by Lynne Graham
His car stayed at the kerb until she stalked into the building and only then did she breathe again, filling her compressed lungs and shivering as though she had stepped out of a freezing snowstorm. She felt all shaken up, shaken up and stirred in a way she didn’t appreciate and almost hated him for.
The feel of his mouth on hers, the taste of it, the explosive charge of heat hurtling at breakneck speed down into her belly and spreading to other, more intimate places she never ever thought about. How dared he do that to her? She would lodge a complaint of sexual harassment! Didn’t he know what he was risking? But being Angel, he wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even stop to consider that he was playing with fire. Indeed, the knowledge would only energise and stimulate him because he loved to push the limits.
She curled up tight in her bed that night, overwhelmed by her first real experience of sexual temptation. When he kissed her she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. A kiss had never had that effect on her before and she was unnerved by the discovery that a kiss could be that influential. She toyed with the idea of complaining about sexual harassment, pictured Angel laughing fearlessly in the face of such a threat and finally decided that she didn’t want the embarrassment of that on her employment record. Particularly when such a claim would fail because she hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t given him an immediate rejection.
The next day she was very nervous going into work, but Angel didn’t do or say anything that was different and she was strangely irritated by that reality: that he could act as though he had never offered to take her home to bed for the night and, afterwards, simply treat her like everyone else. But those same moments of intimacy had carried a higher price for her. It was as though he had stripped away her tough outer layer and chipped her out of her cautious shell to ensure that she began feeling physical and emotional responses she had comfortably held at bay until she’d met him.
During the week that followed she was feverishly aware of Angel to a degree that sent her temperature rocketing. When he looked at her, it was as if a blast of concentrated heat lit her up inside and her bra would feel scratchy against her tender nipples and a dull ache would stir between her thighs, her every tiny reaction in his presence like a slap in the face that shamed her. It was a terrible destructive wanting that wouldn’t go away. He had lit the spark and she seemed stuck with the spread of the fire licking away at her nerves and her fierce pride.
At the end of that week, Angel asked her to stay behind after everyone else had left to go for drinks.
‘Next on the agenda...us,’ Angel murmured sibilantly.
Merry shot him a withering appraisal. ‘There is no us.’
‘Exactly,’ Angel pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Scratch the itch and it goes away and dies, ignore it and it festers.’
‘Your seduction vocabulary needs attention,’ Merry quipped, standing straight in front of him, grudging amusement dancing in her crystalline eyes.
Angel grimaced. ‘I don’t do seduction.’
‘I don’t do one-night stands.’
‘So if I make it dinner and sex I’m in with a chance?’ A sardonic ebony brow elevated.
‘No chance whatsoever,’ Merry contradicted with pleasure. ‘I’m a virgin and I’m not trading that for some sleazy night with my boss.’
‘A virgin?’ Angel was aghast. ‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously,’ Merry traded without embarrassment, reflecting on how her mother had fallen pregnant with her and determined to make every choice that took her in the opposite direction. ‘Sex should mean something more than scratching an itch.’
Angel sprang upright behind his desk, all supple, graceful motion, the fine, expensive fabric of his suit pulling taut over powerful thigh muscles and definable biceps. Her mouth ran dry, her eyes involuntarily clinging to his every movement. ‘It’s never been anything more for me,’ he admitted drily. ‘But I take offence at the word “sleazy”. I am never sleazy and... I don’t do virgins.’
‘Good to know,’ Merry breathed tightly, watching his shirt ripple ever so slightly over his muscular chest as he exhaled while cursing her intense physical awareness of him. ‘May I go home now?’
‘I’ll drop you back.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ she told him coolly.
‘I decide what’s necessary around here,’ Angel pronounced, throwing the door wide and heading for the lift. ‘You realise you’re as rare as a unicorn in my world? Are you holding out for marriage?’
Involuntarily amused by his curiosity, Merry laughed. ‘Of course not. I’m just waiting for something real. I’m not a fan of casual or meaningless.’
