Penny Jordan's Crighton Family Series

‘But your wife, I believe, is British,’ Bobbie pointed out sweetly, just ever so slightly emphasising the words ‘your wife’.

‘Very much so,’ Max agreed suavely, looking more amused than concerned that she should have reminded him that he was a married man, confirming her inward assessment of him when he continued, ‘My wife is also small, plump and, I’m afraid, rather plain and a brunette, while I, I must admit, have a penchant for long-legged blondes, especially when they’re as beautiful as you are.’

His audacity was unbelievable, Bobbie decided as she replied with cool firmness, ‘Really. Unfortunately I do not have a penchant for married men, especially those as unkind about the woman they’ve chosen to marry as you have just been. Please excuse me,’ she added as she detached herself from him and started to move away.

Only she didn’t get very far because as she turned round, to her consternation, she found her way blocked by Luke. When had he arrived and why was he looking at her like that?

‘Er...Luke,’ she faltered as guiltily as a child caught with her fingers in the cookie jar, as she later angrily told herself.

‘Luke,’ she heard Max drawling in a far more composed voice, ‘I was just taking Bobbie over to introduce her to Grandfather.’

‘Really. Via a rather long detour I can only presume,’ Luke returned coldly as Max looked innocently round the empty room he had brought her to and told him, ‘Your grandfather is in the library with your wife.’

‘Oh, is he? That’s obviously why we couldn’t find him, then,’ Max replied cheerfully, but he made no attempt to remain with them, Bobbie noticed, excusing himself with some vague comment about needing to speak with his father and leaving Bobbie on her own to face Luke’s obvious ire.

‘I might have known,’ Luke said grimly. ‘I imagine it must be a case of like to like, but let me warn you, if you’re hoping to get anything more than a very brief tumble in bed and the dubious pleasure of boosting Max’s ego out of him, you’re going to be very disappointed.’

‘There’s obviously not much to choose between you, then, is there?’ Bobbie quipped, using flippancy to cover the churning havoc his presence was creating in her body.

She knew she had gone too far, though, when Luke turned towards her, reaching for her wrists, his teeth baring in a feral smile of high-octane anger, but before he could say or do anything, mercifully Olivia popped her head round the door.

‘Not still quarrelling? I thought you’d have made it up by now, the pair of you. You should be kissing and making up, not fighting....’

She was gone before either one could say anything, responding to Caspar’s summons from the other side of the door, leaving Luke to demand savagely, ‘And just what the hell was that all about?’

‘Olivia thinks that you and I...that we’re...that we’re romantically involved,’ Bobbie informed him shakily.

‘She what?’

‘Don’t blame me. I’m not the one who dragged you into my hotel room and then left a note at the reception desk that anyone could have seen,’ Bobbie reminded him grittily. ‘You were keen enough to have Fenella think we were involved. It’s a pity that you didn’t think a little harder and realise that others might make the same mistake.’

‘I see, and you, of course, being the person you are, obviously haven’t thought it desirable to put Olivia right.’

The sarcastic contempt dripping from his words made Bobbie flinch, but she was determined not to let him see just how much he was hurting her.

‘Why should I do your dirty work for you?’ she challenged him spiritedly.

‘Why indeed,’ he returned unpleasantly, ‘especially when you could have some hidden agenda of your own that makes it an advantage for you to be publicly, at least, romantically attached to me?’

He had come perilously close, too close, to guessing the truth for Bobbie’s peace of mind, guilt and anxiety panicking her into reacting angrily. ‘There couldn’t be any advantage, public or private, that would make me want that—or you,’ she denied vehemently.

‘No!’ Luke contradicted her firmly. ‘That isn’t the way I remember certain events—far from it. In fact, while I hate to call you a liar,’ he drawled unkindly, ‘there have been at least two occasions I can call to mind when you evinced anything but reluctance to demonstrate just the opposite.’

