opinion that her savaged pride could not allow. "You stay away from me from now on…"

"You made your choices in life long before you met me. What is it that you want now?" Inuyasha demanded contemptuously.

A semi-hysterical laugh erupted from Kagome and she choked it off, twisting her head away defensively before he could see the burning tears in her eyes. "Just the usual things." Then she whipped her ebony head back, shimmering eyes as unwittingly bright as stars.

"And some day, when all this is behind me, I'll have them. I wouldn't have you as a gift, Inuyasha. I wouldn't make love with you unless you tied me to the bed and held me down and forced me...is that clear enough? What you want you will never have!"

Inuyasha stared at her as if he couldn't take his eyes off her and hated her for it. Kagome stared back with a stab of malicious satisfaction new to her experience. "Bad news, eh? I'll be the one who got away," she breathed tautly, frighteningly aware of the thunderous charge of violence in the atmosphere but unable to silence her own tongue and her helpless need to taunt him. "But then why should that bother you? It's not like you have a shred of real emotion in you…"

"What do you want from me?" Inuyasha ripped back at her with suppressed savagery. "I will not and could not love a woman like you!'"

"Oh, that honesty...hits me right where it hurts," Kagome trilled, a knife-like pain scything through her. She was shaking like a leaf without even being aware of it. "But for all that you still want me, don't you? Do you know something, Inuyasha? I like knowing that."

A muscle jerked at the corner of his wide, sensual mouth, his strong jaw line clenching. Those stunning golden eyes burned with rage and seething pride.

"Thanks, you've just done wonders for my low self-esteem," Kagome informed him with a jagged catch in her voice.

"What a bitch you can be...I never saw that in you before.' His accent was so thick she could have sliced it up, but that contemptuous intonation would still have flamed over her like acid, hurting wherever it touched. "So, quote me a price for one night in your bed. What do you think you would be worth?"

The derisive suggestion coiled like a whip around her and scarred her worse than a beating. Her backbone went rigid. Hatred fired her embittered gaze. "You couldn't even make the bidding," Kagome asserted, looking him up and down as if he had crawled out from under a stone. "I'd want a whole lot .more than a wardrobe of designer clothes. You see, I learn from my mistakes, Inuyasha. The next man I live with will be my husband..."

Shock turned Inuyasha satisfying pale. "If you think for one insane second that I…"

"Of course you wouldn't," Kagome slotted in, each word clipped and tight with self-control. "But you must see now why I'm not available for lunch, in bed or out of it. A woman can't be too careful. Being associated with a randy Greek billionaire could be very harmful to my new image."

"I will work this entire dialogue out of your wretched hide every day you are with me!" Inuyasha snarled at her with primal force, all cool abandoned.

"You are just so slow on the uptake. I am not ever going to be with you, Inuyasha," Kagome pointed out, and with that last word she strolled past him, holding herself taut and proud to the last, and walked into the lift.

Outside in the street again, she discovered that she was trembling so violently it was an effort to put one leg in front of the other. For once disregarding her straitened circumstances, she chose to hail a cab. Her mind was working like a runaway express train, disconnected images bombarding her...

How could two people who scarcely knew each other spend so long tearing each other apart? How could she have been that bitchy? How could she have actually enjoyed striking back at him and watching him react with impotent black fury? And yet now she felt sick at the memory, and astonishingly empty, like someone who had learned to thrive on electric tension and pain...and who now could not see a future worth living without them.

Taisho Inuyasha had devastated her but he wouldn't bother her again now, she told herself in an effort at consolation. Even the toughest male wouldn't put himself in line for more of the same. And Inuyasha least of all. He had expected her to fall into his bed with the eagerness of an avaricious bimbo, scarcely able to believe her good fortune. Instead she had hit that boundless ego of his, watched him shudder in sheer shock from the experience...and yet inside herself she felt the most awful bewildering sense of loss.

Reluctant to dwell on reactions that struck her as peculiar, Kagome chose instead to look back on their brief acquaintance with self-loathing. She squirmed over her own foolishness. Like an adolescent fighting a first powerful crush, she had overreacted every step of the way.

She had fancied him like mad but, blind and naive as a headstrong teenager, she hadn't even admitted that to herself until it was too late to save face. "I have not been unaware of your interest in me." She shuddered with shame. Had she surrendered to that physical attraction, it would've been a one-way ticket to disaster. She knew she couldn't afford to make any more wrong choices. She hadn't needed him to tell her that. Dear heaven, as if becoming his mistress would've been any kind of improvement on the humiliating charade Toutosai had forced her to live for so long!

