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He showed the five men their sleeping quarters first—a cluster of twin-bedded rooms next to a fully equipped computer centre soon cluttered with all the extra equipment they had bought.
Kalera, to her dismay, was far away on the opposite side of the house, in a spacious bedroom next to Duncan’s.
She looked slowly around her room, her eyes avoiding the sliding door midway along the wall, which she guessed must open into Duncan’s master suite, and the wide, inviting bed with its sensuous green satin cover.
‘Shouldn’t I be over with the rest of the workers?’ she commented.
‘I wanted you near me,’ he said simply, sending a frisson up her spine with his heavy-lidded smile. ‘In case I need you.’
She looked at him sharply. ‘For work, you mean?’
The smile grew bitter-sweet. ‘I can always rely on you to tell me what I mean, can’t I, Kalera? God forbid you should believe I mean what I actually say.’
Shortly afterwards the helicopter was despatched on a round trip back to Auckland in order to fetch Kalera’s solitary suitcase—an absurd extravagance that she nonetheless accepted as compensation for the vast inconvenience of the trip.
Over the next three days, Kalera saw virtually nothing of the other five men, who seemed to be breathing, eating and sleeping on the job, but she saw far too much of Duncan, whose sole purpose in existing now seemed to be to drive her crazy with unrequited love. Now that she had finally admitted her own feelings to herself, it was proving impossible to push them aside and pretend that she wasn’t aware of him with every breath that she took.
It didn’t help that instead of knuckling down to any serious work Duncan was merely flirting with it—and with her—teasing her with his arrant mischief, making her laugh at his wit and tempting her with sultry glances and wicked reminders of the passion they had shared.
The catalyst came early one morning when she happened to meet Bryan in a state of half-zombification in the kitchen, blearily chugging milk from the refrigerator after another all-nighter, and learned something from him that sent her exploding furiously into Duncan’s bedroom, forgetting she was only wearing her demure white cotton nightie.
He groaned and rolled over onto his back, looking up at the blonde banshee who had erupted into his dreams.
‘This is all an elaborate sham, isn’t it?’ she shouted at his big, supine body, sheathed in green satin sheets. ‘We never had to come down here at all! Bry
an just told me that there wasn’t a big leak at all, just a campaign of misinformation by Stephen—and you knew all about it last Friday!’ Throwing his behaviour at the party into a shattering new perspective and raising all her old angry doubts about his motives.
Duncan closed his eyes again and she was furious with him for pretending to be bored to sleep by her accusations.
‘Get up! I want to hear this from you. There’s no need for us to be here at all, is there?’
She grabbed a handful of the slippery sheet, creased across his chest, and tugged it threateningly. ‘I said, get up, you rat!’
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ he warned gently, still not opening his eyes.
Exhilaration raced through her veins at the challenge.
‘Huh!’ With a snort of defiance she ripped the bedclothes off and tossed them away over the end of the bed where he wouldn’t be able to reach them. Her whole body immediately felt as if it had been dipped in boiling water.
‘As you can see, I’m already up,’ drawled Duncan, looking down at the bold arousal of his body. He lazily rolled onto his side, facing her with the jutting evidence. ‘Actually, I’m always up when you’re around, Kalera. This happened last time you came into my bedroom, too, remember?’
All too well. She trembled, unable to look away, the turbulent excitement building to flashpoint inside her, the breath jamming in her throat as he lightly touched himself. ‘Don’t—’
‘Don’t what? Want you? Too late. Look at me. This is how I feel about you. I want you…all the time. And I’ve waited a long time for you to invite yourself back into my bedroom…’
She gasped and turned to flee, but he hit the floor running and scooped her up easily with one long, muscled arm, ramming the door shut with a bang, and flipping her backwards onto the crumpled sheet in a wild flurry of long blonde hair and kicking bare legs.
‘You want the charade to be over—so be it, it’s over!’ he said, pinning her to the bed with his sleep-warm body, luxuriating in the instant melting of her resistance. ‘Bryan wanted to give the project a hurry-up and this was the perfect place to do a full immersion, but no, you and I didn’t have to come, too. You and I are here because of this…’
He lifted her right hand and dragged off the glittering diamond ring and threw it onto the floor. Then he placed her bare hand on his thrusting body and crushed her mouth with his and suddenly her dammed emotions were bursting their swollen banks and she was fighting with him for the pleasure, helping him tear off her nightie, arching her breasts to his mouth and lifting her legs to encompass the rock-hard strength of his thighs, guiding him into the silky heat for the physical union that would complete them as two halves of a whole. The intense pleasure spiked at his first thrust, then again, and again, as his hips drove him deep into her central core, and Kalera shuddered, her gasping cry mingling with his answering groan of completion.
‘I never meant that to happen,’ said Duncan in a hoarse, stunned voice as they lay in a tangle of sweaty glory. He felt her tense beneath him and chuckled wryly into her tangled hair. ‘I don’t mean making love to you, darling, I mean ravishing you wildly like that. Not the first time. I was going to seduce you gently, with love, so that you’d respect me in the morning—and yourself—not like that other time…’
With love. Her heart suddenly felt too big for her breast. ‘I wasn’t ready for you then,’ she remembered painfully. ‘You were too…’
He lifted his head and frowned down into her eyes. ‘Too what?’
‘Much,’ she said wryly, touched by his anxiety. ‘Too exciting, too sexy, too…alive. Too much a man for me in every way at that point in my life.’
