Entirely focused on him, she felt light-headed. ‘I didn’t know—’
‘Didn’t know what?’ Cesare whispered unevenly, dropping his hand to the bedspread wrapped beneath her arms as he coiled fluidly up so that their eyes locked. ‘That wanting like that is rare? That most people go all their lives without ever feeling like this? It’s a hunger so strong it has to be satisfied…and it’s bound to rage out of control.’

A Savage Betrayal by Lynne Graham, first published in September of 1995 is told in the third person from the heroine’s perspective. The story begins with the heroine, Mina Carroll, who while working alongside her boss at the charity benefit that her workplace organized, runs into none other than Cesare Falcone, the man who broke her heart years ago.

Four years back, a freshly graduated Mina found herself at the receiving end of a cutthroat job interview, after which Cesare hires her as his executive assistant. Two months in, Mina realizes that she was head over heels in love with her boss, and by the end of the third month, Mina is sacked rather unceremoniously, and that too without a reference.

Discovering that her one night of passion with Cesare right before she was sacked had borne its fruit, Mina finds herself in the tough position of having to juggle being a single mother and making ends meet in a world that is frightful for women who do not have the kind of support systems that prevent them from falling into utter destitution.

Coming to the realization that the spark that has always existed between her and Cesare burns even brighter than before, and that she is just as vulnerable to the heat between them, makes Mina wary, especially in light of the revelations that Cesare believes her to be a deceitful tramp, perhaps the only woman who has ever made a fool of him in the worst way possible.

Cesare’s belief that Mina committed a criminal offense four years back is an ironclad one, citing that he is in possession of irrefutable proof with which he could send her to jail even now. While Cesare continues to believe the worst about Mina, the way he is helplessly ensnared in the web of desire that clouds his judgement is something he perhaps despises about himself.

Cesare definitely drives a hard bargain, expecting Mina to be his and only his satisfying his every carnal desire, and in bed, Mina knows that she is able to drive him just as wild as he does her. When the truth of her conception four years back comes to light, Cesare is of course livid and devastated, and what ensues leading up to the climax of this delectable story was just unforgettable.

A Savage Betrayal is a novel that is evidence of Ms. Graham’s remarkable talent in weaving a story that would have required so little to completely unravel. At certain points, I was left wondering as to how Ms. Graham would be able to turn things around, to show to readers why Cesare was worth all the heartache, grief, and pain that Mina goes through, even as she struggles with her enduring love for a man who sees very little of worth in her.

The story is one that is brilliantly executed, with the sexual chemistry and heat between Mina and Cesare off the charts hot and steamy. Perhaps the one reason the story got to me so much is the fact that the reader has to discover how Cesare feels about Mina through her perspective of his actions. The hero who comes off as ruthless and says often the cruelest things (which Mina is perfectly capable of handling), is unable to bear it when he witnesses Mina being hurt, in pain, or in tears. That is how the reader knows just how deeply that Cesare feels for her. And there is of course the red blooded alpha male whose possessive streak rears its head whenever he feels that what is his is in danger of being claimed by another, and the red hot jealousy that courses through him every single time!

I loved how Cesare meets his daughter who is just as temperamental as he is which gave me a couple of good chuckles that broke the never ending tension that is consistent throughout the story. This book had such good verbal warfare happening alongside all that sizzle, which made Mina and Cesare highly entertaining. The way Ms. Graham managed to make Cesare so arrogant, powerful, sexy, and vulnerable was nothing short of amazing, paving the way for everything to just click into place when all was said and done.

Recommended for fans of Lynne Graham and those who love explosive love stories between two protagonists whose verbal warfare just adds to the spice factor!

Final Verdict: A Savage Betrayal is a novel that is fierce in the way it consumes all your emotions. Those who love a good angst-fest; this one is for you!

Favorite Quotes

Her breath hung suspended and then he pressed his mouth hotly to the tiny pulse flickering wildly above her collarbone. Every bone in her body melted in a burst of feverish heat. Her head fell back, her throat extending. She trembled violently, an upswell of sensation suddenly released with devastating force. Her hands flew up of their own volition, one finding his shoulder, the other spearing into his hair, and just touching him again felt so good that she ached.