Inuyasha hadn't believed her about Toutosai, of course he hadn't—hadn't even paused to catch his breath and listen. And in pushing the issue she would've made an ass of herself, for nothing short of medical proof of her virginity, if there was such a thing, would've convinced him otherwise. In any case the level of her experience wouldn't count with a male like Inuyasha. He viewed her the same way people viewed a takeaway snack. As something quick and cheap to devour, not savor. Her stomach lurched sickly.

Even had she been tempted, which she hadn't been, had he thought for one moment that she would've believed she was likely to hold his interest as long as six months? "A man will tell a girl who looks like you anything to get her in to the bedroom"' her father had once warned her grimly. "The one who is prepared to wait, the one who is more interested in how you feel, is the one who cares!
'
That blunt advice had embarrassed her at a time when she was already struggling to cope with the downside of the spectacular looks she had been born with. Girlfriends threatened by the mate attention she attracted had dumped her. Grown men had leered at her and tried to touch her and date her. Even teenage boys who, alone with her, had been totally intimidated by her, had told crude lies about her sexual availability behind her back.

Eight years on, Kagome was still waiting without much hope to meet a man who wasn't determined to put the cart before the proverbial horse.

An hour after she got back to Sango's house, the phone rang. It was Hyata Midoriko, who ran the Star modeling agency which had first signed Kagome up at eighteen.

"I've got no good news for you, Kagome," she shared in her usual brisk manner. "The PR people over at LFT Hair care have decided against using you for another series of ads."

"We were expecting that," Kagome reminded the older woman with a rueful sigh of acceptance.

"I'm afraid there's nothing else in the pipeline for you. Hardly surprising, really," Midoriko told her. "You're too strongly associated with one brand name. I did warn you about that risk and, to be blunt, your recent coverage in the tabloids has done you no favors."

It had been a month since Kagome had moved out of LToutosai's townhouse. She hadn't worked since then and now it looked as if she was going to have to find some other eans of keeping herself. Her bank account was almost empty. She couldn't afford to sit waiting for work that might never come, nor could she blame Midoriko for her lack of sympathy. Time and time again the older woman had urged Kagome to branch out into fashion modeling, but Toutosai's frantic social life and the demands he had made on her time had made that impossible.

Hours later, Kagome hunched over both bars of the electric fire in Sango's lounge as she tried to keep warm while she brooded. Inuyasha was gone. That was good, she told herself, that was one major problem solved. She scratched an itchy place on her arm and then gazed down in surprise at the little rash of spots there.

What had she eaten that had disagreed with her? she wondered, but she couldn't recall eating anything more than half a sandwich since breakfast time. She just couldn't work up an appetite. She fell asleep on the settee and at some timeless stage of the night wakened to feel her way down to the guest-room and undress on the spot before sinking wearily into bed.

When she woke up late the next morning, she wasn't feeling too good. As she cleaned her teeth she caught a glimpse of her face in the tiny mirror Sango had on the wall for visitors and she froze. There was another little rash of spots on her forehead. It looked remarkably like... chickenpox. And she itched, didn't she? But only children got that, didn't they? And then she remembered one of Sango's neighbors calling in a couple of weeks back with a child in tow who had borne similar spots.

"She's not infectious any more," the woman had said carelessly.

Lower lip wobbling, Kagome surveyed the possible proof of that misapprehension. A dry cough racked her chest, leaving her gasping for breath. Whatever she had, she was feeling foul. Getting herself a glass of water, she went back to bed. The phone went. She had to get out of bed again to answer it.

"What?" she demanded hoarsely after another bout of, coughing in the cold hall.

"Angelos here, what's wrong with you?"

"I have...I have a cold," she lied. "What do you want?"

"I want to see you..."

"No way!" Kagome plonked down the phone at speed.

The phone rang again. She disconnected it from its wall point. A couple of hours later the doorbell went. Kagome ignored it. Getting out of bed yet again felt like too much trouble.

She dozed for the rest of the day, finally waking up shivering with cold and conscious of an odd noise in the dim room. Slowly it dawned on her that the rasping wheeze was the sound of her own lungs straining to function. Her brain felt befogged, but she thought that possibly she might need a doctor. So she lay thinking about that while the doorbell rang and rang and finally fell silent.

Fear got a healthy grip on her when she stumbled dizzily out of bed and her legs just folded beneath her. She hit the polished wooden floor with a crash. Tears welled up in her sore eyes. The room was too dark for her to get her bearings. She started to crawl, trying to recall where the phone was. She heard a distant smash. It sounded like glass breaking, and then voices. Had she left the television on? Trying to summon up more strength, she rested her perspiring brow down on the boards beneath her.

And then the floor lit up...or so it seemed.