by Helen Brooks
She was pressed against the length of him, his arms holding her in instinctive protection against his muscled chest, and as she raised a flushed and breathless face to him, her wind-blown hair curling in shiny, silky strands about her pink cheeks, he made no attempt to let her go.
The hushed dark corridor, the utter absence of all sound or movement made the moment surreal, like a vaguely remembered chimerical dream, and it seemed part of the fantasy when his dark head bent and caught her mouth in a deep languorous kiss that went on and on. His lips were moving against hers slowly as he crushed her closer, his hand cupping her head for deeper penetration as he urged her into an increasingly intimate acceptance of his hungry mouth, and it didn’t occur to Kim to even struggle.
There was an insistence, a dominant mastery that demanded rather than asked for her consent and there was no way she could refuse. She had lived this moment so many times, tasted it, savoured it in her dreams, and now, in the shadowy alien confines of the silent corridor, fantasy and fact were combining in overwhelming ecstasy.
Heat was surging in the core of her, lighting flickers of fire in every nerve and sinew, and as her lips parted to allow his probing tongue access into the secret places her body curved closer into him, the physical ache becoming sweeter.
He made a small sound of pleasure deep in his throat and Kim answered it with one of her own, faintly bewildered by her desire. She had lost all thought of where she was, her mind and her emotions totally captive to the sensations he was evoking with such consummate ease. This was the sort of kiss she had dreamt about as a young, romantic teenager before life had taught her such things only existed in the land of make-believe, but this was real, this was now.
She was kissing him back in the way she had during her sleeping fantasies, without restraint, hungrily searching for she knew not what.
Graham had not been an adventurous or a thoughtful lover and she hadn’t slept with anyone before her husband, therefore her sexual experience was limited to Graham’s hasty couplings without much finesse. This was gloriously, frighteningly different.
The warmth and the slowly building ache in the core of her femininity, the spasmodic thrills circulating her bloodstream and causing her breath to shudder and gasp against his warm knowing mouth, were something outside her knowledge and desperately seductive. This was pleasure; this was the sort of pleasure she had read about but never imagined was so fiery, so consuming, so frightening. And she wanted more, much more.
Kim wasn’t even aware of the sudden brightness of lights against her closed eyelids, but the whirr of the lift did cause her to open dazed eyes, or perhaps it was the fact that Lucas’s mouth had left hers.
‘The power’s back on.’ His voice was thick and husky and he still held her against him, his arousal hard against her softness.
She was trembling, she knew she was trembling, and now that his lips had stopped fuelling the fire that had eaten up all her inhibitions and common sense she felt a growing horror at her complete submission to his lovemaking. And bereft. Bereft at the feeling of loss now it had stopped.
‘Let…let go of me.’ It was a faint whisper but he didn’t argue, his eyes a brilliant silver in the hard, ruthless lines of his face.
‘That was unintentional, Kim.’
As she jerked back from him, her hands to her hot face, the words caught at her. Was he saying he regretted it? She stared at him wildly, her eyes deep pools of black velvet in the flushed smoothness of her face. Probably. But then she had more or less offered herself on a plate and few men would resist such an opportunity. What would have happened if the power hadn’t come back on when it did?
She clenched her shaking hands into tight fists at her side, noticing, with further shame, that Lucas was perfectly cool and relaxed. And it was her humiliation that made her say, her voice bitter and tight, ‘You mean you just felt a sudden urge for a quickie?’
Immediately the ugly words left her lips she wished them back, the crudeness shocking her, but it was too late. She had said them. Out of pain and anguish, but she’d still said them.
And Lucas was furious. She knew it from the dark colour that flared across the hard cheekbones and the muscle working in his jaw, but his voice was at direct variance to his face when he said icily, ‘You rate yourself very cheaply if you believe that.’
‘I’d say it’s you who rates me cheaply,’ she hissed back sharply.
‘Then you’d be wrong.’ The words were like bullets. ‘If you were anyone other than who you are I wouldn’t have stopped at a kiss, believe me, Kim.’