‘Move, Cesare!’
Cesare continued to stare at her as though he was mesmerised, brooding golden eyes intently fixed on her. Outraged by his lack of response, Mina planted a small hand against his broad chest to thrust him out of her way. A lean hand whipped up and unexpectedly trapped hers, preventing her from withdrawal.
‘What the heck are you—?’ she began.
Without the smallest warning he grabbed her right there in the middle of the street. Two strong hands clamped to her waist as he lifted her up against him and brought his mouth smashing down on hers with an explosive sexual hunger that travelled through her like forked lightning.

The first day when you walked into that interview I decided I could not possibly employ a woman whom I wanted to strip and fling onto the nearest bed!’
Helplessly her head flew up. She couldn’t believe her ears.
‘I gave you a nightmare interview…and you took it,’ Cesare condemned with lingering disbelief at such unfeminine strength of will and staying power.
‘You were trying to scare me off?’ Mina questioned in a tone of revelation.
‘I was a fool. I gave you the job.’

‘You’re mine,’ Cesare muttered thickly, one strong arm closing fiercely round her to stress the assurance, and he simply shifted his hand smoothly from beneath hers and slid it beneath the parted edges of her bodice, slowly curving his fingers over the firm thrust of one unbound breast.
It had been so long since she had known such intimacy that her teeth clenched on the sweet pleasurepain of her own helpless excitement, and in the interim her hand fell away. He tugged the dress open, exposing the smooth pale flesh he sought, discovering the delectable curves she had tried to conceal. With an unashamed groan of hunger he caressed a pouting pink nipple with almost worshipping fingers, watching the bud bloom into aching prominence.

On some other level she was aware of the cooler air that brushed her skin as her dress fell away entirely and then he was laying her flat, crushing her mouth under his with raw, unashamed hunger. Her hands swept over his silk-clad back in sudden frustration, instinctively seeking the satin-smooth skin she remembered. His muscles rippled as he tautened and broke the connection of their mouths.
Her glazed eyes opened on that shock of separation. He was ripping off his shirt, and she remembered that from before, but she heard no warning bells. Past and present had merged indistinguishably. The pectoral muscles of his lean, golden torso were hazed with a sprinkling of ebony curls. Like someone in an hypnotic trance, she focused on the blazing gold of his eyes and sank ever deeper into his power.

He pulled her to him with strong hands and instantaneously attempted to sink into her with one powerful thrust. There was a flash of momentary pain that made her bite down on her tongue and taste blood. Cesare muttered something in Italian, settled his hands on her hips and drove into her again, making her tender flesh yield more fully, and the sensation was so unbearably pleasurable that she moaned in shock and delight, for she had worked so hard at forgetting, had made herself forget, that most intimate moment.

Cesare had turned pale at one glimpse of her Caesarean scar. ‘You’ve had surgery,’ he breathed as she sat bolt upright, grabbed clumsily at her discarded dress and concealed herself behind it as best she could. ‘Major surgery—’
‘No, only a little female thing,’ Mina lied in desperation, evading his shocked gaze. ‘It looks much worse than it is.’
‘What was the matter with you?’ he demanded tautly.
‘I told you, something female and private—minor.’
‘It doesn’t look minor—’
‘But it is and I’m sorry you find it so offensive,’ she said wildly, ready to say or do anything to throw him off the subject.
‘Of course I don’t find it offensive but naturally I was disturbed,’ Cesare asserted stiffly, ‘and if that is the result of some minor female problem you must have had a third-rate surgeon!’

‘It doesn’t even have to be my best,’ Cesare murmured thickly, dense black lashes screening his gaze to a sliver of hard gold as he scanned her feverishly flushed face and unwittingly pleading eyes. ‘The one thing you ever gave me that was honest…why? You can’t control it. But I can—’
‘Can you?’ Mina was in another world, one where she felt far more than she thought. Her hand lifted of its own volition, shyly smoothed along his strong, clean shaven jawline, fingertips softly brushing a high cheekbone. Her nostrils flared on the warm maleness of him. That close, it would have been sensory deprivation not to touch.
He dipped his dark head and trapped her fingers with his mouth before she could reluctantly drop them again. Her eyes squeezed shut on a wave of unbearable excitement as he sucked first one finger and then another and her breath rasped in her dry throat, liquid fire running through her quivering body, melting every bone to boiling honey. She was poised on the edge of an erotic anticipation so intense, it consumed her.

Cesare tensed, momentarily holding himself back, and then her tongue flicked against his in an enticement that was entirely instinctive and, with a raw groan of need, he ravaged her reddened mouth with potent hunger. Suddenly she was no longer upright but lying back. His hand slid up one trembling thigh, wrenching the dress out of his path.
She was out of control, her breath sobbing in her throat, her heart racing. She clung to any part of him she could reach, her fingers clutching at his hair, the back of his neck, splaying against the silk-clad heat of his taut abdomen, scratching down his long spine, clothes, always clothes getting in her way, driving her mad with frustration.

