by Robyn Donald
‘Yes, of course.’
When he’d left the room she drank some coffee, grimacing at its strength and the sugar he’d tipped into it. It worked, though; within minutes the subtle stimulation of heat and caffeine and sweetness began to shake off the chill.
Mug in hand, she got to her feet, trying to work off the prowling energy that kept her tense and shivering. The view beckoned again; she looked for some way to pull the drapes back, but couldn’t find any cord or rod that might do the trick, so she parted the heavy curtains where they met, holding one up and back so that she could gaze out at the lights.
Tony’s mother, she thought, nerves jumping at the memory. What a malevolent trick of fate!
The last time she’d seen Mrs Simpson had been after the inquest. Although the coroner had accepted Rowan’s account of the events leading up to the shot that had killed Tony and returned a verdict of accidental death, the older woman hadn’t been satisfied. Outside the courthouse, in front of journalists, she had lost control and accused Rowan of murdering her son, morally if not legally.
Each bitter accusation still echoed in Rowan’s ears—cheat, liar, common little slut.
Appalled and in shock, Rowan had been unable to defend herself; not that she’d have tried, because behind the excoriating insults she’d sensed his mother’s enormous grief and her bitter inability to accept his death.
Besides, she understood some of Mrs Simpson’s loss of control. Although she knew it was illogical, Rowan herself blamed Tony for her father’s death.
‘I’m sorry about that.’
Wolfe’s voice, hard and controlled, caught her by surprise. Whirling, she dropped the heavy drape, which hit the coffee mug, tipping it far enough to fling the rest of the liquid over Rowan’s shoulder and chest.
Stung by the heat, she was unable to prevent a soft cry of pain and shock.
In a blur of speed Wolfe seized the mug and dropped it. ‘Get your shirt off,’ he commanded.
‘The curtains—’
‘Forget the curtains.’ He jerked the silk straight over her head in one smooth, powerful movement.
‘Hey!’ she protested, snatching wildly and ineffectually at Bobo’s shirt.
‘You’re scalded—it has to come off,’ he said curtly, removing the hot, wet bustier.
Shocked at the speed of his reactions, and now bare from the waist up, Rowan shut her eyes and clamped her arms across her breasts as he scooped her up and carried her towards the door, one arm around her shoulders, another behind her knees.
‘You need cold water on that scald,’ Wolfe said shortly, shouldering the door open. ‘The kitchen’s closest.’
Deep inside Rowan heat flared—taunting, eager, a wildfire response to the flex and torsion of his arms and his body, to his faint, heady male scent as he carried her against his chest through a dining room and into a vast kitchen.
After dumping her on her feet in front of the sink, he grabbed a teatowel from a drawer and ran it under the tap. ‘Hold it against your skin,’ he ordered.
Rowan pressed the cloth over her skin, welcoming the soothing coldness with an involuntary sigh and the covering with relief.
‘Thank you,’ she said in a ragged voice. ‘I hope the clothes are all right—they belong to Bobo.’
‘If they aren’t I’ll replace them,’ Wolfe told her, holding another cloth under the tap.
‘And the curtains and the carpet—’
‘To hell with the curtains and the carpet,’ he said with suppressed violence. ‘They’ll clean.’
Startled, Rowan looked up into eyes as glittering and green as a predator’s. Her mouth dried, but she said sturdily, ‘There’s coffee all over them. I’ll pay—’
‘How does your shoulder feel?’
‘It’s stinging a bit, but it’s all right.’
‘Do you need a doctor?’
‘No,’ she yelped. ‘It’s barely a scald—see?’ She lifted a corner of the teatowel. The flush was fading from her skin as fast as the smarting.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, uncertainly this time, hardly able to articulate because a primitive hunger stripped away everything but a stark, forbidden need.
Remember, Tony was rich and charismatic too, she warned herself, striving to kill the desire. But Tony had been cunning and obsessive, determined to take by force what she wouldn’t freely give him.
So how do you know Wolfe isn’t the same?
