LITMIR.BIZ

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for a while it had been flamed into insignificance in the heat of their passion.

      His body was rigid with tension, his shoulders like concrete beneath her fingers. They were both shaking, but as he entered her she felt some of the tightness leave his body as if he too felt the wild, exhilarating rightness that surged through her. Her arms were locked around his neck, their foreheads touching, and the feel of his breath on her cheek, his skin, was almost enough to make her come. Her body shivered and burned, but fiercely she held back, tightening her muscles around him, holding on like a woman in danger of drowning.

      With a moan he slid his arms beneath her back, gathering her up and pulling her hard against his chest as he sat up. Sophie wrapped her legs around his waist, and the increase in pressure was enough to tip her over the edge. She let go, arching backwards and gasping as her orgasm ripped through her.

      He held her, waiting until it had subsided before pulling her back into his arms and burying his face in her neck. She could feel him inside her still, and slowly she rotated her pelvis, stroking his hair, holding him tightly until he stiffened and cried out her name.

      Together they collapsed back onto the bed. Cradling his head against her breasts, Sophie stared up into the darkness and smiled.

      CHAPTER TWO

      KIT woke suddenly, his body convulsing with panic.

      It took a few seconds for reality to reassert itself. It was light—the cool, bluish light of an English morning, and the sheets were clean and smooth against his skin. Sophie was lying on her side, tucked into his body, one hand flat on his chest, over his frantically thudding heart.

      The fact that he wasn’t actually walking along a dust track towards a bridge with a bomb beneath it told him he must have slept. After a hundred and fifty-four largely sleepless nights it felt like a small miracle.

      He shifted position slightly so he could look into Sophie’s sleeping face, stretching limbs that had stiffened from being still for so long. His heart squeezed. God, she was so lovely. The summer had brought out a faint sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and put a bloom into her creamy cheeks. Or maybe that was last night. The erection he’d woken up with intensified as he remembered, and he looked at her mouth. Her top lip with its steep upwards sweep and pronounced Cupid’s bow was slightly swollen from his kisses.

      It was also curved into the faintest and most secretive of smiles.

      Deeply asleep, she looked serene and self-contained, as if she was travelling through wonderful places where he could

      never hope to follow, full of people he didn’t know. No godforsaken, mine-strewn desert roads for her, he thought bleakly.

      The light filtering through the narrow gap in the curtains gleamed on her smooth bare shoulder and cast a halo around her hair. Picking up a silken strand, he wound it lazily around his finger, thinking back to one of the last times he had lain here beside her and asked her to marry him.

      What a fool. What a selfish, stupid fool.

      Anything could have happened. He thought of Lewis’s girlfriend; her terrified eyes and her swollen stomach. We don’t even know each other that well … If he’s … injured, I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? What if it had been him instead of Lewis? They’d only had three weeks together. Three weeks. How could he have expected Sophie to stand by him for a lifetime when he barely knew her?

      The gleaming lock of hair fell back onto her creamy shoulder, but he left his hand there, holding it in front of his face and stretching his fingers. They shook slightly, prickling with pins and needles, and he curled them into a fist, squeezing hard.

       Harder.

      The bones showed white beneath his sun-darkened skin and pain flared through the stretched tendons, but it didn’t quite manage to drive away the numbness, or stop the slide-show that was replaying itself in his head again. The heat shimmering over the road, the hard sun glinting off windows in the buildings above. That eerie silence. The way everything had seemed to slip into slow motion, as if it were happening underwater. His hands trembling uncontrollably; the wire cutters slipping through his nerveless fingers as the voice in his earpiece grew more urgent, telling him that a sniper had been spotted …

      And then the gunshots.

      He sat up, swearing under his breath. Dragging a hand

      over his face, he winced as he caught a scab that had begun to form on one of the cuts across his cheekbone.

      He was home, and back with Sophie. So why did it feel as if he were still fighting, and further away from her than ever?

      Sophie stopped in the kitchen doorway.

      Kit was sitting at the table with the pile of letters that had come while he’d been away, drinking coffee. He was wearing jeans but no shirt, and his skin was tanned to the colour of mahogany. Sophie’s stomach flipped.

      ‘Hi.’

      Oh, dear. Having leapt out of bed almost as soon as she opened her eyes, brushed her teeth like a person on speeded-up film and even slapped a bit of tinted moisturiser onto her too-pale cheeks before running downstairs, it was ridiculous that that was all she could manage. Hi. And in a voice that was barely more than a strangled whisper.

      He looked up. The morning light showed up the mess of cuts and bruising on his face, making him look battered and exhausted and beautiful.

      ‘Hi.’

      ‘So you are real,’ she said ruefully, going across to fill the kettle. ‘I thought I might have dreamed it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d done that while you’ve been gone—dreamed about you so vividly that waking up was like saying goodbye all over again.’ She stopped, before she said any more and gave herself away as being a terrifying, crazy, obsessive fiancée. To make it sound as if she were joking she asked, ‘Did they let you off a day early for good behaviour?’

      ‘Unfortunately not.’ He put down the letter he was reading and pushed a hand through his hair. It was still wet from the shower, but she could see that it had been lightened by the sun, giving the kind of tawny streaks only the most expensivehairdressers could produce. ‘A man in my unit was badly injured yesterday. I flew home with him.’

      ‘Oh, Kit, I’m so sorry.’ Filled with contrition for thinking such shallow thoughts, Sophie went over to stand beside him. ‘How is he?’

      ‘Not good.’

      His voice was flat, toneless, and he looked down at the letter again, as if the subject was closed. On the other side of the kitchen the kettle began its steam-train rattle. Sophie touched his cheekbone with her fingertips.

      ‘What happened?’ she said softly. ‘Was it an explosion?’

      For a moment he said nothing, but she saw his eyelids flicker, as if he was remembering something he didn’t want to remember; reliving something he didn’t want to relive.

      ‘Yes …’

      His forehead creased into a sudden frown of pain and for a second she thought he was going to say more. But then the shutters descended and he looked up at her with a cool smile that was more about masking emotion than conveying it.

      Sophie pulled out the chair beside him and sat down, turning to face him. ‘How badly hurt is he?’

      ‘It’s hard to tell at the moment,’ he said neutrally. ‘It looks like he’ll live, but it’s too early to say how bad his injuries will be.’ His smile twisted. ‘He’s only nineteen.’

      ‘Just a boy,’ she murmured. The kettle boiled in a billow of steam and hissed into silence. Aching for him, Sophie took his hand between hers, feeling the hard skin on the undersides of his fingers, willing him to open up to her. ‘It’s good that you stayed with him. It must have made a huge difference to him, having you there, and to his family, knowing that someone was looking after him …’

      She trailed

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