the kiss. She heard him groan, felt the hot, hard evidence of his arousal against her and every inch of her body throb with need. He was all hard, powerful muscle and strength and the idea that right now every drop of it was hers was making her head swim. It was a good thing he had such a tight hold of her. If she hadn’t been clasped so tightly in the strong, warm circle of his arms she’d have crumpled to the floor in a quivering, molten heap.
‘You pack quite a punch,’ Jack muttered, dragging his mouth from hers to explore the skin of her neck and upper chest.
‘So do you,’ she said raggedly as a series of uncontrollable shudders ripped through her. ‘You know, never have I been so glad to be wearing a strapless dress.’
She was even more so when he slid his hand up her side to cup her breast. At the jolt of desire, Imogen let out a whimper of pleasure.
‘Shh,’ Jack murmured.
‘Make me,’ she said, desperate for his mouth to find hers again.
Which, to her fevered relief, it did. While he continued his devastating assault on her mouth, he pushed the top of her dress and her bra down and, taking the weight of one breast in his palm, he rubbed his thumb over her nipple.
Beneath his touch her nipple hardened and ached and Imogen groaned and arched her back. And then his mouth moved down to her other breast, closing over that nipple, and she screwed her eyes tight shut and dug her teeth into her lower lip, because, wow, she’d never felt pleasure like it.
Sparks showered through her, straight down to the hot, aching centre of her, and she shuddered against him, trembling with the desire to have him thrusting up hard inside her.
But just when she thought she was about to collapse with need, Jack lifted his head and stared down at her, breathing heavily, his eyes blazing and dark and his face tight with restraint. Swallowing hard, he dragged in a ragged breath and took a step back.
‘No,’ Imogen muttered in protest.
‘We have to stop,’ he said roughly, drawing her dress and bra back into place with shaking fingers.
‘Why?’
His eyes dropped to her mouth and for a moment she thought he would declare he was joking and drag her back into his arms.
But he didn’t. Instead, he backed away even more and set his jaw. ‘Because we’ve already been more than five minutes,’ he said grimly, ‘and if we carry on like this I might very well end up getting us a proper room.’
‘A proper room?’ she echoed dazedly.
‘Well, this is a hotel, and beds are in dangerously close proximity.’
Imogen went dizzy at the thought of her and Jack hot and sweaty and naked in bed. ‘That would be fine by me.’ In fact, the sooner, the better.
‘What happened to you being the star of the show and all that concern about being missed?’
Oh. Damn.
She blinked as reality crashed back into her head and obliterated the heat. Yes. Of course. The Ball. Dinner. Her speech. She blanched. Her speech! In a matter of minutes, she had to get up in front of a hundred people and speak. Agh. ‘You’re right.’
‘You’d better go. Now. Before I change my mind and book that room.’
‘What about you?’ she said, wishing she didn’t have to leave.
‘I’ll follow in a few minutes.’
‘Will I see you after dinner?’
Jack hauled her into his arms and gave her a swift, hard kiss that made her head reel, and then shot her a look full of hot, dark promise before nudging her through the door and pointing her in the right direction. ‘You can count on it.’
COUNT on it?
Hah. She couldn’t count on anything, thought Imogen, stalking into the conservatory after dinner with as much speed and force as her dress would allow, which infuriatingly wasn’t a lot. Ideally, she’d have liked to pace and stomp but all she could do was totter over to an armchair and throw herself into it.
At least the glowering she could manage, she thought, staring gloomily out into the softly lit gardens.
Where had the evening gone so wrong?
After leaving Jack, she’d sailed into the dining room as if she were floating across the floor, aware that the electricity still flowing through her must be evident to anyone with eyes in their head, but unable to summon up the energy to do anything to hide it.
She’d taken her seat and smiled a hello to the other people at her table. She’d murmured her appreciation of the food and dipped in and out of the conversation. And all the while her thoughts had kept drifting back to that broom cupboard.
How she’d managed to get through the short speech she’d had to give thanking the sponsors and the guests she’d never know. Even as she’d been elaborating on the causes the trust had recently supported she’d felt a self-destructive urge to rip up her prompt cards and ask the audience, in a choose-your-own-adventure kind of way, what they thought might have happened next if Jack hadn’t stopped when he had.
Which would really not have impressed the illustrious gathering. Nor the trust’s board. And had it made its way into the press, it certainly wouldn’t have gone down well with the submissions committee at the university she’d applied to in the States.
Imogen let out a sigh and frowned. Oh, who was she kidding? She knew exactly when the evening had started to go downhill. It had taken a turn for the worse the moment she’d stepped down from that podium and spotted the woman Jack was sitting next to.
She’d been a blonde of indeterminate age. Beautiful in a ravaged kind of way. The sort of woman who commanded the centre of attention and revelled in it. And, judging by the way her hands had been all over him, one who’d clearly set her sights on Jack.
Not that he’d seemed to object, she thought sourly. Throughout dinner her gaze had kept sliding to him and every time she’d looked, he’d just been sitting there, letting himself be pawed to pieces.
Probably still was, because where was he anyway? Dinner had been over for ages and she’d hung around but there’d been no sign of him. So much for his promise to come and find her after supper.
Logic and common sense told her that there were a dozen different reasons he might have been delayed, but neither stood a chance against the overwhelming suspicion that he could well be checking out the broom cupboard with the blonde.
And how had he known about that anyway? Imogen frowned and swung her feet up to rest on the window sill. The way he’d steered her out of the lobby and down that corridor, as if he knew exactly where he was going …
She nibbled on her lip, vaguely aware that her mind was careering off in a dangerously extravagant direction, but too wound up to stop it. Why was she even bothering to wonder? For all
