by Penny Jordan
‘It hasn’t,’ Finn responded grimly. ‘You can’t. And even if you could, after three glasses of wine I doubt you’d be legally able to drive.’
Three glasses? Maggie was horrified. Had she really drunk so much? A glance at the glass in front of her was enough to have her saying with solemn dignity, ‘I’ve only had two and a half.’
‘That’s still over the legal limit,’ Finn told her. ‘And besides,’ he added, ‘in those ridiculous shoes you’re wearing you couldn’t make it through one centimetre of snow, never mind closer to ten.’
‘Ten? No, that’s impossible,’ Maggie gasped, adding with a glower, ‘And will you please stop criticising my shoes? Just because you don’t like them.’
Finn, who had been loading the dishwasher, turned round, subjecting her to the full heart-rocking force of a look of such intense sensuality that it literally made her moan softly out loud.
‘I never said anything about not liking them,’ he told her succinctly. ‘Simply that they were impractical.’
‘Ridiculous” was the word you used. Not impractical,’ Maggie reminded him. She felt as though she were clinging helplessly to a very precarious rock in the middle of an extremely dangerous body of water. Pushing back her chair, she stood up. ‘I’m tired…I think I’ll go to bed. Hopefully the snow will be gone by morning, and I’ll be able to make an early start.’
Why on earth was the way Finn was looking at her making her stammer and walk away from him so self-consciously, all too aware of the way the height of her shoe-heels was making her body move?
As though he had read her mind, when she reached the door she heard Finn saying softly, ‘I was wrong. Neither ridiculous nor impractical is the right description for them. But provocative—now, that is.’
Provocative! If Finn was trying to imply that that was what she was, then…
But for some reason, instead of turning round to confront him and demand a retraction of his statement—a statement that could quite definitely be described itself as both ridiculous and provocative—Maggie discovered that she was actually hurrying away from him…running away from him? From him or from what he was making her feel?
In the silence of his now Maggie-free kitchen, Finn wondered irritably what subtle ingredient her perfume possessed that made its delicate fragrance linger so long. He could swear that his bedroom at the farm had continued to carry her scent right up until the day he had moved, and now here she was occupying his bedroom yet again…his bedroom…his bed…his life…his heart…
Grimly he closed the door of the dishwasher and switched it on, glancing out into the snow-covered yard beyond the window as he did so. Snow in November? It was unseasonable, unsettling and should have been unfeasible—like his feelings for Maggie?
Maggie woke up with a start, wondering at first, in the semi-darkness of the unfamiliar bedroom, illuminated by the bedside lamp she had deliberately left on, just where she was. And then she remembered. She was in Finn’s house, in Finn’s bed. Finn.
Her mouth felt dry from the wine she had drunk. She was desperate for a glass of cold water. Hesitantly she sat up. It was just gone midnight. Pushing the bedclothes aside, she got out of bed. When she opened the bedroom door she saw that the landing and stairs were in darkness. A sharp nervous frisson shivered through her. Loath though she was to admit it, she was afraid of the dark.
Her fingers trembled as she reached for the light switch she had remembered seeing on the wall next to the bedroom door, relief flooding through her as the lights came on. The house felt quiet and still. She had pulled on her coat before leaving the bedroom rather than wear the folded but Finn-sized robe he had given her. There was something about the intimacy of wearing something that belonged to him that was far too potentially dangerous for her to risk. The brilliance of the chandelier illuminating the stairs made her blink a little. Quickly she padded down the stairs and into the hall. She was less than halfway across it when the drawing room door was suddenly flung open and Finn strode into the hall.
Like her, he must have been asleep. But unlike her he obviously had no hang-ups about semi-nudity—and no modesty either, Maggie decided shakily as she frantically tried to focus on something other than his naked torso, wondering what on earth was wrong with her recalcitrant gaze as it recklessly returned to his shorts-only clad body.
‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’
The harshness of his angry demand bemused her, forcing her to lift her gaze to meet his in response to his angry challenge.
