had a pretty tough day.’ Pushing the door closed behind him, he stooped to put the suitcase down in the little hallway, his cologne drifting disturbingly towards her. ‘I felt something of a peace offering might be in order.’ It was only then, as he straightened up, that her brain registered the bouquet of predominantly white-and-yellow flowers he was holding.
‘Where did you get these?’ She wasn’t ready to be placated as he handed them to her. ‘Late-night shop at the supermarket?’ And instantly she regretted her caustic and rather childish remark when he made no reply.
The bouquet was fragrant and beautifully arranged and the name of an exclusive florist on the wrapping caused her eyebrows to lift in surprise.
Had he been planning to come round with these much earlier? Was that why he had telephoned just now—to check that he wasn’t going to have a wasted journey?
‘You think that this makes everything all right?’ she uttered waspishly. ‘That I’ll be bowled over by an apology and a few expensive flowers?’
‘I’m not trying to bowl you over.’ His tone was self-assured, his jaw cast in iron. ‘And it certainly isn’t intended as an apology.’
Of course not. She laughed. ‘No. How stupid of me,’ she bit out, swinging away from him into the lounge.
‘Why is it,’ he asked, following her, his voice suddenly dangerously seductive, ‘that when I’m around you you’re always in a state of undress?’
An insidious heat crept along her skin, making her heart beat faster, her nerve-endings tingle.
Why? Grace similarly wondered and, caught in the snare of his regard, felt that same throb of tension that she’d felt from the very first instant their eyes had clashed eight years ago.
‘Perhaps because I didn’t invite you up here in the first place,’ she returned heatedly.
Seth’s mouth curved in an indolent smile. His senses absorbed the translucent quality of her skin; those blue eyes that could make a man drown in his own longing for her; that rather proud nose that mirrored her attitude towards her subordinates and made him want to drag her to her knees; that full, slightly pouting mouth. He wanted to taste that mouth until he was drugged by the potency of all it promised him, devour it with his own until she was begging him to take her as she had all those years before.
He saw her as she had been then, naked except for that web of lace across her pelvis, offering herself to him like a beautiful, abandoned spirit of the sea. He had never known a girl as passionate as she had been, although he’d known enough in his time. When he had dropped her off the bike outside her grandparents’ house that night, she’d seemed to leap at his suggestion to meet him the following day. He’d felt sick to the stomach when she hadn’t turned up, although he’d waited for hours on that beach. And the day after that, when he had bumped into her in town, she’d treated him like he hadn’t existed. No, worse—like he was scum. He had been just someone with whom to amuse herself, he thought with his mouth hardening. Just a substitute until she could get back to her richer, stuck-up friends back home.
For a long time afterwards all he could think of was of getting his own back—having his revenge on the Culverwell family for the humiliation they had caused him, and for the hardship they had inflicted on his mother and his foster siblings as a result. Well, now he had, he thought grimly. And it wasn’t over yet!
He noted the way she was clutching the flowers to her breast as though to conceal the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. But he could see that all too clearly from the way her nipples protruded tantalisingly through the satin robe, and he had to clench his fingers to control the urge to rip it from her body and replace it with his aching hands instead.
‘You had your hair cut,’ he commented with an unaccustomed dryness in his throat, thinking, as he had done when he had seen her again in the flesh that morning, that the mid-length silky cloud that gently brushed her shoulders added a sophistication that hadn’t been there eight years ago.
Poignantly she said, ‘I grew up.’
And how, he thought. Feeling the uncomfortable constriction of his clothes below waist level, he was annoyed at how she could still affect him without even trying.
‘Why have you come?’ she demanded, but Seth noticed that those eyes he had drowned in all too willingly eight years ago were wary, as though she were afraid of him—or, amazingly, herself.
‘I was naturally concerned,’ he said against his better judgement. She had sounded ghastly over the phone. Now he could see the dark circles under her eyes that no amount of make-up could conceal. She had to be tired, and she was most certainly jet-lagged. But there was something else. Something that caused that same bleak look about her that he had noticed when he had strode into her office that morning, which surprisingly had caused a slight pricking of his conscience, making him feel less a conquering hero and more like a heel for what he had done. ‘I thought I’d come and see for myself that you were all right.’
Grace wanted to respond with some cutting jibe, but the events of the day had taken their toll. She had no more energy left to fight him tonight.
‘Well, now you’ve seen me,’ she murmured with her shoulders slumping, the bouquet hanging heavily at her side. She felt fit to drop, and as she made to move away from him she tripped over one of the shoes she had left lying on the carpet and would have stumbled if he hadn’t been there, reaching for her.
‘I don’t need your help,’ she said despite herself as his long, tanned hands pressed her down onto the sofa, disposing of the flowers on the table beside it.
‘Well, that’s just too bad, because you’re getting it.’
His forcefulness, his proximity and his pine-scented cologne made her weak with a heady excitement that quickly turned to panic when he came down beside her on the settee.
‘Who invited you to sit down?’ she croaked, breathless from the force with which her heart was thumping.
‘Your good manners,’ he drawled, half-amused.
His droll remark would have drawn some retort from her if she hadn’t been so keyed up, debilitated by the hot sensations that were pulsing through her.
Desperate to distance herself from him, she was all for leaping up.
As if he could read her mind, though, his arm suddenly sliced across her middle, preventing her precipitous flight.
Grace’s gasped breath seemed to lodge in her lungs, every part of her burning with the fire that strong arm was igniting in her as its warmth penetrated the fine material of her robe. His other arm was stretched across the back of the settee, setting her head spinning in a whirl of fear and wild anticipation.
If he kissed her…!
Surprisingly, though, he made no other move to touch her beyond keeping her there.
Rigid with tension, her breasts rising and falling sharply, she breathed, ‘What do you want from me, Seth?’
She caught his sharp intake of breath and wondered if that arm lying across her could feel the hard pulse that was throbbing away inside her.
‘I believe I once asked the same question of you.’
Yes,