Turning away from him as she clamped the wet teatowel back onto the skin, she listened to an obstinate intuition reassure her that Wolfe showed nothing of the manipulative greed for possession that had driven Tony.
She certainly hadn’t felt anything like this potent fascination for the other man. Gratified at first because of Tony’s open admiration, it hadn’t taken her long to realise that her liking went no deeper than the surface, whereas one look from Wolfe’s green eyes had summoned her from a long sleep, waking her to life and colour and a perilous, fascinating invitation to feel again.
Wolfe felt it too—she read it in the line of colour along his high cheekbones, in the molten intensity of his eyes as the air turned to fire between them.
‘Let me see,’ he said, waiting as she revealed the skin again.
Her heart shook as he touched her shoulder, a gentle pressure with the back of his hand that sizzled through her like lightning, blocking the breath in her lungs.
And then he stepped back. ‘Your skin’s still hot. As soon as that cloth stops feeling cold, change it to this one,’ he said curtly, dropping the second wet teatowel onto the granite bench.
Horrified by her wild response, Rowan watched him walk out of the kitchen. Hastily she changed the cloths, holding the discarded one against her hot cheeks as she ached for something she could never have.
She didn’t hear him come back into the room, so she jumped at his mocking voice—and the raw undernote he couldn’t conceal. Nor could he conceal the stripped, stark angles of his face, or the predatory gleam in his eyes.
‘Hiding, Rowan?’
If she gave him one signal he’d take her to bed. And she’d go with him, eagerly.
She lowered the cloth from her face. ‘No,’ she said defensively.
He showed her a tube of green gel. ‘Aloe vera, which is exceptionally good for minor burns. Do you want to put it on in the bathroom?’
‘Yes, please. And Bobo’s shirt.’ Colour burned along her cheekbones, but she continued sturdily, ‘I’ll collect it on the way.’
‘I’ve dumped it in a tub of cold water. I’ll bring you one of my shirts.’
Rowan did not want to wear Wolfe’s shirt—it was altogether too intimate—but her skin crawled at the prospect of huddling back into wet clothes for the ride home. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a muted voice.
The bathroom he took her to was big and sparely luxurious with marble and glass and heated towel rails and vast mirrors.
Gazing at a set of plumbing that looked as though it needed an engineering degree to make it work, Rowan tried to lighten the crackling tension by asking in a disappointed voice, ‘No gold taps?’
With a glinting, sardonic glance he returned, ‘Sorry.’
Unlike Tony, he wasn’t a man who needed the quick ego trip of expensive accessories. Everything in this palatial penthouse was something he liked, and that was why the place looked so good; it was an expression of his personality.
Her bowl would fit in here…
Wolfe put out a long-fingered hand and dropped the tube of gel onto the marble vanity. She didn’t want to look up, but compelled by an urge she understood too well, she flicked a swift glance into the mirror.
Only to have it snared by his eyes. He loomed over her like some Dark Lord of Hades, she thought, catching her bottom lip in her teeth for a second before wrenching her gaze away.
‘I’ll get you that shirt,’ he said, tension rasping through the words.
She waited until the door closed silently behind him and let her breath out in a quiet h
iss. Slowly, reluctantly, she lowered the cloth and stared at her body in the mirror. The scald had faded to soft pink; beneath it her breasts still throbbed, their peaks tightly budded in a primal response to the turmoil in her body. Had Wolfe liked what he’d seen?
Oh, yes, she thought grimly, uncapping the tube. He’d liked it. But then most men responded easily to smooth female skin and soft breasts. Beneath her fingers the gel sank in, easing the last of the pain away.
She was screwing the cap back on when she heard him knock at the door. Snatching up the nearest towel, she held it across her breasts and called, ‘Come in.’
He opened the door and tossed in a white T-shirt. ‘Try that,’ he said, and disappeared, closing the door firmly behind him.
The perfect gentleman, even if he had ripped her clothes from her. A hot little shudder worked its way down her spine, turning her bones to rubber. She squirmed at the hard tug of desire in the pit of her stomach.
