the shiver it gave down the length of her spine—she now thought better of it. She was far too aware of everything about Max Hamilton already and needed to keep him firmly at arm’s length, rather than try to become friends with him. If any woman could ever actually be friends with such a physically immediate man.
Sophie doubted she could.
Although she found his continued silence now more than a little puzzling.
She looked across at Max searchingly, noting the grimness of his expression. His face was pale and there were lines around his eyes and mouth; his jaw was tightly clenched.
‘Max?’ she queried uncertainly, not sure if he’d just had a bad day at work—after all, he was minus his PA now that Sally had arrived safely in Canada!—or if she had done something to upset him since he came home?
But considering he had only been in the apartment for a few minutes, she had no idea quite what that could have been.
Even if she did say so herself, the decorations had been tastefully finished, and the presents were all gaily wrapped and placed beneath the brightly lit tree in the sitting room.
But Max had known she was going to do that this morning, had left the written labels in the kitchen for his sister and niece as Sophie had asked him to do, so that she could put them on the parcels today.
Some of the food had been delivered today too, the things that weren’t perishable, but she had already put them away in the cupboards, so there was no clutter in here to annoy him either.
The only thing she could think of that might possibly have annoyed or irritated him was that she was once again still here when he returned from work. But, after today, she was going to be here most of the time over Christmas anyway.
Max gave himself a mental shake, aware that Sophie could have no idea why he had reacted in the way that he had to the smell of her cooking. ‘I … It’s just that I haven’t smelt baking like this since my mother …’ He broke off, mouth thinning into a tight line. ‘Well, in a long time,’ he completed abruptly.
Sophie eyed him quizzically for several seconds before prompting huskily, ‘How long?’
Since his parents had died that bleak Christmas sixteen years ago!
Since his own and Janice’s world had been shot to hell by some drunk driver who hadn’t bothered to stop at the red traffic light and had driven straight into his parents’ car, killing them both instantly.
He deliberately hadn’t thought about his mother’s baking for years; the way the house would be filled with the smell of it for days before Christmas. And she had always, always, even when he and Janice were both in their teens, made gingerbread angels and snowmen for them to eat in the week leading up to Christmas.
Entering his apartment and being instantly assailed by that same smell had brought back all the nostalgic memories of those happier Christmases, as well as the more painful ones since.
He had forgotten—chosen to forget?—the days of his mother baking cakes and puddings ready for Christmas. The joy of helping her wrap up the family’s Christmas gifts. The excitement of the whole family decorating the tree.
And in just a few short days Sophie Carter, with her Christmas preparations, had succeeded in bringing it all back to him with painful clarity.
It wasn’t her fault, of course, just a sequence of unfortunate circumstances, Janice and Tom’s marital difficulties having been the start of them.
Max drew in a deep breath before crossing the kitchen in two long strides. ‘These look delicious—Ouch!’ He let out a protest as Sophie smacked his hand away from taking one of the cooling gingerbread snowmen. ‘What was that for?’
‘They haven’t been decorated yet,’ she reproved. ‘And you haven’t answered my question,’ she added intuitively as she looked up at him questioningly.
Sophie looked extremely cute with her hair tied up with a black band, the freckles endearing across her cheeks and nose, with a light dusting of flour on the top of the latter, and wearing a red Santa pinafore to protect her red shirt and black jeans while she was baking.
Cute?
Max didn’t do cute!
He liked his women sophisticated, as well as tall and beautiful.
And Sophie Carter was none of those things.
Cute, but certainly not tall or sophisticated, and her face was intriguing—arresting?—rather than classically beautiful.
It had to be this family Christmas thing that was messing with his head, as well as the rest of his well-ordered life, because right now Max couldn’t think of anything he would enjoy more than kissing that dusting of flour off the tip of Sophie’s pert little nose, before laying siege to the sensuously pouting lips beneath. And to hell with the consequences!
Sophie wasn’t sure she was altogether comfortable standing this close to Max. So close she could feel the heat of his body through the thin material of her blouse, and smell that insidious lemon and sandalwood aftershave as it invaded her senses.
She certainly didn’t understand the emotion burning brightly in the glittering green eyes looking down at her so intently as Max reached up and released her hair from the confines of the black velvet band.
Or the way all the air suddenly seemed to have been sucked from the room.
Just as all the air left her lungs in a whooshing sigh as that dark head slowly began to lower towards hers.
As if having Max Hamilton kiss her had been inevitable.
As if she had wanted him to kiss her.
Which was …
There was no more time for thought. No more time for reasoned protest. No more time for anything but sensation, as Max’s arms moved about her waist while his lips now feathered lightly, caressingly, across the top of her nose, along the warmth of her cheek, before moving unerringly to claim her own slightly parted lips.
A questing, seeking, searing kiss, as Max’s lips sipped and tasted hers again and again, his arms tightening about her waist as he pulled her in against him to mould the softness of her curves against his much harder body.
Sophie was so stunned she didn’t know what to do with her own hands for several seconds as they lay flattened against the hardness of Max’s silk-covered chest. Feeling emboldened as she heard him give a low and throaty groan, she slowly moved her hands up onto his shoulders and then over and into the dark thickness of the overlong and silky hair at his nape.
Max deepened the kiss, feeling the capitulation of Sophie’s body as she leant into and against him, running the moist warmth of his tongue over her softly pouting lips as he tasted her before parting them and then venturing inside. He groaned softly as his tongue was instantly enveloped in the perfect heat of her mouth.
Much like his pulsing and rapidly lengthening erection would be welcomed into the moist and heated channel between her thighs?
Dear God!
Just thinking about making love to Sophie, of laying her naked on his bed, looking down at
