was her choice.
If she kissed him, nothing in her life would ever be the same. But how could that be? She didn’t even know if she would see him again after tonight.
Still, something real had flared between them. Something more than sexual.
She sensed that he held his breath, silently waiting for her to make a decision about the two of them. She stayed where she was, her lips slightly parted.
Finally, because it was what she wanted, she turned her face, cupped the back of his head and brought his lips to hers.
The first mouth-to-mouth contact was undemanding, yet it was electric and rich with promise.
She heard herself make a small needy sound. Accepting her invitation, he increased the pressure of his lips on hers, then tipped his head first one way and then the other, changing the angle, changing the pressure and charging the moment with his powerful sexuality.
As the heat of the kiss flared hotter, he slid one hand down her body, pulling her hips against his erection.
The potency she sensed made her moan. When she found it impossible to hold still, she moved against him.
It had been a long time since she’d been with a man this way. A man who turned on every one of her senses. Long before her accident, actually. When she’d first come to Vegas, she’d enjoyed the attention men gave a woman they’d seen up on stage. Then she’d realized it was nothing personal. They wanted to seduce one of the glittering women who were hired for their looks and talent.
The woman would stay in Vegas, and they’d come home feeling like a conquering hero.
This was different. This man didn’t see her as a trophy. His focus on her was very personal. She knew it from the delicate way his hands stroked her hips and from the way his mouth moved over hers.
As her insides turned liquid, she pictured the two of them naked on the bed in the next room. Him on top of her, their bodies intimately joined in the age-old dance of love.
The explicit image shocked her. She had met this man less than an hour earlier, yet she was ready to make love with him.
Breaking the kiss, she looked at him, seeing the dazed look in his eyes, and knowing he was affected as deeply as she was herself.
The knowledge should have been reassuring. Instead, to her utter horror, she burst into tears.
Olivia felt Noah stiffen. Leaning back, he stared down at her.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry,” she managed to get out between sobs.
She wasn’t any kind of delicate little doll a man could easily pick up, but he scooped her into his arms and carried her to the sofa, where he sat down, still cradling her against him.
“I thought…”
“My fault,” she said between sobs.
Cradling her tenderly in his arms, he let her cry.
JARRED Bainbridge had learned to trust his hunches. Still, the first report on Noah Fielding startled him.
As far as he could tell, the man didn’t exist.
Well, he’d been on that experimental sub. A whole bunch of people had seen him, interacted with him. He’d financed the expedition, and he’d been staying at a bed-and-breakfast in George Town.
But within hours of being pulled from the sub, he’d left the island on a small, private jet. The plane had refueled in Chicago, then gone on to L.A. And that was the last anyone knew of Noah Fielding.
He’d vanished into thin air.
Had he gotten off in Chicago? Or had he gone on to the West Coast? Nobody knew.
Which meant the man had gone to considerable trouble to hide his whereabouts in a day and age when most people’s movements were a matter of record.
If Fielding had his methods, so did Jarred Bainbridge. He picked up the phone and made a call to the security service he used. “I want to know where to find Noah Fielding. And I want to know it now.”
NOAH cradled Olivia in his arms, rocking her gently. He’d been right; she was in some kind of trouble. He could tell she’d been holding herself together by strength of will. But she’d been through too much tonight to maintain her composure. That encounter with Carlson had scared her spitless. And her roiling emotions had sent her crashing into Noah’s arms.
Well, maybe that wasn’t fair. He had felt the powerful attraction between them right from the first, and he’d worried that he was taking advantage of her after the attack. Then he’d let his pleasure of holding her and kissing her take over.
The taste of her had been sweet and heady. So had her response to him. That was the most powerful aphrodisiac of all. He’d thought they were headed for a very stimulating session in the bedroom, until her emotions had taken another wild swing.
He bent to stroke his lips against her beautiful golden hair. He’d been intimate with thousands of women, yet this one stirred him as few of them had.
Once again he thought of how much she reminded him of Ramona, although the two of them looked nothing alike. But there was some innate facet of her personality that was the perfect foil for his own dark view of life. She might be in trouble now, but she would always try to find the good in every situation and every person.
He and Olivia Stapler could mean something important to each other—if he dared to let it happen. And if they did, he would lose her and it would take him years to recover from the loss. That was the risk he faced at this moment.
’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Lord Tennyson had said that in 1850, in a poem called “In Memoriam.” Noah wasn’t sure it was true. Tennyson had lived a normal life span. How many times had the poet known the pain of lost love?
OLIVIA struggled to conquer the flood of emotions that had swooped down on her without warning. Finally she was able to stifle the tears.
Noah shifted her weight so that he could reach into his pocket and bring out a handkerchief, which he handed to her.
She stared at the folded square of white linen. “What kind of man carries a handkerchief?”
He laughed softly. “It’s an old habit.”
She blew her nose. “I guess chivalry isn’t dead.”
He shook his head. “One man can’t keep it alive.”
“But you try.”
“It’s too much of a responsibility.” The way he said it made her wonder if he wasn’t half serious. Before she could work her way through that, he asked, “Better?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She
