Sharon Kendrick Collection

‘I don’t want to be late,’ he ground out, but once again he drove his mouth down onto hers in a sweet, crushing kiss.

‘God forbid,’ she murmured, and flicked her tongue inside his mouth, hearing him groan in response.

‘Stop it, Sabrina,’ he pleaded, but only half-heartedly.

Caught up with longing and compelled by a need to shatter that rigid control, she moulded her breasts brazenly against his torso. ‘Stop what?’ she murmured, and allowed her fingers to trickle down over the rocky shaft of his erection, feeling him jerk in distracted response. ‘Do you want me to stop this?’ She ran her hand expertly over him. ‘Do you, Guy?’

A shudder ran through him as he felt her begin to unzip him. There would be no stopping now, he realised with a hot, heady rush of blood, and then his hands were on her breasts, feeling them spring into excited life beneath his hungry fingertips.

She struggled to free the zip and the trousers fell redundantly to his ankles. She heard him swear softly, and then, very deliberately, he moved the damp silk panel of her camiknickers aside and delved his fingers deep into the honeyed moistness. She gasped.

‘Do you like that?’ he murmured, feeling her thighs instantly parting for him. ‘Do you?’

Her response was instant and overwhelming. Sabrina swayed as she clasped his dark head against her, murmuring a protest she didn’t feel, her knees sagging weakly as she felt the swift heat of need. He lifted his head to glitter her a look of provocative assessment and swiftly turned her over so that she was bending over the bath.

He ripped her camiknickers off without compunction and let his silk boxer shorts fall to his ankles, and she realised that he was going to…going to…

‘Oh, Guy!’ she gasped ecstatically, as he entered her.

He groaned as he submerged himself in her hot, molten depths, thinking that it shouldn’t be this simple—or this out of control. And then he wasn’t doing any thinking at all. The world had shifted focus and then hardened, to a brighter focus, and now it splintered out of all recognition as they both cried out at the same time.

He pulled out of her and turned her around, thinking how shaken she looked. Well, hell, he was pretty shaken him self. When had he ever acted like that before? In Venice, he reminded himself grimly, that was when.

‘You’ve made me late for work,’ was all he said. Then he gave her a hard, crushing kiss before turning and swiftly walking out of the bathroom.

Flushed with orgasm, and a bitter kind of regret, Sabrina slammed the lock home behind him and then sank to her knees on the bathroom floor as dry, shuddering sobs began to tear at her throat. What on earth was happening to them?

As a demonstration of lust, that experience had been in a class of its own. Guy had used her for sex, but hadn’t she gone ahead and allowed herself to be used? She loved him, yes, but he’d never given any indication that he felt even a fraction of love for her. And she didn’t want to love again. Not like this. Bad enough that she’d loved and lost Michael—but at least Michael had felt the same way about her.

And she had known then with a sinking certainty that this one-sided love would bring her nothing but heartbreak. Far better to begin to distance herself. Starting from now.

It was late-night shopping this evening, and she’d make herself go browsing round after she’d finished work, deliberately make herself late home.

But Guy was even later. He’d had to juggle his day to include the missed meeting, and then had sat through it, bored and distracted, trying not to keep glancing down at his watch and thinking about Sabrina.

This was getting slightly ridiculous, he thought exasperatedly as he let himself into the flat. Going home at night had become the highlight of his day.

But tonight there was no meal cooking.

Just Sabrina sitting on the sofa, looking moody, an unopened book lying on her lap.

He dropped his briefcase and gave her a thoughtful look. ‘Hi,’ he said softly.

‘Hi.’

He thought how wooden her voice sounded. And maybe he deserved it. ‘Sabrina, listen—about this morning—’

‘No, Guy, please.’ She shook her head, her cheeks growing pink as shame vied with remembered pleasure. ‘It happened—let’s forget it.’

That was the trouble—he couldn’t forget it. It had been on his mind all day. And so had she. ‘I shouldn’t have been so abrupt with you afterwards.’

‘No, you shouldn’t!’ She threw him a furious look. ‘And maybe I shouldn’t have committed the terrible sin of wandering in looking like that when you were getting ready for work. How wicked of me to unwittingly throw temptation in your path, Guy! Heaven forbid that you should ever break your rigid routine and be late!’

‘Sabrina,’ he said softly, ‘are we going to fight about this all night?’

‘No, we aren’t.’ She drew a deep breath. They weren’t going to fight about anything and she was going to be very calm and grown-up about what she had to say. ‘We ought to talk about me going.’

He went very still, as though he hadn’t heard her properly. ‘Going?’ he echoed. ‘What are you talking about?’ His voice softened. ‘Aren’t you taking things a little too far, princess? I know what we did was pretty wham-bam-and-thank-you-ma’am, but there’s no need to overreact.’

‘This has nothing to do with this morning.’ But she forced herself to remember that brutal and loveless kiss, and that somehow made what she had to say all the easier. ‘I only came here on a temporary basis, remember? And the six weeks are nearly up.’

If she’d detonated a small bomb on the carpet in front of him he couldn’t have been more shell-shocked. Her stay had merged into one pleasurable and sensual blur. Had she really been here for that long? Guy stared at her. ‘But you aren’t really going?’

It was a million miles away from the ‘please, don’t go’ she’d been hopelessly praying for. She kept her face carefully composed. ‘I have to, Guy—I won’t have a job after next Friday, and they won’t hold my job in Salisbury. Believe it or not, jobs in bookshops are highly sought-after.’

He could believe it quite easily—but then he’d seen her at work. A meeting had been cancelled and he’d called for her unexpectedly one lunchtime, dismissively waving away her protests that she’d brought a sandwich with her.

‘We’ll feed it to the pigeons,’ he’d murmured, thinking that the books and the old polished wood of the shop only seemed to enhance her bright-haired beauty. One look at Sabrina sitting busy at her desk, and any sane person would have thought it the most perfect job in the world.

‘So leave.’ He shrugged.

Sabrina froze. ‘Leave?’

Guy gave a slow smile. ‘Sure. I can support you.’

‘I don’t want your support,’ she said stiffly. ‘Or your charity.’

‘Sabrina.’ His voice softened as he walked across the room and sat down beside her on the sofa, not missing the almost imperceptible shift of her body as she leaned away from him. ‘It’s not charity. I earn obscene amounts of money—’

‘You said it, Guy.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t need to work,’ he said quietly.

‘I don’t need to work?’ she repeated in disbelief, before leaping to her feet to stare down at him in an angry blaze. ‘Says who? Says you! Well, if that’s the case, you don’t know anything, Guy, not really!’

‘Oh? This is fast becoming a real home-truth session,’ he drawled. ‘Do continue, Sabrina—I’m fascinated.’

‘Don’t you have any idea about my need for independence?’ she stormed, ignoring the dangerous note in his voice. ‘Or did you think I would just fall to the ground in a grateful heap because you’ve offered to “support” me?’

‘Clearly not,’ came the dry retort. A lot of women would have done. His mother, for example, had never forgotten what he’d done for her. But that had been different. That had been called survival.

Jenna, he realised, would have adored the idea. So would many of the other trust-fund babes. Not Sabrina, though, he realised slowly. Her principles were in a different class.

‘It’s your flat!’ she stormed. ‘You have all the control here—so just imagine if you started paying for me, too. How unequal would that make things? At least buying groceries now and then makes me feel as though I’m doing my bit!’

He looked at her steadily. ‘So what do you suggest we do?’

She looked at him sadly, realising that she’d talked herself into a corner. There was no solution—or at least not one that would make her happy. Only one thing could do that, and he wasn’t offering her permanence.