The Woman Sent to Tame Him

A voice, richly amused and lathered with sin, curled around her nape.

A squeak burst from her throat.

Her head shot upright.

Boom! Her heart vaulted from her chest and she pivoted clumsily, then spread herself against the door panel like strawberry jam on toast.

One look...

Oh. My. God. No!

Squeezing her eyes shut she began to pray. This is not happening. Not again. I am not the unluckiest woman alive!

‘Good evening, Miss Seraphina Scott. Come to join the party?’ he asked, with such unholy glee that she was fuelled with the urge to smack her head off the door. ‘There’s always room for one more.’

‘When...’ Oh, great—she couldn’t even breathe. And her heart—God, her heart was still on the floor. ‘When hell freezes.’

She wanted out of here. Now. Except the idea that she was acting like a pansy made her root her feet to the floor like pesky weeds and she prised her eyes wide. Only to decide being a sissy wasn’t so bad.

Leaning insolently against the polished panels, no more than two feet away, Finn St George smouldered like a banked fire and the heat spiralling through her veins burst into flames, seared through her blood. All she could think was that she must have done something atrocious in another life to deserve this.

After what he’d done, had it truly been too much to hope his mere presence would have stopped affecting her?

She hated him. Hated him! He hadn’t changed one iota. Still the most debauched, moral-less creature on two legs. And clearly he intended to go on as if he hadn’t taken a crowbar to her life and smashed it to smithereens. What had her father said? ‘He goes on like nothing’s happened...’

Over her dead body.

Seraphina. No one was allowed to call her that. No one!

‘This isn’t a social call, I assure you,’ she said, proud of her don’t-mess-with-me voice as she restrained the urge to shiver before him. ‘Any other time it would take an apocalypse to get me into this den of iniquity.’

His mouth—the very one that had been known to cause swooning and fever-pitch hysteria—kicked up into a crooked smile and one solitary indentation kissed his cheek. ‘And yet here you are.’

Here she was. It was a pity, that for a moment, she couldn’t remember why. All she could think was that that mouth of his was a loaded weapon.

‘I do seem to find you in the most...deliciously compromising situations, Seraphina.’ His prurient grin made his extraordinary eyes gleam in the dim light. ‘Listening at doors? Bad, bad girl. I ought to take you over my knee.’

Thanking her lucky stars that she wasn’t prone to blushing like a girl—because, let’s face it, she’d never been one, and the fact that this man made her feel like one was probably the greatest insult on earth—she weighed up the intelligence of answering that symphony of innuendo. Meanwhile she returned his visual full-body inspection just as blatantly. Why he insisted on going through this rigmarole every time they met was a mystery. With one arching golden brow he arrogantly put her in her place—ensuring she understood that she was a duck among swans.

Unluckily for him intimidation didn’t work on her. Not any more.

As she soaked up every inch of him she decided she didn’t understand the man’s appeal.

Obviously there had to be some basis for his being named the world’s greatest lover, an erotic legend in the racing world. But, come on, plenty of men must be good in bed—right? Plenty had sexy dimples in lean jaws. Plenty had a mouth made for sin, lips that moved sensually and invitingly and downright suggestively, and eyes the colour of—

Ohhh, who was she kidding?

Finn St George was flat-out, drop-dead insanely gorgeous—an abundance of angelic male beauty.

Thick dirty-blond hair; cut short at the back and longer at the front to fall in a tousled tumble over his brow, gave him a sexy, roguish air. And that face...

Not only did he defy nature, he literally bent the laws of physics with his intriguingly wicked mouth and that downright depraved gleam in his cerulean eyes. Eyes that had catapulted him into the hearts and fantasies of women the world over.

Between his leading-man looks and his celebrated body—currently dressed in low-slung board shorts and an unbuttoned crisp white linen shirt, showcasing his magnificent torso—he was mouth-watering, picture-perfect in every single way.

It was a good thing she knew how well a polished chassis could hide an engine riddled with innumerable flaws.

‘What do you think you’re playing at, Lothario? Don’t you think drinking and partying the night away before a race is dangerous, even for you?’

‘I have to find some way to work off the residual adrenaline rush from the qualifying session, Seraphina. Unless you’re offering to relieve some of my more...physical tensions.’

Her lower abdomen clenched in reaction to that catastrophically sensual drawl, and as if he could sense it his lips twitched.

‘I’d be quite happy to knock you out—would that help?’

There it was again. That smile. A dangerous and destructive weapon known to bring women to their knees. And the fact that it turned her own to hot rubber made her madder still. ‘Then again,’ she sniped, ‘we wouldn’t want to mar that pretty-boy face, would we?’

A trick of the light, maybe, but she’d swear he flinched, paled...before something dark and malevolent tightened the hard lines of his body until he positively seethed.

Whoa...

Her mind screaming, Danger! Danger! Run!, she backed up a step and nudged the door. She wanted to snarl and bite at him. It was as if her body knew he was the enemy and she was gearing up for a fight. The fight she’d once been incapable of.

Not any more.

Her blunt nails dug into her palms, but in the next breath he pursed that delectable mouth in suppressed amusement, as if it had all been some huge joke, and the change in him was so swift, so absolute, she floundered.

‘There’s something dark about him all of a sudden.’ Or she could be hallucinating from an overdose of his pheromones.

‘If you don’t mind,’ he drawled, ‘I’d appreciate it if we kept my face out of it. After all, I wouldn’t want to distress the ladies with some unsightly bruising.’

‘Like you need any more ladies! Looks to me like you’ve had your fair share already this evening.’

He looked well-sexed, to be sure. Hair damp, with his glorious fresh water-mint scent flirting with her senses, she guessed he’d just stepped from beneath the assault of a shower.

‘On the contrary, I was just about to indulge in a good workout.’

Disgust drove her tone wild. ‘Yes, well, bedding the latest starlet or pit-lane queen is one thing—partying the night away before racing on the most dangerous circuit on the calendar is downright risky and inappropriate!’

He gave an elaborate sigh. ‘Where is the fun in being appropriate? Even the word sounds dull, don’t you agree?’

‘No, I don’t—and nor do our sponsors.’ She rubbed her brow to pacify its exasperated throb. ‘I swear to God, if you don’t start pulling through for this team I will make you wish you’d never been born.’

‘You know, I believe you would.’

‘Good.’

He brushed the pad of his thumb from the corner of his mouth down over the soft flesh of his bottom lip. ‘So if you haven’t come to indulge in some heavy petting why are you here, beautiful?’