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He turned away, lashes veiling his eyes, and she wondered what was going on inside his head, if he was weighing her words and finding them wanting; and then he was turning back to her, his mouth curling in a faint smile as he said easily,
‘It was a bad summer for me. I knew my folks were on the point of divorce, and to be sent away to England, not knowing what my future might be and not able to do a single thing about it, made me angry. I guess both of us were operating under the same handicap and having Neville around didn’t make things any easier.’
‘No.’
Unsaid was the knowledge that without Neville’s interference they might have found a way through their mutual distrust of one another, but Lucy was not going to tell him about her realisation of what her maternal cousin was right now.
‘So I’m forgiven?’
The words trembled from her lips, her voice soft and unfamiliarly hesitant.
Saul smiled and leaned towards her, curling strong fingers round her wrists.
‘When you look at me like that how can I say no?’
She hadn’t completely lost all hold on reality, retaining enough sanity to say drily, ‘Very easily I imagine, when I remember what a little beast I was.’
‘Mmm… you certainly made it plain that you didn’t want me around.’ He laughed then, his eyes warming. ‘It dealt quite a blow to my adolescent male pride to be so obviously cold-shouldered—something which Neville thoroughly enjoyed, as I remember.’
He saw her expression and his mouth curled in amused mockery. ‘What’s wrong? Didn’t it ever occur to you that a boy of sixteen is quite capable of being hurt by the so obvious rejection of a girl of twelve?’
‘I was only just twelve and you were almost seventeen,’ Lucy reminded him huskily.
‘And almost seventeen was quite definitely old enough to realise and appreciate the charms of a girl soon to be a woman.’ He looked at her and laughed again. ‘Didn’t you realise later when you looked back how much of our mutual antagonism could be put down to mutual attraction, even if emotional rather than physical?’
Had she? Was that why Saul aroused such a powerful reaction in her now? With a small shock she realised he had said ‘mutual attraction’. Did that mean…?
She looked at him and he said softly, ‘Since we’ve now made our peace with one another we should perhaps seal it in the time honoured way.’
Almost as though he had known she would pull away from him and been prepared for it, his fingers tightened round her wrists refusing to let her go, and then with his eyes looking directly into hers he said lightly, ‘Without the seal the peace treaty could be rendered null and void.’
And then he slowly uncurled his fingers from her wrists and let his hands hang free.
Without being aware of it she moved, swaying slightly towards him, taking that one step that would bring her close enough to his body to be aware of its strength and power. His eyes smiled into hers, teasingly, intoxicatingly, making her feel as giddy as an eighteen-year-old. And then his head bent towards her, his fingers sliding into the hair at her nape, gently angling her head so that her mouth was at exactly the right angle to meet his.
There was nothing forceful or demanding in the warm contact of his lips against her own; nothing at all in their almost fraternal pressure to make the world explode inside her in a blinding whirl of colours and sensations, but somehow it did.
As he kissed her she had automatically closed her eyes, but as he lifted his mouth from hers, the sensation of deprivation was so intense that her eyes flew open.
For what felt like a lifetime but was probably only a second he looked into them, and then both hands cupped her face, one thumb softly probing the moist fullness of her lips.
She responded instinctively, her head tilting back as she let him draw her even closer to his body so that she could feel the measured thud of his heartbeat against her skin.
Her eyes opened and watched the agonisingly slow descent of his head before her eyelids grew too heavy and fluttered closed. This time there was nothing fraternal in the touch of his mouth against her own.
Instinctively and willingly she met its demands, giving herself to the heady thrill of desire he aroused within her with a trust that would normally have appalled her. It was almost as though she possessed some instinct that overrode caution to tell her that with this man she would always be safe no matter what heights he urged her to scale.
When he released her she told herself she was not imagining it was with reluctance, and certainly there was a glitter in the darkness of his eyes that suggested he was as affected by their kiss as she was herself.
But now that he had set her free and her body was no longer being intoxicated by the heat of his, she reminded herself that she would be foolish to read too much into a mere kiss, and so as she stepped back from him she said as lightly as she could,
