Page 42 of The Couple Behind the Headlines

Taking a couple of quick long steps towards her, Jack wrapped one arm around her waist, buried the other in her hair and put a stop to the torrent of words with his mouth.

As he kissed her, hot and hard, he felt her melt against him, heard her moan, and the sound of it sent desire rocketing through him. She sighed against his lips, tilted her hips and pressed herself closer, and Jack thought he’d better stop before he lost all control.

Reluctantly lifting his head, he drew back and stared down at her. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes glazed and her lips red and swollen and she looked so desirable he told himself that, whatever the initial reason for it, his decision to detour via here was the best move he’d ever made.

‘Thank you,’ she breathed.

‘What for?’

‘Shutting me up.’

‘It was a pleasure.’

‘It was indeed. As you may have noticed, I tend to talk too much when I’m nervous.’

He had, and he thought it rather adorable. ‘Are you nervous now?’ he muttered, faintly perplexed because he rarely found anything adorable.

She leaned back in his arms and smiled up at him. ‘Not any more.’

‘Good,’ he said firmly because he didn’t need to be thinking of Imogen as adorable.

‘I’ll just be a minute. Make yourself at home.’ Extricating herself from his arms, she backed away. Straight into the wall. She jumped and winced, then shrugged and flashed him a self-deprecating ‘ignore me, I’m an idiot’ kind of grin before disappearing through the door.

The chicken was fine. Imogen, who was taking a wine glass from a cupboard and shaking her head in frustrated bewilderment, however, was not.

She was twenty-eight, for heaven’s sake. She wasn’t naïve. Or inexperienced. So why did she have to be so gauche? Why did she have to rattle away like that in his vicinity? She’d always thought she’d got over that particular habit years ago, but she clearly hadn’t.

And what exactly was it about Jack that reduced her to such a tangled bundle of nerves anyway? It wasn’t as if she didn’t know him, was it? And it wasn’t as if she had to worry about whether he was going to stay for more than just supper. The hungry way he’d been looking at her and the hot fierceness with which he’d kissed her moments ago gave her the impression that she only had to give him the nod and she’d be on the floor on her back and naked within seconds.

Obviously his unexpected appearance at her door had thrown her more than she’d thought. When she’d first spotted him through her spyhole she’d been overwhelmed by a wave of delight, then relief at the realisation that she’d been presented with a solution to the problem she’d been mulling over without any success whatsoever.

But when she’d seen him

prowling round her sitting room, her haven, his large body taking up such a great chunk of space and his presence wiping out all the air, her brain had kind of short-circuited. And then gone into complete meltdown when he’d told her he thought she looked gorgeous.

Imogen felt a reluctant grin tug at her mouth as she ran her wrists under the cold tap and took a series of deep, steadying breaths. He must be completely shattered if he thought that, because without a scrap of make-up on and her oldest clothes she was not looking her best.

She poured Jack a glass of wine, pleased to note her hands were no longer trembling, then pulled her shoulders back and headed into the sitting room. He was holding one of the many photos that sat on her shelves and staring down at it, the expression on his face so unfathomable that she instantly longed to know the reason for it.

Her hours browsing the Internet, which hadn’t revealed as many in-depth personal details as she’d expected, had whetted her appetite and she wanted to know more. She shouldn’t, yet she did, so there’d be no giving of any nod and no tumbling to the floor and getting naked just yet.

‘How did the babysitting go?’ Imogen asked lightly, as if the mortifying previous ten minutes had never happened.

Jack turned and looked up, then took the glass she held out. ‘Thank you. It was knackering,’ he said, regarding her thoughtfully. ‘But then you knew all along it would be, didn’t you?’

Imogen hid a smile. ‘I did have an inkling.’

‘Because of these two?’

She glanced down at the photo he was holding and nodded. ‘My nephew and niece. They’re five and three respectively. Gorgeous but tyrannical.’

‘You could have warned me,’ he murmured, putting the photo back.

‘And spoiled all your fun?’

She sat at the end of one sofa while Jack settled himself into the armchair and grimaced. ‘It wasn’t fun. It was hell.’

‘Really?’ She frowned. He couldn’t mean that.

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