Repressing it, she got into the T-shirt, smiling as she bunched it around her. He was even bigger than she’d thought; his smooth-knit co-ordination and grace hid his size.
At least this huge T-shirt swathed around her would stop any hint of seduction in its tracks! Yet she felt oddly vulnerable as she emerged and found her way back to the sitting room.
He’d cleaned up the spilt coffee, although her gaze flew guiltily to the dark marks on the curtains and the carpet.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said briefly, getting up from a chair as she hovered in the doorway. ‘I’ve poured you another cup.’
‘Thank you.’ She made her way across the room and collapsed into the sofa. The T-shirt billowed around her before settling. ‘And thank you for the loan of the shirt,’ she said as she picked up her coffee.
‘How’s your shoulder?’
‘It’s fine. It was hardly a scald, and the aloe vera has taken away the sting. It’s wonderful stuff, isn’t it? I have it growing in my garden.’ Rowan knew she was chattering inanely, but she needed to throw up barriers.
The balance had altered. Wolfe had seen her breasts, touched her skin, and she was wrapped in his shirt; intimacy hung like a heavy perfume in the tense air, mindless and erotic, smoking through her body and her brain.
Mrs Simpson or not, she had to get out of here!
Taking temporary refuge behind the coffee, she drank some gratefully before setting the mug down sharply. ‘Could you call a taxi, please?’
‘I’ll take you home,’ he said abruptly.
‘A taxi will be—’
‘Rowan.’ His voice was cool and silky, a warning in itself. ‘I’ll take you home. Finish your coffee.’
‘Has anyone ever told you,’ she asked with spurious brightness, ‘that your sort of man—the high-handed, masterful type—went out of fashion thirty years ago?’
‘Plenty.’ He got to his feet and crossed the distance between them in two long strides. ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re bloody dangerous?’
Her mouth dropped slightly open, but before she could think of a brisk reply to fling back he added, ‘As in dangerously desirable…’
The words hung in the air as he drew Rowan to her feet. It was no swift, brutal clutch, and she might have been able to resist him if he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t looked at her with such open, untamed hunger.
This, she thought with something that felt like relief, had been inevitable from the moment they’d set eyes on each other. Tomorrow she might regret it, feel shame, but now, with that passionate seeking coiling through her, she knew it was the only right way for the evening to end.
‘I want to kiss you,’ he said between his teeth, hands tightening on her shoulders.
One kiss wouldn’t shatter her soul. She didn’t move. ‘And I want to kiss you.’ Was that her voice, low and husky?
Deliberately, her pulses pounding, her limbs heavy with the same languor that weighted her lashes, she put her hand over his heart. As it jumped beneath her palm, lean fingers closed around hers, tanned skin overwhelming pale.
Ignoring the warnings that clanged in her mind, she breathed his name—‘Wolfe’—as though she’d been waiting down the ages for it, and smiled.
Instead of the kiss she’d expected, he looked long and deep into her eyes—claiming her, she thought dazedly, in a wordless, primitive takeover, a conqueror asserting his power, making her his for ever. Yet even that wasn’t enough to stifle her senses, now thrumming with erotic input.
When his gaze had stripped away her defences, he bent his head and claimed her mouth too, wiping everything from her mind but her need to follow where he led.
Dimly she thought, I don’t even know this man, and her heart said, So?
She suspected she had always known he existed, unconsciously yearned for him and needed him, so this joining was the culmination of aeons of frustrated desire. More than anything in this world she wanted him—more than peace of mind, more than love, more than life itself.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, but his eyes, his voice, his knowledgeable hands revealed his confidence.
Her gaze still imprisoned by the blazing greenstone of his, she caught his free hand and held the palm against her cheek, before turning her face into the strong warmth of it and kissing the palm. ‘More than sure,’ she told him. ‘Show me.’
Narrowed eyes scorched across her skin and came to rest for vibrant, humming moments on her mouth. ‘Show you what?’
‘Everything.’
His smile was crooked, without humour. ‘Dangerous indeed,’ he said. ‘So be it.’ The harsh words had the inexorable ring of an incantation.
