Bridegrooms Required: One Bridegroom Required / One Wedding Required / One Husband Required

But, for the first time since his teens, desire took precedence over wisdom. His throat felt as though it had been constricted by a vice. Every word a victory. ‘Oh?’ he asked unsteadily.

Holly shrugged, drained her glass and put it down on the fireplace. ‘I’ve kind of got used to having you around, I suppose. And these last few days...’ She hesitated, aware that, if she was totally honest with him, she might come over as weak. And pathetic.

‘These last few days....what?’ he prompted.

‘Well, they’ve been easy. Relaxed. Civilised.’

‘Civilised?’ he laughed.

‘Sure.’ She nodded passionately, too tempted by the clear blue light in his eyes not to lay her feelings bare. ‘When I was a student I lived in houses which were too cold and too crowded,’ and when I was a child I lived in lots of different houses Houses where I was a stranger—tolerated simply because whoever owned the house really only wanted my mother. I never felt I fitted in—not anywhere. I used to have dreams about proper houses with proper fires, where people made proper meals and ate them sitting at proper tables. Storybook houses that I never really believed in. Except...‘ and her voice went very quiet ’...that yours was exactly like that.’

There was silence while he thought about the import of what she had just told him. Did she not realise just how potent was the power of her vulnerability? The enormous compliment she had just paid him? She was an enigma—with the face and the body of a sorceress and the trusting vulnerability of a little girl. So which was the real Holly Lovelace?

Had he been weak to come up here, or merely foolish Luke wondered if she could see the tussle on his face. Wondered whether she was deliberately tucking her legs up beneath her like that, so that the movement not only emphasised their length, but also drew attention to the pert thrust of her breasts. His hands felt shaky, his mouth as dry as tinder and, all the while, there was the slow, painful build-up of desire.

He diverted his thoughts by focussing on her words instead of her body. ‘Then yours is an upbringing I can identify with,’ he told her. ‘Only mine was the more institutionalised version of solitary confinement.’

Her hand stilled over the peanuts. ‘Tell me.’

The women he had known had not wanted to hear sad stories about dispossessed little boys—they’d wanted hard, strong bodies and hands that knew exactly how best to please them. He shook his head, aware of the dangers m baring a soul which necessity had clothed in secrecy many years before.

‘Everyone knows what British boarding-schools are like,’ he said dismissively.

‘Not unless they’ve been to one, they don’t. And I haven’t. So I don’t. Tell me, Luke!’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a system which works well on many levels,’ he conceded levelly. ‘So it isn’t necessarily bad—just different.’

Holly smiled. ‘It’s okay—you don’t have to defend the status quo to me, you know.’

She was chipping away with her persistence, each soft word exposing the hard, cold core of pain he had hidden away for so long.

‘So which particular aspect would you like me to reveal to you?’ he demanded. ‘The isolation? The lack of physical warmth? The total lack of time to just sit and think? The disgusting food? The freezing dormitories? The even more freezing early-morning showers which followed the equally freezing cross-country runs?’

‘You must have been pretty fit,’ she observed slowly, and cast him a long look from beneath lashes which could not quite obscure the glittering of her eyes.

Luke started. Of all the things she could have said... He had expected and been dreading the kind of cloying sympathy which most women seemed so comfortable with. Not a light, teasing kind of comment delivered with a little glint in her eye which made the slow pulsing of his desire escalate into an insistent pounding.

This was a game he was familiar with...

He bent his legs, just in case his exquisite hardness would be revealed to damn him. He needed to get out of here fast, but first he needed to kill that desire stone dead. And the only way he could think of doing that was by getting Holly and her long, long legs out of his line of vision.

‘How about some coffee?’ he suggested throatily, as his vocal cords joined in with his body’s conspiracy by telling her how much he wanted her.

Coffee? Holly was both startled and disappointed. She wanted much more than coffee. She wanted him. And she wanted him badly—just as she had done from the moment she had first set eyes on him. When she had experienced an attraction towards him which had started with a thunderbolt and just continued to grow.

She had thought that he felt something for her, too—if not exactly the same in terms of intensity, then something very similar. Or had she simply been imagining that raw gleam of hunger which sometimes illuminated his eyes with a deep blue radiance? The easy companionship they had shared during her time at his house? Easy enough for her to think that there might be something more than just friendship...

