Set on a small incline, so that it could overlook its surrounding gardens and parklands, it was everything that the neoclassicist architects had decreed their houses should be and then some more, Sylvie acknowledged as she drove slowly towards the gravelled parking area in front of the massive columned portico to the house. Stopping the Discovery, she opened the door and started to get out.
Ran had seen her drive up from an upstairs window. She was just a few seconds short of five minutes early. Remembering a younger Sylvie, and her apparent total inability to arrive anywhere on time, he grimaced ruefully to himself before making his way downstairs.
They met on the paved portico. Ran opened the massive front door just as Sylvie mounted the last step. She stopped the minute she saw him, freezing instinctively like a gazelle scenting the presence of a leopard.
He hadn’t changed, but then why should he have? He still looked exactly the same. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the smooth warm skin of a countryman, his jeans clinging softly to the taut muscles of his long legs, his forearms bare and bronzed, the soft checked shirt he was wearing exactly the same kind of shirt she could remember seeing him wearing all the years she had been growing up. His hair was still as thick and darkly rich as ever, his jaw just as chiselled—no signs of soft, rich living there, despite the odd snippets of gossip she had picked up from her mother and from Mollie about the discreet parade of elegant, wealthy women who had passed through his life—Ran had always had a penchant for that type, women in the main who were slightly older than himself, soignée, knowing … all the things that an adoring, unknowing seventeen-year-old was not.
Only his eyes had changed, Sylvie noticed, with a sudden sharp flicker of sensation which she immediately suppressed. Oh, they were still the same incredible colour, somewhere between onyx and gold, still flecked with those heart-dizzying little specks of lighter colour and still surrounded by those unfairly long, thick dark lashes.
Yes, all that was still familiar to her, but the lazily sensual way they were studying her, the subtle but very male message she could read in them as Ran’s gaze flicked over her T-shirt-covered breasts and her slim waist in the plain blue jeans … that was most certainly not familiar to her, at least not from Ran.
And it was only then, when she countered that look with an instinctive and automatically female one of cool reproval, that Sylvie realised that one of them had closed the distance between them from its original safe several metres to a much, much less secure three or four feet.
One of them … To her chagrin Sylvie recognised that it was not only Ran who had moved so much closer and that she herself was halfway towards the front door now instead of on the perimeter of the portico … When had she moved … and how, without knowing what she was doing …? Ran had always had that kind of effect on her … Had had … All that was in the past now, she reminded herself fiercely. And just to ensure that Ran knew it too she held out her hand to him and, raising her voice slightly, smiled with cool authority as she greeted him.
‘Ran, good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get straight down to work. I’ve studied the plans of the house, but I always find that it makes an enormous difference to actually walk over a property, so …’
God, but she was so incredibly sexy, Ran acknowledged. He could feel the heat, the reaction, the response surging through his veins. He had been prepared to find her beautiful. She had always been that. But in the past it had been almost a sexless, childish kind of beauty … Now her sensuality, and his own reaction to it, hit him in the solar plexus like a blow.
As for that cool little voice of authoritative superiority, that distancing little outstretched hand … Later Ran was to ask himself what on earth he had thought he was doing and if he had gone completely mad, but at the time …
Ignoring her outstretched hand, he covered the distance between them and before Sylvie could even begin to guess what he intended doing his hands were resting either side of her waist, his scent, his heat filling her nostrils, his body and his mouth less than inches away from her own.
‘Ran!’
Was that really her own voice, that soft, husky, and, yes, somehow invitingly sensual little thread of sound, gasping his name in a slow-drawn-out moan that was more invitation than protest?
But it was too late to correct the erroneous message she knew instinctively she had given; Ran was already acting on what he had obviously interpreted her ‘protest’ to mean, his hands lifting from her waist to her arms, her shoulders, as he drew her closer, his mouth fastening on hers as he kissed her, not as an old acquaintance or a friend of her brother’s, Sylvie recognised, her senses reeling, but in all the ways she had dreamed of him kissing her all those years ago, as a man kissed a woman.
Despairingly she struggled valiantly to resist but it was useless. Her own foolish senses were doing far more to aid Ran than to support her, turning traitor and welcoming his sensual assault of her mouth with the eagerness of parched land greedily soaking up a heavy rainfall.
‘Ran …’
She tried weakly to summon her flagging defences, but the objection she tried to make was lost beneath Ran’s kiss and all the ineffectual parting of her lips did was to allow Ran’s tongue to slip masterfully into the sweet moistness of her mouth.
Briefly she tried to challenge its entry, but what should have been the rejecting thrust of her own tongue against his swiftly became, under Ran’s sensually skilful manipulation and expertise, more the intimate sparring of lovers rather than the defensive rejection of adversaries.
‘Mmm …’ Instinctively Sylvie moved closer, close enough to lean her body fully against Ran’s and let his strength support her weakness as delicious tremors of sensation skidded dangerously over her.
‘Mmm …’
Beneath her hands Ran’s back felt so broad, so firm, so …
Eagerly she tugged his shirt free of his waistband, glorying in the sensation of sliding her hands beneath it and onto the hard heat of his skin.
She felt him shudder responsively as she traced his spine and her own body jolted fiercely in excited reaction.
Beneath her white T-shirt she could feel her suddenly swollen breasts pressing eagerly against her bra. Her nipples ached and even without being able to see them she knew the crests would be hard and erect, the soft flesh around them flooded with aroused dark colour.
Ran could not see what he was doing to her, though … what effect he was having on her as his tongue slid erotically against her own, no longer coaxing but openly, fiercely demanding from her the response his sexuality wanted.
Only one man had seen her body naked and aroused, to only one man had she willingly and, yes, almost wantonly exposed the full femaleness of herself, glorying in her sexuality, in her response to him, her need for him, not fearing … not imagining that he would reject her.
Reject her!
Immediately Sylvie stiffened, her nails momentarily digging into Ran’s back as she recognised with shocking abruptness just what she was doing and, even worse, whom she was doing it with.
‘Let go of me …’ she demanded furiously, fiercely pushing him away, her face bright with mortification and confusion as Ran immediately stepped back from her and then, without taking his eyes off her face, casually unfastened his belt and started to push his shirt back inside his jeans.
If her face had been pink with self-consciousness before, that was nothing to the heat she could feel burning off it now, Sylvie recognised as she refused to give in to the silent visual challenge Ran was giving her and forced herself to keep her gaze locked on his as he slowly and tauntingly completed his task.
Why, oh, why should it be that when a woman disturbed a man’s clothing in the heat of passion he could make her feel so self-conscious and femininely vulnerable whilst he repaired the dishevelment she had caused, but when it had been a man who had disturbed a woman’s