Page 6 of Modern Romance January 2025 1-4

Every so often, Lexy’s attention strayed from the giant screen to the snow still falling heavily beyond the glass.

‘Stop worrying. We’re not trapped.’

‘Your car is getting buried,’ she contradicted.

‘I’ll leave next week regardless of how deep the snow is,’ Nic murmured soothingly.

‘Next week isn’t tomorrow.’

‘But you don’t work at the weekend, do you? I assure you that you won’t be trapped here for days,’ he responded calmly.

‘You don’t freak out often, do you?’

Nic sent her another brash grin. ‘How did you guess?’

His lack of concern soothed her. Her mother had fretted constantly about every little thing after the divorce and to some extent that habit had threatened to infiltrate Lexy as well.

‘Is Lexy short for Alexandra or Alexandria?’ he asked.

‘Neither. It’s Alexander on my birth certificate.’

‘Assuming that you were born a girl—’

‘I was. But my father was wanting and hoping for a boy and he wouldn’t change the name he had chosen,’ she admitted stiffly.

‘This is actually quite funny,’ Nic conceded of the programme, choosing not to comment on what he could see was a sore subject.

‘I hate to say I told you so,’ she teased.

And then Nic convulsed over one of Joey’s lines and Lexy bounced on the seat and punched the air. ‘Told you so...told you so!’ she crowed like a kid.

Nic rested his hands on her slight shoulders as she turned to him. ‘Smug, aren’t you?’

Her eyes widened as she looked up at him. Even sitting beside him, she was still looking up and just as suddenly she was almost drowning in the velvet darkness of his spectacular eyes. There was nothing else in the world at that particular moment. It was as if time just stopped dead for her, freezing her in place.

Long brown fingers lifted to her cheekbone and spread at a slow cautious pace. ‘Is this all right with you?’

A helpless giggle erupted from Lexy. ‘Is this what happens when you tell a guy he’s impossibly pretty?’

Nic’s wicked smile flashed out. ‘I think it must be...’

His mouth covered hers and his lips were unexpectedly soft. Not rough, not aggressive. But who was she kidding? It was only her third ever kiss. There would have been more had her mother not had hysterics when Lexy had tried to leave their little rental flat in male company. In the end men had proved to be too much hassle for her when she had already been struggling to cope with her mother. And why was she even thinking about such stuff when Nic was kissing her? Presumably he couldn’t tell that it was only her third kiss.

‘You taste amazing,’ he said thickly against her parted lips.

Yes, amazing just about covered him as well, she thought helplessly as he pried her lips apart and went off on an exploration that made her shiver and sent a wave of heat she had never experienced before shooting up through her. His lips teased, his tongue stroked her lip line and then delved inside to provide more intense sensations. She was feeling way more than she had ever expected to feel from a single kiss. Her breasts felt heavy, swollen, her nipples prickling points and that wicked growing heat pooled in her pelvis.

‘You’re good at this...’ she framed, struggling to catch her breath.

‘I’ve been on a learning curve since I was fourteen.’

‘That’s young.’

‘It wasn’t in my circle,’ Nic husked, gathering her slight body close, edging her carefully onto his lap, gripped by a seething desire as ironically new to him as it was to her and faintly spooked by it. In one strike, she hit every one of his sexual buttons, unleashing a craving that inflamed him, and it was infinitely more exciting than any female possibility he had met with in years.

But he was a playboy, like his big brother, Jace, he reminded himself. He did not have the yacht that his late father had dubbed ‘the whorehouse on the seas’ but he was far from being boyfriend material. And yet the appeal of those ocean eyes when she looked up at him? In a weird way it knocked him sideways. Even so, he was only twenty-seven and he had no plans to settle down for years and years... There, death of that worrying thought train of association.

He slid a hand below her loose tee shirt and discovered that she wore no bra. He cupped the warm, soft weight of her pouting breast and rubbed the pointed nipple greeting him. She gasped out loud and it was the sweetest sound he had ever heard. It turned him on so hard and fast he pushed against the zip of his jeans. He could barely credit the strength of his own response.

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