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impossible with the way she was clinging to him.

      ‘Vivienne,’ he said a bit brusquely.

      Her head lifted, her tear-stained face no less beautiful, her lovely green eyes searching his with a strange intensity. And then she did something which shocked him. She planted her hands on his shoulders, reached up on tiptoe and kissed him full on the mouth. When he jerked his head backwards, her hands fell away and she sank back down on her heels, her face crumpling.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she choked out. ‘I thought...I thought...Oh, it doesn’t matter what I thought. Obviously I was wrong.’ And she staggered back from him, her shoulders slumping, her eyes wretchedly unhappy.

      ‘No. You thought right, Vivienne. I’ve been struggling with my desire for you since I saw you naked in that bath yesterday. It’s come as a surprise to me, I admit, but I want you, and I’d like to take you to bed more than anything. But not like this, Vivienne.’

      She lifted startled eyes to his. ‘What do you mean, not like this?’

      Jack sighed as he pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head. ‘Your kiss just now. It wasn’t for me, not really. It was just a reaction to your close call with death. An instinctive wish to feel still alive.’

      ‘No,’ she denied quite fiercely. ‘That isn’t true. It was for you.’

      Jack stared at her, shock rendering him speechless.

      ‘I’m not sure I understand this sudden sexual attraction I have for you any more than you understand yours for me,’ she swept on. ‘Since we’re being brutally honest here, till yesterday I never even liked you, let alone fancied you. It was weird, the way I started having these wicked thoughts about you.’

      ‘What kind of wicked thoughts?’ he asked her.

      Vivienne shook her head. ‘I...I’ve tried to work them out because they don’t make sense. All I know is that I want you to make love to me. Very much so.’

      Jack did his best to stay cool. Despite dying to put her words to the test, he suspected that if he wanted any kind of relationship with Vivienne—as opposed to just a quickie—then he needed to show some sensitivity to her present, highly vulnerable state. If he rushed her into bed right at this moment—there was a king-sized one in the nearby master bedroom, he recalled—she might regret it afterwards. At the same time, the temptation to do just that was almost irresistible.

      ‘Hell, Vivienne, you shouldn’t say things like that.’

      ‘Why not? It’s true. Crazy, perhaps, but true.’

      He didn’t like the ‘crazy’ bit.

      ‘Kiss me, Jack,’ she begged. ‘Please.’

      Oh God, he thought as his groin twitched painfully. ‘If I kiss you, I won’t stop at kissing,’ he told her bluntly.

      She didn’t say a word, just closed her eyes and parted her lips in the most provocative fashion.

      Jack groaned, then pulled her back into his arms—hard—his head swooping down at the same time.

      It was not a tender or loving kiss. It was rough and ravaging, his hands lifting to hold her face solidly captive so there was no escape from his merciless assault on her mouth.

      Not that she tried to escape; Vivienne moaned her surrender the moment his lips crashed down on hers. Her body melted against his, the soft swell of her stomach pressing against his erection. This only inflamed Jack further, his teeth nipping and tugging at her lips until they felt swollen and hot. She gasped when he ran his tongue over their burning surfaces, moaning when at last his tongue darted deep into her mouth.

      Jack’s gut tightened when her lips closed tightly around him, sucking him in even deeper. He immediately started imagining what it would be like when she did that to other parts of his body. Which she would at some stage, he was sure. Although a cool character on the surface, Vivienne was obviously a wildly passionate woman underneath. A woman who liked sex and needed it. The perfect candidate to become his lover. Or even girlfriend, if that was what she wanted. He didn’t much care, as long as he could have her in his bed on a regular basis.

      When he tore his mouth away from hers, she moaned again, her green eyes glazed when they opened to stare dazedly up at him.

      ‘Don’t say a word,’ he bit out. ‘I’m not stopping altogether. Just till I get a couple of things straight.’

      She didn’t say a word. He suspected she was almost beyond talking, a fact he found rather flattering.

      ‘I don’t want this to be just a one-night stand,’ he said. ‘Or should I say, a one-day stand. I like you, Vivienne. Very much so. I want more from you than that. Tell me now if this idea doesn’t appeal to you, then I won’t start making plans for afterwards. If you say you don’t like me enough to consider a relationship with me, then after this once, we’ll have to go our separate ways. Because once we cross this line, sweetheart, there will be no working together unless we’re sleeping together.’

      Jack hoped Vivienne didn’t see his ultimatum as a form of sexual harassment, or even blackmail. He was just telling her as it was. He wasn’t her boss. Yet. But by God he wanted to be, especially in the bedroom.

      Hot images danced in his head of her obeying his every command and demand; of her going down on him wherever and whenever he wanted; of her being tied naked to various pieces of furniture, totally at his mercy. All silly fantasies, he suspected. Because, as passionate as Vivienne seemed to be, she wasn’t the submissive type. Though who knew? Maybe she would enjoy being dominated in the bedroom.

      His earlier fierce arousal, which had subsided somewhat with his talking, came back with a vengeance.

      ‘You don’t need to give me your answer right now,’ he ground out to a still silent but flushed Vivienne. ‘Afterwards will do.’ Unable to wait another second, Jack swept her up into his arms and headed for the master bedroom. When his sunglasses fell off the back of his head in the process, he didn’t bother to stop and pick them up.

       CHAPTER TEN

      VIVIENNE’S HEAD WHIRLED with conflicting thoughts as she clamped her hands around Jack’s neck and burrowed her face into the base of his throat. What remained of her sense of decency demanded that she stop him right now. She liked Jack somewhat better than she had, but to have sex with him wasn’t right—surely?

      But the voice of decency wasn’t nearly as powerful as the voice of desire. It obliterated and overwhelmed all objections with its promise of excitement and pleasure. Jack’s impassioned kiss had given her a taste of what was to come. Not just excitement and pleasure, but abandonment and satisfaction. The kind of abandonment which she’d always secretly craved. The kind of satisfaction which she’d never really enjoyed.

      Somehow, Vivienne knew that in Jack’s arms she would become a different woman from the one who’d kept her virginity until she was twenty-one, and who’d remained a shy, timid lover in the years since that first, uninspiring initiation into sex. With Jack, she would be wild and wanton. Maybe even wicked. Already her lips were opening to kiss his neck. Though it wasn’t a kiss for long, more of a slow, sensual sucking at his skin, her heartbeat quickening at the sheer audacity of her action.

      When he groaned and tipped his head to one side, her mouth clamped him more tightly, as if she were some rabid vampire.

      This time he wrenched his head away before setting her down abruptly in the middle of a large room, which was devoid of all furniture except for a huge bed, which looked new, its striped red-and-white bedding totally at odds with the pale blue shag-pile carpet and faded floral wallpaper. The air in the room was a little musty but surprisingly warm, probably because the sliding glass doors which led out onto the east-facing balcony would have caught the morning sun. Jack left her to go over and open one of those doors before turning and shaking his head at her.

      ‘Do

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