In Bed With...Collection

‘What is?’

She rounded on him, not liking the cynical flavour of his comment, and hating the idea of him applying any shade of it to her. ‘You have a father. What was right for you as a child?’

His mouth curled with irony. ‘For him to be there when I needed him.’

Which she could no longer trust Derek to do. The clanging casino noise around her drove that home again.

‘You’ve just said it all, Mr. Templar,’ she stated decisively.

Her eyes clashed with his, daring him to refute that this quality overrode everything else. It carried the acceptance of responsibility and commitment, displayed reliability and caring, and generated trust…all the things Derek had just demonstrated wrong about himself.

Bryce Templar didn’t refute it. He stared back at her and the air between them sizzled with tense unspoken things. Sunny had the wild sense that he was scouring her soul for how right a mother she would be, judging on some scale which remained hidden to her but was vibrantly real in the context of mating.

‘Let’s make that Bryce,’ he said quietly.

And she knew she had passed some critical test. They stood apart, yet she could feel him drawing her closer to the man he was, unleashing a magnetism that tugged on all that was female in her…deep primitive chords thrumming with anticipation.

He smiled…slowly, sensually, promisingly. ‘You must be hungry by now. I am.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, almost mesmerised by the sensations he was evoking. She was hungry for so many, many things, and every day of this week in Las Vegas she had felt them slipping away from her, leaving an empty hole that even the most exciting career couldn’t bridge. Maybe she was crazy, wanting this man to fill the emptiness so much, she was projecting her own desire onto him.

‘This way,’ he said, and proceeded to guide her around the casino area to the MGM reception desk.

Sunny was barely conscious of walking. She was moving with him, going with him, and he was taking her towards a closer togetherness. Dinner for two. On first-name terms. Sunny and Bryce.

She expected him to ask about restaurants at the desk, but he didn’t.

‘Bryce Templar,’ he announced to the clerk. ‘A suite has been booked for me.’

‘Yes, Mr. Templar. The penthouse Patio Suite. Your luggage has been taken up. Your key?’

‘Please.’

It was instantly produced. ‘If there’s anything else, sir…’

‘Thank you. I’ll call.’

He was steering Sunny towards the elevators before she recollected her stunned wits enough to say, ‘I thought you were staying at the conference hotel.’

‘I’d already checked out when I saw you in the lobby.’

She frowned, bewildered by this move. ‘Couldn’t you check in again?’

‘I preferred to keep my business with you private.’

Private…in a private penthouse suite.

A penthouse for playboys?

The elevator doors opened and Bryce Templar swept her into the empty compartment…just the two of them…doors shutting off the crowded casino, closing them away from all the people who had surrounded them on their walk, and suddenly there was silence…except for the hum of the elevator and the thundering beat of Sunny’s heart.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ud535c0fb-8216-5cc4-a273-7d8e9771b73f)

SHE stood rigidly beside him. Bryce willed the elevator to go faster. He knew she had expected a public restaurant, not this, but he had to get her alone with him. Close the net. His mind worked double-time, producing a string of soothing words, ready to answer any protest she might make about the situation he’d set up.

He saw her hand clench. She took a deep breath. Her face turned to him, her stunning amber eyes swimming with questions. Her mouth moved, tremulous words slipping out. ‘I don’t think…’

‘Don’t think!’

The growled command came from nowhere. Before any sophisticated reasoning could stem the urge that exploded through him, Bryce scooped Sunny York into his embrace and kissed her with such devouring intensity, there was no possibility of any more words being uttered by either of them.

He was so hungry for her—for all that she was—the raging desire coursing through him directed all movement. The elevator stopped. The doors slid open. He swung his woman off her feet, hooking her legs over his arm, and it felt absolutely right as he carried her to his suite because her hands were linked around his neck and her breasts were pressed to his chest, and she was kissing him back as wildly as he was kissing her.

The slot-card in his hand opened the door. He kicked it shut. No bed in sight. The suite was a two-storey apartment. Catching sight of the staircase he charged up to the intimate rooms on the next level and straight into the bedroom. Seduction did not enter his head. There was no finesse at all in the need that had him put Sunny on her feet so he could get her clothes off. And his own.

