Part-Time Father (Harlequin Presents)

by Sharon Kendrick

  Her breath came short and painfully from her lungs, catching the back of her throat to dry her already dehydrated lips as he drew her body closer, so that she could feel the solid length of each strong, muscular thigh as it moved enticingly against hers.

  ‘Harrison…’ It was meant to be a plea; it sounded like a prayer.

  He gave a soft, low laugh. ‘Yes, I know. So let’s show them, little temptress. Which brother you want so much it’s nearly killing you.’

  If her brain hadn’t been so befuddled by his proximity then warning bells would have sounded at those cold, clipped words, but the words had been accompanied by his completely enfolding her waist in his arms, and by his head falling to rest on hers.

  The magic of dance could bewitch you into believing what you wanted to believe, and this dance was more bewitching than any other, thought Kimberley as she drifted in time with him to the music. For within the outwardly decent boundaries of what constituted a slow dance there were many variations, which ranged from the innocent to the sensual…and this dance was profoundly, shockingly sensual. But not just sensual—Harrison danced with such skill that for a moment there even seemed to be tenderness mingled with the voluptuous pleasure of his touch.

  Or perhaps, thought Kimberley, she was confusing tenderness with propriety—they were, after all, in the middle of a dance-floor, exciting the interested looks of most of the county set—so he could hardly touch her with the undisguised passion he normally demonstrated towards her.

  She tried to tell herself to leave, yet she was reluctant to move her head from his shoulder, where the material of his jacket rubbed softly against her cheek. She forced herself to straighten up, but that was even worse—she would have to confront those narrow grey eyes which gleamed with some unspoken message.

  ‘Are you going to let me go now?’ she whispered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll struggle.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Scream, then.’

  ‘I’ll kiss you.’

  ‘Oh, Harrison—why are you doing this?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ he asked softly.

  She closed her eyes to shut out that speculative grey gleam. She tried to imagine how she would behave if Harrison were some tiresome executive she was dealing with. Reason might work.

  She opened her eyes again, wondering what it was she read in the spark of those enigmatic eyeswas it humour, or challenge? Whichever—it made no difference. She put on her calmest voice. ‘You’re a very attractive man, Harrison——’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve noticed.’

  He’d deliberately misinterpreted her. ‘What I mean is that there must be countless women in this room who are dying to dance with you—do you really have to resort to these caveman-like tactics?’

  ‘It seems that with you I do,’ he said softly, and his eyes glittered. ‘Besides, I don’t want to dance with anyone else. Just you.’

  She forced herself to remember that the words meant nothing. This was just a different approach to settling that ‘unfinished business’ he’d spoken about. And it seemed that reason was totally ineffective against such a determined and singleminded man as Harrison. Plain speaking might work.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to dance with you,’ she said decisively, marvelling to herself that lying could be this easy. ‘So can we please stop this nonsense right now?’

  With her question she gave a little shake of her head, and as she did so a lock of hair tumbled free and fell on to her mouth—which was sticky with scarlet gloss—and stayed there.

  Immediately he lifted a finger and pulled it away from her lips, staring at her for a long moment with hard and brilliant eyes, and suddenly his whole demeanour altered. The soft, languid grace which had characterised his dancing up until then disappeared, and instead she saw him tense, his body become rigid, and as it did so his face acquired a taut and flinty look to it.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said harshly. ‘This “nonsense”, as you so sweetly put it, has been going on for too damned long.’ And, so saying, he clasped her hand firmly in his and led her off the dance-floor, through the crowds of dancers, past the curious eyes of the onlookers and out into the hall.

  Kimberley looked around her wildly, waiting for someone to challenge him, stop him—to quit behaving as if it were perfectly normal for a man to drag a girl behind him as if they were still living in the Stone Age.

  But no one did anything other than smile indulgently as Harrison led her through a series of rooms, until at last they were in the library.

  She supposed she could have stopped him herself; she didn’t ask herself why she hadn’t until afterwards, and by then it was too late. She could have stopped him at any time, especially once they entered the realms of total fantasy, when he pulled aside a crimson velvet curtain to expose a wooden panel which, when touched, slid silently aside to reveal a spiral staircase. He pulled her inside before the panel slid shut to enclose them.

  It was ridiculous, crazy—like something out of the adventure stories she’d read as a child—but still she kept her hand meekly in his, saying nothing, not even when the staircase terminated in a room at what was obviously the very top of the house.

  And she couldn’t even pretend surprise when she saw that it was a bedroom.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KIMBERLEY snatched her hand out of Harrison’s, and this time he made no demur, just let her.

  She stared up at him, dark and tall and forbidding in the stark black dinner jacket and the slim-cut tapered trousers. His dark hair was very slightly ruffled—had she done that? she thought suddenly. Hadn’t her fingers crept up to run themselves luxuriously through his hair during that dance? His eyes had an almost luminous brilliance as they studied her, waiting for her next movebut grey was essentially a cold colour, she reminded herself, and Harrison’s eyes were well suited to his nature.

  She realised that she had been expecting him to take her into his arms, confident that once he had begun to touch her there would be no argument from her about what he had in mind—and it was pretty obvious just what he had in mind. After all, you didn’t bring a woman into a room with a huge double bed and little else if you wanted to talk about the weather!