What did that mean? That he had stopped because he didn’t fancy her that much, or because she was his secretary and it would cause too many complications, or what? ‘So you expect me to be grateful you didn’t force me?’ she snapped bitterly.
‘I wasn’t using any force.’ His voice was soft now, soft and mocking, and his eyes dared her to deny what they both knew. ‘You were with me every inch of the way from the second our lips touched.’
‘I don’t think so!’ she flung sarcastically.
‘I know so.’ He paused, the glittering silver eyes like liquid steel as they held hers. ‘But when I take you it won’t be in a work situation and on the floor of a corridor, Kim. That’s a promise.’
She stared at him, utterly taken aback and more frightened than she had ever been in her life. But not of Lucas. Of the feeling deep inside his softly growled words had evoked. She wanted to hate him or at least dislike him but she couldn’t. Neither could she pretend that he was just someone she worked for and dismiss him the moment she left the building; he had woven himself too skilfully into her life for that.
‘I resign.’ She raised her chin defiantly, her back ramrod-straight. ‘As of now.’
‘Don’t be childish,’ he said cuttingly, and before she could say anything more he had stepped past her and opened the door onto the stairs, leaving her alone and shaking.
Childish? She stared at the door, nonplussed by the sudden end to what she had considered the most devastating experience of her entire life. Childish? How dared he?
She stood for a moment more and then forced her shaking legs to carry her into the office where she made straight for her little cloakroom.
The flushed, bright-eyed girl in the mirror, with the bruised mouth, was not someone she recognised, and she gazed at herself for a full minute before she could persuade her trembling hands to do something about her dishevelment.
Childish. The word had stung and she couldn’t get it out of her mind. Possibly because she had to acknowledge, ruefully and only after another five minutes had ticked by in painful self-assessment, that there was more than grain of truth in it.
She had handled it all wrong from the moment his mouth had touched hers. What she should have done—what any normal, level-headed, experienced woman would have done—was to accept the kiss lightly, move gracefully out of his arms after a moment or two and make some casual comment to defuse what had been—by his own admission—a momentary impulse on Lucas’s part.
Instead she had nearly eaten him alive and then accused him of—she didn’t like to think what she had accused him of. She gave a little groan, scraping every tendril of hair back so tightly into the knot that her scalp ached.
He must thing she had a screw loose. The mirror told her that she was once again transformed into the neatly tailored, cool and efficient Mrs Allen—on the outside, at least. Perhaps she did have a screw loose, she admitted weakly. In fact she suspected she had whole box of them jangling about with regard to Lucas Kane. Certainly he had the power to turn her into someone she didn’t know, someone who was very different from the reserved, cool, careful person she had believed herself to be before she had worked for him.
She was typing away at her word processor, her mind ten per cent on her work and ninety per cent on Lucas’s return, when she heard his voice in the corridor outside talking to someone. Her heart jumped up into her throat but she forced her hands to keep up a
steady rhythm, even as every sense in her body tuned itself in to the moment when he would walk through the door.
She thought the other voice belonged to Lucas’s general manager, who had his office at the other end of the corridor, but she couldn’t be sure; most voices had a habit of lowering themselves deferentially in Lucas’s presence.
And then the door opened and, although she kept her eyes on her work, she knew he was looking at her.
‘Kim?’
She’d half hoped—coward that she was, she conceded silently—that he would simply carry on as though nothing had happened, but she might have known Lucas wouldn’t take the easy way out. She raised reluctant eyes to meet his piercing grey gaze and the butterflies in her stomach did a war dance.
‘We have to discuss this properly. You know that.’
It was a statement, not a question, but she answered it as though it had been the latter when she said, her voice as cool and distant as she could make it, ‘There’s nothing to discuss.’
His compelling light eyes narrowed at the words. ‘If you felt disturbed enough to make that ridiculous suggestion about resigning I’d say there’s every need,’ he said grimly. He perched on the edge of her desk—a habit of his and one which always sent her senses haywire—and continued to survey her unblinkingly.
