Page 17 of Bound By Her Baby Revelation (Hot Winter Escapes)

He had never envisaged feeling any sort of sexual pull to a woman who demanded more from him than what was straightforward.

So Kaya? It was baffling.

But right now, as that telling colour remained staining her cheeks, there was certainly something about this inexplicable tug, something that made his blood hot and suffused him with a sort of keen, restless craving that was utterly novel and disturbing.

But also quite exciting.

‘If you weren’t worried, you wouldn’t have bothered,’ Leo pointed out reasonably. ‘If I recall, you weren’t exactly the height of warm and friendly when I decided to head to town.’

‘Can you blame me?’

‘Really want to go down this road again? Because I don’t.’

Kaya slanted a glance at him and bristled. The man could not have got on her nerves more and yet she was still so aware of him next to her as they bounced along back to the house, driving back to it slightly faster than she had come from it.

He’d left the house with an angry slam of the front door but he couldn’t be in a more chipper mood now. That was what a fan club of pretty young things could do for a guy, she thought sourly, and then was immediately impatient with herself for the thought.

Fact was, she was the only one fuming here. He was cool, calm and collected. He’d made up his mind and he wasn’t going to start having second thoughts. If she ventured into that slice of forbidden territory again, then there was no telling how hard he would slam the door in her face.

And the truth was that she still had a load of clearing out to do, including Julie Anne’s quarters, which she had left as was when she’d disappeared off to New Zealand. At the time, she’d been far too shaken to undertake that heart-wrenching task.

They were going to be sharing space for at least another twenty-four hours and low-level sniping was going to be exhausting.

Thinking rationally was one thing, though. Putting it into practice was quite another when the guy sitting next to her was making her feel as though she were on the verge of going up in flames.

‘I had no idea whether you’d become disoriented out there,’ she said in a driven undertone. ‘You don’t know this part of the world and I wanted to make sure you hadn’t fallen in a ditch.’

‘I’ve always been very good at navigating my way in places I don’t know.’

‘So I’ve seen,’ Kaya muttered. ‘You certainly managed to navigate your way to a jolly crowd of friends in no time at all.’

‘What can I say? People like me.’ He paused. ‘With one or two exceptions.’

‘Do you think this is funny?’

‘What?’

Kaya’s head was bursting. Everything was rushing at her all at once. Seeing him there in that café, laughing and joking... Somehow it had brought home to her the life she led—a careful, responsible life; the life of someone who didn’t hang out in cafés laughing and giggling with the cute new guy in town.

He had swept in on a blizzard of snow and everything was upside down now. She had been forced to face limitations within herself that she hadn’t faced before. How entrenched had she become in a life that held few surprises and stretched ahead of her without the excitement of anything unknown?

If her mother had been the ‘naughty one’, then how easy had it been for her to over-compensate by being the good girl?

And didgood girlshave fun?

Somewhere along the line, had she ended up equating fun with being like her mother—irresponsible, throwing herself into untenable relationships...getting hurt over and over again?

She resented the fact that Leo had opened her eyes to all this murky stuff. But more than that she resented the fact that, despite it all, she still couldn’t stop her body from responding to him. She still couldn’t sit next to him in a banged-up old four-by-four without this electric thread of sexual awareness running through her veins.

Because that was what this was. It wasn’t just an objective appreciation of a guy who was sinfully good-looking. This was the sort of attraction that she had never before felt in her safe, guarded, carefully thought-out life.

And there he sat, refreshed after socialising at the café, not a care in the world.

She pulled into the still snowy drive that wound its way up to the house with reckless abandon, barely aware of the slide of the four-wheel drive as it shuddered to an uneven stop.

‘Everything!’ she said. ‘None of this is funny.’ She stared at him and there was a stretching silence. It went on and on and on. She could feel her temples begin to throb.

‘No. None of it is.’

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