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“Whereas being taunted and nagged provides a better incentive,” she guessed. She remembered that he worked best under pressure, setting his own goals and deadlines, and taking satisfaction in exceeding those set by others. She stepped off the treadmill and gestured to a padded floor area in one corner. “It’s a shame you can’t join me in a few falls—in the interests of not mollycoddling you.”
While guarding him the last time, she had jogged with him, worked out in the gym with him, but never invited him to join her in practicing any of the defense disciplines in which she was trained. The warrior arts created a physical closeness between the combatants that was more than she dared to encourage between herself and Mathiaz, not that resisting had done her much good.
She wasn’t sure why she wished he could join her now. Telling herself she was complying with his order to push him to his limits might explain his motives, but it didn’t explain hers.
Mathiaz looked at the mat speculatively. “Might be interesting at that.”
She had only made the comment because she thought it was impossible. “I’m sure Dr. Pascale’s prescription doesn’t include martial arts,” she said, hoping he would agree and give her a graceful way out of this.
Mathiaz’s jaw hardened as he compared her small size against his own well-muscled bulk. His stay in the hospital hadn’t done much to even the odds between them. “Pascale gave me the all-clear to do anything I feel up to doing. You should be more worried that I might hurt you.”
He had already done so in ways he couldn’t imagine. Throwing her over his shoulder a few times couldn’t do much more damage. “In your dreams, Baron,” she said. “Haven’t you heard the saying that size isn’t everything?”
She regretted starting down that path when she saw his eyes glitter. “All depends on the arena,” he said softly and closed the distance between them.
She drew a ragged breath, feeling cornered. “Shouldn’t we get changed?”
“There’s something I want to do first.”
The air seemed charged, and she had difficulty catching her breath. She knew it had nothing to do with her workout on the treadmill, and everything to do with the man standing so close to her she could see the tiny flecks of gold in his blue eyes.
He had lost a little weight since the explosion, and the aristocratic angles of his face were more sharply defined than ever, adding to his devastating appeal. Though his ordeal had etched lines of strain around his mouth, renewed energy radiated from him. He stood easily, his injured leg taking his weight almost evenly with his good leg. She let her eyes close, knowing that he meant to kiss her, and knowing equally well that she was going to let him.
Ten months of self-imposed exile from him had taken a toll. She told herself she wanted to feel his touch for old times’ sake, to give her something to remember him by when this was over, and they went their separate ways again.
The moment his arms came around her and he pulled her against his chest, she knew she lied.
Her cheek molded against his shoulder as if by design, and her palms slid up his back. She felt corded muscle and scented dampness from his exertion. The steady sound of his breathing almost completed the sensory package. All that was missing was taste.
He supplied it by tilting her head up and bringing his mouth down to cover hers, breathing in the sigh she had begun to release. The mingling of her breath with his felt so erotic that her heart picked up speed.
The effect increased when he flicked the corner of her mouth with his tongue. She opened her mouth in surprise, probably just as he had intended, and he used the advantage to deepen the kiss.
Her senses spun. Clinging to him to steady herself only intensified the feeling. She had forgotten how well he could play her, like an instrument in which he was a virtuoso.
Even as logic insisted she should end this, part of her returned his kiss with all the pent-up passion inside her. She had no business allowing herself such an indulgence, but she could no more push him away than she could fly.
As he lifted his mouth away, she murmured a protest, then sighed again as he rained tiny kisses along her jaw and down the sensitive column of her throat. He cupped her face, looking at her from under heavy lids as if seeing her for the first time.
“I dreamed of this,” he said huskily.
He wasn’t dreaming, he was remembering, but she wasn’t going to tell him so. He had held her and kissed her more times than she liked to think. With no memory beyond their working relationship, he thought this was the first time his mouth had almost drowned hers in a kiss so sweetly demanding, that she wouldn’t have cared if she never surfaced again. He had no idea that they had resisted the pull between them for almost two months, pretending that theirs was a purely professional relationship.
After he’d kissed her on the night of the trade dinner, she could no longer pretend. Mathiaz had worked his way into a corner of her heart she had walled off since her late teens. He not only ignited her senses in every way possible, he seduced her mind, too. She was skilled in defending herself against physical encroachment, but had no practice at keeping someone like Mathiaz out of her mind.
Her thoughts spun back to candlelit dinners in his villa, as he fascinated, aroused and intrigued her with his conversation, as well as his beguiling touch. One night he had arranged to screen a movie especially for her. Afterward, in the darkness of the private theater, they’d come so close to making love that heat poured through her thinking about it now.
