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‘Please do not be nice to me or I will cry,’ she begged between her chattering teeth, as if this weren’t a humiliating enough position to be in.
‘I have no intention of being nice to you,’ he promised grimly, reliving the moment that he had seen the security guards move to contain her.
They had been doing their job and his fear had been they would do it too well. They had not deserved his reprimand or the curt dismissal. She, on the other hand... His jaw clenched, and the muscles quivered as he ground his teeth.
Left with nothing to do but wait to regain control of her body, she took in his outfit, what there was of it. As distraction went it was a good one. Her covetous glance moved up from his bare feet shoved in a pair of leather sliders up strong, lightly hair-roughened brown calves and deeply muscled bronzed thighs. His wet black shorts were the mid-thigh, low-on-the-hip variety and a sleeveless white vest revealed his muscular shoulders and biceps.
He had the sort of body that you saw on men who leapt off a diving board and arched through the air, throwing impossible shapes before they hit the water without a ripple. Sleek, streamlined, powerful—there wasn’t an ounce of excess flesh to hide the taut, perfectly formed muscle beneath oiled smooth skin.
Marco dragged a hand through his hair and some of the excess water that came away with it splashed icy droplets on Kate’s face, breaking her free of the sexual thrall that had gripped her.
Lust, mindless attraction, chemistry, she listed them in her head in the hope that facing her monsters would make them vanish...aware that the exercise did smack of something horribly close to desperation.
‘You can’t wander around at will. Did you not see the signs saying private?’ he ground out, the fury etched on his face emphasising each plane and hollow. ‘This area—’ his expansive gesture took in the lush green they stood in and caused a sequence of fluid contractions of muscle beneath the listening golden skin of his torso ‘—is,’ he spelt out, gouging out each syllable for biting emphasis, ‘off limits to—’
‘No one told me. Those men—’ She stopped and looked around, half expecting to see them lurking, but there was no sign of them. ‘Those men could have...’ Conscious of the whiney note in her voice, she bit her lip. What was she making excuses for anyhow? She’d done nothing wrong.
‘Thosemenwere doing their jobs.’ Pausing as she continued to crouch there looking like some sort of bewildered supplicant, he held out his open-palmed hands in a gesture of impatience. When she didn’t respond to encouragement he snapped out, ‘Get up!’
‘Do not order me around...’ Her angry defiance vanished in the blink of an eye. She bit her lip harder this time and admitted, ‘I don’t think I can.’
It was the ruefully reluctant admission itself that hit him in a spot he didn’t want to acknowledge. He knew that it had hurt her to have to admit she needed help. Taking a step towards her, he bent forward and held out a hand. ‘Come on!’
Shifting her weight to one side, she reached for the hand but before her fingers had made contact his had curled around her wrist. He casually hauled her to her feet and immediately let go, but Kate had not got her land legs yet and she staggered, grabbing for anything to stop herself falling.
The anything was his vest.
Both hands clutching the white fabric, damp from his body, she fell against him, experiencing an immediate thousand-volt shock that stopped her breathing. It was only the large hand that moved to the small of her back that stopped her sliding back down to her knees.
It was sensory overload, the heat of his body, the hardness, the warm male scent of him... Her nostrils flared, her eyes closed, as she dug deep to break free of the mind-numbing tsunami as she leaned, weak-kneed, literally plastered to his front. The tremors that had been shaking her took on a different quality, no longer fuelled by shock but by the breath-catching, illicit excitement swirling through her veins like champagne bubbles.
She could hear him swearing above her head, feel his breath in her hair on the side of her face as the hand in the small of her back slid around her waist. The other curved around her jaw, turning her face up to him.
‘You are not going to faint.’
She wanted to tell him she never fainted, but her throat felt too thick and scratchy.
He studied her face. The dilated pupils leaving only gold rims. ‘Take some deep breaths...notthatdeep...’
Reacting to hisgive-me-strengthtone, she rallied slightly and rebutted shakily, ‘I do not need you to tell me how...’How to stay standing?
Fighting the mindless hunger clawing in his gut striving to get a firmer hold, Marco swore and stepped back. ‘Fine, you do not need me.’
Arms folded, he watched as she wobbled before, with another curse of defeat, he grabbed for her, but she backed away like a drunken tightrope walker, strangely graceful.
He huffed out a sigh of defeat and reached for her. She wheeled backwards, muscle memory co-ordination keeping her upright, and instead of his hands landing on her shoulders they came to rest either side of her face.
A face minus make-up and its usual fiery halo, the purity of her features washed pale by shock making her look even younger. Even though he knew this was an illusion—he had made a point of checking her age and knew she was twenty-seven—it did serve as a timely reminder of the very real but invisible barrier they stood on opposite sides of.
The barrier wavered as her heavy eyelids lifted and she looked at him with eyes that were sohungryit took his breath away. The promise of passion sending a thudding stream of neat hormonal heat through his body.
Still, he rose above his baser instincts, though fingernails were involved this time. ‘Next time,’ he promised, reliving the blood-freezing moment that he’d recognised the figure surrounded by the men, crack marksmen all, whose jobs it was to protect him and his family, ‘I’ll cut out the middleman and shoot you myself. Do not,’ he added with grim warning, ‘sayanything. Not a word!’
She blinked, a belligerent glitter cutting through the shocked glaze in her eyes. She didn’t respond well to ultimatums and that went double when the person issuing them was this man. She didn’t care how many titles he had, she was not going to be silenced.
‘I...they could have shot me; I could have died!’
‘Do not dramatise!’
