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In the breathless little silence that followed, the sudden spit of hot olive oil in the frying-pan was a welcome distraction. Turning away, Kalera blindly shovelled in the chopped vegetables and sautéed them with fierce concentration. When they began to brown, she quickly added the pasta just long enough to heat through, and stirred in a sprinkling of the grated Parmesan cheese that she kept in the freezer. The steam from the pan added to the discomfort caused by her snug skirt and stifling tights and she surreptitiously unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, hoping to improve the air circulation over her heated skin.
Since she had determined to treat the meal with the utmost casualness they ate at the kitchen table and after her initial hunger pangs were satisfied Kalera found herself fighting a losing battle against the growing tension which gradually stifled their desultory conversation. Even when her eyes were lowered to her plate she was aware of every bite that Duncan took, every shift of his legs under the table, every dip and tilt of his dark head and flex of his fingers against the tall glass of iced water, which was all she had to offer him to drink.
‘This is delicious!’ Duncan’s sigh of satisfaction forced her to look up to acknowledge his compliment. She watched the fork slide between his lips and the motion of his mouth as he savoured the flare of flavours on his tongue. He chewed slowly, making a bio-mechanical process seem like a sensual act of erotic enjoyment, and when he washed down his swallow of food with a sip of water the gloss of moisture left on his lower lip made Kalera want to lean over and lick it off.
Unnerved by the pang of sexual aggression, she flushed when a piece of pasta slipped off her suspended fork and fell back onto her plate, splashing a little of the cheesy sauce onto her forearm. Unthinkingly she scooped it up with her finger and popped it into her mouth, a social solecism that she would never have dreamed of committing if she had been dining with Stephen.
She cast a sheepish look across the table and froze, finger in mouth, at Duncan’s smouldering expression. His eyes were black as jet and hot with arousal as he watched her jerkily release her finger. His lips parted and his tongue reflexively circled the inner rim of his mouth, and she knew that he was reliving, as she was, those fraught moments back at his office.
‘You have a unique and very unforgettable taste,’ he said huskily, indicating that his thoughts were reaching even further back. His eyes dipped to the open V of her blouse and Kalera felt a tiny trickle of perspiration shimmer down between her breasts. ‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning with it so vividly on my tongue that I roll over, expecting you to be still lying there beside me, all drowsy and damp with my loving…’
Oh, yes…!
A wild craving leapt in Kalera’s blood, clawing for freedom, but the sound of the telephone ringing in the hall caged the reckless response before it was uttered. Her fork clattered onto her plate and with an inarticulate cry she fled to answer it.
Duncan’s head dropped into his hands and he uttered a thick curse of bitter frustration. Dammit, he had almost had her. Now she would have time to gather her defences and would be more wary of him than ever.
He prepared himself for the worst, but it was still a crushing blow when she came back a few minutes later, the pale oval of her face flushed with shame, her lips reddened by the indentation of her teeth.
‘Stephen,’ he guessed, his voice flattened into harshness by his rigid grip on his emotions. ‘I told you he’d be checking up on you. Did you tell him we were eating?’
She shook her head as she picked up her plate and took it over to the sink, scraping the rest of her rapidly cooling meal into the waste disposal.
‘I think you’d better go.’
His hands clenched beside his plate, his eyes sullen with hostility as they bored into her slender back. ‘I haven’t finished my pasta yet.’
She clattered her plate into the sink and spun around, her hips pressing back into the hard edge of the bench. ‘Please, just go!’
‘Did he tell you to say that? Was he furious with you for feeding me? Did he threaten to come over to make sure I was gone?’
‘No!’ She felt his angry disbelief pulsing at her in physical waves and burst out, ‘For goodness’ sake—I didn’t even tell him you were here!’
She clapped her hands to her hot cheeks and Duncan kicked out of his chair, startled understanding dawning in his eyes.
‘And now you’re afraid of what will happen if he finds out?’ His voice gentled as he moved towards her.
His misunderstanding only poured salt into the wound. ‘No, it’s not that—’ She tried to curl away from him as he approached but he caught her shoulder, pressing her back against the sink.
‘I don’t even know why I did it,’ she said miserably.
Duncan’s forefinger curled under her chin and lifted it so that she was forced to meet the steady challenge of his gaze.
‘Yes, you do.’ His quiet certainty burned like a brand into her consciousness.
‘We were just having a meal,’ she denied.
‘A man and a woman innocently enjoying each other’s company,’ he agreed softly. He had a gift for making a chaste phrase sound ineffably wicked.
His thumb pressed into the tiny indentation in the middle of her chin, tugging minutely on her lower lip. ‘Only it wasn’t entirely innocent, was it, Kalera?’
‘We weren’t doing anything,’ she blurted feverishly.
His eyes grew slumberous. ‘But we wanted to,’ he murmured, his hand moving to cup her smooth cheek, encompassing it from jaw to temple, the heel of his palm curving under the angle of her jaw. ‘We wanted to do this…’ His thumb dragged across her parted mouth, smearing moisture along her lips.
‘And we wanted to do this…’ He bent his head and fitted his mouth briefly against hers, then again, harder, crushing her lips and darting his tongue between them to sip at her liquid heat.
‘And most of all,’ he whispered, his mouth still touching hers, his lips caressing her with every word, ‘we wanted to do this…’
