say that I would welcome dealing with the frostbite afterwards…’
The office comprised three rooms attached to the far end of the stables. One small sitting area for clients, a room in which the books were kept and a bathroom, all furnished with exquisite taste. Soon, Gabriel thought, they would no longer need to scurry and hide and make love like thieves in the night. He imagined her face as she heard him ask her to marry him and he felt a fierce quiver of possessiveness.
‘What’s the matter?’
He turned to see that she was staring up at him, all wide-eyed and concerned, and he smiled.
‘Do you ever dream of us making love in a proper bed?’ he asked softly, unlocking the door to the office with the key that, unimaginatively, was hidden under one of the plant pots outside. He pushed open the door and then closed it behind them, capturing her against the back of the door and kissing the nape of her neck. ‘A proper, king-sized bed complete with satin sheets and a feather duvet?’
‘A cramped single bed would do,’ Laura murmured, sighing as his tongue trailed along her neck. ‘Anywhere but here. I have nightmares about Dad bursting in when we’re in the middle of…of…’
‘Making love…?’ he finished smoothly for her and she coiled against him with a smile. His voice always did this to her, turned her legs to water. His dark, deep voice with the lingering traces of his Argentinian background, and his smoky, sexy eyes that could stroke her body even when he wasn’t touching her.
He had turned up out of the blue one wintry morning a year ago. One minute she had been bending over, grooming one of the horses, her long hair roughly braided back away from her face, and she had stood up to find him staring at her from the stable door, his hands in his pockets, his body leaning against the rough doorframe. He had heard about their stables and he had come to see whether he could earn some money helping out because he loved horses and was a natural at handling them. He had only just come up there to live. His father had been made redundant from his post as a teacher and, whilst he could cope until he located another job, there simply was no longer enough to cover his son’s university fees. Gabriel needed to work for a year and had taken a job nearby at a small company, interrupting his university career until he could accumulate sufficient money to put himself through the remainder of his course. He had explained all of this without taking his eyes off her and without moving from his indolent stance by the door. Laura had listened and had hardly heard a word he had been saying. She had been too overwhelmed by his sheer animal beauty.
‘Are you suggesting that you want to make love to me?’ Gabriel whispered in her ear now, and Laura made a low, gurgling sound as he cupped her face in his hands and began kissing her jawbone with infinite, lingering tenderness. Underneath her three layers of clothing, she could already feel her breasts aching to be touched.
It was dark in the office. Dark but warm, with the small fan heater gently purring like a soothing background noise.
‘What would you do if I said that I just wasn’t in the mood?’ Laura teased, curling her fingers into his dark hair and nudging his face up so that she could cover his mouth with hers. The kiss was fiercely passionate, tongue pressing against tongue with an urgency that spoke volumes about the four days during which they had not seen one another. An eternity, it seemed to her.
‘I would call you a liar,’ he teased back. He slipped his hands beneath her thick, woollen jumper and hooked his fingers under the waistband of her jeans, then he gently circled his fingers round so that he could undo the button and slide down the zip, whilst Laura made a tiny moaning sound in anticipation of what was to come. Heaven on earth. It was the only way she could describe it. Sometimes when, for whatever reason, they had not managed to touch one another for a while, they would scrabble to make love, ripping each other’s clothes off in their eagerness to unite their bodies.
Tonight, Gabriel thought, was a special night. Tonight, they would take their time.
He led her towards the back of the office, where a long sofa was ranged against the wall. In the beginning, it had felt odd to make love in the place where Peter Jackson’s accountant did the books. Necessity, however, was the mother of invention, and over time the oddness had faded away.
The sofa could have been specially designed for coupling. Laura had once laughingly told him that, in her opinion, Phillip Carr had stationed it there so that when he came twice a week to do the accounts he had somewhere to nod off when the boredom of the numbers began to get to him.
‘Let me look at you,’ Laura said huskily, stretching her long body on the sofa and staring up at him as he towered over her. ‘You know I love looking at you get undressed.’ She loosely clasped her arms above her head so that a slither of flat, pale stomach was visible.
‘I have no idea why.’ He gave a low, teasing laugh.
‘And who’s the liar now? You know exactly why I love looking at you. You have the most beautiful body I have ever set eyes on in my life. You’re as powerful and muscular as any one of our prized racehorses.’
‘Thank you very much,’ he said drily, although he knew that, coming from her, this was the biggest compliment she could give him.
He shrugged off his bomber jacket, then tugged his thick jumper over his head, followed by his tee shirt, once black, now faded to a dark, uneven grey.
Laura gave an involuntary groan of physical response at his bare-backed torso, just a shadowy outline in the darkness. She had seen him bare-backed before, though. In the summer, when he had stripped off his shirt and ridden Barnabus, without her father’s knowledge. Her memory could easily fill in the details of how he’d looked, his body bronzed, his muscles defined and rippling with every little movement. She watched, heavy-eyed, as he removed his trousers and the boxer shorts that were low slung on his waist, and her smile met his.
‘Enjoying the view?’
Laura sighed with delicious assent and stood up, ready to wriggle out of her jeans. Her body was on fire. Just looking at him was enough to make her breathing shallow and unsteady.
‘Allow me, querida,’ he murmured. It was one of the rare times when he uttered an endearment. He was a man of passion but essentially a controlled man. Outbursts of verbal emotion were not in his nature. No phoney declarations of love for him. Laura appreciated him for that. His tenderness went beyond mundane utterances. Which was why his endearment now made her heart flutter with pleasure. She allowed him to strip off her jumper, her long-sleeved rugby shirt, which had been a legacy from her father’s barnstorming days when he’d played rugby for the county, her tee shirt, leaving only her lacy bra, which barely covered the full swell of her generous breasts.
‘Beautiful. You are exquisite.’ He dipped his finger into the hollow between her breasts and languidly stroked her, mesmerising her with his eyes until her breath caught in her throat. ‘I will never tire of looking at you, touching you.’
Laura laughed softly and caught his finger in her hand, raising it to her mouth so that she could draw it in between her lips, whilst she continued to look at him with her amazing chocolate-brown eyes. With her other hand, she lightly traced the hard muscles of his flattened stomach, down to where his manhood was sheathed with dark, vibrant hair.
‘What, never? Even when you go to university in September to finish your course? And all those young, beautiful girls are there making eyes and flinging themselves at you?’
‘Would you be jealous?’ He slipped his hands down her waist and began easing her jeans off, tucking the tips of his fingers into her briefs