Bobbie glared at him. ‘If you’re referring to the way you forced yourself on me ... the way you kissed me totally against my will...’ She stopped, her face flushing as she saw the way Luke was looking at her. ‘I...I’ve told you before,’ she started to protest defensively. ‘I was thinking about someone else.’

Wildly she started to head for the half-open door, knowing that she was on unsafe ground, very unsafe ground indeed, but she was still unable to resist one final act of defiance in the face of his accusations.

‘Under normal circumstances,’ she raged furiously, ‘there’s just no way I’d respond to you and anyway I wasn’t responding to you ... I was...’ She shook her head. What was the point in arguing with him? The sensible thing to do would be quite simply to walk away from him right now.

But unfortunately she had left it a little too late. Luke’s gaze was already mercilessly fixed on her and as she measured the distance between them and the narrow doorway he was blocking, he sprang into action, catching hold of her as she tried to run past him and imprisoning her easily in his arms despite her attempts to struggle free. Kicking the door shut and enclosing them both in the semi-darkness of the room, he pushed her back against the closed door.

‘You’re sure about that, are you?’ he demanded mockingly.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ Bobbie lied through gritted teeth. ‘And even if I wasn’t, I don’t get any kicks from...from physical violence,’ she told him bitingly.

She could feel Luke’s anger as he absorbed the impact of her angry remark, and her own body tensed in wary response. How much, after all, did she actually know about him? How much did she...?

‘Neither do I,’ she heard him telling her curtly and with so much distaste in his voice that she knew he was speaking the truth. ‘But I don’t like liars,’ he continued. ‘When I kissed you, you responded to me.’

‘I responded to being kissed,’ Bobbie protested. ‘It had nothing to do with you. You were ... I thought you were someone else,’ she lied again.

‘Is that a fact? Well, let’s just put that to the test, shall we?’ Luke told her and she could tell from the deceptive softness of his voice that he was very, very angry, indeed, far more angry in fact, than he had been when he had physically stopped her from leaving.

The panic that flared inside her and had her struggling and trying to break free from his imprisoning grip had nothing to do with any fear or horror at the thought of being kissed or even touched by him. No, it was the fear, her fear, of what she might do, how she might react when he did that was urging her to struggle so desperately to break free of him, Bobbie acknowledged. But all her struggles could not break his firm hold of her. All they were doing, she had to admit, was exhausting her strength and bruising her ego far worse than his strong hands on her wrists were likely to be bruising her flesh.

He waited until she paused to draw a deep lungful of air before releasing her wrists so that he could use his arms to bind her tightly against him, so tightly that she could feel the hard imprint of his body against her own, even through both their layers of clothing, Bobbie realised. So closely that...

‘Look at me, Bobbie,’ she heard him commanding her grimly, and to her own self-disgust she found that she was obeying him, lifting her gaze to meet his. ‘Good,’ he told her mock-softly. ‘Now we both know that this time you know exactly who I am, don’t we?’ And before she could argue or object, he did what she had known he intended to do all along and what she had told herself she would resist with every ounce of her mental, emotional and physical strength. He bent his head and started to kiss her.

It was a bruising, hard, angry kiss that cerebrally Bobbie realised should have left her completely cold and unmoved, a kiss of icy, arrogant male passion, born of a male need to dominate and conquer, the kind of kiss a conquering warlord would give a captive victim and yet, the moment his mouth touched hers, Bobbie knew she was lost.

