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The heat from his fingers seemed to be flowing into her, trickling into every nerve and sinew and setting her body alive with a strange electric current. What would it be like to be kissed by a man like Lucas Kane? Kim gave up the fight to dismiss the thought that had been paramount for most of the evening. Thrilling, exciting, out of this world. He’d know how to kiss. Sexual expertise was there in his eyes, his body, even the way he walked and moved…
She jerked her hand free, disguising the gesture with a tight little laugh as she said, ‘This won’t get the coffee percolating.’
Damn the coffee. Lucas smiled blandly. ‘Can I help?’
The thought of him in the close confines of her little kitchen was overwhelming. ‘No, it’s fine. I won’t be a minute.’
Lucas’s thick black lashes swept down, hiding his expression from her, and his voice was easy and controlled as he resumed his seat, saying, ‘No hurry.’
No hurry? Once in the kitchen Kim leant her hot forehead against the cool impersonal surface of a cupboard and breathed deeply for several seconds. Her fingers were still tingling from his touch and her legs were actually shaking, she realised with a little dart of disbelief. It might be no hurry to him but she wanted him out of her house as soon as possible.
He was dangerous. She moved away from the cupboards and stared out of the window to where the snowman was still standing patiently in his white frozen world, and remembered how Melody had clung to Lucas as he had enthused over their handiwork.
Very, very dangerous. Kim’s eyes narrowed and she felt something very cold douse the heat inside her as she switched on the coffee machine.
If Graham hadn’t died when he had, she would have left him within weeks, if not days, anyway. The abuse when he was drunk had been becoming increasingly nasty, and the shopping incident had happened the day before his accident. She had known it was the end of the line for their marriage then; she wouldn’t risk putting Melody in danger.
She hadn’t loved him any more at that stage; she hadn’t loved him for months, even though she had stayed because of his threats of what he would do to Melody and to her if she left him.
But that morning when he had struck her had cut the last tentative threads holding her to the marriage. It had happened to be her in the firing line then; it could have been Melody another time and the thought of that was insupportable.
But she hadn’t had to leave. Graham had died, and in spite of all his death had uncovered she had felt a strengthening of her spirit, a determination that she would build a good life for her precious child. And a good life meant never putting Melody at risk again, never allowing a third party to come into their world. Friends were different, and Maggie had been wonderful, but a man…
She had made a terrible mistake in her choice of a partner and she couldn’t trust it wouldn’t happen again.
Melody liked Lucas. And perhaps he was only being friendly and supportive to her about the report incident, but she didn’t dare allow the kind of matey relationship to grow between them she wouldn’t have necessarily thought twice about with any other colleague.
She’d work her socks off for him, go the extra mile and beyond as far as her work was concerned—she owed him that at least—but she would keep him very firmly at arm’s length. It might make things a little awkward at times but she’d have to cross that bridge when it came to it.
She nodded sharply to the golden-haired reflection in the window, lowered the blind abruptly and set about preparing the coffee tray, her mouth set in a grim determined line that wasn’t at all like its normal soft self.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONTRARY to the fear which had gripped Kim when she’d watched the Aston Martin drive away that snowy night in January, Lucas didn’t ask one personal question or do more than briefly enquire after Melody in the following few weeks, keeping their relationship focused and pleasant.
The report was returned within a couple of days from a somewhat bewildered friend of Lucas’s to whom he had written regarding a forthcoming golf tournament, and was the best possible outcome Kim could have wished for.
February passed with more snow, rigid white frosts and a hectic time at the office as the Clarkson contract was finally settled to Lucas’s satisfaction. March was a kinder month weather-wise, but by the end of that month Kim found herself wondering if her relationship with her dynamic boss was quite so cool and controlled as she had thought it was.
He had managed to get under her skin somehow, and not just in the sexual sense—that was something she’d accepted she would have to battle with daily; he was just one exceptional man—but in a hundred other, more subtle ways.
Lucas had a wickedly dry sense of humour for a start and he wasn’t averse to laughing at himself, which was a revelation to Kim after Graham’s self-important, pontifical attitude to life. She found herself laughing umpteen times a day, and often when she least expected it.
He had the habit of scattering numerous little personal facts about himself and his family into even the most businesslike of their days, and by now Kim knew that his parents had retired to a villa in the sun; that the prolific amount of aunts, uncles and cousins on his mother’s side made for some crazy family parties when relations would fly the short journey from Colombia to his parents’ home in Florida; that like himself his father had been an only child and his English relations were few and far between, and many other details besides.
Kim was aware that Lucas’s large country residence situated well beyond the city limits was home to an elderly housekeeper as well as himself. Martha had been with the family since Lucas was a babe in arms, and besides the two human occupants the mansion housed an assortment of feline inhabitants—all belonging to Martha—and two Great Danes which were Lucas’s.
This last had caused Kim one of many disturbed nights in relation to her boss.
She hadn’t had him down as an animal-lover before he had mentioned his home situation, or the sort of man who could be altruistic to old ladies who hadn’t wanted to leave the country of their birth for warmer climes.
The comfortably cold and detached picture of a cool stainless-steel, remotely controlled bachelor pad with all mod cons and the biggest bed money could buy had taken a knock, and when she had made the mistake of revealing her surprise and preconceptions and Lucas had admitted—charmingly—that a few years before she would have been spot-on, it had been scant comfort.
She wanted—needed—to keep him in a neatly labelled box in her mind and, annoying man that he was, he seemed determined to break out of it.
Somehow, and she didn’t quite know how he had accomplished it, he
had managed to paint a picture on her mind that was quite different from the one she wanted to see when she looked at him. If he had met her head-on in direct challenge she would have been able to cope with it and refuse to take on board Lucas the man, rather than Lucas the ruthless tycoon, but he had trickled himself into her psyche with the steady drip-drip of relentless running water.
