- -
- 100%
- +
She staggered a little as Nik suddenly released her arm without warning.
It was an automatic response to a soft peal of laughter that made Nik turn his head. Although it hadn’t been loud, there was something attractively infectious about the sound that tugged his lips into a smile.
As his eyes surfed across the heads of the other guests to the source of the sound, his smile snuffed out as recognition crashed through his nervous system like a tsunami, and for several seconds his mind went a total blank, the effect of sheer shock colliding with serendipity.
He took a deep breath and decided he’d call it something more mundane—convenient. Or he would once he got his rampant, raging libido under control. It took another few deep breaths to think beyond the heat that had streaked down his body and settled painfully in his groin.
His cognitive powers were clearly working on the reserve battery. He had no idea how long he stood there paralyzed, it could have been a second or an hour, before, like a man waking from a trance, he finally shook his head.
The air trapped in his lungs hissed out as in a single urgent sweep his dark, penetrating stare took in every single detail of her. The soft shiny blonde hair falling from a slight widow’s peak down her back and cut shorter at the sides to frame a vivid beautiful face, the sinuous curves of her lush body outlined by the flowing lines of blue silk.
She was stunning.
He’d sometimes wondered, generally around two a.m., if he exorcised the woman, would he finally exorcise the nightmare? The two seemed so intrinsically linked, maybe they were interdependent? It had been an intellectual exercise he’d never really taken seriously as he hadn’t expected their paths to cross again.
Well, it was no longer intellectual, and neither was the roar in his blood, and he knew that not to explore the theory now that he had the opportunity would be insane!
* * *
Chloe knew Nik was standing there even before Spiros’s glance moved past her, alerted by the fine invisible downy hairs on her body rising in reaction to his invisible presence.
She emptied her glass carefully, wiped her expression of anything that could be interpreted as a desire to dig a big hole and jump in it and mentally circled the wagons against attack.
If she refused to be defined by the scars she wore, she was definitely not going to be defined by a past mistake, even if he was six foot three and sinfully gorgeous!
Her defensive stance wasn’t against anything he might say or do, as there was a very strong possibility that he wouldn’t even remember the night they had spent together, but against her own indiscriminate hormones, which still, it seemed, responded independently of her intellect to his rampant animal magnetism.
Oh, for God’s sake, Chloe, you need to get a life!
While she was silently chastising herself Nik had moved level with her. ‘Spiros.’
His voice had the same rough velvet, almost tactile quality she remembered...but this time she was only shivering because she was standing in a draft, she told herself stubbornly.
They were actually standing level, side by side as he stretched out a hand to the older man, but Chloe didn’t turn her head. She didn’t need to, because she could already feel the sheer physical power of his tall, muscled frame.
‘No Petra tonight?’
‘No, she’s resting up. She sprained an ankle during training.’
Nik made a sympathetic noise in his throat. ‘For another marathon?’
The older man gave a rueful nod. ‘I think it’s addictive.’
‘You not going to join her?’
‘I know my limitations.’ Chloe, who felt as though her casual social expression could do with some work but needed all her focus to control her too rapid breathing, took encouragement from the fact that Spiros didn’t seem to notice anything amiss as he touched her arm and looked at Nik. She was still working her way up to it. ‘Do you know Chloe?’
She held her breath.
‘Of course; we go way back,’ Nik said smoothly.
‘Royal connections—you kept that quiet, Nik.’
No longer able to delay the moment, Chloe turned her head, her features arranged in a smile that was intended to project polite indifference, although she had a horrible feeling that a touch of the hunted animal had crept in!
Her first hope had been that he wouldn’t remember her; the second was that up close he would have some flaw she had forgotten, but again her fairy godmother had not granted her wish.
So Plan B it was, then: be polite, be distant, be... Oh, God, on an intellectual level the dark, predatory, raw animal magnetism stuff did nothing for her, only it seemed the message hadn’t filtered through to the non-intellectual parts of her that were only listening to the hormonal clamour—but then it was pretty loud.
His male beauty, and beauty was no exaggeration, hit her at a purely visceral level. She had never experienced anything like it before—well, just the once.
His high knife-sharp cheekbones, strong aquiline nose, and angular jaw even dusted with stubble gave his face a patrician cast, though this was offset by the overtly sensual outline of his mobile mouth, twisted at that moment into a faintly cynical smile. The same emotion was reflected in his eyes, his quite simply spectacular eyes; deep set and heavy lidded, and fringed with dense, straight, spiky lashes, they were a stunning dark chocolate brown.
