She fixed him with a frosty smile, though her heart was beating like a bass-drum in her ears. ‘I rather think you overestimate your own attraction, Harrison.’
He gave a half-smile. ‘You think so? Perhaps I do, but I’m pretty confident in your case. Maybe we should put it to the test.’
She saw the hungry intent on his face, and understood his meaning immediately. ‘Don’t you dare try!’
He came one step closer, totally ignoring what she was saying. ‘But you want me to, don’t you, Kimberley? We both know that. You hate me, yet you want me…’ He pulled her into his arms, not roughly but not gently either.
‘If you dare continue, then I’ll scream as loudly as——’
There was no scream. Not even the smallest attempt at resistance, which would have left her with some dignity. But there was no resistance, and no dignity. Just an overpowering reaction to him which took all her will away, sapped her strength and her resolve and left in their place the swamping, unbearable cocktail of desire and frustration as she let him kiss her.
And, as she’d done once before, she opened her mouth wide beneath his—so wide because she wanted to eat him up, to lick him all over. She gave a little moan as she found her hands winding themselves around his broad back, and she clung on to him as though she were clinging to life itself.
‘Oh, baby,’ he murmured into her mouth. ‘Yes. Show me. Show me just how much you want me…’
She didn’t know what he wanted her to do. She was responding through pure instinct, kissing him back with frantic fervour as though she had never before been kissed. As indeed she hadn’t.
Not like this.
‘Or shall I show you?’ he whispered, and pulled her into him, as close as it was possible to be. She felt his arousal immediately; no garment in the world had yet been designed which could disguise how hard and hot and turned on he was.
Her hips swivelled in instinctive excitement against him, and he gave a low laugh. ‘You want that, don’t you? Don’t you?’ He kissed her again, and one hand slid to her back, underneath her Tshirt, and he rubbed his hand sensually against the silky bareness of her skin, a soft, tantalising caress, a tiny circular movement which cajoled an instinctive response, and she felt as though her veins were being transfused with thick, sweet honey.
‘Oh, baby.’ He dropped his head to whisper against her hair. She felt him shudder—such a wild and uncontrolled shudder of excitement—and it made her realise that he teetered on the very edge of control. She pulled away from him, afraid of what might happen if she didn’t. He stopped kissing her immediately, and she almost gasped as he stared down at her, for she barely recognised him, the stark hunger on his face turning him into a stranger.
But he is a stranger, she thought. What do you know of Harrison Nash, other than the fact that he represents nothing but a wild and elemental danger?
‘You were wise to stop me,’ he said, in a flat, deliberate voice. ‘Because I’m afraid that if we carried on kissing then I would not have been responsible for my actions. Much more of that and I would have been unable to stop myself from removing every single item of clothing from that beautiful body of yours and taking you right here, because all my reason seems to have deserted me.’
And then he shook his head in some kind of despairing disbelief. ‘Dear God!’ he exclaimed. ‘What am I saying? What am I doing? My mother could have walked into the kitchen. The gardener’s outside——’
She’d had enough of his self-disgusted confession, and every word he uttered only added to her own despair. ‘Let me go——’
‘No.’
She stared up at him, her mouth quivering, on the brink of tears. ‘Harrison, please.‘
His eyes narrowed at her trembling state. ‘Kimberley—this thing between us——’
She shook her head distractedly, as if trying to remove a very heavy burden which simply refused to budge. ‘It’s sex!’ she asserted. ‘Nothing but sex! That’s all. Just some unfortunate accident of nature—a chemistry between two people who happen to loathe one another. And I hate it, if you must know.’
His eyes were bleak with self-loathing. ‘You can’t hate it any more than I do,’ he said bitterly.
She tried to pull away, but he still held her firm, and her determination to escape him was only rivalled, infuriatingly, by the desire to give in—to him, and to herself. To give herself up to the white-hot passion which threatened to devour her. ‘Will you please let me go now?’ she asked quietly.
‘Only if you promise not to run away.’
‘I’m promising you nothing. You have no right to ask anything of me.’
‘Not even to leave Duncan alone?’
She could have wept. That he could have started to make love to her, yet still think her duplicitous enough to imagine that she would scheme to steal Duncan from his new fiancée. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! It’s all over! It’s history!’
‘You mean you no longer care about him?’ he asked quietly.
‘That’s right,’ she answered, equally quietly.
‘But maybe you never did care?’ he challenged, in a voice of pure steel.
She took a deep breath. She wanted him to despise her so much that he would be repulsed by her. To hate her so much that he would never try to touch her again. And if he never touched her again she would be safe from the power he wielded over her. ‘Sure, I cared for Duncan,’ she said, in the husky kind of voice she’d heard bimbos use. ‘But maybe I cared about the money more. You did me a big favour, Harrison. Does that make you feel better?’
His mouth became an ugly line. ‘God, you are nothing but a little bitch,’ he ground out. ‘And if I ever doubted whether I’d done the right thing in trying to buy you off, you’ve just convinced me.’
Her cheeks flamed. Knowing that his rejection of her was the only sure route to sanity was one thing, seeing that look in his eyes was another.
‘So, was it worth it, Kimberley?’ he asked, still in that cold, scornful voice. ‘Did the money I gave you compensate for any fleeting regrets you might have had that you’d made the wrong decision?’
She picked up her handbag from the table. ‘I think that we’ve exhausted the whole subject. I’m going now, Harrison. I can’t say that it was nice seeing you again, because I’d be lying. I’ll leave it to you to explain to your mother why I can’t continue with the cleaning. I’m sure you’ll think of something.’
His voice was soft; it echoed in her ears as she left the room. ‘There’s only one thing that I can think of right now, and that’s how much I want you, Kimberley. As much as you want me. Whichever way you look at it—there’s unfinished business between us.’
She composed her face, then turned. ‘In your dreams, Harrison,’ she said coldly. ‘Goodbye.’
KIMBERLEY left Brockbank House mixed up, het up and downright angry with herself at the way she’d handled Harrison. To say nothing of the way he’d handled her—both literally and figuratively, she thought disgustedly.
She walked home by a circuitous route, and by the time she’d reached her mother’s cottage she had calmed down enough to realise that she hadn’t hurt more than her pride—and since only one person knew about it, and she wasn’t planning on seeing