Why did he have to be so attractive? she asked herself rawly. So incredibly, overwhelmingly attractive? She dared bet that there wasn’t a female in the building, in the whole of Cambridge, who wouldn’t jump at the chance of having an affair with Lucas Kane.
Was he seeing someone at the moment? The thought was entirely inappropriate in the circumstances but she couldn’t help it.
‘I’ve…I’ve change my mind about that,’ she managed at last.
‘Of course you have.’ It was dismissive, as though the idea had been so ludicrous it wasn’t worth mentioning. ‘But nevertheless we need to discuss what happened.’
Her cheeks were scarlet again, she could feel them burning, and yet he was as cool and unfeeling as the polished granite his eyes seemed to have been fashioned from. But he hadn’t been so unfathomable and cold when he’d been holding her in his arms. The thought made Kim’s cheeks even hotter. He had been aroused then, hugely aroused, and it had been her body, her lips and mouth and tongue that had made him tremble with desire. She didn’t know if she found the thought alarming or comforting but she did find it exciting, and that was more than dangerous enough to cope with.
‘Look, Lucas, I’m prepared to look at it as a mistake, one of those things that happen now and again when people of the opposite sex work so closely together as we do,’ Kim said with a steadiness she was proud of. ‘It didn’t mean anything—’
‘The hell it didn’t.’
It wasn’t at all the response she’d expected and cut off all coherent reasoning. ‘Wha…what did you say?’
‘Kim, I don’t know what sort of man you think I am,’ Lucas said smoothly, his thick black lashes masking the flicker of anger her words had wrought, ‘but when I kissed you it sure as hell meant something to both of us.’
‘I didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it,’ she said quickly, without thinking. She heard him draw in a quick hard breath and realised her faux pas. ‘I mean…’ Her voice trailed away helplessly.
Lucas rescued her with his normal calm composure. ‘You’ve worked for me for five months and I’ve wanted to see what you tasted like from day one,’ he said as coolly as though he was asking her to type a letter. ‘Why do you think I haven’t dated anyone in all that time?’
‘You haven’t?’ She checked herself quickly. Breathless murmuring was not the way to deal with this.
‘And I’ve been patient,’ he continued with silky quietness. More patient than she’d ever know.
‘But…’
“Yes?’
‘I work for you.’
Lucas ignored every principle he’d ever worked by and said calmly, ‘So? You’re unattached and so am I. That’s the only important thing, surely?’
Was he stark staring mad? Kim had spent five months fighting off the most devastating feeling of sexual attraction, which had frightened her far more than it thrilled her—at least, the potential power it gave to Lucas frightened her—and the only reason she was still working for Lucas Kane was because she had convinced herself the attraction was all on her side. To get involved, to have a relationship with a man like him, was too alarming, too utterly insane and impossible even to consider.
She stared at him, the breadth of his shoulders under the white silk shirt he was wearing suddenly oppressive, and wetted her dry lips. His eyes followed her tongue unblinkingly, his firm, cynical mouth slightly pursed, and her traitorous libido wanted to explode. It was further confirmation that an affair with Lucas was unthinkable. If he would affect her so badly without even touching her…
‘It’s out of the question, Lucas.’
‘I don’t accept that,’ he said immediately in answer to her trembling voice. ‘I’m not asking you to leap into bed with me—’ Liar! his conscience screamed silently ‘—just for us to get to know each other without the pressure of a work environment.’
‘I…I can’t do that. There’s Melody—’
‘Melody isn’t a problem.’
‘It isn’t just that.’ She took a deep breath, her mind suddenly clear. ‘I don’t want to get involved with anyone, a man, ever again,’ she stated firmly. ‘I’ve been through all that and it didn’t work.’
‘With your husband, you mean?’ he asked softly. And at her nod he shook his own head, his voice low and husky as he said, ‘Don’t let him spoil the rest of your life, Kim.’