Angel lounged back fluidly against the wall of the lift, all naked predator and jungle grace. ‘I’m casual but I’m very real,’ he told her huskily, his deep dark drawl roughening and trickling down her taut spine like a spectral caress.
‘Oh, switch it off,’ Merry groaned. ‘We’re like salt and pepper except you can’t mix us.’
‘Because you’ve got too many rules, too many barriers. Why is that?’
‘Like you are actually interested?’ Merry jibed.
‘I am interested,’ Angel growled, dark golden eyes flashing as the lift doors sprang back. ‘I want you.’
‘Only because you can’t have me,’ Merry interposed drily, her skin coming up in gooseflesh as he flashed her a ferocious appraisal capable of flaying her skin from her bones. ‘That’s how basic you are.’
‘You’re becoming rude.’
‘Your persistence is making me rude,’ Merry told him.
‘I want to see your hair loose,’ Angel bit out impatiently. ‘It’s unusually long.’
‘My mother kept on cutting it short when I was little because it was easier to look after. Now I grow it because I can,’ she said truthfully, her stomach flipping as he shot a sudden charismatic smile at her, his lean, darkly beautiful face vibrant with amusement.
‘You’re a control freak,’ he breathed lazily. ‘Takes one to know one, glikia mou.’
‘That’s why we don’t get on,’ Merry pointed out.
‘We don’t get on because you have a very annoying sort of pious vibe going,’ Angel contradicted. ‘You’re smug.’
‘No, I’m not,’ she argued instantly as they crossed the half-empty car park.
‘You think you’re superior to me because you’re not at the mercy of your hormones...but you were when I touched you,’ Angel breathed, caging her in against the passenger door of his car, the heat of his lean, powerful body perceptible even through the inches separating them and the rich, evocative scent of husky male and exotic cologne filling her nostrils. His hands braced either side of her, not actually touching her quivering length, and her knees turned weak at the thought that he might touch her. ‘You can hardly breathe when I’m this close to you. I see that, I know that...every time I try to step back, it sucks me back in.’
He was like an impenetrable force field surrounding her. She knew she could push him away, she knew he wouldn’t fight, she knew he wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want him to do and a weird sense of unexpected power engulfed her. He was still coming back at her because he couldn’t resist the pull between them and she couldn’t resist it either. It was a weakness deep down inside her that she couldn’t suppress. Nobody had ever made her feel the way he was making her feel and that was a thrill on its own, a shot of adrenalin in her veins to match the feverish pound of her heartbeat. She wanted him. The knowledge ploughed through her like a battering ram, casting everything she had thought she knew about herself into a broken jumble of messy pieces.
‘You’re not my type,’ she whispered in dry-mouthed protest.
‘You’re not my type either,’ Angel admitted thickly. ‘But I’d still have sex in a car park with you any time you cared to ask.’
‘Not about to ask,’ Merry confided shakily. ‘Take me home...back off.’
‘You’re making a major production of this again,’ Angel accused, flashing his key fob to open
the car. ‘Stop doing that. It’s...it’s bizarrely unnerving.’
She climbed into his car in a daze, the throb between her legs angry and unsettling, the sensual smoulder in the air almost unbearable, every nerve ending painfully aware of it. She didn’t know how he did that using only words and looks. It was terrifying. He had wiped her mind clean, made her feel stuff she didn’t want to feel, rocked the foundations of her security.
‘I don’t like you,’ she admitted.
‘Thee mou...you don’t have to like me, you only have to want me...and you do.’
And it was agonisingly true, she registered in dismay. Her brain didn’t seem to have anything to do with the equation. She thoroughly disapproved of everything he was and yet the chemistry between them was wild and dominant.
‘We have one night together and sate the craving. Then we put it away and bury it,’ Angel intoned in a driven undertone.
‘I thought you didn’t do virgins.’
‘Evidently you were born to be my single exception.’
‘Is this an actual negotiation?’ Merry enquired incredulously.
‘We have to sort this out. You’re taking my mind off work,’ Angel complained. ‘I can’t handle watching you all day and fantasising about you all night. It’s bad for business.’
‘What’s in it for me?’ Merry whispered unevenly.