‘Get out of here, Cesare!’
‘But this is our wedding night, cara.’
Mina’s teeth clenched. She wanted to leap off the bed and thump him but she was afraid that the bedspread would fall off. ‘The answer is no!’
A winged ebony brow elevated. ‘Did I ask a question?’
‘You need it spelt out to you?’ Mina intoned, quivering with fury. ‘OK. I am not prepared to share a bed with a man who thinks I’m a gold-digging, dishonest tramp!’
‘Why not?’ Cesare enquired softly. ‘If I’m prepared to sacrifice my principles—’
‘Yours?’ Mina flared in disbelief.
‘Who else’s? If I could keep my hands off you, don’t you think I would?’ Cesare murmured with grim satire. ‘Do you really think that it was my secret ambition to take a wife who could be described as a gold-digging, dishonest tramp?’

He leant over her, nibbled erotically at the reddened fullness of her lower lip, and as she trembled, he uttered a strangled groan and shuddered, every muscle tautening with whipcord tension as he lifted her against him, searching out the moist heat between her thighs. She writhed, cried out, unbearable sensation rising to a sudden shattering peak that was pure torment.
‘I can’t wait.’ He brought her down to him with aching slowness and agonising control, forging his entry little by little, and it was so staggeringly exciting that she somehow wanted to faint with delight and scream with frustration at the same time.

He took her by storm and she felt possessed, driven, inflamed by the feeling that he was out of control. All honeyed pliancy and complicity, every fibre of her body pitched to an unbelievable height of anticipation, she let herself go, lost herself entirely in the thunder of her own crazed heartbeat and the fevered tension coiling ever tighter inside her. With every driving thrust he took her higher, and then suddenly the whole world went multi-coloured, her back arching, her teeth clenching as she sobbed, ‘I love you…I love you!’ on the peak of a shuddering and ecstatic wave of drowning pleasure.

‘Why do you think Steve hates you so much? Steve and I dated for four years and we were never intimate, never even partially intimate! But I only knew you for three months and he actually dared to tell me once that that was the hardest thing of all for him to accept…and I thought at the time, To hell with fragile male egos—and I still think it!’
‘Mina—’
‘So if you want to go on thinking that I bounced straight out of bed with you into bed with him, go ahead! I’ll phone and tell Steve…he would be absolutely delighted to know you think that! But how dare you try to drag me down to the level of a slot on some pathetic male sexual score card?’
A dark flush of blood had highlighted his hard cheekbones. ‘That was not what I was doing,’ he told her rawly.
‘That’s exactly what you were doing! All that sophistication on the surface, and underneath what are you?’ Mina splintered tempestuously. ‘You’re so primitive you haven’t even made it on to the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder!’
‘Whatever turns you on, cara,’ Cesare murmured, eyes a sliver of flaring gold below his black lashes.

‘This time…you really are mine,’ Cesare murmured roughly, framing her hectically flushed face with hard, possessive hands as he looked down at her, eyes of molten gold alight with desire and primitive satisfaction. But those hands weren’t quite steady and that big, powerful body trembled in the circle of her arms. On a very female level, she was fully attuned to that awareness.
‘Absolutely mine,’ Cesare savoured, lowering his dark head to her breasts, circling a taut bud with the tip of his tongue and then hungrily engulfing her achingly tender flesh with the raw heat of his mouth.

‘We should have made better use of last night,’ Cesare muttered raggedly. ‘I want you so much, I ache…’
Without warning, he pulled back from her and communicated with the chauffeur.
‘What are you doing?’
‘It’ll take over an hour in this traffic to reach the town house…’
Minutes later he was tugging her out of the limousine in front of a well-known hotel. Ten minutes after that they were standing in a luxurious bedroom.
‘This is crazy,’ Mina protested weakly.
‘Everything I do with you is crazy,’ he muttered thickly, hauling her into his arms.

She lost herself in him. Her heart hammering, her slender body writhed beneath his, desperate for the completion that only he could give. She clutched at his hair, scored the satin-smooth skin of his back and then arched and sobbed as he sank into her in one powerful thrust.
‘Nobody is going to take you away from me,’ he said savagely, scanning her with glittering golden assurance. ‘Nobody!’

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