Seth’s mouth curved in an indolent smile. His senses absorbed the translucent quality of her skin; those blue eyes that could make a man drown in his own longing for her; that rather proud nose that mirrored her attitude towards her subordinates and made him want to drag her to her knees; that full, slightly pouting mouth. He wanted to taste that mouth until he was drugged by the potency of all it promised him, devour it with his own until she was begging him to take her as she had all those years before.
He saw her as she had been then, naked except for that web of lace across her pelvis, offering herself to him like a beautiful, abandoned spirit of the sea. He had never known a girl as passionate as she had been, although he’d known enough in his time. When he had dropped her off the bike outside her grandparents’ house that night, she’d seemed to leap at his suggestion to meet him the following day. He’d felt sick to the stomach when she hadn’t turned up, although he’d waited for hours on that beach. And the day after that, when he had bumped into her in town, she’d treated him like he hadn’t existed. No, worse—like he was scum. He had been just someone with whom to amuse herself, he thought with his mouth hardening. Just a substitute until she could get back to her richer, stuck-up friends back home.
For a long time afterwards all he could think of was of getting his own back—having his revenge on the Culverwell family for the humiliation they had caused him, and for the hardship they had inflicted on his mother and his foster siblings as a result. Well, now he had, he thought grimly. And it wasn’t over yet!
He noted the way she was clutching the flowers to her breast as though to conceal the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. But he could see that all too clearly from the way her nipples protruded tantalisingly through the satin robe, and he had to clench his fingers to control the urge to rip it from her body and replace it with his aching hands instead.
‘You had your hair cut,’ he commented with an unaccustomed dryness in his throat, thinking, as he had done when he had seen her again in the flesh that morning, that the mid-length silky cloud that gently brushed her shoulders added a sophistication that hadn’t been there eight years ago.
Poignantly she said, ‘I grew up.’
And how, he thought. Feeling the uncomfortable constriction of his clothes below waist level, he was annoyed at how she could still affect him without even trying.
‘Why have you come?’ she demanded, but Seth noticed that those eyes he had drowned in all too willingly eight years ago were wary, as though she were afraid of him—or, amazingly, herself.
‘I was naturally concerned,’ he said against his better judgement. She had sounded ghastly over the phone. Now he could see the dark circles under her eyes that no amount of make-up could conceal. She had to be tired, and she was most certainly jet-lagged. But there was something else. Something that caused that same bleak look about her that he had noticed when he had strode into her office that morning, which surprisingly had caused a slight pricking of his conscience, making him feel less a conquering hero and more like a heel for what he had done. ‘I thought I’d come and see for myself that you were all right.’
Grace wanted to respond with some cutting jibe, but the events of the day had taken their toll. She had no more energy left to fight him tonight.
‘Well, now you’ve seen me,’ she murmured with her shoulders slumping, the bouquet hanging heavily at her side. She felt fit to drop, and as she made to move away from him she tripped over one of the shoes she had left lying on the carpet and would have stumbled if he hadn’t been there, reaching for her.
‘I don’t need your help,’ she said despite herself as his long, tanned hands pressed her down onto the sofa, disposing of the flowers on the table beside it.
‘Well, that’s just too bad, because you’re getting it.’
His forcefulness, his proximity and his pine-scented cologne made her weak with a heady excitement that quickly turned to panic when he came down beside her on the settee.
‘Who invited you to sit down?’ she croaked, breathless from the force with which her heart was thumping.
‘Your good manners,’ he drawled, half-amused.
His droll remark would have drawn some retort from her if she hadn’t been so keyed up, debilitated by the hot sensations that were pulsing through her.
Desperate to distance herself from him, she was all for leaping up.
As if he could read her mind, though, his arm suddenly sliced across her middle, preventing her precipitous flight.
Grace’s gasped breath seemed to lodge in her lungs, every part of her burning with the fire that strong arm was igniting in her as its warmth penetrated the fine material of her robe. His other arm was stretched across the back of the settee, setting her head spinning in a whirl of fear and wild anticipation.
If he kissed her…!
Surprisingly, though, he made no other move to touch her beyond keeping her there.
Rigid with tension, her breasts rising and falling sharply, she breathed, ‘What do you want from me, Seth?’
She caught his sharp intake of breath and wondered if that arm lying across her could feel the hard pulse that was throbbing away inside her.
‘I believe I once asked the same question of you.’
Yes, he had, she remembered, recoiling from the reminder, because they both knew what it was she had wanted—and, heaven help her, still wanted—from him. In spite of the ruth-lessness in his desire for revenge, in spite of all he had taken from her, because she couldn’t deny it now.
Sexually, she was as attracted to him as she had ever been. More so, if that was possible. But it was just her flesh that was weak. It meant nothing beyond that, and she had to keep reminding herself of that. Seth Mason was a dangerous man and she’d be a fool if she were to allow herself to fall into his honey-tongued trap. Because that was all it was, she decided—the flowers. The apparent concern. Just ways of wearing her resistance down until he could claim the ultimate prize for himself: her surrender to his powerful sexuality. And what then? she wondered, shuddering.
She longed to put a safe distance between them, and common sense alone prevented her from making any sudden moves. That would have had the same effect as a mouse trying to escape the clutches of a prowling jungle cat, she realised hopelessly, knowing by instinct alone that if she attempted it then that arm would tighten mercilessly around her—and where would she be then?
Instead, her fine features ravaged by her darkest emotions and the things that she must never, ever tell him, and with her eyes fixed on a pastoral watercolour on the far wall that she had bought for next to nothing at a car-boot sale, she asked, ‘Just how much persuasion did it take on your part to get Corinne to hand over her share of the company?’
‘What is it you want me to say, Grace?’ He inhaled deeply, sitting back, mercifully withdrawing his arm as he did so. ‘That I’m sleeping with her?’
Unable to help herself, she sent a swift glance towards his hard-hewn face, breathing normally again now that he had released her, or as normally as it was possible to breathe in his devastating sphere. ‘Are you?’
His lashes came down, veiling the perfect clarity of his eyes. ‘You think I’d kiss and tell on any woman I bed?’
She laughed, a humourless sound strung with tension, as images of him naked on that beach, and as he would be in bed now—his long limbs entwined with others that were paler, more submissive in their passion—rose to threaten her far-too-vulnerable defences. ‘Are you trying to tell me you have scruples?’
Seth’s mouth compressed. ‘No more than you.’
She turned away from him, her chin lifting in spite of the reminder. A cold feeling seemed to settle right in the place where his arm had lain.
‘Does it matter to you, Grace?’
‘What?’