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That was ridiculous. She meant nothing to him. Just because she had aroused him physically…He stepped out onto the veranda and frowned as he saw a movement in the women’s courtyard.
Keira. What was she doing out there at three o’clock in the morning? And why was she crouching on the ground?
Snakes sometimes slid into these gardens.
It only took him a handful of seconds to pull on his underwear and a pair of jeans. The tiles beneath his bare feet still held the warmth of the day’s sun as he padded down the private staircase that led into the courtyards. It wasn’t until he had opened the gate between his own courtyard and the women’s courtyard that Jay realised that what had brought him here had been an age-old in-built male protective concern, which he had not even realised he possessed until now, and which if he had known he possessed, he would not have thought would be activated by or for Keira…
The sight of Jay walking towards her through the shadows was so unexpected that it shocked Keira into immobility for a few seconds, before she struggled to her feet. His terse, ‘What are you doing?’ didn’t help.
‘I wanted a closer look at the pattern on these tiles,’ she told him, indicating the tiles forming the narrow footpath. ‘And if you’ve come to find out if I’ve finished the layouts you wanted, then the answer is yes. At least in draft form. They’ll be on your desk before you leave tomorrow.’
The words were a staccato burst of edgy defensiveness that fell away into sharp silence when Jay stepped out of the shadows. Automatically she looked at him, and then couldn’t look away, her breath locking in her throat, her stomach tightening in response to what she could see. His torso and his feet were bare, as though…as though he had been in bed. Naked? Why was she thinking that? He could just have been relaxing. But something told her that Jay wasn’t the kind of man who relaxed by taking off his clothes and lounging around semi-nude.
‘If they’re ready I may as well have them now,’ Jay told her.
‘I was going to polish them a bit more.’
‘There’s no need. It’s understood that these are preliminary drafts. If I have them now it will give me more time to consider them. I’ll walk back with you and collect them.’
Keira wished she hadn’t said anything about the layouts. She’d wanted to look them over again before handing them to him, but now if she refused to let him take them he was bound to think that she’d been boasting, and that they weren’t finished at all.
‘Very well,’ she agreed.
She’d closed her door when she came out. As they approached it Jay stepped in front of her—intending, she realised too late, to open the door for her. But the practical whys and wherefores of how she had come to be touching him hardly mattered. Because when she’d reached out to stop herself from colliding with him he had reached out too, and now his hand was on her shoulder, and her senses were filled by the feel of his warm flesh beneath her hand and the scent of his skin in her nostrils.
She could have moved away. She certainly should have done so. But instead she was looking up at him, and he was looking back at her. A dangerous tension stretched the silence. Her fingers curled into his arm, the breath shuddering from her lungs.
Danger crackled through her senses like static electricity. Abruptly she removed her hand from his arm, but it was too late. Without knowing that she was doing so she had moved closer to him, as though in mute invitation, and he had responded to that invitation.
She had thought that people only kissed like this in films—briefly, testing, tasting. Two people who were both trying desperately not to give in to the fierce undertow of a desire that neither of them really wanted, only to be swamped by it as their lips met and they were overwhelmed by a hunger that leapt from nerve-ending to nerve-ending, binding them together as their mouths and hands and bodies meshed, plundered and pleaded.
It was like being possessed by a universal force that could not be controlled, Keira thought dizzily, her lips clinging to Jay’s. His hand was spread across the back of her head beneath her hair, keeping her mouth close to his own whilst his tongue probed the soft willingness of her mouth, possessing it in the same way that her desire for him was possessing her.
