Читать книгу The Complete Red-Hot And Historical Collection - Ким Лоренс, Kelly Hunter - Страница 77

CHAPTER EIGHT

THOUGH SHE WAS convinced she wouldn’t be able to, Mari finally did drift off. She had no idea how long she actually slept, but it was still dark when she woke up, her body bathed in sweat, her heart thudding; only wisps of the nightmare remained. As they slipped away, reality came rushing in.

It was far worse than the creature that had been pursuing her in the nightmare.

‘I’m married!’

It had been her secret dream, one she’d never even admitted to herself: her own home, a family and a man who she could drop her defences with, someone she could trust. She saw him in her dreams sometimes, but when she woke, his face vanished like smoke.

What have I done?

On the verge of panic, breathing hard, she sat bolt upright in bed, the crumpled sheets still clutched in her fingers.

She’d made a mistake, a terrible mistake! No, mistake wasn’t a big enough word for what she’d done. Eighteen months, Mari, that’s all and then you can have your life back, and you’ll never have to see him again.

She flopped back and lay, one hand curved above her head, staring at the ceiling, seeing the shape of the dark exposed rafters against the white. Even though she had left the doors to the Juliet balcony open, the room was totally still, the only noise the soft swishing sound of the whirring fan. The silence pressed down on her like a weight. Her thoughts went round in circles like the fan as she tried to work out what was going to happen next.

She tried to block the negative thoughts. He liked dogs; he loved his grandmother... Oh, God, how had she got herself in this position?

She sat up again and her stomach rumbled. She knew from experience that a glass of warm milk was the only thing that would give her any more sleep that night. How far had it been to the kitchen?

She pushed back the covers, went across to her open case and took out the first thing she saw. It was a lacy shrug, and she pulled it on over the calf-length nightshirt she was wearing.

Outside her room the corridor, with its modern-art-treasure-sprinkled walls, was still lit at intervals by soft light from the wall sconces of beaten copper that had fascinated her when Tomas had led her this way.

Right, she was here, so what next? Right or left?

She remembered a wooden carving of a Madonna at the top of the flight of stairs, but there was no sign of that or, for that matter, the stairs, just lots of doors along both sides of the hallway, all heavy banded oak.

Right, Mari, it’s hopeless. Go back to bed.

She ignored the good advice of the voice of common sense, unable to face the thought of lying there for the rest of the night. She was not ready to give up yet. She walked down to the end of the hallway that opened out onto what appeared to be a wrought iron Juliet balcony similar to the one in her bedroom, then with a sigh turned around.

She froze, the feral shriek of fear emerging from somewhere deep inside her... She opened her mouth and it just went on and on. The ghostly apparition screamed right back at her, and when she clamped her hand to her mouth, so did the spectral image that appeared to be floating in the distance.

Weak-kneed but smiling, she gave a shaky laugh of sheer relief, and her reflection, framed in the massive mirror that filled the entire wall the opposite end of the corridor, laughed back at her.

Shaking with reaction, she grabbed the nearest thing for support; it was the big heavy metal handle of the door she stood beside.

‘Ghosts don’t have red hair.’

* * *

Even if he had been asleep the scream would have woken him; the visceral sound of terror made his blood run cold.

‘Mari...?’ Heart pounding, grim faced, he threw back the thin cover on the big carved oak bed that, had the room not been vast, would have dominated it and leaped out.

Seb hit the ground running, moving as if the devil himself were at his heels. Luckily the room was not in total darkness; a small lamp still burned on a desk in the corner of the room where the book he had abandoned earlier lay open. It illuminated the corner, casting a series of dappled shadows across the vaulted ceiling.

He grabbed the heavy oak door, pulling it hard enough to wrench the ancient wood off its hinges; it held even though it carried the extra weight of someone who was attached to the handle.

Unprepared for the violent lurch, Mari found herself dragged without warning into the room behind the big door. She managed to keep her balance by holding the handle for dear life.

She barely registered the room itself. Her wide eyes developed a severe case of tunnel vision. Spectres were one thing, but flesh and blood and very real Seb clad in what seemed to be a pair of black boxers that hung low on his narrow hips and nothing else was another and far more disturbing proposition!