He couldn’t wait to have her naked with him, to feel every luscious curve of her, skin to skin, her lovely long legs in intimate entanglement around him. It excited him even more that she was as eager as he was to be rid of all barriers, her hands just as frantically busy with undressing, wanting to feel him and know everything there was to know.

Her eyes were a blaze of gold, burning him up. Her mouth was sensationally passionate in its hunger for his. Her hands were wildly erotic in their touch. Her glorious hair was pure sensual pleasure, its scent, its silky mass, its flashing colours. And fully naked, she was stunningly perfect, her whole body so lushly female, soft and supple, calling on him to perform as a man, and he was so ready to, the drive to take and possess was overwhelmingly immediate.

He laid her on the bed, kneeling over her for a moment, savouring the sight of her—all her sizzling warmth lying open to him, every inhibition abandoned in the sheer craving for this mating with him. Her arms lifted, winding around his neck, pulling him down, wanting him as much as he wanted her.

No foreplay. It wasn’t needed by either of them. They were both poised for a completion that had to come. He drove forward, sheathing himself in her moist heat, revelling in her ecstatic welcome, loving the sense of being deep inside her. And her legs wrapped around him, holding him in, exulting in the sensation of feeling him there, then urging him to repeat the action, to move into the rhythm that would take them both on the upward climb to where they had to be…together.

It was an incredible feeling—this compulsive copulation with her—his intense arousal, the sense of being so aggressively male, primitively needful of having this woman. Somehow she embodied everything he had to have, and it drove him into a frenzy of possession.

The amazing, the wonderful, the totally exhilarating thing was, she was just as frenzied as he was in wanting what he was giving her, and when he could no longer stop himself from climaxing, she was right there with him, joining him in a fantastic meltdown that seemed to fuse them as one.

For a few moments he spread his body over hers, wanting to feel the whole imprint of her femininity as he kissed her again, sealing their oneness—all of him, all of her, together, as deeply and totally as they could be. The satisfaction of it was euphoric. He wished he could stay where he was, but it wasn’t fair to subject her to his weight for long.

He rolled onto his side, scooping her with him to lie in the cradle of his arm, holding her snuggled close to him. He was swamped by a sense of tenderness for her, this woman who made him feel as a man should feel, wanted for what he was, not who he was…an instinctive, compulsive wanting.

His hands moved over her, gently caressing, loving the soft texture of her skin, soothing the endearing little tremors his stroking aroused. His fingers threaded through her hair, enjoying the winding spring of curls around them. The urge to bind her to him was so strong, he didn’t even pause to wonder what she was thinking—or feeling—about what had happened between them. The words simply spilled straight out.

‘Marry me!’

He didn’t even realise he spoke in a command. Her head was resting just under his chin. He felt it jerk slightly, a startled little movement.

‘What…’ The question was choked with disbelief. He heard her sharply indrawn breath, then, ‘…what did you say?’

Bryce was not about to back off from having the advantage of their intimacy to press his suit. He rolled Sunny onto her back and propped himself up on his elbow beside her, meeting her stunned gaze with an intensity of purpose that was not to be shaken. He lightly traced the line of her full-lipped mouth with his finger as he delivered a clear and firm statement.

‘I want you to marry me, Sunny York.’

Sunny could scarcely believe her ears. But he’d said it twice and his eyes were serious. Her sensitised lips were tingling and she couldn’t get her mind thinking in any order at all. It didn’t help when he lowered his head and grazed his mouth over hers, his tongue sliding seductively across the soft inner tissue, and the hand that had caressed her lips, moved down to cup her breast, gently kneading it as his thumb fanned her nipple with tantalising tenderness.

He knew how to do it right. Sunny’s mind completely glazed over again, mesmerised by the rightness that had swamped it from the moment she had been seized by lustful madness in the elevator. He kissed her more deeply, re-igniting all the exciting sensations of previous kisses.

‘I want you to be my wife,’ he murmured against her lips, his breath still mingling with hers.