  ‘You’re smiling,’ he observed. ‘What’s amused you?’

  ‘You have,’ she answered coolly.

  ‘Oh?’ A black eyebrow lifted elegantly upwards.

  ‘I had expected a little more subtlety from you. Does it usually work—this approach?’

  ‘And what approach is that?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Dragging a woman into the nearest bedroom.’

  ‘It isn’t the nearest,’ he pointed out infuriatingly. ‘But it’s the one where I can guarantee we won’t be disturbed.’

  His words, deep and sensual, full of some sweet, sexual promise, sent a reluctant shiver down her spine. ‘You’re assuming a lot, aren’t you?’ She was amazed at how calm, how controlled she sounded, just as if she was the kind of woman who was frequently being propositioned like this.

  ‘Am I? Don’t you like the room?’

  Dark woods and crimson hangings, a bedcovering of gold and deep bright hues; it looked medieval—and so did Harrison, she realised, for he had unknotted and removed his bow-tie and was now in the process of draping his jacket over the back of a chair. Positively medieval, she thought, her mouth drying as she stood watching him. But it wasn’t the clothes that made him look that way, it was that whole masculine and arrogant stance— the total lack of pretence. He wanted her, and…and…

  ‘Would you have preferred the women’s magazine guide to seduction?’ he queried. ‘The romantic, candle-lit dinner followed by the stilted offer of a nightcap? The soft music and the grappling on the sofa?’ He smiled. It was a cold smile. ‘Such a bore, don’t you think?’

  ‘You cynic,’ she said disbelievingly.

  ‘But no hypocrite,’ he parried softly.

  The most unbelievable thing was that she was actua
lly continuing the conversation, actually enjoying the mental sparring in a perverse sort of way, instead of turning round and fleeing from him. ‘Do you do this sort of thing very often?’

  Her cool query seemed to surprise him. ‘Never.’

  ‘So what makes me different?’

  Only one tiny fragment of her mind acknowledged what she wanted him to say—that he loved her, that she was the only woman in the world for him. But of course he didn’t say it. Because, in his own words, he was no hypocrite. Nor a liar.

  ‘You know why,’ he said softly. ‘Because you’re a fire in my blood which refuses to be dampened. You know that. It can’t go on like this. I can’t go on like this any more. We have to have this one night together.’

  One night. That was all he offered. No, he was certainly no hypocrite. She shook her head and made to turn away, but then he did touch her, catching her lightly by the shoulders to turn her to face him, and she revelled in the feel of him, almost as much as she reluctantly thrilled to the burning brilliance of his eyes.

  He stared down at her, the intensity which hardened his features making his face seem like granite come to life. ‘Tell me you haven’t thought of me these last two years, Kimberley, and I’ll call you a liar,’ he whispered softly. ‘Tell me you haven’t tossed in your bed at night, reliving that very first kiss and wanting me to kiss you again but this time not to stop. I want you, Kimberley—God, help me—I want you as I’ve never wanted a woman before.’

  She recoiled even as she was enthralled by the stark statements. Hating him, yet wanting him, too. ‘But I don’t even like you…’ she said brokenly.

  His eyes hardened into slivers of grey metal. ‘I know that. You’ve made that abundantly clear. But liking has nothing to do with us—or this. This…’ And he shuddered as his mouth sought hers.

  It was the end—or the beginning, whichever way she cared to look at it, and she couldn’t even pretend that he’d forced his lips on hers because he hadn’t. She had turned her face up to his eagerly and of her own volition, entranced by that raw and harsh entreaty.

  He kissed her hard, passionately—not even bothering to disguise the depths of his ardour—and she kissed him back in kind, opening her mouth to him like a flower to the morning sun. She knew one brief moment when she tried to tell herself that it was not too late. That if she pulled away now and walked out of that door he would not stop her. But she knew she would not walk away, for he had spoken nothing but the truth to her. She had thought about him, tossed in bed, dreamt of him and wanted him, like this.

  And what was he offering her? Very little. One night—nothing more. To damp the fire in his veins; to free him from the curse of wanting her. So might it not do the same for her? Leave her free to lead a normal life, instead of existing in the self-imposed isolation she’d sought because Harrison had haunted her mind and her senses for so long?

  He broke away and, incredibly, he was smiling. A sweet, soft smile, more insidiously enticing than the hard, heated pressure of his body, and Kimberley found herself smiling back, forgetting everything but the pleasure of the night to come.

  ‘You’re so beautiful, Kimberley,’ he whispered softly. ‘So very beautiful, with your hair as black as the night itself and your face pale as a moonbeam.’

  But she had to put a stop to this; he was telling her everything she wanted to hear, but she was in danger of reading more than he intended into his soft words of seduction. She wound her arms around his neck, pressed her body sinuously close to his, her mouth against his ear. ‘Isn’t that starting to sound like the women’s magazine guide to seduction?’ she whispered huskily, echoing his own words of earlier. ‘And didn’t you say you found that boring?’