Her glance moved up in a slow sweeping arc from his bare feet. The farther she travelled, the hotter she got and the more squirmy the feeling in her stomach; her heart was beating harder than it had when she had faced the prospect of a ghostly haunting.

He was magnificent. He looked like some sculptured statue brought to life in glowing golden tones. There wasn’t an ounce of surplus flesh on his body to blur the muscle definition of his ridged belly, shoulders and thighs.

Mari had no control over the series of breath-catching butterfly kicks in her stomach; she had never imagined a man could be so rampantly male. Before she had time or the ability to form anything approaching a rational thought, the cocktail of apprehension and excitement coalesced into a heavy ache low in her abdomen.

‘I was looking for a glass of milk,’ she heard herself say. ‘I saw a ghost...’ The protective screen of her lashes lifted. ‘Not really but—’

‘There are probably a few ghosts knocking around the place.’ Holding her eyes, he pushed the half-open door closed with his foot.

Mari’s glance went to the door and back to his face in a jerky, half-scared movement.

She was nervous. He was the one who should be feeling nervous, Seb thought... Very nervous. She was the one creeping around the place in the dead of night dressed like... Well, actually if she had not been dressed at all it could not have been any more provocative than the near transparent floaty number she had on.

The thing might be some modern take on Victorian primness, long-sleeved and fastened high at the throat with a little ribbon, but back-lit by the golden light from the lamp the white material became effectively transparent, the fabric so gossamer fine that if he tried, actually even if he tried not to, he could make out the dark perimeter of her rosy areola and the shadow between her thighs.

Mari ran her tongue across her lips to moisten them, struggling for some composure, and missing the resultant hot flare in his hooded glance.

She cleared her throat and turned her head, saying conversationally, ‘My, this is a big room.’ Big room—my God, could I sound any more inane?

He had a cameo view of the classic purity of her profile, her hair a glorious fiery halo glowing under the subdued artificial light in the hallway, appearing dark against the pale and almost transparent whiteness of her provocative nightclothes.

She brought to mind one of the impossibly desirable virgin sacrifices in an old-fashioned horror movie that every dashing hero was determined to rescue and the villain wanted to lay.

As a fist of lust tightened in his groin Seb discovered his sympathies lay with the villain. He dragged a frustrated hand over his hair and reacted to the emotions spilling from her with a sardonic smile. This woman seemed to go from one emotional crisis to another. Did she not understand the meaning of restraint?

He understood it—he valued it because he had seen the sort of selfish excess and chaos that came with it—and yet understanding the meaning of restraint did not prevent his rampant hormones exploding. They overrode his iron control as his dark smouldering stare travelled slowly over her body.

‘So what couldn’t wait until the morning? Where’s the fire?’ He struggled to inject some amusement into his voice, but the combination of vulnerability and sheer unadulterated feminine sexiness had got to him in a place Seb had thought he’d hermetically sectioned, sealed off...when...

He couldn’t remember exactly what age he’d begun to worry he’d inherited his parents’ genes. It had kept him awake nights until he had realised that recognising your weaknesses meant they weren’t going to trip you up; it was all about control.

Control, he told himself, struggling to recall the meaning of the word as he breathed his way through the conflicting needs to comfort her and tear off her clothes and sink into all that luscious softness.

‘Fire?’ she echoed, blinking up at him.

If there wasn’t one, there would be—she looked hot enough to ignite anything within a fifty-yard radius, he decided, dragging his gaze from the plumpness of her trembling lips as he reminded himself that she might be as attractive as sin and twice as tempting, but Mari Jones was not destined to share his bed. Even if it hadn’t been essential that he kept things on a professional footing, she was not the sort of woman he would have entertained having any sort of relationship with.

Even so, it would have been much simpler if she had been unattractive or, for that matter, had one single flaw physically. His eyes moved from the fabric that had begun to cling with an electrostatic charge to the long shapely length of her legs, drawing his attention once more to the suggestion of shadow at their apex, and he forced himself to focus instead on the many flaws she had personality-wise.

