‘You’re very welcome, I’m sure. It’s just…. you’re very pretty.’
‘Ah,’ said Kathryn, seeing the light, and couldn’t help laughing, though not unkindly. ‘It’s all right, Agnes. Drew has told me all about our furry friend.’
‘Furry friend?’ It was the housekeeper’s turn to look puzzled.
Kathryn leant down towards the woman, who was a good half a head shorter. ‘The wolf,’ she whispered confidentially. ‘Don’t worry, I had a tetanus booster not long ago.’
‘Just lead us to him, Agnes,’ her cousin suggested, setting their bags at the foot of the stairs and removing his coat. He handed it to the housekeeper and Kathryn did the same. ‘My cousin has a weird sense of humour. Don’t try to understand her.’
Agnes, far from being put out, suddenly had a twinkle in her eye. ‘Something tells me somebody might just have met his match. You’re not at all what he was expecting. For one thing, he was expecting a man. You’ll find him in the library, gnashing his teeth and cursing till the air is blue. I’ll bring along some coffee in a few minutes. Unless you would prefer something else?’
Kathryn said coffee was fine, and Drew led the way to the back of the house, then along a passage to the west wing. As he opened the door, Kathryn felt her heart rate increase in sudden expectation, and smoothed the blue chenille jumper she wore with leggings down over her hips. As she followed her cousin inside, she heard a husky voice growl a greeting.
‘It’s about damn time you got here!’ it said, and she grimaced. It sounded very much as if the wolf had a sore head.
She almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Stepping inside, she caught her first glimpse of the man she had heard so much about.
Joel Kendrick was certainly impressive. He stood by the fireplace, where a fire blazed welcomingly, a glass of what appeared to be whisky in his hand. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, and clearly at the peak of fitness. He wore jeans which hugged his long muscular legs, and a black sweater which outlined a powerfully masculine physique. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, she guessed, with hair so dark it appeared blue where the light caught it. His face, even from the side, was most definitely handsome, but there was a ruggedness about it which prevented it from being too pretty.
There was no denying it; he was a very attractive man. In fact, he was the most attractive man she had seen in a long while. She could feel the aura of him even from where she stood, and rather unexpectedly it set her nerve-endings tingling like crazy. Even stationary he had a kind of dynamic magnetism which reached across the space separating them and touched her. At its basic level, it was the female responding to a prime example of the male of the species. Translated to the present day, it meant she could no more ignore him than she could stop breathing.
It wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t overly alarmed by it. On the contrary, it added a certain spice to the situation. It was time to make her presence felt.
‘As we didn’t have Scotty to beam us through the air in a split nanosecond, I think we did a pretty good job getting here so quickly,’ she put in before Drew could utter a word, and instantly found herself staring into piercing blue eyes.
They were the sort of eyes which, in certain circumstances, would create havoc with a woman’s senses, and when they locked with hers that was precisely what they did. Because something elemental connected them in the space of a heartbeat. The air seemed to sizzle and hum between them, as if it had taken a positive charge. It was pure chemistry, and a look was all it had taken to set off a chain reaction. The attraction was instant—and mutual.
Kathryn experienced a familiar curling sensation inside her. She acknowledged it with a shiver of excitement. Attraction, pure but not so simple. Just as she had supposed, the man had sex appeal oozing from every pore, and it had struck her on a primitive level. Her senses responded by setting every nerve in her body tingling. Given his visual attraction, she wasn’t surprised to feel it, but she was surprised by its strength. The man had something, and whatever it was her senses liked it. Liked it a lot.
His eyes as they roved over her were like a lick of flame, and she wondered if it had been wise to wear leggings tucked into knee-length boots for the journey. It showed off altogether too much of her to his gaze. Not that she revealed her concern for an instant. Every instinct she possessed told her that he was not the sort of man you gave any sort of weapon to.
‘And you are?’ Joel Kendrick asked curiously, in a voice laced with a lethal brand of husky sensuality. Setting his glass aside, he slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans, a move which tightened the material around his thighs and raised her temperature accordingly.
The man was pure dynamite, she acknowledged wryly, and all done without even trying. It was stunning. Nobody had had quite this effect on her before. How could she possibly ignore it? Did she want to? That imp of devilment which was always under indifferent control now decided to come to the surface, and, as Drew had feared, she didn’t resist it.
‘I’m the woman you’ve been waiting for,’ she quipped back with a deliberate mix of seduction and mockery.
Amusement flickered in those devilish blue eyes. ‘Is that so?’ he drawled softly, giving her his full attention in a way that set up goosebumps on her flesh.
Caught between them, Drew rolled his eyes despairingly. ‘Kathryn, cut it out!’ he ordered.
‘Shut up, Drew,’ Joel commanded quietly, strolling towards her. ‘This is just getting interesting.’ Coming to a halt a mere foot away, he smiled lazily, an action that threatened to steal her breath away. ‘So, I’ve been waiting for you, have I?’
She inclined her head, smiling sweetly, whilst her heart raced away at a mile a minute at his closeness. ‘Impatiently, by the sounds of it.’
He shrugged that off without taking his eyes from her. ‘My temper’s been a bit frayed lately, but it’s improving by leaps and bounds now.’
Kathryn laughed, a sultry sound that made something flare to life in the depths of his eyes. ‘I have that effect on people.’ She knew she was behaving outrageously, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. ‘In fact, they’ve been known to hug and kiss me on sight.’
He grinned, and there was definitely something wolfish about it. ‘I can quite see why. I’m tempted to do the same.’
Oh, boy, he had the charisma to make a woman forget her principles just when she ought to be standing on them, she decided as she held up an admonitory hand to keep him at bay. ‘I should wait until you’ve seen what I can do first.’
Joel laughed, sending a tingle down her spine and curling her toes. ‘I’m impressed already.’
Drew, by this time, had steam coming out of his ears. He crossed over to them and took Kathryn by the arm. ‘OK, that’s enough!’ he exclaimed, and she turned startled eyes on him, having quite forgotten he was there. ‘When you’ve quite finished playing games, perhaps I should introduce you.’
A faint flush skimmed her cheeks, but it had nothing to do with his remonstration. She mouthed the word ‘sorry’ to him. It was partly true. She was sorry for upsetting him, but not for behaving as she had. It had been fun. It had been exciting. Her heart was still tripping madly, with no sign of slowing. Boy, the man was positively lethal. He had switched her senses on like a neon light. So that was what it felt like to flirt with the world’s number one playboy! It