  For a moment she felt him stiffen and grow rigid beneath her touch, and then it was gone and he pushed her away from him, his face a series of hard, unreadable planes and shifting shadows, the eyes now less brilliant than opaque. ‘Boring?’ His hand slid round to the back of her dress and slid the zip down in one fluid movement. ‘Sweetheart, the last thing you’re going to be tonight is bored.’

  The dress pooled around her ankles with a silken whisper, but Kimberley’s heart beat a little faster— not at the exultant look of pleasure which hooded his eyes as she stood before him wearing nothing but her underclothes but at the almost cruel indefinable note in his voice as he made that last statement.

  A small sound escaped his lips as his gaze devoured her, and, strangely, she wasn’t shy. She liked it. Liked seeing that hungry, almost awestruck look on his face. He was, she realised, with a sudden flash of insight, as much at her mercy as she was at his. Uncaring of her semi-nakedness, she stood before him in her scarlet silk and lace until he took her into his arms.

  She felt that he was quite fierce with excitement—kissing her on a long sigh, his hand moving up to unclip her hair so that it spilt in streams of black satin over her pale shoulders. With slow, sure fingers he massaged her back, gradually moving his hand round—but taking forever to reach her breast. And then it was her turn to make a helpless little throaty assertion, to shudder as his fingers traced tiny circles closer and closer to the nipple, until they both grew impatient with the costly bra, and he moved his hand round to her back, unclipped it with a single movement, so that her breasts fell out and against him, and the soft mounds were crushed against his chest.

  He moved her away from him, studied both the pale, swollen globes so that they tightened almost unbearably under his lingering scrutiny, then bent his head and began to suckle at one tingling erect nipple. A sharp dart of pleasure pulled deeply at her womb.

  ‘Harrison!’ she whispered helplessly. Stop this, she wanted to say, though she was powerless to say it as she glanced down at his dark head at her breast. She hadn’t known…No one had told her…That it was going to be this intimate, this beautiful…this special.

  He kissed her while he removed his own clothes, one by one. Instead of feeling embarrassed, as his magnificent body was gradually revealed, Kimberley felt instead a mixture of heady pleasure and anticipation—for hadn’t she lived this scenario in her dreams, a thousand times over?

  He kissed her while he unbuttoned his shirt, and she helped him take it off, eager to feel the silk of his bare skin against her fingertips, and as she slid her hands down to rest against the hair-roughened chest she heard him make a small sound of delight as he deepened the kiss still further.

  His ardour fuelled hers, so that she let him push her down on to the softness of the silken rug.

  He kissed her from mouth to breast, over and over again. His lips found her eyelids, her cheeks, her shoulders, the tiny warm, soft crook of her elbow, and each of these he kissed, anointing her with the soft caress of his mouth.

  She saw the brilliance in the grey eyes as he knelt over her, before his mouth began to explore her body, to seek out every centimetre as if he were paying homage. His tongue found the dip of her navel and her head fell back as he began to trace a wet path to her panties. And then she waited, her apprehension only surpassed by her breathless anticipation of what he was going to do next.

  He hooked his fingers at the edge of the flimsy little garment and tore the delicate scarlet lace apart with a gentle ripping sound, and the thought of his scant disregard for the expensive piece of underwear sent her trembling anew with excitement.

  She saw him smile as the discarded garment fell unnoticed to the floor and his gaze fell to the lush, creamy bloom of her naked body. She gasped with shocked excitement as he pushed her thighs gently apart with his fingers and dipped his head to kiss the soft fuzz of hair.

  ‘No,’ she begged him, but her body was trembling with delight.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he whispered, before his tongue found that aching, delicate spot and he started to lick her with slow, pleasurable sweeps of his tongue, over and over again, until she realised that he was taking her down a path from which there could be no return.

  ‘No!’ she said again, on a broken note of protest, but it
was already too late, and she moved with disbelief as she felt waves of pure pleasure tantalise her, rock her, until they finally engulfed her and she exploded against his mouth, sobbing as he caught her and pulled her into his arms.

  She felt helpless, hopeless, vulnerable, shaking in his arms as her climax subsided, and he soothed her by stroking her all over again, until the delicious warmth began to build up once more, and Kimberley began to play with his nipples, to suckle them exactly as he had hers.

  She looked up once and stole a glance at him. He had his eyes closed, a look of such exquisite rapture on his face that she grew bolder, her fingers moving down to touch him as intimately as he had touched her, and her breath caught in her throat with the pleasure of her first touch…Oh, it was enchanting to be able to touch him like this.

  She felt him shudder beneath her fingers as she experimentally began to stroke him, waiting until he grew more and more aroused, then, wanting to taste him as he had tasted her, she bent her head, took the potent fullness of him in her mouth… She heard him give a groan of pleasure before she felt herself being gently but decisively moved away, and he scooped her up to lie on top of him.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Oh,’ she protested.

  He laughed. ‘Did you happen to read up a textbook about every man’s ideal fantasy woman? Because, if so, I think maybe you might have skipped a chapter, my sweet. I don’t want any substitute—not this first time. I’ve dreamt about this far too long to want anything other than the real thing, Kimberley. You.’

  ‘But you did it to me,’ she pointed out. ‘So why not?’