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‘You did it really well,’ said Max. ‘You were brilliant at that too, and you’re right, you got me the job. Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘Really, Allegra: thank you.’
Perversely, his gratitude just made her feel worse. She hunched a shoulder. ‘I only did it so that you’d do the article.’ She sounded petulant, but that was how she felt.
‘I know.’
‘But you could have helped,’ she grumbled. ‘You were useless! I can’t believe the Laskovskis were taken in. A real fiancé would have looked at me, maybe smiled occasionally, taken every opportunity to get close to me, but not you! It was like you couldn’t bear to touch me.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Max tautly. ‘I kissed you.’
As if she could have forgotten!
‘Only when I threw myself into your arms! Pretending to be a loving fiancée, thrilled for her future husband’s promotion,’ Allegra added quickly, just in case he had misinterpreted her instinctive reaction. She had been so pleased for him too, she remembered bitterly. ‘Although I don’t know why I bothered. You gave the impression you’d rather have been picking up slugs!’
‘What?’ Max sounded so staggered that Allegra wondered if she might have exaggerated a little, but she had gone too far to back down now. Besides, she had been bottling it up all evening and it was good to get it off her chest.
‘I might as well have been a pillar of your precious concrete for all the notice you took of me all evening!’
Max uttered a strangled laugh and dragged a hand through his hair. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he began.
‘Then why did you ignore me?’
‘Because I didn’t trust myself, all right?’ he shouted, goaded at last. ‘Because if I hadn’t ignored you, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off you! I’d have kissed you again and again and I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I’d have dragged you down under the table and ripped that bloody dress off you so I could kiss you all over your body and to hell with my boss sitting there with his wife and the rest of the restaurant...’
He broke off. His chest was heaving and he looked wild-eyed as he glared at Allegra. ‘So now you know. There, are you satisfied now?’
‘But...but...’ It was Allegra’s turn to gape.
‘Of course I wanted to touch you!’ Max said furiously. ‘I’ve wanted it ever since you opened the bathroom door. I haven’t been able to think about anything else all evening. I had to sit there, trying to talk to my boss, when all I could think about was how easy it would be to slide my hand under your dress, about how it would feel to unzip it, all the time knowing it would never happen! And you wanted me to do chit-chat as well?’
He was glowering at her as if he hated her, but a treacherous warmth was stealing along Allegra’s veins, dissolving her own anger into something far more dangerous, while the spikiness in the atmosphere evaporated into quite a different kind of tension.
He wanted her.
Desire twisted sharp and sure in her belly. His hair was standing on end where he had raked his hand through it and he looked cross, rumpled, gorgeous. When had he become so...so...so hot? Why hadn’t she noticed?
Allegra’s heart thudded in her throat and her mouth dried with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. She had been sent once to try bungee jumping for an article and she had felt just like this when she’d stood on the edge of the bridge: terrified, thrilled, longing to be brave enough to jump but afraid that she would never have the courage.
She had done it, though. She could do this too, if she really wanted to. Allegra moistened her lips.
Max wanted her.
She wanted him.
Allegra’s mind was still busy calculating the risk when her mouth opened and she heard herself say, ‘How do you know?’
Thrown, Max stared at her. ‘How do I know what?’
‘That it would never happen.’ Allegra watched, appalled, as her body took over, shifting towards him, reaching out for his hand, setting it on her knee, all without a single instruction from her brain.
What was she doing? she thought in panic, but her hands seemed to have acquired a will of their own. Stop it, she told herself frantically, but the message wasn’t getting through, and now her legs were getting in on the act, quaking with pleasure at the warm weight of his hand.
Max swallowed. ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, Legs,’ he said in a constricted voice, but he didn’t seem to have any better control over his hands than she did. His fingers were curling over her knee, pressing through her sheer tights into the soft skin of her inner thigh, and she couldn’t prevent the shudder of response clenching at the base of her spine.
‘I’m not sure either,’ she admitted with difficulty. She willed her knees to press together and squeeze out his hand but they wouldn’t cooperate.
