of us could have prevented it, and the way we are whenever we’re around each other… well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.’
‘Why? Because you were determined it would?’
He laughed softly behind her. ‘Hopeful, dearest, but not exactly determined.’
‘OK. So you got what you wanted.’
‘What I wanted?’ he breathed with harsh emphasis and, before she could sidestep, he was reaching out and pulling her back against the whipcord strength of his body. ‘What I wanted,’ he repeated, his words softly mocking now because his arms were already crossed over her breasts, and his hands were massaging the small mounds through her clinging sweater. ‘I think, my love, if I took you upstairs now, you’d be begging me again as helplessly as you were begging me last night.’ The reminder stung, scorching her cheeks with bright colour. ‘You want me as much as I want you—no matter how much your pride and crazy determination tell you otherwise. OK. Perhaps you were right once when you accused me of marrying you on the rebound. Maybe I didn’t show you enough love or appreciate you as much as I should have done. Possibly I neglected to do all the little things you needed me to do for you to feel wanted—perhaps I was away too much. Oh, I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t still in contact with Alicia when I met you. God knows, I was!’ His deep voice seemed to rumble with an intensity of emotion and, recognising it, Taylor closed her eyes against it, against the longing to be able to move him to such a degree. ‘When I saw you at that party, you were like the promise of summer after a long, long winter, with your youth, your sexy mystique and your surprising innocence. You showed me something new, something different, something to hope for. And you excited me more than any woman I’d ever met.’
She wanted to keep her mind on what he was saying, hold on to her composure, but she couldn’t because of what he was doing to her. Even through the layers of her clothes her breasts were responding to his sensuous massage, his sweet provocation stimulating the more intimate and secret pathways of her body.
‘Give us this chance, Taylor.’
His lips against her ear whispered their trembling message, his teeth nipping the sensitive area now just above the neck of her sweater, so treacherously feather-light that she gave a small groan and dropped her head back against him.
‘What you’re suffering—what we’re both suffering from,’ he breathed, ‘is chronic frustration from being cooped up here together. It’s not surprising I’m going out of my mind with wanting you—with what I want to do to you. Especially when—deny it as you may, Taylor—you want it too.’
His breath came warmly across her ear, arousing her, bringing her hand up to the nape of his neck so that he wouldn’t stop, because, dear Heaven! she wanted him to do all those things he had spoken of, take her upstairs and make her his again, so that she could make him hers, and only hers…
‘No, Taylor,’ he said gently, reading all the signals. ‘That won’t do either of us any good right now.’ With amazing control he was removing her arm from around his neck, leaving her feeling oddly bereft and disappointed as his hands slid away from her. ‘Right now—for both our sanities’ sakes—I think you should concentrate on breakfast, while I finish off what I was doing outside. And then, my dearest, I’m yours for the rest of the day, during which you and I are going to get down to some really serious fun.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘A TOBOGGAN!’
Taylor stared disbelievingly at the sleek, well-made contraption Jared had dragged around to the front of the house and thought back to his disturbing words in the kitchen earlier about having fun. ‘You’re never going to get two of us on that thing!’ And when she could see that that was his intention, ‘You’re crazy!’ she laughed.
From the other side of the narrow slatted frame, Jared gave a casual shrug. ‘Possibly,’ he conceded with a wry compression of lips, but she sensed a hidden depth of meaning in the way he said it.
‘Where did you get it?’ It was obvious he had dug the sledge out of the old shed. But then something rang a bell with her, even as he started to remind her. Just large enough to take two adults, at a push, he had constructed it himself under the keen eye of his grandfather when he had been a mere youngster. Its cleverly constructed design, though, with the painstaking curvature at its front, showed how good he was with his hands and what a talented, caring craftsman he might have been if he hadn’t chosen to make his living with his brilliant intellect instead.
Like him she had already donned a thick anorak, woollen hat and gloves and scouted around for some wellingtons from a previous visit when he had suggested she get ready for a walk.
Now the green eyes she lifted to his were shining with anticipation and excitement. ‘Well? Are you going to take me for a ride?’
So he did, laughing at her eagerness as they came out of the lane and trudged, with the sledge trailing behind them, up the frozen, steeply rising ground.
From the top of a long sweep of snow-blanched terrain he stopped, and Taylor turned to look about her.
They had come a long way, much further than she had expected. She couldn’t see the house now, only the smoke drifting up from its chimney above a belt of trees. Now and again she caught the faintest traces of its sweet woody scent on the air. Below it, on the flat pastures of the valley, sheep huddled together, feeding on silage and hay, fat woollen bundles, heavily pregnant with lambs, or with their young already braving the unexpected freeze-up at their mothers’ sides. A tractor was moving away from them, out of range of her hearing, and yet if she listened she could almost imagine she could hear the throb of its engine on the absolute stillness of the air.
Perhaps that was why the travel brochures and magazines referred to this valley as the loveliest in England, Taylor appreciated, allowing her eyes the luxury of a full breathtaking survey.
Grey and white stone houses—clustered in hamlets— crouched beside open fields and seasonally stark woodands, a tranquil haven within the deep yawning mouth of the mountains. She could see the meandering river glinting in the sun, disappearing now beneath one of the many small stone bridges that were a feature of the area, appearing again between twisting, wooded banks, joining the dark oval of Derwent Water on its south side with Bassenthwaite Lake to the north. The low stone boundary walls of the outer fields, she noticed, stretched to the very foothills of the mountains, while beyond, at the head of the valley, the dramatic assembly of craggy peaks dominated the whole scene, austere, magnificent and awesome.
Like him, Taylor decided as her gaze came back to where Jared was stooping, doing something to the toboggan. Behind him their own mountainside glared down at them, its face cruel and inclement, giving no quarter to the unwary hiker.
He would know every curve and bend of these hillsides, she thought, with a marked degree of respect for him; know which ones to traverse and which to avoid. And it surprised her to realise that she didn’t doubt for one second that she would be safe with him. That in spite of all that had happened, between them, she would trust him with her very life if she had to.
A small frisson ran through her just from the sight of his bent head in the dark wool hat, from watching him securing the tow-ropes and thinking about what those capable gloved hands could do to her.
Suddenly then he stood up, caught her looking at him through the dark glasses he had recommended they both should wear and colour stained her cheeks, already pink with the cold.
‘OK.’ With sighed