The temper, he thought, sweating now, the mulish obstinacy, but most of all the sheer emotional excess in everything she did. She cried, she laughed, she screamed, she fought, and none of these things she did in moderation—he doubted she was even capable of it.

It didn’t matter how pretty the packaging, he pitied the man who eventually tried to domesticate this red-headed witch. It would take a saint or someone equally capable of making a walk in the park a full-blown drama.

The thought triggered an image, a memory he’d thought he’d forgotten. The day his parents had managed to make such a harmless outing a front-page headline. The moment his mother had pushed his father into the lake had been caught on camera for posterity, as had been their making up, but what Seb remembered was the nauseous, churning sensation of shame in his stomach and the desire to vanish.

When he had run away from the scene, his passionately reunited parents had not noticed their three-year-old son was missing until later that night.

The memory enabled him to claw back some semblance of control. He took a step back and stood there waiting.

Her stomach went into free fall as she glanced up at him through her lashes. He looked like the modern-day flesh-and-blood version of some sort of Greek god in his close-fitting boxers that did a very poor job of concealment, his dark hair standing up spikily, his jaw deeply scored with stubble. A primitive thrill shot through her body as she drank him in, in great greedy gulps.

‘I’m sorry. It was a m-mistake.’

‘Probably,’ he agreed huskily. ‘Calm down, you’re shaking.’ He caught her slim hands and pressed them between both of his.

The action might have been meant to soothe, but it did the opposite. Mari reacted to the contact like a cattle prod, throwing her arms wide to break the connection.

‘I was looking for the kitchen. Do I go right or left?’

There was a long pulse of silence. It buzzed in her ears like a cloud of bees. Mari waited until it became unbearable.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

He was so still, his stillness projecting a tension that was evident in the skin taut over his face. The tension emphasised each slashing angle and perfect plane. Even at a moment like this Mari marvelled that a man could be that beautiful, not just aesthetically because of the sculpted outline of his lips or the symmetry of his bold features, but it was the underlying earthy quality that charged the air around him.

‘This has been a long day. I’ll get Tomas to fetch you—’

‘Don’t wake the poor old man, just tell me how to get there!’ She struggled to flatten the panic she could hear in her voice. ‘Please, Seb.’

She shook her head resolutely, too stressed to interpret the strange way he was looking at her, wishing he’d put on some clothes.

‘You’ll get lost. I’ll show you,’ he said, but didn’t move.

‘No!’

‘Yes!’

They both spoke and moved at the same time, colliding.

Maybe he was a bastard; maybe he was just his parents’ son. You couldn’t choose your genes, and why fight nature? he thought as he reached for her. ‘Later,’ he murmured as he pulled her up hard against him and, one hand on her bottom, the other tangled in her hair, he pulled her head back and fitted his mouth to hers.

She melted into him, soft and warm, her arms going up to circle his neck as she gave a little sigh into his mouth, and kissed him back.

The hungry kiss went on and on, until with a groan he pushed her away and turned his back to her.

‘Get out of here,’ he growled. ‘While you still can.’

The sudden rejection left her trembling. She could still feel the strength of his arms, the hardness of his erection against her belly. Mari bit her lip, and thought to hell with pride—she didn’t care if he knew. She didn’t care who knew. She wanted him, and if that meant begging she would, even at the risk of rejection!

‘Let me stay, Seb, please. I don’t want to go.’ She had never wanted anything less in her entire life; she felt dizzy with the sweet hunger that coursed through her veins.

He swung back, took one look at her standing there and with a groan swept her up into his arms and stalked across to the bed with his prize.

He laid her on the bed and knelt beside her, sweeping her wild curls from her cheek and forehead, smoothing them out onto the pillow. The expression of fierce concentration on his face made her stomach flip.

One hand beside her face, he bent down and kissed her softly, running his tongue along the inner surface of her lower lip, tracing the pouting outline before he slid inside, his tongue tasting every inch of the moist interior. His free hand moved to one breast, cupping it through the thin fabric, his thumb running up the lower slope to graze then tease the engorged rosy peak. Then he covered it with his mouth, wetting the fabric and drawing a hoarse cry of pleasure from her aching throat.