Shakily, and trying to use as much grace as possible—which wasn’t easy, given the length of her skirt—Holly rose to her feet and stood looking down at him.

‘Coffee it is, then,’ she said quietly, but still she didn’t move, and there was a question in her eyes.

During his life, Luke had faced the very real adversities of hunger and pain and physical danger—and yet now he found himself in a situation far more threatening. He had a will of steel, forged by need in the long, lonely hours of his childhood, and yet that will now seemed to have deserted him.

He put his hand out towards her, and looked at it with bemused detachment, as if that hand were not under his control any more. It alighted on the slender curve of her ankle, and he felt the tiny shudder which thrilled her flesh as he made that first contact.

Slowly, lingeringly, he let his hand move upwards, so that it encircled her calf, and that calf suddenly seemed like the most erotic zone he had ever encountered. He let his middle finger trickle along the silken swell, in a way that made his body shudder as he imagined the natural path for that finger to now travel...

Holly didn’t dare move, didn’t dare speak, some instinct telling her that to do either would be to break this bewitching spell he had cast on her. His hand felt like the centre of a furnace. Or maybe his touch had transformed her into a furnace—for she could feel a fire beginning to blaze at the fork of her legs, the honeyed wetness which followed doing nothing to quench the remorseless heat building up inside her.

Luke’s hand reached her knee. Never had he felt such an erotic contrast between bone and velvet-soft skin. He felt for the fleshy pocket behind the knee itself and sighed with pleasure. Using his thumb, he circled the skin there, round and round, over and over, until he felt it tremble helplessly beneath his touch. His hand crept inexorably upwards; he knew where he wanted to touch her most and, from the give-away little sag of her knees, he knew that she wanted it, too.

He knelt before her then, tightening his arms around her bottom, burying his face in the softness of her belly through the filmy voile of her dress. He felt her sway, and pulled her down so that she was kneeling, too, their eyes almost on a level, her expression one of breathless curiosity as she waited to see what he would do next.

Her eyes had never looked greener—luminous and bright as leaves which had just been rained on—nor more inviting. He saw her lips pucker helplessly, noted that the lush, dark lashes were in danger of fluttering to a close.

‘I want to kiss you,’ he told her, in a voice which sounded as heavy and as sweet as syrup.

‘Then kiss me,’ she managed drowsily, half despairing of her passivity.

‘God, yes...’ He would have kissed her anyway, invitation or not, for it would have been impossible to resist those lips. He lowered his mouth slowly... brushing it against hers with the merest whisper of contact... and Holly felt her lips part immediately.

Steadying himself with a hand now buried in the rippling copper ropes of her hair, Luke deepened the kiss with his tongue and felt her meet it, matching his own passion and need, and yet inciting it further...demanding more...

Fireworks threatened to explode inside his head and in his aching groin, and he thought how intoxicating this kiss was...

Intoxicating...

The word began to batter relentlessly at his conscience like rain lashing against a window, and Luke felt his body freeze with rejection, his lips stilling against hers.

For this was the act of a fool. This woman was like a glass of champagne: the sudden high, the slaking of a sensual thirst and then—what? The dry mouth, the headache and the regret of a hangover—that was what.

He was not in the market for any woman—but particularly not one who was everything he most feared and despised in a woman. With her fey, enchanting beauty, and all the restless inner energy of the creative personality, she was the kind of woman who was bad news. Very bad news indeed.

He plucked his mouth away from hers, and something in his attitude must have unnerved her, for he saw the sudden whitening

of her face and the way that her eyes had grown leaf-dark and startled.

And, even then, that treacherous protective instinct which she alone seemed to inspire in him reared its interfering head once more, and he reached out automatically to steady her, afraid that she might simply crumple to a heap in front of him.

‘Luke—what on earth is the matter?’ she demanded, as she unseeingly let him gently propel her back towards the sofa, where she slumped down like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m doing what I should have done about ten minutes ago,’ he told her grimly. ‘I’m leaving!’

‘But why? I don’t understand!’

‘And you don’t need to understand,’ he gritted, his mouth hardening into an ugly line as he thought of how close he had come to... to... ‘Forget it ever happened, Holly, because it meant nothing! It was an aberration, that’s all.’

‘An “aberration”?’ she challenged, then wished she hadn’t because the look he threw her in response was insulting. ‘What a horrible word!’