Although she told herself she was relieved that he couldn’t remember, she felt stupidly hurt to think that the night he had told her he loved her wasn’t burned on his memory the way it was on hers.
The baron had received another threatening letter, this time with a live bullet enclosed in the envelope, hand delivered to his villa. The stalker had known how to bypass the palace security protocols, giving himself away as an insider, The mistake had enabled him to be caught within hours.
She should have left then, but had allowed Mathiaz to convince her to stay, supposedly to help tighten up palace security protocols. They both knew the real reason. He wanted her to stay, so she stayed.
A month after the stalker was caught, Mathiaz had arranged a moonlit picnic in a secluded area of the garden at Château Valmont, instructing palace security to allow them their privacy. The champagne and excellent food, moonlight and the perfume of roses had bewitched her into forgetting that she shouldn’t let him kiss her, far less caress her so intimately that her eyes blurred just thinking of that night.
Afterward they had gone for a midnight stroll along the private beach and he had told her that he was in love with her.
He hadn’t understood when she pulled away from him in panic. How could he, when she barely understood herself? Like Cinderella fleeing the ball on the stroke of midnight, she’d gone back to her suite in the guest wing, and started packing. Her resignation had been on his desk next morning.
He had asked her to explain, plainly hurt by her apparent change of heart. Her job at the château was done, she informed him, the finality of it echoing in her soul. Time she moved on. She knew she sounded uncaring, when it was the last thing she felt. Better he thought she didn’t care, than discover how much she did, when her every instinct rejected the feeling.
She hadn’t wanted him to know about the panic attack his declaration of love had brought on, ashamed to admit how the thought of loving anyone paralyzed her. If he knew, he would want more from her than she was capable of giving. So she told herself she was doing the right thing leaving now before she hurt him more than she had already. For herself, it was already too late.
No one else had ever held her so tenderly, or made her feel such intense emotions. She put them into her response now, blindly, hungrily, the long months of deprivation overriding the inner voice that warned her she was playing with fire.
How had she found the strength to walk away from him, and live without him for ten of the longest months of her life? How was she going to find the strength to walk away a second time?
“Jacinta,” he murmured, his lips moving against her mouth. “While I was unconscious, I dreamed of you, and this was exactly how I imagined kissing you would feel.”
She turned her head away, trying to sound unaffected, when it was the last thing she felt. “In my experience, reality rarely measures up to our dreams.”
He dropped his hands to his sides and moved back a few paces. “I wanted to know, all the same.”
She kept the disappointment out of her voice. “And now?”
“Now we practice those falls.”
She should be glad he had the strength to stop when he did, but regret pulsed through her as she went to the dressing room and changed. Close combat was probably the last exercise she should contemplate with Mathiaz, but since she couldn’t risk any other kind of intimacy, she decided to take what comfort she could in this kind.
When she emerged from the dressing room, he was waiting for her at the padded floor area. His loose-fitting white pants and tunic matched hers. The sash around his waist was also black.
“You sure you want to go through with this?” she asked more cheerfully than she felt.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Regretting accepting my challenge already? I’ll try not to do too much damage.”
“I was more concerned about hurting your leg.”
“Let me worry about the leg. You worry about surviving.”
She was already worried about survival, but knew he didn’t mean the same kind she did. Emotional survival worried her more than dealing with his greater physical strength. She was trained to handle opponents twice her size, but her training hadn’t included what to do when your opponent kissed you and left your mind so fogged you could hardly think straight.
She forced her mind to clear and bowed ceremonially to him. He returned the bow, then began to circle around her, warming up.
The first couple of times he threw her easily, and let her throw him once out of courtesy. Then she managed to throw him once without his cooperation. She saw the look of surprise on his face as he landed, slapping the mat to absorb the impact of his fall.
Rolling to his feet, he began to react with more strength, demanding more from her to keep up. “You’re good at this,” he said as she rolled to her feet, after another fall.
“For a woman of my size,” she added, tongue firmly in cheek.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I’m used to being underestimated.”
“I have the feeling I’m doing it now.” He sounded as if he meant something more than the friendly bout.
“Are you remembering something?”
He frowned. “Not sure. I have the feeling we’ve done this before, or something very like it. Have we?”
“This is the first time we’ve practiced martial arts together,” she said with scrupulous honesty.
He circled again, looking for an opening. “But not the first time I’ve kissed you.”
Apprehension prickled along her spine. “You said you dreamed about it. Sometimes the mind can’t tell the difference between a real experience and one that’s strongly imagined.”
“Now you sound like Pascale.” Mathiaz said in annoyance, as if her evasiveness bothered him more than her fast footwork.
She was bothered, too, for different reasons. She didn’t like lying to him even by omission, but how else could she describe her refusal to tell him what had gone on between them in the year he had lost?