And he kissed her again. Lost in passion, she yielded, just as desperate, just as starving, just as eager for fulfilment as he was, drowning in the heat of his mouth and her own incandescent responses.
‘You are so beautiful,’ he said against her throat. ‘I want to touch you, see you, take you.’
‘Yes.’ Although she whispered the word soundlessly, he heard it.
Slowly, so slowly that every cell in her body thrummed with expectation, he eased his big white T-shirt to one side so that he could kiss the place where her neck joined her shoulder.
At least she thought he was going to kiss it; when he nipped her there she shuddered at the exquisite sorcery of the exotic little caress.
On the rare occasions when she’d speculated about making love she’d always imagined that removing clothes had to be awkward and embarrassing, but Wolfe made it a seduction in itself; unhurriedly, his expression absorbed and serious, he eased the shirt over her head, kissing the pale skin his leisurely skill revealed until at last he looked down at the soft flushed skin of her breasts.
Tormented by the need for some unknown caress, they ached. Rowan felt the nipples bead into little nubs as sensation abraded them, a sensation that flamed to amalgamate with the fire building rapidly in the pit of her stomach.
All she could see in Wolfe’s dark face was that complete concentration, tanned skin tightening over his proud bone structure so that he looked like some mythic warrior.
When he lifted his eyes she gasped at the naked heat and desire she saw in their depths. A barely articulated noise in his throat echoed through her. She drew back fractionally, but he reached for her and crushed her mouth beneath his, and this time he didn’t stop when he broke the kiss but travelled further, until his seeking mouth found one of the aching peaks.
Rowan cried out, her fists clenching in his hair, holding the sweet, sharp torture closer. He suckled, gently at first and then more strongly as shivers racked her, turning her bones to jelly, sending messages of need and fierce surrender through every cell, messages that coalesced with white-hot speed at the centre of her desire.
Just how she got to the sofa she never remembered, but even as she registered the cushions across her back her skirt was being stripped from her, and with it her briefs.
For years Rowan had believed that Tony’s stalking had frozen her ability to feel desire, but occasionally in t
hat semi-conscious state between sleep and wakefulness she’d imagined making love to an unknown lover. Always in her dreams she’d been shy, embarrassed by the raw power of the process, unable to visualise what the faceless lover would do.
One glance at Wolfe had smashed through the shield she’d erected around herself, and now his hard-edged, autocratic face would be forever stamped on her fantasies, his disciplined grace would prowl for ever through her dreams.
She watched from beneath her lashes as he unbuttoned his shirt, lean brown hands working deftly. Slowly her gaze wandered across the tanned, sculptured torso, thrilling to the contrast between sleek tanned skin and the patterned whorls of fine hair.
Muscles flexing and bunching, he shrugged free of his shirt and dropped it. Like something out of a dream world, a place where the archetypes held true and heroes hunted dragons through the mountains, he looked down at her, sleek and magnificent and potent as some great beast of prey.
His hands dropped to his belt; he began to unbuckle it. Dry-mouthed, Rowan stared into the face of a conqueror—and caught a glimpse of her own unsuspected power, her own strength. Her wondering eyes snared by his, she lost herself in the golden, glinting galaxies that smouldered like stars in explosion.
Fool’s gold, she thought as her lashes drifted down, but the words echoed emptily, without resonance. She was stripped of any awareness except of the sensations rocketing through her.
Powerful and menacing as a thundercloud, yet pierced by light, Wolfe’s maleness demanded all that was female in her.
The sofa gave as he came down beside her. Lightning arced from his fingertip when he traced the shape of her lips, the high sweep of her cheekbones, the arch of her brows, and her lashes. ‘Look at me,’ he murmured huskily.
‘I burn up when I do,’ she mumbled.
He laughed beneath his breath. ‘And you think I don’t? Touching you is like riding the storm. Look at me.’
Obeying, she recognised the feral heat of passion in his skin, the glitter of it beneath his eyelids, its force in the mirthless smile curving his mouth.
‘Now touch me,’ he said quietly.