turned tail and lurched towards the house. Mark watched until he was out of sight, then faced Ellie. ‘I’m so sorry about that. Are you all right?’
‘Fine.’ Her voice quivered enough to call her determined face a liar.
‘You gave him one hell of a clout with those shoes!’
The shell-shocked expression gave way to a delightfully naughty smile. ‘You should have warned him I was dangerous to mess with.’
The fingers of Mark’s right hand wandered to the spot near his left collarbone, where she’d bitten him only a few weeks earlier. At the time he’d been livid, hadn’t found it funny in the slightest. Tonight, however, he found he couldn’t find it anything but, and he started to laugh.
To his surprise, Ellie joined him. Softly at first, with a giggle that hinted she was holding more of it in than she was letting out. But eventually she was laughing just as hard as he was, and the more he saw her eyes sparkle and her cheeks blush, the more he wanted to keep the moment going.
Look at her. When she smiled like that, lost the glare and the frosty expression, she was…Not beautiful. At least not in the way Hollywood and the media defined the word. But he couldn’t stop looking at her.
And why would he? She was laughing so hard she’d gone pink in the face and her eyes were squeezed shut. Any minute now he thought she’d keel over. It was adorable. Just as she threatened to make his prediction come true, she clutched at the air to steady herself. Her hand made contact with his upper arm and all the shared laughter suddenly died away.
Ellie looked away and tucked and escaped curl into the clip on top of her head. It bounced back again, unwilling to be leashed. His desire to reach forward and brush it away from her face was almost overpowering, but he’d done that so many times with other women. It would be too much of a cliché.
She looked up at him and shivered.
‘You’re cold.’
She started to protest, but he swung his jacket off and carefully hung it round her shoulders. It must be the night for clichés. This, too, was something he’d done more times than he could remember too—one of his moves, part of the game.
But it wasn’t like that with Ellie. She’d been cold, and he’d done something to remedy that. He wasn’t playing any games. Mainly because he didn’t know what the rules were with her. She made him feel different—unpolished, uncertain—as if he wasn’t in control of whatever was going on.
He looked at the warm light spilling from Larkford’s every window. He really ought to get back to his guests.
She moved slightly, and the friction of material between his fingers reminded him he was still holding the lapels of the jacket firmly. He really should let go. But Ellie was looking up at him, her eyes soft and unguarded, just as they had been when she’d stared down at him from the landing.
He’d liked that look then, and he liked it now. There wasn’t a hint of greed or artifice in it. And that was a rare thing in his world. It was as if she saw something that surprised her, something that everyone else missed.
He’d seen her skirting the edge of the party, boredom clear on her face. And when he’d turned back to Melodie and the record producer he’d been chatting to he’d suddenly seen the whole gathering through Ellie’s eyes, as if he’d been given X-ray specs that cut out the glare and the glitter, revealing everyone and everything for who and what they really were. Not much of what he’d seen would benefit from close scrutiny.
But out here on the lawn everything felt very real indeed. Uncomfortably so. His heart was hammering in his chest—and it wasn’t from his race across the lawn.
She was tantalisingly close, her feelings clearly written in her face, floating across the surface. He felt her warm breath on his neck, sending shivers to the roots of his hair. He clenched the lapels of the dinner jacket, pulling her closer until only a molecule of air prevented their faces from touching. Normally he’d go in for the kill now, take the advantage while he had it, but he waited.
What for, he wasn’t exactly sure.
The world seemed to shrink into the tiny space between his lips and hers. At least Ellie was aware of nothing but this, nothing beyond it. And, since remembering past or future was a struggle sometimes anyway, she finally let go and just existed in the moment. This particular moment revolved around a choice, one that was hers alone: to flow with the moment or push against it.
She was so tired of fighting herself, tired of pushing herself, of always keeping everything under constant surveillance. Just once she wanted to follow an impulse rather than resist it.
She wanted this.
Hesitantly, she pressed her lips against his, splaying her hands across his chest to steady herself. For a moment he did nothing, and her heart plummeted, but then he pulled her to him, sliding his hands under his suit jacket to circle her waist, and kissed her back.
All those women who fluttered and twittered merely at the sight of him would have melted clean away if they’d been on the receiving end of a kiss like this. Every mad hormonal urge she’d been fighting for the last few weeks roared into life and she didn’t resist a single one.
It was a kiss of need, exploration…perfection.
She didn’t need to think, to struggle to remember anything. And she wouldn’t have been able to if she’d tried, not with Mark’s teeth nipping at her lower lip, his hands sliding up her back until they brushed the bare flesh of her shoulders. Ellie reached up to feel the faint stubble on his jaw with her fingertips. He groaned and pulled her close enough to feel the muscles in his chest flexing as his arms moved. She let her head drop back when his lips pressed against the tingling skin just below her jaw, and she slid her fingers round the back of his head, running them through the short hair there and feeling him shiver.
A tray clanged inside the kitchen, and the noise cut cleanly and smoothly through the night air. They both froze, and the moment they’d shared shattered along with the glasses landing on the kitchen floor.
There was a horrible sense of déjà vu as they stared at each other, neither sure of what was going on and what they should do next.
Mark grasped for words inside his head. Say something!
He reached for her. ‘Ellie…’
Come on, smooth talker! Where’s all your patter now?
She stared back at him, wide-eyed and breathless. Then, before he could get his thoughts collected into syllables, she bolted into the house.
See? Unpredictable. He couldn’t have guessed she was going to do that. After all, it wasn’t the normal response he got when he kissed a woman—quite the reverse.
He raced after her and burst through the French windows into the kitchen. Precious seconds were lost as he collided with a fully laden waiter. The clattering of trays and muttered apologies masked the sound of her bare feet slapping on the tiles as she tore out of the kitchen and down the passageway that led to the back stairs.
He dodged another waiter and ran after her, only to be corralled by a group of guests.
‘Mark!’
