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‘You’re shaking like a leaf.’ His deep-pitched drawl was disarmingly gentle.
‘I’m cold,’ she lied.
Hovering on the edge of flight, she collided involuntarily with dark magnetic eyes that compelled and controlled. Her heartbeat hung in suspension. He touched a teasing fingertip to her taut lower lip. ‘Would you like me to take your socks off for you?’
‘Jake…I…oh…’ Without making any effort to match the offer to action, he had lowered his head to let his lips hotly explore the slim arc of her throat. Her skin had acquired an unbearable sensitivity. She melted from outside in, completely losing the thread of what she had intended to say.
He eased apart the edges of her shirt to expose the swelling fullness of her breasts. Black hair brushed her chin as he ran his tongue oh, so lightly down the valley between the ripe mounds of creamy flesh. His thumbs grazed over her taut nipples and her hands dug into his shoulders in an unconscious revelation of frenzied need. His mouth fastened to a pink swollen peak and a torment of sweet sensation rippled drugging waves through her quivering limbs. For an instant she thought she might die of the pleasure he was giving her.
Her fingers knotted into his hair and she arched up to find the heated oblivion of his mouth again for herself. Her every skin cell was impatient, greedy, and that first scorching contact with his hard, masculine body excited her beyond bearing. Her hand ran down the length of his spine to press him still closer. Her abandonment jerked a stifled groan from him. The intimate proof of his desire for her was pushing against her stomach, sending her temperature shooting higher. The hand following the curve of her hip to the damp meeting of her thighs stilled as he dragged his mouth free of hers. ‘Slow down,’ he breathed raggedly. ‘I want this to be perfect.’
Imperfect for Kitty was an inch of separation from any part of him. Her passion-glazed eyes focused on him. ‘Don’t stop,’ she framed tightly, and reaching up she mated her tongue deeply with his to extract a soul-deep moan of response from him.
The skill of his exploring fingers drove out the last remnants of her control. What she was feeling could not be contained. A wild, tortured hunger guided her restive, pleading movements, inciting him to the same impatience. He found the rounded softness of her hips and pulled her to him. Kneeling between her thighs, he entered her, and suddenly he was there where she most needed him to be in a piercing, awesome surge of masculine power.
A split second of unexpected discomfort dredged a strangled gasp from her, but the thrusting urgency of his possession submerged the pang in a heady, exultant flood of almost agonising pleasure. She hadn’t believed that there could be anything more, and then all of a sudden she was flying into the burning heat of the sun to shatter into a million glittering pieces in a climax so intense that she was utterly overwhelmed.
She floated back to the real world again. He was heavy in the tight circle of her arms, his face buried in her hair, the smooth skin of his back damp with perspiration beneath her spread fingers. An urge to smother him with grateful kisses and verbally bombard him with her love threatened her instantaneously. Her teeth connected painfully with her wayward tongue. If she had considered herself weak before this hour, she understood now that she was infinitely weaker in its aftermath. The powerful emotions flooding her demanded expression, not denial.
Releasing her of his weight, he stared searchingly down at her. His eyes veiled, a muscle pulling at the corner of his mouth as he breathed, ‘You were nervous because it was a disaster the last time.’
‘Was it?’ Dialogue was beyond her. She didn’t want to think; she didn’t want to talk. She just wanted him to hold her.
‘My ego’s not that tender. If my memory serves me correctly, I hurt you a lot. I was drunk and I didn’t have much experience.’ The suggestion of honesty via gritted teeth larded his intonation. ‘I was half crazy with wanting you and I lost my head—’
‘Do we have to talk about this?’ she interrupted.
He was cruel enough to push her hair off her cheek and deprive her of all natural concealment. His eyes were darkened pools of thoroughly determined gold. It seemed to her that, while she had shrunk in stature by placing herself in an indefensible position, Jake had gathered strength from the ease of his conquest. The idea left a nasty taste in her mouth.
‘You don’t need to talk. You only need to listen.’