‘I’m superlative at sex.’
‘Oh...’ Her lashes fluttered, her tummy somersaulting again as she wondered if she really was about to do what he wanted her to do, what she herself wanted to do. And that was the answer there and then when she was least expecting to see or understand it.
He would make a great introduction to sex for her, she thought dizzily. It would end the insane craving he had awakened inside her and maybe then she could return to her normal tranquil self. That prospect had huge appeal for her. The need would be satisfied, the intolerable longing ended. All right, it wasn’t the big romance with hearts and flowers that she had dimly envisioned, but then possibly that had never been a very practical aspiration. What he was offering was basic and honest even if it was casual and uncommitted and everything she had once sworn she would never participate in. It was not as though she had been saving herself for a wedding ring. She had been saving herself for love, but love hadn’t happened.
‘So, you’re suggesting that I just use you,’ Merry remarked grittily as he pulled into another underground car park.
‘We use each other,’ Angel exhaled in a rush and, killing the engine, stretched out a long powerful arm to enclose her in almost the same moment.
His mouth crashed down on hers with a hunger that blew her away. Somehow he made it that she didn’t remember getting out of the car, didn’t remember getting into a lift or emerging from it. There was only that insane, greedy melding of their mouths and the frantic impatient activity of their hands in a dimly lit hall. Her coat fell off or maybe he helped it. His jacket disappeared at similar speed. She kicked off her shoes. He wrenched off his tie and cannoned into a door as he lifted her off her feet.
‘We have to slow down,’ he told her roughly, dark golden eyes shimmering like gold ingots, his sexual excitement patent. ‘Or I’ll screw this up for you.’
He laid her down on a wide, comfortable mattress and stood over her, stripping without inhibition. All she wanted was his mouth on hers again, that magical escape from the limits of her own body that sent her flying higher than she had ever known she could fly. He shed his trousers and her attention locked warily on the very obvious bulge in his boxers while she struggled to accept that she could, even briefly, be with a man who was chronically untidy and dropped clothes in a heap on the floor. Not her type, not her type; she rhymed it like a mantra inside her head, her bulwark against getting attached in any way. It was sex and she didn’t want to regard it as anything else.
He unzipped her dress and flipped her over to remove it with deft precision and release her bra, before pausing to carefully unsnap the clasp in her hair and let his skilled mouth roam across her pale shoulders. He tugged her round and up to him then, long fingers lifting to feather her curtain of dark coffee-coloured hair round her shoulders, thready shimmers of lighter caramel appearing in the light filtering in from the hall.
‘You have amazing hair,’ he muttered intently, gazing down into blue eyes as pale as an Arctic sky.
‘Is that a fetish of yours?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed, but that prissy little smile of yours turns me on no end,’ Angel confided, disconcerting her.
‘I do not have a prissy smile.’
‘Talking too much,’ Angel growled, crushing her ripe mouth beneath his again, running his hands down the sides of her narrow ribcage to dispose of her bra and let his hands rise to cup the small delicate mounds of her breasts.
As his thumbs grazed her sensitive nipples a gasp parted Merry’s lips, and when his hungry mouth followed there she fell back against the pillows and dug her fingers into his thick tangle of curls. Heat arrowed in stormy flashes right to her core, leaving her insanely conscious of how excited she was becoming. Her thighs pressed together, her hips dug into the mattress as she struggled to get a grip on herself, but it was as if her body were streaking ahead of her and no matter how hard she tried to catch it, she couldn’t.
He shifted position, ran his tongue down over her straining midriff to her navel, parted her from her knickers without her noticing, traced her inner thighs with a devil’s expertise until she was splayed out like a sacrifice. And then the flood of crazy pleasure came at her in breathless, jolting stabs that shocked and roused her to a level that was almost unbearable. She was shaken by what she was allowing him to do and how much her body craved it and how very little she could control her own reactions. She twisted and turned, hauled him back to her at one point and kissed him breathless, wanting, needing, trembling on the edge of something she didn’t understand.