‘I’m going for a drink of water,’ Maggie responded.
‘Dressed like that? Do you think I’m a complete fool?’ he demanded without giving her any opportunity to answer. ‘I appreciate how keen you are to leave, Maggie—’
‘Leave…?’ Maggie gave him a blank look. ‘I’m not leaving.’
‘Then why are you wearing your coat?’ Finn asked her grimly
Her coat! Maggie had forgotten that she was wearing it. Pink with embarrassment, she shrugged as nonchalantly as she could as she told him, ‘I…er…just put it on to come downstairs in…you know…as a sort of a robe. I’m not wearing my shoes,’ she pointed out. ‘Or…’ Self-consciously she stopped.
‘Or…?’ Finn prompted, recovering his sang-froid with a speed she envied.
When she remained silent, he pressed her softly. ‘If you don’t answer me, Maggie, then I’ll have to use my imagination, and right now it’s telling me…’ He stopped and groaned before challenging her hoarsely, as he came towards her, ‘Have you any idea just what it’s doing to me knowing that you’re as near as dammit naked underneath that coat?’
Maggie could feel her heart beating so frantically that it literally shook her whole body. The effect the raw sensuality of Finn’s voice was having on her was making it almost impossible for her to breathe. It shocked her that she should feel so wantonly excited by the knowledge that Finn found her desirable, that he wanted her. The voice of caution and common sense urged her to say nothing, to walk away from temptation whilst she still could. But when she responded it was to a far stronger and more deeply rooted instinct, a contrary reckless impulse impelling her to challenge him.
‘If you’re trying to tell me that you want me, then—’
‘Then what?’ Finn interrupted her rawly. ‘Then you’d rather I showed you?’
Maggie gasped as he caught hold of her, but not out of shock or protest. No, it was her own reaction to him that caused her to tremble so violently. She could feel the rapid tattoo of Finn’s heart, even through the muffling folds of her coat. But she wasn’t feeling him through her coat at all, she recognised dizzily as Finn parted it and slid his hands inside it.
‘Nothing,’ she heard him whisper in a thick openly aroused voice. ‘You aren’t wearing anything at all.’
‘I was in bed,’ Maggie responded in a voice she had intended to be indignant but which in reality had become soft and slurred with reactive need.
‘In bed…in my bed. Have you any idea how much I’ve been aching to be there with you?’ Finn told her. ‘Ever since…’
‘Ever since I got here?’ Maggie questioned, striving to keep her balance in the midst of a passion that was threatening to totally overwhelm her.
‘No,’ Finn told her starkly. ‘Ever since you left it.’
It was too much. Helplessly Maggie gave in, closing her eyes in subjugation to her own feelings.
‘There hasn’t been a single night since then when I haven’t wanted you,’ Finn was whispering to her as he bent his head towards hers and slowly started to kiss her—slow, seductive kisses, strung together in an erotically dazzling chain that would tie her to him for ever, she suspected, as her body melted into his and his fingertips stroked her neck from her jaw to her collarbone, raising an erotic line of goosebumps that gave away her longing for him.
‘Which is it to be?’ she could hear Finn whispering as his lips found and then probed the warmth of hers. ‘Your bed or mine? Mine’s nearer
…Or we could always try them both…The fire’s still warm in the drawing room. Have you ever made love in front of a fire, Maggie, with the firelight highlighting every delicious inch of you, and your lover’s body to keep you warm…?’
Maggie shuddered in mute pleasure at the images the hypnotic seduction of his voice was conjuring up for her. ‘No…’ Her denial was a strangled sound that tore at her throat, making her close her eyes against the acid burn of her own tears as she wondered how many other women Finn might have shared such a pleasure with, whilst she had never…
‘No…? Oh, of course, I was forgetting. Open fires and city living don’t exactly go together, do they?’