Oh, she still felt angry—bitterly, furiously so—still resented what he was doing, resented him. She still rejected with her mind, her reason, everything he was, everything he was doing to her, but her body, her senses, had urges and needs of their own and to them the hard possession of Luke’s kiss had nothing of the gloating male triumph her mind flinched from, none of the sense of subjugation that her feminine pride fought so hard against. No, they saw and felt only a heady sense of power and heat; a sweet, soaring obliterating surge of feminine triumph that she...they, could make this man, who resented her so much, who disliked her so much, ache so much for her that he couldn’t stop himself from touching her, kissing her, wanting her and most empowering of all, reacting to her. And wantonly they played on that reaction, teasing it, enticing it, inciting it, so that without being able to do a thing to stop herself, Bobbie discovered that she had raised her own arms to wrap them tightly around Luke as she opened her mouth to the demanding pressure of his probing tongue, that the anger fuelling her was making her body ache and yearn, that the low growl of sound Luke made deep in his throat as she raked his tongue passionately with her teeth and pushed herself even closer to his body so that she could feel the powerful surge of male arousal that jolted through him, made her emit a small, purring, femininely feline sound of triumphant pleasure of her own.

As she felt his hands on her body, a fierce, wild thrill of hunger swept through her, banishing logic and reason and even reality; they were man and woman, yin and yang, cause and effect, two primitive forces that when combined together...

When Bobbie felt Luke’s hand covering her breast, pushing aside her clothes with savage urgency to reach the soft warmth of her flesh, she moaned a sharp protest beneath her breath, but the protest wasn’t because he was touching her. She was trembling from head to foot, the sheer force of the desire that had erupted inside her from out of nowhere making her body ache with something approaching an actual physical pain.

She had never dreamt that physical desire could generate such an intense and immediate reaction, such a sense of urgency and aching, teeth-grinding immediacy.

‘Luke...’ She neither knew nor cared what she might be betraying as she dragged her mouth from his to whisper his name in female need, the look in her eyes as they met his, his flashing a message of intense pride and equally intense desire.

She could see Luke’s response in the way his pupils dilated, feel it in the unexpected tremor that passed through his body as he responded as though by telepathy to the need conveyed in her husky moaning of his name to run the hard pad of his thumb over the soft curve of her breast until he found her nipple and then to circle it and go on circling it as Bobbie gasped her physical pleasure in his touch and instinctively pressed herself even closer to him. And she could hear it in the harsh sound of the air escaping from his lungs as he muttered something unintelligible under his breath and then, leaning back against the wall, urged her between his parted thighs. Then, under the protective shadows, he dragged her clothes completely free of her breast so that he could satisfy the need pounding through both their tormented bodies by fastening his mouth over the swollen point of her nipple and sucking rhythmically on it.

It was the sound of a child crying in the hallway outside that broke the dark spell that was binding them together, causing them to spring apart and watch one another breathing harshly, confronting one another not as lovers but as warriors, foes, enemies, Bobbie recognised sickly as she tried to come to terms with what had happened, what she had done.

Denied the physical protection of the warmth of Luke’s body and the emotional and mental protection of the sheer heat of the need that had possessed her, Bobbie started to shiver.

Luke’s face was hidden from her by the shadows, not that she wanted to look at him, to see the contemptuous triumph she was sure must be in his eyes. No matter how much one might deplore it, there was still this unspoken belief that whilst it was still just acceptable for a man to be motivated by and give in to sexual desire, where a woman was concerned the waters were far more muddied and dangerous. Bobbie wasn’t even sure herself which side of the fence she stood on. Certainly she would never condemn another woman for admitting that she felt only physical desire and lust for a man, but when that woman was herself... She pushed away the idea that love could be tangled up in her emotions.

‘I hate you, do you know that?’ she told Luke huskily, adjusting her top before she opened the door and walked shakily through it—and away from him—moving down the hallway blindly to mingle with the other guests, her fists clenched as she fought to suppress her emotions, coming only to a halt when she realised she had reached the far side of the drawing room and could go no farther.

‘So you’re the American I’ve been hearing so much about.’

As Bobbie turned her head, she saw that there was someone seated in the wing-chair next to the window, a man in his seventies whom she had no difficulty whatsoever in guessing to be Ben Crighton.

‘I imagine so,’ she concurred warily.

‘Hah. Been telling you about me, have they? Warning you!’ he exclaimed with a dry laugh.