LITMIR.BIZ

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again.

      And maybe that was a good thing, she rationalised. Yes, head-banging, uninhibited sex was good—it was pretty excellent—but so was waking up with someone who actually cared for you, or for that matter was physically still there in the morning.

      Refusing to acknowledge the sense of loss that still lay like a heavy weight in her chest, she reminded herself that she was looking, or she would be when the time came, for more in a man than his knowledge of the female anatomy... Hell, clumsy with feeling was infinitely preferable to the refined torture of a skilled touch with no emotion behind it.

      ‘How long has it been?’ he asked coolly.

      ‘I’m not sure,’ she lied, thinking, Eighteen months, eight days and thirty-one minutes...not that I’m counting.

      She stiffened when without warning he bent his head and brushed her mouth lightly with his. His lips were warm, reminding her of when they had been even warmer, when he had tasted of her... The muscles low on her pelvis cramped as she stood as still as a statue, fighting with all her might the shameful urge to lean in and kiss him back.

      The gasp she locked in her throat ached as she breathed in the warm male scent of him through flared nostrils.

      It wasn’t until he lifted his head that she realised she was holding his sleeve, though she had no memory of grabbing it. Disturbing, but there was no point reading too much into it, she decided as she let it casually fall away, ignoring the tingling sensation in her fingertips.

      Nik smiled. The quiver he’d felt run through her body as he’d kissed her reminded him of just how receptive she’d been that night...how giving she’d been. And he’d taken... He countered the irrational slug of guilt with a reminder that she was the one who had taken the initiative that night, she’d made all the running and she hadn’t acted like a woman who would take no for an answer.

      His smile, the glimmer of dark danger glittering deep in his eyes, elicited an involuntary spasm of excitement in her belly that made Chloe feel ashamed.

      ‘You look well.’ She looked incredible, though up close there was less of the outdoorsy golden glow he remembered. Her skin was creamy, the faint touch of colour in her cheeks highlighting the smooth contours, the freckles along her cheekbones paler too, but she was, if anything, even more delicious than he remembered.

      ‘Thank you, and how are you—sorry, Nik, wasn’t it?’

      The composed words aimed somewhere close to his left ear were prim, but the message shining in her deep cobalt-blue eyes as they glittered up at him was neither prim nor polite.

      They said quite clearly, Go to hell!

      Her reaction threw him off his stride, in the same way he realised he’d have been thrown if he’d reread a favourite book and found a main character had suddenly been given a different personality.

      Except the woman in his dreams had never had a personality beyond being warm, giving, passionate and available when he had needed her, and he had not been curious about what lay beyond those qualities.

      Realising that there was a beyond came with a sense of shock as Nik struggled to consider her negative reaction to him dispassionately, but got sidetracked by his own reaction to her.

      The problem being there was very little room left for dispassion after the explosive blast of primal desire that obliterated everything else when he looked at her. It was like walking...no, running full pelt into a ten-foot wall of lust.

      The time it took his stupefied brain to push past this fresh blast of raw hunger was only moments but it felt longer, and the mere fact that he had to make the effort deepened the frown lines in Nik’s broad forehead.

      In his previous life, he had cultivated dispassion until it required no effort, and it was second nature. He’d seen men and women in his old line of work who hadn’t managed to do that, and the personal toll it had taken on them had not been good to see. You needed to be able to keep an emotional distance.

      He had witnessed acts of bravery and self-sacrifice that were humbling, but for every one of those inspiring acts there were a hundred acts and images of suffering and inhumanity. You carried those nightmare images around with you and they ate you from the inside.

      The sheer absurdity of comparing a war zone to a dinner party where people were toting glasses of wine instead of automatic weapons almost dredged up a smile. Almost.

       CHAPTER THREE

      ‘I’M—’

      ‘With Lucy Cavendish...’ Chloe paused, head tilted in challenge, to let the reminder sink in and had the satisfaction of seeing an expression of shock chase across his handsome face.

      ‘Lucy...hell, I forgot about her!’ A quick glance located the model, who was deep in conversation with another guest. Nik dragged a hand across his hair-roughened jaw in annoyance; he must have left her standing there looking like... He gritted out a curse. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of this.’

      The wrathful, choking gasp of sheer disbelief that escaped Chloe’s lips drew his attention back to her face.

      If there had been even the faintest suggestion of guilt in his reaction, she thought it would have gone some way to redeeming him...actually, no, it wouldn’t!

      Wanting to make excuses for him made her even angrier—as if there could be any excuse for a man who arrived with one woman and then came on to another with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer!

      It made her wonder whose bed he had walked straight into after being in hers.

      There had been a time when the thought would have hurt...now it simply made her stomach quiver queasily.

      ‘It’s so inconsiderate of a woman to expect you to remember that you came with her.’ She produced a saccharine-sweet sympathetic smile, waiting until he frowned slightly in response to her comment before slinging out sarcastically, ‘I suppose she even expects you to be there when she wakes up in the morning.’

      The words hung there, every syllable oozing with exactly the sort of subtext Chloe had wanted to avoid. She sounded just like what she hated most: a victim.

      Someone to pity.

      Her narrow-eyed glare dared him to show it, but, although her comment had surprised a flicker of reaction, it was something else she saw move at the backs of his eyes. Fine, she could deal with something else, actually anything else, but pity.

      ‘You were asleep.’ This was the reason he avoided one-night stands; there was the potential for the stranger you went to bed with assuming that one night of sex connected you in some deep and meaningful way.

      ‘I’m not talking about me.’ She lifted her feathery brows in an attitude of mild surprise that he should think otherwise, then, willing herself not to blush, she pronounced bluntly, ‘We had sex but we were not in a relationship. Although it would have been useful if you had woken me as I had somewhere I needed to be.’ She wrinkled her brow, giving the impression she was trying to recall the sequence of events—events that couldn’t have been more indelibly imprinted on her had someone branded them into her soul. ‘I’m pretty sure I was late.’ In her head she clutched the invisible award to her chest as a voice pronounced, And the award for most convincing liar goes to... Chloe Summerville!

      The dream had once more become a nightmare before he’d ever reached the moment where he’d made the choice to leave her sleeping, not that waking her had ever really been an option. Good manners versus getting to his dying father’s bedside after receiving the call about his stroke had been a no brainer.

      And yes, he’d been relieved not to have to speak to her again.

      Relieved to avoid the potential morning-after awkwardness and recriminations. It hadn’t been his first one-night stand, but those other encounters had all been with fellow journalists, and there had been some mutual respect

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