‘I’m not, but it is my life now and that’s what I like.’ Her dark-brown eyes held Lucas’s gaze with an earnestness that was almost childlike. ‘I…I don’t think I’m the sort of person who should ever be with someone else, not really.’ Graham had flung that at her once in a drunken rage but the barb had held and dug itself deep into her mind.
‘What rubbish.’ Kim lifted her chin in unconscious defiance and he added, ‘Who told you that? Slimeball?’
‘Slime… Oh, Graham?’
He could tell by the flush that rose in her cheeks he was on the right tack and anger thickened his voice as he said, ‘Don’t judge the whole male race by the lowest specimen, Kim, and sure as hell don’t take on board anything he said. The guy was crazy not to appreciate what he had.’
‘You don’t know how it was,’ she said defensively. ‘It wasn’t just Graham, it was… Oh, you don’t know.’
Lucas expelled a silent breath. This was the first time she had talked to him, really talked to him, and he didn’t want her to close up again. ‘No, I don’t know how it was,’ he agreed quietly, ‘so why don’t you tell me?’
‘I can’t.’ The colour had drained from her face, leaving it chalk-white. How could she make someone like Lucas understand what it had been like all those years in the children’s home? Wanting, aching to belong to a family, to have people she could call her own? And then, as she had gone into her teens and realised it wasn’t going to happen, she had purposely grown a protective shell, telling herself she didn’t care, that she would make it on her own and blow the rest of the world.
And then Graham had happened in her first year at university. Handsome, charming Graham, sweeping her off her feet with all his attention. She had thought he loved her, believed everything he’d said, and it hadn’t been until after they had been married that she had come to realise—through something he had yelled at her in one of their rows—that the main reason he had been interested in her was because several of his friends had wanted her. Graham always had to be the one who was admired and envied.
But Graham had given her Melody. By accident, admittedly, but Melody was worth a hundred times the heartache Graham had put her through. And now she had her family and she didn’t need anyone else. She wouldn’t let herself need anyone else. Needing Graham had made her vulnerable and exposed and
weak and she would never give that power to a man again.
Lucas had watched the changing emotions wash over her white, fragile face and he knew she wasn’t about to say any more—not here and now, anyway. She didn’t trust him, he wasn’t even sure if she liked him very much, but she couldn’t deny the physical attraction between them. His bruised ego seized on the thought but it was scant comfort.
No woman had ever treated him as Kim had done. He had thought, at first, that the air of cool restraint would mellow as she settled into the job, but it had got stronger, if anything. That night at her home he had felt as though he was treading on eggshells, damn it, and all the ground he thought he’d gained over the last weeks now seemed to exist only in his imagination. She might look fragile and breakable but she was as hard as iron underneath.
So why didn’t he cut his losses and congratulate himself on having an efficient and beautiful secretary who was clearly interested in her career and nothing else, and leave it at that? He had any number of women he could call who had made it clear in the past that they were available. Successful, confident, attractive career women. Women with no hang-ups, no inhibitions.
A loud knock at Kim’s outer door, followed by the big, rotund figure of John Powell, Lucas’s general manager, effectively finished the conversation. It brought Lucas to his feet; the other man was waving a file at his managing director as he said, ‘Those subcontractors you wanted the low-down on? You were right, Lucas. We shouldn’t touch them with a barge-pole.’
Perfect timing as always, John. Lucas kept his thoughts to himself, but his voice was curt when he said, ‘Come into my office, John, and tell me what you’ve got.’ He didn’t alter the tone as he added, ‘Coffee when you’re ready, Mrs Allen.’
Coffee when you’re ready, Mrs Allen.
Kim sat for some moments without moving after the door to Lucas’s office had closed and she was alone.
The kiss, their conversation, all the emotion of the last half an hour or so hadn’t meant a thing to him, not really. He looked on her as a challenge, if anything—that was it at base level. She hadn’t fallen into his arms as women were prone to do with Lucas—she ignored the fact that that was exactly what she had done, both physically and metaphorically, that morning—or fluttered her eyelashes or given him the come-on over the coffee cups.