There was a harshness in his voice now that physically hurt her.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ her honesty compelled her to tell him. ‘Since I don’t—I haven’t…There isn’t…’ Her voice started to tail away. She didn’t want to talk, to spend time dealing with the cumbersome delay of words, and she certainly didn’t want to be forced to think about the other women who might have shared Finn’s life. What she wanted, all she wanted…Maggie gave a small shiver as she tried to ignore what she was feeling. What was it that happened to her whenever she got physically close to Finn that affected her so strongly, that made her feel that what was happening between them was the most important thing in her life?
‘What are you trying to tell me, Maggie?’ Finn demanded grimly, cupping her face with his hands and looking down into her eyes so that there was no way she could hide her expression from him. ‘That there hasn’t been anyone else?’ He gave her a derisive look. ‘Do you really expect me to believe that a woman as intelligent, as desirable, as downright impossible to resist as both of us know you are, lives the life of a celibate?’
It frightened Maggie to realise how much pleasure it gave her to hear him describe her in such a way—and how much more the rawly sensual message in his eyes was giving her.
‘I wanted to concentrate on my career,’ she told him truthfully. ‘And that hasn’t left me any time for…for relationships.’
The way he was looking at her made her heart slam so heavily into her chest wall that she gasped out loud.
‘Oh, Maggie…Maggie…’
She gasped again at the fierce note of male passion she could hear in Finn’s voice as he slid his hands into her hair and bent his head to kiss her.
‘You do things to me that no other woman has ever done, do you know that?’ she heard Finn whispering passionately to her several minutes later as he raised his mouth from hers.
She could feel their breath mingling as he lowered his head again, and the fine tremors running through her body echoed the much fiercer shudders galvanising his.
Wrapped in one another’s arms, they made their way slowly towards the drawing room, their journey there interspersed with fiercely passionate kisses and Maggie’s softly breathy little moans of pleasure as Finn’s hands caressed her naked body. But it was the sight of the firelight playing on his body as he released her briefly to remove the duvet from the sofa and place it in front of the fire that sent such wild surges of arousal through her that Maggie couldn’t help herself from making a small strangled cry of longing.
‘What is it?’
The look of frowning anxiety he gave her as he dropped the duvet and came towards her made her blush a little at the explicitness of her thoughts. And then, as though he had guessed them, his frown gave way to a look of heavy-lidded sensuality that made her bones feel as though they were melting as it skimmed lazily over her body, and a heat that had nothing whatsoever to do with the fire burned through her.
‘Finn…’ she protested, so shocked by her own desires that she immediately blamed him for causing them. Prior to knowing Finn she had lusted after a pair of new shoes far more strongly than she had ever lusted after a man—but now…
‘Come here,’ Finn commanded softly.
Helplessly Maggie went to him, knowing that he was not so much demanding something from her as giving her the right to take whatever she wished from him.
‘City lady, country man,’ Finn whispered to her as he smoothed her skin with his hands, making her shudder as rivulets of hot, swift delight ran over her. ‘We’re poles apart, and yet there’s never been anyone I’ve ached so much to be close to.’
Awed by the intensity of the feeling she could hear in his voice, Maggie closed her eyes against the tight ball of emotions she could feel blocking her throat. When she could finally manage to speak all she could say was a choked, ‘Well, you are close to me now.’
‘But not as close as I want to be,’ Finn murmured as his fingertips investigated the exquisite silky sensitivity of her taut nipples. ‘Skin on skin, body on body, mouth on mouth. That’s how close I want to be to you, Maggie.’
She knew she must have made some reply because she heard the sudden acceleration of Finn’s breathing in response to it, and then blissfully his mouth was on her throat, trailing hot kisses of sheeting fire down her arm, to the sensitive hollow of her elbow, nibbling at her fingers, licking and sucking them until she thought she might actually faint with the intensity of the desire exploding inside her.
When he kneeled in front of her and kissed her waist, the curve of her hip, her belly, Maggie moaned his name, her fingers digging into the hard muscles of his arms as she clung desperately to him, driven beyond shock by the extent of her response to him, her need for him. Through the haze of her longing she could see the long weals her nails had raked against his skin. Mindlessly she leaned into him, shuddering as his breath touched her skin.
