was inches away from her own as he lowered his head slightly.
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘It looks to me as if you’re trying to intimidate me!’
He gave a slow and mocking smile as he regarded her through narrowed lids. ‘Am I succeeding?’
‘You must know that you intimidate everyone.’
‘I’m not interested in everyone, Cyn, just you.’
Thia’s heart was beating such a loud tattoo in her chest that she thought Lucien must be able to hear it. Or at least see the way her breasts were quickly rising and falling as she tried to drag air into her starved lungs. ‘You’re standing far too close to me,’ she protested weakly.
He tilted his head, bringing those chiselled lips even closer to hers. ‘I like standing close to you.’
She realised she liked standing close to Lucien too. That she liked him. That she wanted to do so much more than stand close to him. She wanted Lucien to pull her into his arms and kiss her. To make love to her.
Which was strange when she had never felt the least inclination to make love with any man before now. But Lucien wasn’t just any man. He was dark and dangerous and overpoweringly, mesmerisingly, sexually attractive—a combination Thia had never come across before now. She knew her breasts had swelled, the nipples hard nubs, pressing against her cropped top, and between her thighs she was damp, aching. For Lucien Steele’s touch!
As if he was able to read that hunger in her face, Lucien’s pupils dilated and his head slowly lowered, until those beautiful sculptured lips laid gentle but hungry siege to hers.
Thia felt as if she had been jolted with several thousand volts of electricity. And heat. Such burning heat coursing through her. She stepped in closer to that hard, unyielding body and her arms moved up and over Lucien’s wide shoulders as if of their own volition. The warmth of his strong hands spanned the slenderness of her bare waist as her fingers became entangled in that silky black hair at his nape, her lips parting as she lost herself in the heat of his kiss.
* * *
Trouble...
Oh, yes, Cyn Hammond, with her black hair, electric-blue eyes, beautiful face and deliciously enticing body, was definitely Trouble with a capital T...
But at this moment, with the softness of her responsive lips parted beneath his, his hands caressing, enjoying the feel of the soft perfection of her bare midriff, Lucien didn’t give a damn about that.
Nothing had changed since last night. If anything he wanted her more than he had then.
Again. Right here.
And right now!
Lucien deepened the kiss even as he moulded her slender curves against his own much harder ones, intoxicated, lost in Cyn’s taste as he ran his tongue along the pouting softness of her bottom lip. Groaning low in his throat, he let his tongue caress past those addictive lips and into the heat beneath, plunging, possessing that heat as his hands moved restlessly, caressingly, down the length of her spine. Soon Lucien was able to cup that shapely bottom and pull her snugly into and against the pulsing length of his arousal.
The softness of her thighs felt so good against his, so hot and welcoming. He shifted, the hardness of his shaft now cupped and cushioned in that softness, and moved one of his hands to cup her breast through her T-shirt. It was a perfect fit into the palm of his hand, the nipple hard as an unripe berry as Lucien brushed the soft pad of his thumb across it and heard Cyn’s gasp of pleasure, felt her back arching, pressing her breast harder into his cupping hand in a silent plea.
Her skin felt as smooth as silk beneath Lucien’s fingertips as he slipped his hand beneath the bottom of her top to cup her bare breast—
* * *
Thia wrenched her mouth from Lucien’s and pulled out of his arms before taking a stumbling step backwards—as if those few inches in any way nullified Lucien’s sexual potency, or the devastation wrought upon her senses by that hungry kiss and those caressing hands!
‘No...’ she breathed shakily, her cheeks ablaze with embarrassed colour as she attempted to straighten her top over breasts that pulsed and ached for the pleasure she had just denied them.
Lucien’s gaze was hooded. There was a flush across those high cheekbones, a nerve pulsing in his clenched jaw. ‘No?’
‘No,’ Thia repeated more firmly. ‘This is—I don’t do this.’
‘“This” being...?’
‘Seduction in a zillionaire’s office!’
He arched one dark brow. ‘How many zillionaires do you know?’
Her cheeks warmed. ‘Just the one.’
He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’ He crossed his arms in front of his chest and he looked at her from between narrowed lids. ‘Just what did you think was going to happen, Cyn, when you came to my office dressed—or rather undressed—like that?’ That glittering silver gaze swept appreciatively over her breasts, naked beneath the crop top, her bare midriff and hip-hugging denims.
She hadn’t allowed herself to think before coming here—had just acted on impulse, knowing she had to thank Lucien Steele for his help some time today and just wanting to get it over with. But, yes, now that he mentioned it she wasn’t exactly dressed for repelling advances. Deliberately if subconsciously so? Lord, she hoped not!
‘Stop calling me Cyn,’ she snapped defensively.
‘But that’s what you are to me... Sin and all that word implies.’ He all but purred. ‘You have all the temptation of a candy bar in that shocking pink top. One that I want to lick all over.’
Thia felt heat in her already blushing cheeks at the provocative imagines that statement conjured in her mind. ‘You—I don’t—didn’t—’ She gave a shake of her head. ‘Could we get back to our earlier conversation?’ Please, she added silently, knowing she would have plenty of time later today to think about and to remember with embarrassment the touch of Lucien’s lips and hands on her body. ‘For one thing, Jonathan was only ever my friend,’ she continued determinedly.
‘Not any more he isn’t.’ Lucien nodded with grim satisfaction. ‘He made it clear before I left his apartment earlier this morning that he was feeling decidedly less than charitable towards you,’ he explained dryly.
Thia’s eyes widened. ‘What did you say to him?’
‘About you?’ He shrugged. ‘As you have neither a father nor brother to protect you, I thought it necessary that someone should warn Miller against laying so much as a finger on you with the intention of hurting you ever again.’
She gasped. ‘I can look after myself!’
‘Is that why you spent the night at a less-than-reputable hotel? Why you have bruises on your arm?’ Lucien’s expression darkened with displeasure as his glittering silver gaze moved to the purple-black smudges at the top of her left arm. ‘If I had known the extent of your bruising I would have inflicted a few of my own on him this morning, rather than just firing his ass!’
Thia