‘It could be that we’re just getting carried away by the pretence,’ Max said but he didn’t lift his hand. Instead his knuckles nudged aside the hem of her dress so that he could stroke higher inside her thigh.
Allegra felt lust crawling deeper, digging in. It would take over completely if she didn’t regain control, but his skimming fingers were searing such delicious patterns on her skin she couldn’t think clearly.
‘Bound to be that,’ she agreed breathlessly. ‘And the whole article thing. It’s getting a bit out of hand. We’re spending too much time together.’
‘Yep,’ said Max, as his fingers played on the inside of her thigh, higher, higher, higher, until Allegra squirmed in her seat. ‘We should stop right now.’
‘We should,’ she managed.
‘Unless...’
‘Yes?’ Her breathing was too choppy to get anything else out.
‘Unless we get it out of our system,’ Max suggested. Had his voice always been that deep, that darkly delicious? ‘Just one night, and then we can forget all about it. What do you think?’
Think? How could she be expected to think when his fingers were stroking so exquisitely that she couldn’t breathe properly and she was giddy with the dark pleasure of it? Oh, God, if his hand went any higher, she would come apart.
If it didn’t, she would explode. Either way, they would end up with a horrible mess all over the taxi seat.
Struggling to stop herself pressing down into his hand, she scrabbled for some words to put together. ‘I think...that’s...a good idea...’ she gasped and Max smiled, a wicked smile she hadn’t known he possessed.
When he withdrew his hand, Allegra almost moaned in protest before she realised that the taxi had stopped in front of the house. Max paid the driver while she made it waveringly to the front door on legs that felt boneless.
She was still fumbling with the keys as Max came up behind her. Wordlessly, he took them from her and opened the door.
‘After you,’ he said, but there was a telltale hitch in his voice that made Allegra feel obscurely better. So it wasn’t just her having trouble breathing.
She didn’t want to put on the hall light, so she waited, trembling with anticipation, in the dark until Max had closed the door behind them. A muted orange glow from the street lights outside filtered through the glass pane above the door. It was enough to see him turn, see the gleam of his smile as he moved towards her, and then his hands were on her and at last—at last!—his mouth came down on hers, angling desperate and demanding.
This time there was none of the piercing sweetness she had felt in the restaurant. Instead his kiss was hot and fierce, and Allegra felt need explode inside her, vaporising the last lingering remnants of rational thought. Her mind went dark and she kissed him back, wild with hunger, wanting his hands on her harder, hotter, harder.
No, there was no sweetness now. It felt like more of a struggle as to who needed most, who could give most, who could take most. Allegra scrabbled for his tie, at the buttons on his shirt, while his hands pushed up her dress urgently and his mouth blazed a trail to her breast. The hunger rocketed through her, so powerful it thrilled and terrified her in equal measure, and when they broke apart the narrow hallway echoed with the rasp of their ragged breaths.
Chest heaving, Max pressed their palms together and lifted their arms slowly above her head so that he could pin her against the wall.
‘We’re going to regret this,’ he said, even as he bent his head to kiss her throat, making every cell in her body jolt, turning her insides molten.
‘I know.’
‘It’s crazy.’ His lips drifted downward in a searing trail over her skin that left her breathing in tatters.
‘You’re right,’ she managed, sucking in a gasp as he explored the sensitive curve of her neck and shoulder and arching into the wicked pleasure of his mouth.
When he released her wrists to jerk her closer, she whimpered with relief. Now she could tug his shirt free so that she could slide her palms over his firm, smooth back, letting herself notice how his muscles flexed beneath her touch. He was gloriously solid, wonderfully warm. She wanted to burrow into him, lose herself in him.
‘It’ll just spoil things,’ she said unevenly, holding onto the track of the conversation with difficulty.
‘It will. It’ll never be the same again,’ said Max, his voice low and ragged. ‘I’m never going to be able to forget how you taste,’ he warned her. ‘I’ll never forget how you feel, how soft you are.’
‘So...we should stop,’ she tried, even as she pressed him closer, revelling in the feel of how hard he was, how strong, how male. Her blood was thumping and thudding and throbbing with urgency and she wanted him so much that she couldn’t think about anything else.
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