Page 5 of 2 Books in One Bundle

She looked charmingly dazed, he noted with satisfaction as he worked the knot free. Her blue eyes were glazed and her cheeks were flushed and she was breathing even more raggedly than he was. But then she blinked and put a staying hand on his and said urgently, ‘Wait,’ and he froze.

‘What’s wrong?’ he rasped, thinking with his one remaining functioning brain cell that he might explode if they had to stop this now.

‘Those women.’

He frowned. Reeled. Who? What the hell was she talking about? ‘What women?’

‘The moths to your flame.’

Ah. Right. Them. ‘An attempt at distraction,’ he muttered, rather regretting the move but at least understanding now why none of them had appealed. ‘Which proved to be futile. So I sent them home. I’ve wanted you since the minute I laid eyes on you, Mia. Even after you turned down my invitation to dinner and drinks. You have no idea of the things I’ve imagined doing with you. You’re not the only one who’s been taking cold showers. Who’s been going out of their mind. And, to add insult to injury, it would appear you’ve ruined me for anyone else.’

Her hands fell away from his, her head dropped back and a faint smile curved her gorgeous mouth. ‘God, you’re good,’ she breathed as her gaze softened.

‘I am,’ he agreed, although, unusually, none of it was a line. He’d meant every word, which he did not want to analyse right now—or ever, for that matter, since navel-gazing was not his thing, unless literally. ‘But know that you have no reason to be bothered by anyone.’

Clearly something in his tone or his expression reassured her because she said, ‘We’re wasting time,’ and knocked his hands off her belt to take care of it herself.

His heart pounding, his need for her rushing back and hitting an almost unbearable high, Zander reached into his back pocket for his wallet. He shoved his trousers and shorts down and, with gritted teeth, rolled on protection. Mia slipped off her underwear and yanked up her dress and then, with hands that were strangely trembling, he gripped her thighs and lifted her up. She locked her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and, unable to hold back a moment longer, he thrust into her warm, wet heat on a rough shuddery groan.

He cut off her cry with a kiss that was desperate and fierce and, powerless to wait, he began to move. He clasped her hips and she clutched at his hair and he tried to maintain control, but it had been four months and she felt like heaven. She was urging him on, panting and begging with increasing excitement, and he was fast unravelling.

Her legs tightened around his waist. Her inner muscles clenched around him as if she didn’t want to ever let him go. Desperate for air, he wrenched his mouth from hers. As he slid it along her jaw, he could feel her ragged breath hot against his face. The exquisite tension in his muscles was building. His head was swimming and a wave of pleasure was beginning to ripple up from the base of his spine and he couldn’t hold back any longer.

With a primitive growl, he nipped her earlobe and adjusted the angle of her hips and thrust hard, lodging so deep in her smooth, tight heat he saw stars. While she came apart, convulsing and trembling and pressing her mouth to his neck to muffle her cry, he shattered, pulsating into her relentlessly and burying his face in the crook of her neck as white-hot ecstasy crashed through him.

How long they stayed there locked together, hearts pounding against each other, slowing as they began to recover, he couldn’t have said. It was only once the adrenalin had drained from his body, turning his muscles to mush and rendering his legs so weak they could barely hold him up, that he lifted his head from her neck, gently eased from her and set her down.

‘So that was good,’ Mia murmured hoarsely, blinking as if stunned, still plastered to the wall as if moving away from it might land her in a boneless heap on the floor.

Zander turned away to deal with the condom and thought that good was an understatement. Never before had lights actually flashed behind his eyelids. Never before had undoing one gorgeous yet stubborn woman given him such satisfaction.

‘You really do live up to your reputation.’

‘I’ve barely even started,’ he muttered, briefly wondering whether the fact that he’d never surrendered control to such mindlessness before either was a concern or merely the consequence of four months of abstinence. ‘We have months to make up for and I have plans for your scarf.’

‘Well, we can’t stay here,’ she observed with breathless excitement and a glance at the door that wouldn’t remain locked for ever.

She was right. They couldn’t. So, the only question that remained was, ‘Your place or mine?’

CHAPTER THREE

Seven weeks later

‘STILLNOREPLY?’

With a scowl, Mia shoved her frustratingly silent phone into the back pocket of her jeans and reached for a giant colander. ‘Nothing,’ she said, dumping it in the sink and heading to the fridge.

Hattie, who was blitzing a pile of parsley and thyme with a gleaming ten-inch knife, grimaced. ‘What’s the tally now?’

‘Twelve calls, fifteen messages and seven emails in total.’

‘Maybe he’s somewhere that doesn’t have a mobile signal or Wi-Fi.’

‘For forty-eight hours?’

‘Yeah, I guess that is pretty unlikely,’ came the dry response. ‘Your emails now go straight into his junk mail folder, then. He’s deleted you from his contacts and doesn’t answer calls from unknown numbers.’

Retrieving the mussels—the main course for tonight’s dinner party for twenty—Mia had to admit that that explanation for Zander’s lack of response to her attempts at communication wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. The morning after the incredible night they’d spent incinerating her sheets, when she’d woken up to find him gone, no note, no nothing, she’d neatly excised him from her life too, although luckily, given recent developments, she did at least archive past clients’ correspondence details.

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