LITMIR.BIZ

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him into the suite of rooms he had been assigned. He wondered for a moment if she was going to follow him all the way into his office but she perched her neat bottom on one of the seats in the currently unattended reception area and idly leafed through a magazine.

      Sam came out wearing theatre scrubs and handed her his shirt. Lexi took it from him and tried to ignore the fact that it was still warm from his body. She wanted to hold it up to her nose to smell his particular male smell but she could hardly do that in front of him. It was perhaps a little foolish of her, sentimental perhaps, but she had never forgotten his wonderful male smell. He hadn’t been one for using expensive aftershaves. He had smelt of good clean soap and a supermarket-brand shampoo that had reminded her of cold, crisp apples.

      Lexi put the magazine down. ‘Look, all other things aside, I just wanted to say thank you for all that you’re doing for my sister.’

      ‘It’s fine,’ he said, his granite face back on. ‘It’s what I do.’

      The silence stretched and stretched like an elastic band pulled to its capacity.

      Lexi couldn’t stop looking at him. It was as if her gaze was drawn by a force she had no control over. She longed to know what was going on behind the unreadable screen of his dark eyes. Was he thinking of the time they had spent together? Did he ever think of it? Did he regret walking away from her without saying goodbye? Why had he gone so abruptly? She had thought he was different from other men. He had seemed deeper and more sensitive, more emotionally available. Or had that all been a ploy on his part to get her into his bed as quickly and as often as he could? It had certainly worked. She had held nothing back from him physically. Emotionally she had been a little more guarded because she’d been worried about revealing how insecure she’d felt as a person. She’d known how unattractive that was for most men. He, like all the other men she had met, had been attracted to her as Lexi the confident and outgoing party-loving social butterfly. She hadn’t felt comfortable revealing how much of an act it had been to compensate for the deep insecurities that had plagued her. How being surrounded by people had stopped her thinking about how lonely she’d felt deep inside. She had wanted to wait until she was a little more confident that their relationship had a future before she revealed that side of herself. But he clearly hadn’t been thinking about their future. His sights had been solely focussed on his own.

      ‘Alexis.’ There was a note of warning in his voice.

      ‘Please don’t call me that,’ she said. ‘I know why you’re doing it but please don’t.’

      He turned and walked behind the reception desk, the action reminding Lexi of a soldier going back into the trenches. He fiddled with the computer for a moment before he spoke in a casual tone that belied the tension she could see in the square set of his broad shoulders. ‘I didn’t realise you hated your name so much.’

      ‘I don’t hate my name,’ she said. ‘It’s just I can’t get used to you calling me anything but Lexi.’

      He stopped fiddling and turned, his gaze colliding with hers. ‘Will you stop it, for pity’s sake?’

      ‘Stop what?’ she asked.

      ‘You know damn well what.’

      ‘I don’t know what.’

      His hands went into fists by his sides. ‘Yes, you do.’

      ‘You mean acknowledging you?’ she asked, coming to stand in front of him. ‘Stopping to talk to you in the corridor or on the fire escape? Treating you like a person, that sort of thing?’

      ‘You probably staged the coffee thing to get me alone,’ he bit out.

      Lexi glared at him in affront. ‘You think I would waste a perfectly good double-strength soy latte on you?’ she asked.

      His frown closed the gap between his chocolate-brown eyes. ‘That shirt cost me seventy US dollars,’ he said through clenched teeth.

      She put her hands on her hips. ‘If that’s so then you need some serious help when you go shopping, country boy,’ she tossed back.

      ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

      She gave her head a toss. ‘Call me if you want a style advisor,’ she said. ‘I have connections.’

      He glared at her broodingly. ‘You think I need help dressing?’

      No, but I would love to undress you right now, Lexi thought. She reared back from her traitorous thoughts like a bolting horse suddenly facing a precipitous drop. What on earth was the matter with her? Her fiancé was working hard in a remote and dangerous part of a foreign country and here she was betraying him with her wayward thoughts about a man she should have put out of her mind years ago. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You need to buy quality, not quantity. That shirt is not stain-resistant. For just fifty dollars more you could have bought a stain- and crease-resistant one.’

      ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he said as he rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation.’

      Lexi headed for the door. ‘I’ll get this non-stain-resistant, non-crease-resistant shirt back to you as soon as I can but if the stain doesn’t come out don’t blame me.’

      ‘Careful not to break a fingernail doing it,’ he muttered.

      Lexi stomped back behind the reception desk, right into his body space, eyes glaring, cheeks hot with anger. ‘What did you say?’ she asked.

      He looked down at her from his height advantage, dark eyes glittering, jaw clenched, mouth flat. ‘You heard.’

      She stepped forward half a step and stabbed a finger at his rock-hard chest. ‘I might be just an empty-headed party girl with nothing better to do than paint my nails in between organising the next shindig, but this unit, your unit, would not be able to do even half of what it does without my help,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should think about that next time you want to fling an insult my way.’

      Suddenly the distance Lexi had been so determined to keep between them had closed significantly. She felt a current of energy pass from his body to hers. It was like receiving a pulse of high-voltage electricity through her fingertip. She felt it run all the way up her arm until her whole body was tingling. She felt the shockingly traitorous drumbeat of desire between her thighs. It was a primitive pulse she could not control. The proximity of his hard male body had jolted hers into a state of acute feminine awareness. She could feel every pore of her skin dilating in anticipation. The hairs on the back of her neck rose and danced. A shiver ran down her spine and then pooled at the base, melting her bones and ligaments until she wasn’t sure what was keeping her upright. She looked into his eyes, those gorgeous sleep-with-me-right-now-and-be-damned-with-the-consequences eyes and her heart gave an almighty stammer.

      He felt it too.

      The air was vibrating with the heat of their past sexual history. Every moment she had spent in his arms seemed to have assembled and joined them in his office. Every steaming kiss, every smouldering slide of a hand over her breasts or thighs, every blistering caress that had left her senses spinning like a top.

      Every heart-stopping orgasm.

      She quickly pulled her hand away from his chest, stepping back blindly. ‘I—I have to go …’

      She was almost out of the door when he spoke. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

      Lexi turned back, her heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings as she met his dark satirical gaze. In his hand was his stained shirt. She hadn’t even registered she had dropped it. She stalked back over to him, her mouth set in a grimly determined line. She tried to pluck it from his hand but his other hand came from nowhere and came down on hers, trapping her.

      Her breath stopped.

      Her heart raced.

      Her stomach folded when she looked at his darkly tanned hand covering her lighter-toned one.

      Her

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