She turned away from him, savaged by the lowering acknowledgement that once again she had given herself too lightly. ‘I don’t want to listen either!’
A ruthless hand connected with her shoulder and unceremoniously pushed her flat against the pillows again. ‘Tough,’ he said succinctly. ‘You’re not wearing the trousers in this relationship. Lie there and listen. I’ve lived with that night on my conscience for a very long time. I hated myself for it. You were sweet and innocent and no way were you ready for a physical relationship, but if there’s a red-blooded male within a thousand miles of here who could have withstood the encouragement you gave me that night, I’d like to meet him!’
Her absolute silence inflamed him. His mouth tightened. ‘I’m only asking you to put that night in some kind of perspective. When you ran away from home, I was worried half out of my mind about you. I blamed myself and I still blame myself. No comment?’ he almost snarled down at her. ‘Damn you, why are you freezing me out again?’
When he had supposedly been worrying himself out of his mind he had still been in the honeymoon phase with Liz. Scorn and pain mingled in her retort. ‘Just because we’ve slept together, it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to—’
‘Talk?’ he cut in derisively. ‘Or stake a claim on you? Is that what’s really worrying you? That there might be strings attached?’
Scalding moisture lashed her partly lowered eyelids. Two minutes of conversation and they were circling each other like wolves again, ready to claw to the death for supremacy. Only this time she knew that defeat would be hers. She was in no state to match his rhetoric. ‘I don’t want to talk about the past. How many times do I have to tell you that?’
‘Do you count Maxwell a part of that past? Or are you hoping that he’s still hovering on the horizon?’ he demanded roughly.
She wrenched the rumpled sheet back and rolled off the bed in one driven motion. ‘You don’t own me. You don’t have any rights over me. Grant is none of your business!’
Snatching up her shirt, she fled downstairs. Shakily she pulled on the garment in front of the low-burning kitchen fire. Painful emotions were gusting through her in debilitating waves. He would leave. He had got what he wanted and more. She shuddered. To think of the gift of her body in such terms was degrading, but she was lacerated by the awareness that she had betrayed every atom of her desperate uncontrollable hunger for him.
Wouldn’t he just love to learn in addition that Grant was her father? That Heaven might play the sultry man-killer on screen, but that Kitty at the age of twenty-five had less experience of men than many a teenager? Her blossoming sexuality had been cruelly arrested at seventeen. And out of fear she had kept herself inviolate from further masculine threat, only to surrender all over again to the same renegade male. What did that say about her moral fibre?
He might as well have put a cattle brand on her hip all those years ago, she reflected in sick despair. She belonged to him still. Heart and soul and body. She was as obsessed by Jake now as she had been in her teens, and once again Jake was the dominant partner—an inequality that shrivelled her pride and her confidence.
‘By my code that bed we just shared makes Maxwell my business,’ a cool, hard voice drawled.
She leapt up off her knees, clumsily holding her unbuttoned shirt closed. His bare feet had been soundless on the stairs. He had pulled on his jeans. In the moonlight he was a half dark, half silver pagan outline less than a foot from her.
As she went to step back, powerful hands clamped to her waist. Indifferent to her gasp of alarm, he lifted her and plonked her down on the edge of the table behind
her. His leashed anger beat down at her from his fierce stare. ‘Now you may find that attitude out of date,’ he continued with galling evenness. ‘But that’s the way I feel and I’m not likely to change either. Have you been in contact with Maxwell?’
‘Let me down!’ she spluttered furiously.
‘I want an answer first,’ he said grimly.
‘No!’
‘No, you’re not giving me an answer? Or no, you haven’t been in touch with him?’ he prompted.
‘No, I haven’t been in touch with him.’ It was a driven surrender, enforced by the humiliating position he had her in.
He freed the small hands he had pinned flat to the table surface and her palms instantly flew up to lodge against his chest, seeking to push him away. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. You were the one to make a drama out of it,’ he murmured infuriatingly as he eased his hands under her thighs, tugging her forward into the cradle of his pelvis.
‘What are you doing, for God’s sake?’ she gasped.
