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The dogs, alert to the human emotion in the air, began to whimper.
Soren held up a hand and they both slid down onto their haunches, ears pricked but silent, their almond-shaped eyes moving from one human to the other as they lay there panting.
‘Anna!’
She flung off his hand. ‘Which way is my damned room?’ She sniffed.
He moved in front of the door and stood there like a sentinel. ‘Last night...you were the best sex I have ever had in my life!’ he pushed out in a driven voice.
She stopped dead, her anger peeling away to leave just the hurt exposed, which from Soren’s point of view was worse.
‘Why would you even say that?’
‘Because it’s true and I don’t want you to walk out that door. You areexactlywhat you seem to be... I am not. There are things you don’t know about me yet, things that might make you feel differently.’
‘Then tell me.’ What? she wondered. What could be so bad?
‘It’s complicated and I’m not sure you’re ready to hear what I need to say, and until you are...can we get to know one another? Do the normal things that people do...?’
‘A date, you mean?’ She turned over this choice of words in her head. Best sex, while flattering, was not exactly an avowal of love, but you couldn’t fall in love in days; she had never believed that. She believed love was something that grew out of respect and shared values, laughter?
His brows lifted and an odd laugh emerged from his lips. ‘I hadn’t thought of that, but why not? Sure, a date.’
‘Best sex?Really?’ She thrust out one hip to a provocative angle and moistened her lips. ‘Sorry,’ she said in response to his deep groan of pain. ‘But I’ve been going slow all my life and I have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Sometimes, Anna, the only way to move forward is to go backwards.’ Even to him that sounded like running away, and would that be such a bad thing?
Maybe it was the honourable thing, because he knew, even if she didn’t at this point, that Anna was in danger of falling in love with him. With the realisation came the understanding that, even if he hadn’t known it, a woman’s love was something he had been avoiding all his life.
Backwards...?Anna could not think of any situation where what he said was true, but she let it pass. He had trusted her with his secret, or at least allowed her to know it existed, and that had to mean something, didn’t it?
No one falls in love in days, Anna.She repeated the words in her head until the flurry of panic passed.
‘Well, don’t ask me to forget last night happened because I couldn’t if I wanted to and I don’t!’
‘You don’t regret it?’
‘Of course not.’ She thought about asking him if he did but she wasn’t sure she’d like the answer.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SOHE’DLASTEDan entire day.
He had fought the fevered mind-numbing hunger and won. Of course, he had removed himself from temptation’s way, actually put several hundred miles between himself and the source of his ultimate desire, but all was fair in lust and... He inhaled sharply as that source came into view.
It was definitely too soon to declare victory!
Thanks to the incline of the undulating path she was walking down he knew Anna wouldn’t be able to see him for another few moments, which meant that Soren did not have to filter his stare.
His hungry blue eyes burned with a flame as hot as the fire inside him as he watched the slim figure approach. She moved with a natural grace that made him think of a ballet dancer; her hair was loose the way he liked, the sunlight picking out the darker titian threads in the waves that fell on her bare shoulders.
The simple square-necked dress she was wearing was sleeveless and cinched in at the waist by a narrow silver belt before falling into a bias-cut skirt, the fluid fabric suggesting the outline of her shapely thighs as she moved.
‘Hello.’ She tried not to eat him up with her eyes, but she was pretty sure she was not succeeding. Her room was littered with outfits discarded during her hunt for something that fell into Soren’s interpretation ofcasual,which had been his one-word response to her texted question.
His casual, it turned out, was an open-necked pale blue shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and a pair of black jeans that made it hard for her to lift her eyes and her mind from the hot place they had sunk to.
She watched him pull out designer shades and thought that was an excellent idea as she rummaged for a pair of her own and hid behind the oversized dark lenses, aware as she did so of him uncoiling his long lean frame from the gleaming sports car.
