Fiancee By Mistake

If he had looked big and strong outside, in the space of the countryside, then now he appeared impossibly so—dark and powerful, the confines of the small hallway dominated by the height and breadth of him. His lean, strong body seemed too vital, too forceful to be restricted by its narrow space, its cosy domesticity.

He was more at one with the wild elements outside, as untamed as the wind that buffeted the stone walls of the cottage and came howling down the chimneys.

Because her attention was so firmly fixed on him, she knew the exact moment that the change began. She saw how his long body stiffened, freezing in the act of shrugging out of his coat. She saw the sudden darkening of his eyes, the burning black obliterating the rich blue. With her hearing made acute by heightened sensitivity, she caught the change in his breathing, the faint sound as he swallowed deeply.

‘This is the first time I’ve seen you in the light,’ he said, and his voice was strangely husky, raw-edged, as if it had not been used for some time. ‘Your eyes—they’re almost purple, the colour of pansies.’

‘They’re like Elizabeth Taylor’s, everyone always says,’ Leah responded, hearing the words and yet feeling unaware of having actually produced them. ‘But of course I don’t really look like her. My hair isn’t black, for one thing.’

Her lips felt disturbingly dry, and she wet them nervously with the tip of her tongue, then froze as she saw his dark gaze drop to follow the tiny, betraying movement. The intensity of his stare made her heart kick in her chest. Suddenly she saw the gesture from his point of view, realising the unconscious provocation it had offered.

‘I prefer your hair colour,’ he murmured. ‘That sort of sable-brown is much softer. Though right now it’s dark enough to pass for black.’

His hand came out to stroke one of the sodden strands that lay over her shoulder. His touch was very gentle, but with every cell in her body hypersensitive to the pull of his physical appeal Leah had to fight the instinctive reaction that almost had her jumping away like a nervous cat.

‘Liz Taylor is regarded as one of the world’s greatest beauties.’

‘Fishing for compliments?’

A slow smile, its sensual appeal lethal to her composure, curled the corners of that beautiful mouth.

‘Believe me, you don’t need to. You must know that you are an exceptionally lovely woman, the sort any man would be proud to have on his arm. Or…’ the smooth voice deepened deliberately ‘…in his bed.’

Those vivid eyes held Leah’s hypnotically, sapphire locked with violet in spellbound isolation from which she was totally unable to break free. She no longer saw the flawed beauty of the damaged side of his face, the raw, red marks that marred the sculpted line of his bones, the plane of his cheek. She was aware only of the glossy darkness of his hair, the unexpected softness of his mouth—and, above and beyond anything else, the burning, mesmeric force of his gaze.

‘I…’

It was all she could manage before her voice failed her completely. Twice she swallowed deeply, opened her mouth, but each time no sound came out, her ability to speak having deserted her.

The silence in the small house was so profound that his breathing seemed unnaturally loud. She could almost sense each exhalation as a warm caress across her skin, raising goosebumps of reaction all over her body.

‘I…?’ said Sean softly, lifting the single syllable on a questioning note.

His smile, the light in his eyes, seemed to say that he knew exactly what she was thinking and that he shared those thoughts. Shared the shivering sense of awareness, the heightened sensitivity to everything around them. With infinite slowness his head tilted, came nearer.

The tiny movement was enough to have Leah closing her eyes in panic, but only for a second. Suddenly fearful that he might interpret her reaction as an invitation to kiss her, she forced them open again, focusing determinedly on a single dark lock that had broken free from the sleeked back smoothness of his snow-soaked hair so that it fell forward over one straight black eyebrow.

‘Sean…’

As she spoke a single drop of molten snow slid, hung, and finally fell from his hair onto his skin, trailing slowly down towards the corner of his eye. Acting purely instinctively, Leah reached out and stopped it with a gentle fingertip, slowly retracing its path to wipe the cold dampness from his skin.

‘Don’t!’

Sharp and hard, it was a rough command that stilled the movement at once. Her eyes flew to his in a look of stunned confusion.

‘But it would have gone into your eye!’

Almost all the blue had disappeared from his iris, she realised. In its place was just a pool of black, with the tiniest rim of colour at its outer edge.

‘It might have stung.’

‘And you would hate to see me suffer even the slightest distress?’

The mockery in his voice was at odds with the heavy-lidded sensuality of his gaze, the warmth that softened his mouth.

As Leah watched with disbelieving fascination that smile grew, and with a slow, indolent movement he turned his head slightly into the hand that still rested against his face. She felt the heat of his skin, warm satin underneath her fingertips, but rougher lower down, where the day’s growth of beard abraded her palm.

She couldn’t hold back a soft murmur of response, a murmur that turned into a choking cry as she felt the new warmth of his lips against her palm. His soft kiss sent a burning reaction like a wild electric shock crackling through every nerve in her arm.

Drawing in a sharp breath, she snatched her hand away, cradling it against her breasts as if it had actually been scorched. Above it, her eyes were wide and dark as pansies in shocked reaction.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Why?’ he echoed thickly. ‘Because I wanted to. Because it felt right, and I enjoyed it. And because…’

Blue eyes smoky with unconcealed desire, he took a step closer, then another. He reached out for her hand, lifting it once more to his lips.

‘Because…’

With his dark eyes still on her face, he traced the shape of her palm in soft, brief kisses, adding the touch of his tongue as he moved up her index finger. He planted a final kiss right on its tip before turning it towards her, letting it rest on her parted mouth as if to deliver the caress back to her. Leah shuddered faintly as she tasted the mixture of herself and Sean on her own skin.

‘Because you wanted it too, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, God!’ She choked the words out, unable to respond to his soft-voiced question.

‘Didn’t you?’

She could deny it, but what would be the point? She knew he was right, and he knew it too. He could read it in her eyes, in their darkness that matched the intensity of his own, in the heightened breathing that brought hot colour to her cheeks and to the creamy breasts that rose and fell rapidly under the tight-fitting bodice of her dress.

‘Yes…’

It was a sigh of resignation, of defeat, but as soon as she had spoken she felt strangely liberated, as if some great weight had dropped from her shoulders.

‘Yes,’ she repeated more firmly, conviction lifting her voice. ‘Yes! Oh, yes!’

‘I knew it.’

A soft thud as the coat he had been in the process of removing finally hit the floor was the last thing Leah was aware of as Sean reached for her, his arms closing round her and hauling her hard up against the lean length of his body. Rough hands in her hair pulled her head back, lifting her face to his, and her mouth was captured in a wild, bruising kiss. With a tiny moan she opened her lips to him, her tongue tangling with his in instant response.

Her groan was matched by an identical one from Sean himself, and then he was kissing her again, but very differently this time. He took her lips hotly, greedily, snatching at her mouth, her face, her neck, like a man who had been starved for a long, long time and was now presented with such an array of dishes that he didn’t know which one to taste first.

One strong hand held the back of her head, keeping her face imprisoned against his, while the other tugged at her already loosened coat, wrenching it from her body and discarding it carelessly beside his own. Inserting one powerful thigh between both of hers, he pushed her backwards until she came hard up against the wall, trapped by the strength of his body.

The heat of his skin reached her through the fine velvet of her dress, and even the heavy denim of his jeans could not conceal the burning evidence of his desire for her as he crushed it against the cradle of her hips. He inched her legs further apart and she yielded willingly, sighing aloud once more as the pressure at the juncture of her legs inflamed the heated need his caresses had created there.

‘Sean…’

His name was a moan of yearning, of hunger, and his raw-edged, shaky laughter in response told her that he recognised the craving that had her in its grip. Recognised it and shared it in every way.