AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Then why haven’t you done something about it?’ he demanded, his impatience reeking of disapproval.
‘I guess I felt—feel—sort of sorry for the guy,’ she admitted, the mingled scents of cologne and male sweat rising between their bodies making her aware of how close they were standing. With Luke leaning in on her, his arms splayed around her sides, anyone coming up the trail behind them would think that they were embracing...
‘Sorry for him?’ Luke’s exasperation with her tolerance was almost identical to Jordan’s and expressed equally forcefully. ‘He doesn’t need your sympathy, Roz; what he needs is to be stopped before he can harm you or himself.’
Rosalind shivered in the steamy morning heat. ‘I know.’ She pulled a face. ‘Jordan suggested I acquire a bodyguard for the duration.’
He frowned. ‘Which you refused, of course.’
He was much better at predicting her behaviour than she was at guessing his reactions. She gave a defensive shrug.
‘I already have too many people following me everywhere. If a crazed fan did try an abduction the reporters would descend like a cloud of locusts. They’d soon scare him off!’
‘And ruin the chance to spin out a good story? More likely they’d stand back and take pictures,’ he said grimly. ‘You’re lucky you’ve got the Staines affair hanging over your head, or you wouldn’t even have the minimal protection of press surveillance.’
Her eyes flashed at the unexpected callousness of the remark. ‘There’s nothing lucky about it! Mrs Staines is still seriously ill in hospital, you know.’
‘Mrs Staines?’ he repeated, his eyebrows flicking derisively upwards. ‘Isn’t that a rather formal way to refer to someone you’ve been having secret assignations with—surely you’re on first-name terms with each other?’
The sting in his tone hit her on the raw. ‘It was only one assignation, damn it!’ she blurted out. ‘It was the first time we’d ever met!’
His seething impatience seemed to still, his voice easing to a toneless neutrality. ‘That must have made it all the more traumatic for you when she collapsed like that.’
Rosalind lowered her head, biting her bottom lip as she replayed her own actions in her mind. ‘I suppose I can’t help feeling as if it was my fault, even though the whole thing was her idea...’ She was so intent on the disturbing memory that she didn’t notice Luke stiffen slightly. ‘I’ve never seen anyone have a heart attack before. There was so little I could do. It was dreadful. I hated being so helpless...’
‘I know the feeling.’
His quiet anger jolted Rosalind out of her self-absorption.
‘Do you?’ She lifted her face to his and saw a bleakness in his brooding countenance that pierced her to the heart. Without thinking she reached up and laid a comforting hand against his rigid cheek. He froze, and his eyes searched hers, then dropped to her pink mouth, which was slightly swollen from her thoughtful nibbling, and she was suddenly breathless all over again, taking shallow sips of air that gave her no respite from the tightness in her chest.
‘Luke...?’
‘What?’ His voice was thick, his cheek heavy in her hand as he leaned his head into her touch, rubbing at her like a giant cat being petted, the corner of his mouth brushing the sensitive mound at the base of her thumb as he spoke.
‘I think...’
‘What?’ He turned his head completely, his mouth opening against the centre of her palm, his eyes flaring darkly at the taste of her, the cold bleakness in their depths disappearing, leaving a smouldering awareness in its wake. He moved abruptly closer, bringing his hips firmly against hers, pushing her backwards against the trunk of the palm, his arms closing in until they brushed her sides.
‘What do you think, Rosalind...?’
His hoarse, muffled whisper made her head spin. Whatever it was no longer seemed important. The important thing was that Luke’s breath was moist and hot in her cupped hand and his bent knee was softly insinuating itself between hers, pressing forward and then retreating until, unable to bear the sensual torment any more, she widened her stance, eagerly inviting the added intimacy. He came the rest of the way in a rush, roughly pushing into the space she had created for him and drawing his other leg sharply against her flank, compressing her thigh between warm pillars of taut muscle.
For some perverse reason she kept her hand over his mouth while the centres of their bodies kissed, shifted and kissed again, her other hand applying pressure to his chest, preventing his torso from crushing against her breasts. She was excited by the stormy look in Luke’s eyes as he submitted reluctantly to the delicate restraint. She was playing power games with him and they both knew it. They knew that he was stronger and fitter and could easily overcome her token resistance if he chose. But he didn’t choose, because he was too much of a gentleman, and maybe because he was a little in awe of her feminine power, thought Rosalind exultantly.
That didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t possess other means of persuasion. Denied the luxury of taste, he resorted to his other most potent sense to appease their mutual craving for contact, holding her gaze as he rocked against her, grinding her soft buttocks into the rough palm-trunk, his muscles quivering with strain. He was wild for more, and so was Rosalind, but she wanted to tease, to withhold the pleasure that she knew was awaiting them for another few, dizzyingly delicious moments.
He made a deep, smothered sound in his chest and she felt his stiffened tongue dart into a crease between her clamped fingers—a blunt, wet probe that she resisted, even as it made her go weak at the knees. His eyes were sullen, raging with a strange mixture of anger and desire, and hints of a sultry male challenge that thrilled her to her toes. This was Luke the athlete, superbly self-disciplined and intensely focused on his own state of physical readiness. Her mouth went dry, a swimmy heat hazing everything but the man sharply centred in her vision.
Rosalind licked her lips, unconsciously tempting him with what she had denied him. His tongue thrust again at her fingers and she felt his thighs simultaneously tense around her trapped leg, squeezing and releasing in a graphic rhythm that made her arch her hips in the instinctive feminine response.
His control slipped a notch and his hands released their whi
te-knuckled grip on the tree-trunk beside her hips and contracted around her waist, his fingers sizzling on her skin where her vest-top had ridden up from the waistband of her shorts. He angled his body, bending Rosalind further back over the curving beam of the palm, until the tendons in her neck ached with the effort of keeping him in sight and every cell and nerve-end between her knees and her waist was imprinted with the indelible evidence of his masculinity.
‘All right!’ she gasped, whipping her hand from his mouth.
‘All right what?’ he growled savagely.