Mari arched up to him, tangling her fingers in his hair, feeling his big body curved over her, tensing a little as his hands slid under her nightshirt, up her thighs, then relaxing, her head pushing back into the pillow because it felt so good.

The sensations shooting through her felt like an electrical storm. The frantic feeling escalated until he suddenly levered himself upright.

Her blue eyes flew wide open in protest.

‘You’re overdressed.’ At some point, Mari had no idea how or when, her little shrug had gone, but before she had time to consider how she felt about being naked in front of him he took the hem of her nightshirt in his two hands and pulled. The middle seam parted with a loud ripping sound until the only thing holding it together was the prissy little bow.

Holding her eyes with a wicked smile, he very slowly undid the bow and peeled the fabric apart, then her insides dissolved some more as she closed her eyes and breathed in his scent. Warm and musky, it was intoxicating.

‘Look at me.’

She did, her dark lashes parting to reveal the blue languid depths.

Lust slammed through him with a force that threatened to stop his heart, and what a way to go, he thought, drinking in the sight of her gorgeous wanton beauty. Her body was perfect, from the fullness of her high, firm breasts to her long, gorgeous legs that he was imagining wrapped around him.

‘Have you any idea how much I want you?’

‘I have some idea,’ she said, daringly running her hand up his hair-roughened chest and belly.

He gave a low laugh and removed his boxers, drawing an ego-enhancing gasp from Mari.

The first skin-to-skin contact caused a flash of heat within her; the burning continued to build as he kissed her while touching her everywhere until she was on fire. She tensed as he parted her legs, then relaxed as the liquid heat flooded through her body, the pleasure bordering pain, it was so intense.

When he flipped onto his back and fed her hands onto his body she began to eagerly explore his warm, moist skin, fascinated by the overwhelming masculinity of his body, moving across the hard contours of his chest and down over the ridged muscles of his flat belly, while he lay, one hand hooked behind his head, watching her through gleaming hooded eyes.

It gave her a feeling of heady feminine power to curve her fingers around the hard, hot, silky column of his erection and hear him groan with pleasure. So much so that when he removed her hands and pinned them above her head she gave a cry of protest.

‘I need to save some for you,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Let me give you it all, Mari.’

‘Please, oh, please!’

Her frantic plea ripped a lusty growl from his throat as he kissed her.

‘I didn’t sleep with Adrian.’

He lifted his head, and dark eyes glazed with passion blinked down at her. ‘Good.’

‘Or actually anyone.’

For a moment he lay above her perfectly still, every sinew strained, then she heard him mumble, low and sounding like someone in pain. ‘Too late... Do you want me to stop?’

‘No...no...’ She trembled in anticipation, relaxing at the first shallow thrust, no explosion of pain just a feeling of intense pleasure... She let out a moan as he pushed deeper, his tongue sensually mimicking the more intimate movement of his hips.

Instinct made her wrap her legs around his waist as she arched under him, her body rippling tight around him, her fingers clawing at his back.

She clung to him as though he were the only thing stopping her vanishing into the sensual maelstrom that held her in its core as he was in her core, filling her with each stroke, pushing her higher and higher until— When it came, the fierce explosion drew a low keening cry from her throat. She grabbed hold of him and was saying his name over and over as she felt his hot release inside her, then he shuddered and rolled away.

For a moment she felt lost, then he pulled her to him, her head on his chest. She fell asleep listening to the heavy thud of his heartbeat.

He waited for the postcoital sense of emptiness that was the trigger for him to leave the warm bed. He never consciously acknowledged it, but if he had he would have considered it a perfectly reasonable price to pay for retaining control, keeping part of himself separate.

Instead Seb felt an utterly alien feeling of peace. Before he had a chance to ponder it another realisation hit: for the first time in his life, not only had he lost control, but he had not used protection. It had not been calculated, but some sixth sense told him that Mari was not going to give him the benefit of any doubt.