‘I’m so alone,’ he told her, trying to sound cool but feeling anything but, ‘that it’s positively indecent.’
‘Nothing about you is indecent, handsome,’ she murmured. ‘You’re positively gorgeous and positively perfect. Come with me...’
She pried the empty glass out of his suddenly frozen hand and bent to place it on the floor, giving him an uninterrupted view of her quite perfect breasts. Rising again, she smiled a siren’s smile, slid her right hand into his still frozen left and began leading him away, across the upper gallery floor then down the wide white staircase.
The shredded remnants of Luke’s common sense finally burst through his paralysed brain and he ground to a halt, momentarily resisting the hyp- . notic pull of the softly feminine fingers entwined through his.
‘You’re not a hooker, are you?’ came his harsh-sounding question as they faced each other on the stairs.
He could not have mistaken the momentary shock which flared within those gorgeous green eyes, or his own inner shudder of relief. For what would he have done if she’d said that she was?
Still have gone with her, came the appalling admission.
‘My mistake,’ he muttered. ‘Lead on, lover.’ Obviously she was just a good-time girl, out on the tiles for the night. She wanted a one-night standwithout—complications, without strings.
As much as that was not usually his style, Luke could see that it was going to be for tonight. It was no use pretending that he wasn’t bowled over. More than bowled over. She seemed to have bewitched him with the primitive and alluring sexuality which emanated from every pore of her body. It wafted from her in waves, weaving a spell around his senses, teasing his flesh and his imagination, making him wonder what it would be like to spend the night with her.
She kept glancing over her shoulder at him as she drew him down the rest of the stairs and through the crowded foyer, her eyes sometimes smiling invitingly, sometimes seemingly checking that he was still there—as though she too could not believe he’d come with her so readily.
It was those glimpses of unexpected vulnerability which began intriguing Luke. The suspicion that this was not her usual style either began to form in his mind. She looked at him that way one time too many after they’d finally made it outside into the street, and he suddenly whipped her over into a darkened doorway, pulling her against him in a jolting embrace.
Her shocked gasp and almost frightened eyes confirmed his opinion that she was not used to playing such dangerous games. Either that, or she had never run into real trouble before.
‘You little fool,’ he snarled, infuriated by this last thought. ‘Don’t you know the risks you run in going off with a stranger?’
Her chin whipped up, green eyes glinting an answering fury at him. ‘I take it you’ve changed your mind—is that it?’ she snapped. ‘If so, then say so, damn you.’ She began to struggle to free herself from his arms. ‘I have no time for cowards tonight.’
‘Cowards! Why, you little...’ Red spots of fury went off in his brain like flashlights, and before he knew it he’d grasped a large clump of her hair and yanked it back so that her chin tipped up all the more.
Before she could do more than cry out through startled lips, his mouth clamped down over those lips and he was kissing her as he’d never kissed a woman before. With anger, not passion, with a desire to punish and hurt, not seduce.
But seduction was the final result.
His, not hers. For as his tongue drove repeatedly into the depths of her mouth she moaned a moan which moved him as no woman’s moan had ever done before, making him want to protect her, not punish her. Hold, not hurt.
He found it impossible to keep kissing her with such ferocity. His tongue gentled to a series of sinuous slides against hers, his free hand finding the small of her back and pressing inwards. He thrilled to the feel of her sinking weakly against him, then to the sound of another longer, more sensual moan—this one signalling total surrender to his male domination over her body. It brought a dizzying sense of sexual power, and he simply could not wait to have her naked and trembling beneath him.
‘This hotel room,’ he muttered thickly against her mouth. ‘Is it far?’
She shook her head in the negative, the movement brushing her lush lips to and fro across his.
He shuddered as a rush of blood almost had him doing what he hadn’t done since he was fifteen. Gulping, he drew back from the raw heat of her body to stare down into wildly dilated green eyes. She looked... stunned, he realised. Stunned, and totally at his mercy. It was an exhilarating and intoxicating thought—a male fantasy come true. Impossible to resist.
‘Then take me there,’ he muttered. ‘And take me there quickly...’
The drill contacting his tooth brought Luke back to the present—physically at least—but his mind continued to chum over his still vivid memories.
Had she deceived him with that air of vulnerability, with her seemingly mindless surrender? Had she been so diabolically clever, so skilled in seducing strangers that she had made it seem as if he had been master of what had happened that evening? Whereas in reality she had been the one pulling the strings and making all the moves?
He desperately wanted to believe that she hadn’t been married at the time—although it seemed likely that she had. Given that assumption, he clung to the idea that it had been her first foray into adultery.
Even so, he could not deny that she had come to that exhibition right and ready for a night of casual sex, dressed for the occasion and armed to the eyeteeth with the equipment necessary to reduce fools like him to instant mush.
Looking back, he could see that she’d also gone to great pains to protect her true identity—to cut down the risk of ever being caught out in her outrageous behaviour. She’d wanted a mad fling of some kind, but she hadn’t wanted any evidence of that mad fling left behind. The only part of the puzzle which remained was why she’d taken that appalling risk during the middle of the night.
It couldn’t have been deliberate, he decided, unless it had been part of some crazy fantasy she’d wanted to fulfil. He preferred to think that she’d simply been carried away—as he had been carried away.
It was one of the reasons why she haunted him. Because he’d never been carried away like that before. Or since...
‘I don’t even known your name,’ he said when he finally closed the hotel room door, neither of them having said a word as she had led him swiftly down two blocks and into the foyer of a small but surprisingly elegant hotel. Not at all the sort of place for a cheap rendezvous.
The lift-ride up to the third floor had been tense, the presence of another man in the lift stifling any conversation or physical contact. Luke had hardly been aware of his surroundings as he’d eagerly followed her down the corridor. He had absorbed little but a brief impression of red-patterned carpet and black and white prints of ships on the walls.
‘My name?’ she repeated, almost as though she were in a fog.
He liked her disorientation, liked the way she gasped when he pulled her abruptly into his arms. ‘Never mind,’ he growled. ‘No names for tonight. We’ll exchange names in the morning.’
He kissed her again before the fog could lift.
God, but he liked the woman his kisses turned her into, liked the sounds she made under them, liked the feel of her lips melting along with her body. He’d never known a woman become so pliant in his arms before. Her sweet surrender to his mouth and hands filled him with the heady power to do as he pleased with her.
He pleased to take off all her clothes. What