Why didn’t she simply tell him that she was the one who couldn’t deal with the closeness blossoming between them?
Mathiaz lunged at her with a speed that surprised her, given his injury. When he grasped her and pulled her down to the floor with him, her mind whirled back to when she was eighteen, returning from a date with her first love, the man she had fully expected to marry when they were old enough.
They had blown a tire on a back road on the way home from a dance. She had been helping Colin change the tire when a group of teenagers pulled up beside them, making lewd, drunken comments.
They had ignored the catcalling, but the four drunken youths piled out of the car and encircled her. She had tried talking to them, hoping to defuse the situation, but they began pawing her. When Colin tried to stop them, one of the youths struck him from behind with the tire lever. Colin slumped to the ground. Never had Jacinta felt more helpless.
She tried to reach Colin but two of the men pulled her to the ground. A third dragged her dress up around her waist. Her attempts to kick and bite her assailants proved useless. She knew what would have happened next if a police car hadn’t cruised to a halt beside them, lights blazing. After a scuffle, the youths were arrested. She had been vindicated to see them convicted of Colin’s murder.
She had made up her mind never to be helpless again, learning every self-defense move she could, and finding that she had an unerring eye with a gun. Perhaps because she now projected an air of being able to take care of herself, she had never needed to use any of her skills other than in practice.
It had taken her a few years to learn that her ability to let anyone get close to her had also been a casualty of that night. After panicking as soon as she began to care too much about anyone, she had made sure her dates weren’t allowed to progress beyond friendship.
Until Mathiaz.
She had resisted his appeal as long as she could, telling herself that anything else was unprofessional. He had no such qualms, making his feelings for her plain, as well as ensuring that she knew he didn’t give his heart lightly. She had really thought she could respond in kind, until the night when he told her he loved her. Until her sense of panic had become too strong to fight. No amount of logic could shake her terror that if she allowed him to love her, something terrible would happen to him, too.
Caught up in the memory of the attack, she fought Mathiaz as if possessed, almost succeeding in breaking his hold on her until she realized who he was, and where they were. In her confusion, he was able to pin her beneath him. She had no choice but to concede the match.
He looked down at her, enjoying the moment. She tensed, thinking he meant to kiss her again, but instead he smiled in triumph. “What was that about hurting me?”
She let him give her a hand up, resisting the urge to use the leverage to flip him over her shoulder. One day she would have to warn him about making such a basic mistake. “I always fantasize when I’m fighting, don’t you?”
He grinned. “Sure. I fantasize that what we’re doing isn’t fighting.”
She felt her cheeks glow, and looked away. While they were apart, Mathiaz had figured in her fantasies more often than he had any right to do. She felt the familiar swell of panic start, and made an effort to control her breathing. “I need a shower.”
Mathiaz watched her go, feeling puzzled. Whoever she had been fighting just now, he’d wager anything that it wasn’t him. When he had lunged at her, she had acted exactly as he’d hoped, moving into his attack and trying to throw him off balance. The move had enabled him to pull her to the floor, pinning her beneath him.
That was the moment when she’d left him to fight some demon of her own imagination. He wished he knew what it was.
There was so much about her he didn’t know, including why he felt as if he’d kissed her many times before today. He felt a tug of need. She was so fragile and so strong, and the glow of her exertion made her look beautiful.
Holding her in his arms felt right. He couldn’t accept that today was the first time. Some part of him had known exactly how she liked to be touched. He crashed one fist into the other in frustration. If only he could force his way through the fog shrouding his memory, he was sure he would find some answers.
He strode to the changing room and stood under a cool shower for a long time, hoping either to stir some memory of the past year, or wash away his need to know. He did neither, and came out chilled to the bone, his leg aching, and his temper heading for boiling point. Dr. Pascale had said Mathiaz’s memory of the last months might be gone for good, but fragments of recollection kept tantalizing him, especially when he spent time with Jacinta. So his next step was obvious. He would spend as much time with her as he could.
Chapter Four
Some people never learned, Jacinta thought furiously as she showered and dressed. Bad enough to let him kiss her. Agreeing to practice unarmed combat with him was the height of folly and could only end in one way, with every nerve in her body screaming for more of his touch, and her mind urging her to get as far away from him as she could before something terrible happened to him as it had to Colin.
She should have turned down this assignment, she knew. But when Dr. Pascale had called to tell her that he needed her help to rouse Mathiaz from his coma, she hadn’t hesitated, hastening to the baron’s bedside like a lovesick adolescent. Her conceit at thinking she was the one person who could bring him back was going to cost her dearly.
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