Bridegrooms Required: One Bridegroom Required / One Wedding Required / One Husband Required. Sharon Kendrick
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had first set eyes on him. When she had experienced an attraction towards him which had started with a thunderbolt and just continued to grow.
She had thought that he felt something for her, too—if not exactly the same in terms of intensity, then something very similar. Or had she simply been imagining that raw gleam of hunger which sometimes illuminated his eyes with a deep blue radiance? The easy companionship they had shared during her time at his house? Easy enough for her to think that there might be something more than just friendship...
Shakily, and trying to use as much grace as possible—which wasn’t easy, given the length of her skirt—Holly rose to her feet and stood looking down at him.
‘Coffee it is, then,’ she said quietly, but still she didn’t move, and there was a question in her eyes.
During his life, Luke had faced the very real adversities of hunger and pain and physical danger—and yet now he found himself in a situation far more threatening. He had a will of steel, forged by need in the long, lonely hours of his childhood, and yet that will now seemed to have deserted him.
He put his hand out towards her, and looked at it with bemused detachment, as if that hand were not under his control any more. It alighted on the slender curve of her ankle, and he felt the tiny shudder which thrilled her flesh as he made that first contact.
Slowly, lingeringly, he let his hand move upwards, so that it encircled her calf, and that calf suddenly seemed like the most erotic zone he had ever encountered. He let his middle finger trickle along the silken swell, in a way that made his body shudder as he imagined the natural path for that finger to now travel...
Holly didn’t dare move, didn’t dare speak, some instinct telling her that to do either would be to break this bewitching spell he had cast on her. His hand felt like the centre of a furnace. Or maybe his touch had transformed her into a furnace—for she could feel a fire beginning to blaze at the fork of her legs, the honeyed wetness which followed doing nothing to quench the remorseless heat building up inside her.
Luke’s hand reached her knee. Never had he felt such an erotic contrast between bone and velvet-soft skin. He felt for the fleshy pocket behind the knee itself and sighed with pleasure. Using his thumb, he circled the skin there, round and round, over and over, until he felt it tremble helplessly beneath his touch. His hand crept inexorably upwards; he knew where he wanted to touch her most and, from the give-away little sag of her knees, he knew that she wanted it, too.
He knelt before her then, tightening his arms around her bottom, burying his face in the softness of her belly through the filmy voile of her dress. He felt her sway, and pulled her down so that she was kneeling, too, their eyes almost on a level, her expression one of breathless curiosity as she waited to see what he would do next.
Her eyes had never looked greener—luminous and bright as leaves which had just been rained on—nor more inviting. He saw her lips pucker helplessly, noted that the lush, dark lashes were in danger of fluttering to a close.
‘I want to kiss you,’ he told her, in a voice which sounded as heavy and as sweet as syrup.
‘Then kiss me,’ she managed drowsily, half despairing of her passivity.
‘God, yes...’ He would have kissed her anyway, invitation or not, for it would have been impossible to resist those lips. He lowered his mouth slowly... brushing it against hers with the merest whisper of contact... and Holly felt her lips part immediately.
Steadying himself with a hand now buried in the rippling copper ropes of her hair, Luke deepened the kiss with his tongue and felt her meet it, matching his own passion and need, and yet inciting it further...demanding more...
Fireworks threatened to explode inside his head and in his aching groin, and he thought how intoxicating this kiss was...
Intoxicating...
The word began to batter relentlessly at his conscience like rain lashing against a window, and Luke felt his body freeze with rejection, his lips stilling against hers.
For this was the act of a fool. This woman was like a glass of champagne: the sudden high, the slaking of a sensual thirst and then—what? The dry mouth, the headache and the regret of a hangover—that was what.
He was not in the market for any woman—but particularly not one who was everything he most feared and despised in a woman. With her fey, enchanting beauty, and all the restless inner energy of the creative personality, she was the kind of woman who was bad news. Very bad news indeed.
He plucked his mouth away from hers, and something in his attitude must have unnerved her, for he saw the sudden whitening -of her face and the way that her eyes had grown leaf-dark and startled.
And, even then, that treacherous protective instinct which she alone seemed to inspire in him reared its interfering head once more, and he reached out automatically to steady her, afraid that she might simply crumple to a heap in front of him.
‘Luke—what on earth is the matter?’ she demanded, as she unseeingly let him gently propel her back towards the sofa, where she slumped down like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m doing what I should have done about ten minutes ago,’ he told her grimly. ‘I’m leaving!’
‘But why? I don’t understand!’
‘And you don’t need to understand,’ he gritted, his mouth hardening into an ugly line as he thought of how close he had come to... to... ‘Forget it ever happened, Holly, because it meant nothing! It was an aberration, that’s all.’
‘An “aberration”?’ she challenged, then wished she hadn’t because the look he threw her in response was insulting. ‘What a horrible word!’
‘Like me to explain it to you?’ he queried, with silky condescension.
‘I think I can just about work it out for myself, thank you!’
With the grace of a natural predator, he rose to his feet and came to stand over her, and Holly found that the trembling simply would not leave her. From her position on the sofa, Holly thought that his towering height made him look impossibly intimidating.
And distant.
Their eyes met, and in hers remained a query he could not ignore.
‘That wasn’t in my general scheme of things,’ he told her brutally, in answer to the unasked question.
‘You mean that kiss?’ she demanded, her voice incredulous. Why was he making her feel like some nightclub stripper over a simple kiss? ‘Is that all?’
‘All? Kisses like that generally lead on to something else, but I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.’ His eyes were wintry. ‘But maybe that’s why you invited me up here? To “christen” the new flat in the way you like best?’
‘You flatter yourself,’ she observed furiously.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ A muscle began to work in his cheek as she frantically pulled at the hemline of her dress. ‘Or are you denying that we’ve had the hots for each other since the moment we first met?’
So she hadn’t been imagining it! ‘No, I’m not denying it!’ she told him, as she sat up straight and looked at him, her voice softening as she said, ‘It isn’t a crime1’
‘No, it’s just sex,’ he told her. ‘And that’s all it is, Holly’
‘Sex?’ she demanded. ‘Sex? What an insulting thing to say!’
He made an impatient movement with his hands. ‘Call it chemistry, then—or mutual attraction. Whatever words you want to use if the truth offends you.’ His voice dropped to a throaty whisper. ‘And it’s powerful, this feeling—I don’t deny that. Potent as hell itself—but nebulous. Insubstantial. It peaks and then it wanes and leaves all kinds of havoc and destruction in its wake.’
Anger