His hands were shaping her hips, stroking down the length of her legs. Tenderly and carefully Finn lowered her to the floor. As he leaned over her Maggie watched him, her gaze drinking in the male perfection of him. She lifted her hand to his shoulder, slowly tracing the shape of his collarbone and then moving over his chest, exploring the tight hardness of his small male nipples with a wide-eyed concentration that made her soft brown eyes darken to almost black.
‘How much longer are you going to torment me?’
The raw hunger in his low growl bit at her aroused emotions with the same devastating effect the erotic nibble of his teeth had had on her flesh. A thousand, no a million tiny sparks of hunger for him ignited at once, feeding a conflagration that threatened to totally overwhelm her.
Finn’s fingers circled her ankle, slowly stroking its delicate bones. Maggie shivered and made a low guttural sound of shocked pleasure as he held her foot in both his hands and then slowly kissed its delicate instep. Immediately her toes curled in a rictus of female response.
‘Me torment you?’
Maggie wasn’t even aware of whispering the passion-husked words, nor of reaching towards him, pulling him against her, her hands trembling as they absorbed the hot velvet sleekness of his skin and the hardness of the muscles it cloaked.
They made love hungrily and fiercely, Finn holding Maggie’s hips in a grip that was possessively hard as she straddled him, enjoying the power to dominate their intimacy and control the hot sleek strength of his body as it entered hers. Each stroke quickened the immediate response of her own flesh as she urged him to seek deeper, to stay longer, to move faster…harder, to give her everything that her body needed in order to satisfy the hunger for him he himself had created.
Her body was slick with sweat, arching against the taut bow of her orgasm, and Finn looked up into her face, drinking in the triumph of watching her succumb to her pleasure. The firelight gilded her damp skin, dancing in a million tiny flames as the shudders of completion convulsed her, and then it was his turn, the dying sound of his release fading into the mingled harshness of their joint breathing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SLEEPILY Maggie turned over, savouring the warmth of Finn’s bed. Finn himself was downstairs, where he had gone to make them both a cup of coffee. Maggie smiled to herself as she stretched with sensual luxury beneath the duvet. The warmth of Finn’s bed wasn’t all she was savouring. There
was the warmth of Finn’s body to be remembered as well, along with his lovemaking last night.
The tenderness he had shown her after the fierce intensity of the passion they had shared still had the power to raise a small frisson of emotional reaction from her as she mentally relived the way he had left her curled up in an exhausted tangle of limbs on the duvet, returning a few minutes later with two huge soft warm towels, gently drying her love damp body with one of them before tenderly wrapping the other around her.
Too relaxed to move, she had drifted off to sleep, waking only when he had kissed her and told her that he thought she would sleep more comfortably in his bed.
‘Only if you share it with me,’ she had answered.
She had woken at first light, whilst he was still asleep, lying next to him and savouring not just her memories of their lovemaking but the reality of his physical presence in bed beside her. Unable to stop herself, she had leaned across to him, studying his sleeping face, feeling the now familiar jolt run deliciously through her body as she’d given in to the temptation to stroke her fingertips exploratively along his collarbone before tangling them gently in the silky warmth of the thick whorls of dark hair the night had flattened against his skin, whilst her lips had teased wake-up-and-play kisses in the hollow of his throat.
Seconds later, when he was still asleep, she had reluctantly been about to move away from him when he had made her almost jump out of her skin by growling mock threateningly at her at the same time as he imprisoned her in his arms, adroitly rolling her beneath him.
Somehow during the play-fight that had followed he had managed to stroke and kiss every sensually vulnerable bit of her.
‘That’s not fair,’ she had pretended to complain when he had gently pinned her arms down at her sides so that she could not touch him, whilst his mouth had had the freedom to make an explosively erotic journey from her throat to both of her naked breasts. The sensation of his tongue lapping seductively at their rapidly hardening crests had made her arch her back in wild abandon, her protests forgotten, their game forgotten as desire had engulfed them both.