Pinned by those dark eyes, she experienced a ‘rabbit in the headlight’ moment and froze.
‘How are you... Chloe?’ He seemed to roll the word over his tongue as though he were tasting it.
As he’d tasted her... Chloe pushed the thought away but not before her body’s core temperature had raised a few uncomfortable degrees. She lifted a hand to her neck to feel the dull vibration of her heavy pulse, and she fingered the uncut gemstones that felt cold compared to her skin.
From somewhere she manufactured a smile but the effort made her cheek muscles ache while she silently struggled to keep the door locked against forbidden memories. It wasn’t about wanting to forget him, she thought, but more not wanting to remember and be reminded of the things she strongly suspected she might never experience again.
And maybe that was a good thing, she rationalised. Yes, head-banging, uninhibited sex was good—it was pretty excellent—but so was waking up with someone who actually cared for you, or for that matter was physically still there in the morning.
Refusing to acknowledge the sense of loss that still lay like a heavy weight in her chest, she reminded herself that she was looking, or she would be when the time came, for more in a man than his knowledge of the female anatomy... Hell, clumsy with feeling was infinitely preferable to the refined torture of a skilled touch with no emotion behind it.
‘How long has it been?’ he asked coolly.
‘I’m not sure,’ she lied, thinking, Eighteen months, eight days and thirty-one minutes...not that I’m counting.
She stiffened when without warning he bent his head and brushed her mouth lightly with his. His lips were warm, reminding her of when they had been even warmer, when he had tasted of her... The muscles low on her pelvis cramped as she stood as still as a statue, fighting with all her might the shameful urge to lean in and kiss him back.
The gasp she locked in her throat ached as she breathed in the warm male scent of him through flared nostrils.
It wasn’t until he lifted his head that she realised she was holding his sleeve, though she had no memory of grabbing it. Disturbing, but there was no point reading too much into it, she decided as she let it casually fall away, ignoring the tingling sensation in her fingertips.
Nik smiled. The quiver he’d felt run through her body as he’d kissed her reminded him of just how receptive she’d been that night...how giving she’d been. And he’d taken... He countered the irrational slug of guilt with a reminder that she was the one who had taken the initiative that night, she’d made all the running and she hadn’t acted like a woman who would take no for an answer.
His smile, the glimmer of dark danger glittering deep in his eyes, elicited an involuntary spasm of excitement in her belly that made Chloe feel ashamed.
‘You look well.’ She looked incredible, though up close there was less of the outdoorsy golden glow he remembered. Her skin was creamy, the faint touch of colour in her cheeks highlighting the smooth contours, the freckles along her cheekbones paler too, but she was, if anything, even more delicious than he remembered.
‘Thank you, and how are you—sorry, Nik, wasn’t it?’
The composed words aimed somewhere close to his left ear were prim, but the message shining in her deep cobalt-blue eyes as they glittered up at him was neither prim nor polite.
They said quite clearly, Go to hell!
Her reaction threw him off his stride, in the same way he realised he’d have been thrown if he’d reread a favourite book and found a main character had suddenly been given a different personality.
Except the woman in his dreams had never had a personality beyond being warm, giving, passionate and available when he had needed her, and he had not been curious about what lay beyond those qualities.
Realising that there was a beyond came with a sense of shock as Nik struggled to consider her negative reaction to him dispassionately, but got sidetracked by his own reaction to her.
The problem being there was very little room left for dispassion after the explosive blast of primal desire that obliterated everything else when he looked at her. It was like walking...no, running full pelt into a ten-foot wall of lust.
The time it took his stupefied brain to push past this fresh blast of raw hunger was only moments but it felt longer, and the mere fact that he had to make the effort deepened the frown lines in Nik’s broad forehead.
In his previous life, he had cultivated dispassion until it required no effort, and it was second nature. He’d seen men and women in his old line of work who hadn’t managed to do that, and the personal toll it had taken on them had not been good to see. You needed to be able to keep an emotional distance.
He had witnessed acts of bravery and self-sacrifice that were humbling, but for every one of those inspiring acts there were a hundred acts and images of suffering and inhumanity. You carried those nightmare images around with you and they ate you from the inside.
The sheer absurdity of comparing a war zone to a dinner party where people were toting glasses of wine instead of automatic weapons almost dredged up a smile. Almost.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.