The tight bands in her pelvis strained to hold in the wild searing shots of pleasure gripping her and then her control broke and she writhed in a wild frenzy of release. The sound of her own gasping cry startled her, her eyes flying wide, and Angel grinned shamelessly down at her like a very sexy pirate, a dark shadow of stubble merely accentuating his fantastic bone structure.
‘You’re staying the whole night,’ he told her thickly.
‘No,’ Merry muttered, head rolling back on the pillows as he crawled up her body like the predator he truly was. ‘Once it’s done, it’s over.’
‘You are so stubborn,’ Angel groaned in frustration, nipping up her slender throat to find her swollen lips again, teasing and tasting and letting his tongue plunge and twin with hers until she was beyond thought and argument again. He donned protection.
He eased into her slowly, very slowly, and impatience assailed her. She didn’t want or need to be treated like fine china that might shatter or like that rare unicorn he had mentioned. Her body was slick and eager again, the pulse at the heart of her racing with anticipation. She tilted under him, angling up her hips, and the invitation was too much for his control and he jerked over her and plunged deep. A brief burning sting of pain made her stiffen and gasp.
‘That’s your own fault,’ Angel growled in exasperation. ‘If you would just lie still.’
‘I’m not a blow-up doll.’
‘I was trying not to hurt you.’
‘I’m not breakable either,’ Merry argued, every skin cell on red alert as she felt her body slowly stretch to enclose his, tiny little shimmers of exquisite sensation flying through her as he began to move, hinting that the best was yet to come. ‘Don’t stop.’
And he didn’t. He sank deep into her with a shuddering groan of pleasure and the pace picked up, jolting her with waves of glorious excitement. She arched her body up, suddenly needy again, hungry again, marvelling at the limitless capacity of her body to feel more and yet more. But this time the climb to pleasure was slower and she writhed, blue eyes lighting up with impatience and a need
she had never expressed before. Her heart raced, her pulses pounded and that sweet, seductive throb of delight grew and grew inside her until she could contain it no longer. Every barrier dropped as her body exploded into an ecstatic climax that left her limp and stunned.
Angel released her from his weight but made a move to pull her under his arm and retain a hold on her. Quick as a flash Merry evaded him, her whole being bent on immediate escape. They had had sex but she didn’t want to hang around for the aftermath. Dignity, she told herself staunchly, dictated an immediate departure. She slid out of the other side of the bed, bending down to scoop up her discarded clothes.
‘I asked you to stay,’ Angel reminded her.
‘I’m going home,’ she said as he vaulted out of bed and headed into what she presumed was a bathroom, his lean, powerful body emanating impatience and annoyance in perceptible waves.
She would have liked a shower but she was determined not to linger. With a grimace, she pulled her clothes back on and was out in the hall cramming her feet back into her shoes and hurriedly calling a taxi when Angel reappeared, bronzed and still unashamedly naked in the bedroom doorway. ‘I don’t want you to leave.’
‘I’ve already ordered a taxi.’ Merry tilted her chin, her long hair streaming untidily round her flushed heart-shaped face. ‘We agreed and it’s better like this.’
‘I asked for one night—’
‘You can’t have everything your way,’ Merry declared flatly. ‘I enjoyed myself but all good things come to an end.’
Angel swore in Greek. ‘You drive me insane.’
‘What’s your problem? According to your forecast, we’re done and dusted now,’ she pointed out helplessly.
Yet for all her proud nonchalance in front of him, Merry travelled home in a daze of mounting panic. Back at her apartment she had to wait until the shower was free. She felt shell-shocked by what she had done. Her body ached but her brain ached almost as much, trying to rationalise the fleeting madness that had overtaken her. She tried to examine it from Angel’s unemotional point of view, but that didn’t work for her when her own emotions were throwing tantrums and storming about inside her as much as if she had killed someone. Done and dusted, forget about it now, she reminded herself doggedly. He had much more experience in such encounters than she had, had to know what he was talking about. The curiosity and that unnatural hunger had been satisfied and now it would all die a natural death and become an embarrassing memory that she’d never ever share with anyone, she told herself with determination.