In Bed with a Stranger

Mine, Kit wanted to say. All mine.

What right did he have to forget that?

Sophie’s eyes snapped open.

She lay very still, staring into the soft summer darkness, all her senses on high alert as she listened out for a repeat of the sound that had woken her.

Or maybe it hadn’t even been a sound. Maybe it was just a feeling. A dream perhaps? Or an instinct …

She sat up, struggling from sleep, the hairs rising on the back of her neck. The blood was swishing in her ears, but outside she could hear the usual sounds of the city at night—traffic on the King’s Road, a distant siren, a car moving through the square below.

And then something else, closer, inside the house. A muffled thud, like something being dropped, followed by the soft, heavy tread of someone coming slowly up the stairs.

Sophie froze.

Then, with a muttered curse, she kicked off the covers and scrambled to her feet on the bed, looking frantically around for a weapon and finding herself fervently wishing she’d taken up cricket or baseball. Her heart was galloping. It was no good—there was nothing remotely suited to fending off an intruder within reach, and she realised that she should simply have rolled off the bed and hidden underneath it …

A shape appeared in the doorway, filling it, just as Sophie’s

pounding heart seemed to have filled her throat. It was too late to move now, too late to do anything but brazen it out.

‘Don’t move,’ she croaked. ‘I have a weapon.’

With what sounded like a sigh the intruder took a step forwards.

‘Where I’ve just come from we don’t call that a weapon. We call that a TV remote.’

His voice was hoarse with fatigue, sexy as hell and instantly familiar.

‘Kit!’

It was a cross between a shout of jubilation and a sob. In a split second Sophie had bounded across the bed and he caught her as she hurtled into his arms, wrapping her legs tightly around his waist as their mouths met. Questions half formed themselves in her brain, bubbling up then dissolving again in the more urgent need to feel him and touch him and keep on kissing him …

He lowered her onto the bed without breaking the kiss, and his mouth on hers was hard and hungry. Sliding her hands into his hair, she felt grit. He smelled of earth and antiseptic, but beneath that she caught the scent that made her senses reel—the dry cedar-scent that was all his own, that she had craved like a drug.

‘I thought …’ she gasped ‘… you weren’t home … until tomorrow.’

His lips found hers again.

‘I’m here now,’ he rasped against her.

Now that they were both together on the bed, that was all that mattered.

Desire gushed through her, slippery and quick. Laying her down on the bed, he straightened up, towering over her for a second. Shadows obscured his face, but in spite of the darkness she caught the silvery glitter of his eyes and it sent another wave of urgent need crashing through her. Rising up onto her knees, she pulled off her T-shirt, stopping with

her mouth the low moan he uttered as her naked body moved against him.

‘Are you all right?’ she murmured moments later, fumbling for the buttons on his shirt with shaking fingers.

‘Yes.’

It was a primitive growl that came from low in his chest. He pulled away, half turning as he yanked his shirt from his trousers and wrenched it over his head. In that moment the light from the street filtering through a gap in the curtains caught his face and Sophie gasped.

‘No—you’re hurt. Kit, your face—’

She got to her feet, reaching for him, taking his face between her hands and stroking her thumbs with great tenderness over the lacerations on his cheekbones until she felt him flinch away.

‘It’s nothing.’

His hands slid around her waist as his mouth came down on hers again, and the feel of his bare chest, hard against her breasts, was enough to banish the anxiety that had leapt in her, along with every other thought in her head that wasn’t concerned with the immediate need to wrap herself around him. To feel him against her and inside her until there were no joins left and the distance of the last one hundred and fifty-four days was forgotten.

His hands were warm on her back, moving across her quivering skin with a certainty and steadiness of touch she couldn’t possibly match as she struggled to undo his belt, impatient to get rid of the last barriers that stood between them. She gave a gasp of triumph as she managed to work the buttons free. Swiftly he kicked off his desert combats and they fell back onto the bed.

None of it was as she’d planned. There was no champagne, no sexy silk nightdress, no sense of seduction, no conversation, just skin and hands and a need so huge she felt as if it might break her wide open.

There would be a time for talking. Later. Tomorrow.

This was the best way she knew of bridging the spaces between them, of telling him what she wanted him to know, of reaching him. Just like the first time they’d made love, on the night he’d found out that Ralph Fitzroy wasn’t his father. There had been nothing she could say then because it was too big, too raw, too complex, but for a while it had been flamed into insignificance in the heat of their passion.

His body was rigid with tension, his shoulders like concrete beneath her fingers. They were both shaking, but as he entered her she felt some of the tightness leave his body as if he too felt the wild, exhilarating rightness that surged through her. Her arms were locked around his neck, their foreheads touching, and the feel of his breath on her cheek, his skin, was almost enough to make her come. Her body shivered and burned, but fiercely she held back, tightening her muscles around him, holding on like a woman in danger of drowning.

With a moan he slid his arms beneath her back, gathering her up and pulling her hard against his chest as he sat up. Sophie wrapped her legs around his waist, and the increase in pressure was enough to tip her over the edge. She let go, arching backwards and gasping as her orgasm ripped through her.

He held her, waiting until it had subsided before pulling her back into his arms and burying his face in her neck. She could feel him inside her still, and slowly she rotated her pelvis, stroking his hair, holding him tightly until he stiffened and cried out her name.

Together they collapsed back onto the bed. Cradling his head against her breasts, Sophie stared up into the darkness and smiled.

CHAPTER TWO

KIT woke suddenly, his body convulsing with panic.

It took a few seconds for reality to reassert itself. It was light—the cool, bluish light of an English morning, and the sheets were clean and smooth against his skin. Sophie was lying on her side, tucked into his body, one hand flat on his chest, over his frantically thudding heart.

The fact that he wasn’t actually walking along a dust track towards a bridge with a bomb beneath it told him he must have slept. After a hundred and fifty-four largely sleepless nights it felt like a small miracle.

He shifted position slightly so he could look into Sophie’s sleeping face, stretching limbs that had stiffened from being still for so long. His heart squeezed. God, she was so lovely. The summer had brought out a faint sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and put a bloom into her creamy cheeks. Or maybe that was last night. The erection he’d woken up with intensified as he remembered, and he looked at her mouth. Her top lip with its steep upwards sweep and pronounced Cupid’s bow was slightly swollen from his kisses.

It was also curved into the faintest and most secretive of smiles.

Deeply asleep, she looked serene and self-contained, as if she was travelling through wonderful places where he could

never hope to follow, full of people he didn’t know. No godforsaken, mine-strewn desert roads for her, he thought bleakly.

The light filtering through the narrow gap in the curtains gleamed on her smooth bare shoulder and cast a halo around her hair. Picking up a silken strand, he wound it lazily around his finger, thinking back to one of the last times he had lain here beside her and asked her to marry him.

What a fool. What a selfish, stupid fool.

Anything could have happened. He thought of Lewis’s girlfriend; her terrified eyes and her swollen stomach. We don’t even know each other that well … If he’s … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? What if it had been him instead of Lewis? They’d only had three weeks together. Three weeks. How could he have expected Sophie to stand by him for a lifetime when he barely knew her?