LITMIR.BIZ

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her five-foot-nine, and unduly sensitive about it, Nora hadn’t possessed any high heels…until tonight. She had been wandering through the complex, following the signs from the underground car park to the Sky Tower lifts, when she had spotted the frivolous, tall strappy pair she was now wearing in the glitzy boutique window…shoes that would have made Ryan look like a tiny insignificant speck beside her. She had immediately marched in and bought them. Only a vestige of her normal thrift had restrained her from binning her low-heeled pumps.

      ‘I admire a woman who knows exactly what she wants…and goes after it,’ he murmured, rescuing more of her scattered possessions from under passing feet.

      She was perversely annoyed by his approval, the rage simmering just beneath the surface of her skin unconsciously seeking an outlet.

      ‘Instead of expecting a man to get it for her, you mean?’ she challenged, startled to hear that her voice was husky with suppressed temper. Heavens! She actually sounded provocative.

      ‘Something like that.’ He smiled, tossing her own phrase back at her, and she was swamped by a hot bloom of physical awareness. His eyes drifted lower, to the ginger-flecked expanse of skin that rose above the flattened curve of her bodice, and the speculative gleam that she glimpsed through his thick lashes made her nervously check the security of her dress with a discreet upward tug under one arm. His white teeth flashed as he innocently returned his gaze to her rosy countenance.

      The fully fledged smile did fascinating things to his sullen face, warming the cold angles and austere planes and lending his mouth a sensuous softness. Close up, she could see the smooth grain of his olive skin, darkened further by the kiss of summer sun and the blue-black shadow on his chin and upper lip. She discovered that his deep-set eyes had tiny chips of green in them, hidden gems embedded in the grey sheetrock, flecks of emerald fire that sparked in her a sudden lust for precious stones. When she inhaled she found that she was breathing in the spicy scent of his body, not an artificially astringent cologne, expensive and anonymous, but his own unique natural fragrance—musky and unmistakably male….

      ‘You certainly seem to have the knack of acquiring things,’ he was saying, helping her to gather up her notebook and calculator, wallet, eye-make-up compact, tissues, vial of perfume, keys, pen-knife, a card of fuse-wire, mini-torch, nail file, comb, travel toothbrush, hotel sewing kit and tube of breath mints amongst sundry other bits and pieces. Pivoting from his splayed crouch he had the greater reach, occasionally stretching across her, the sleeve of his jacket brushing goose-pimples along Nora’s bare arm.

      ‘I—Really, you’ve helped enough. I can manage the rest myself,’ she protested, trying to distract his fascinated attention from the embarrassing amount of personal clutter. She saw him flipping through a small folder of family photos and snatched it away as he reached the image of herself as a plump, fuzzy-haired teenager.

      ‘That was taken when I was sixteen,’ she couldn’t help saying.

      ‘You don’t look much older than that now.’

      ‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’

      ‘Most women enjoy giving the impression they’re younger than their years,’ he said, making her feel unutterably gauche.

      ‘It’s the freckles,’ she sighed. ‘They make me look like a perpetual schoolgirl.’

      He picked up her blood donor card. By the time he had finished ‘helping’ her, Nora thought, she would be totally stripped of all mystery. ‘Please, don’t let me keep you from your conversation with your friends—’

      ‘This is much more interesting,’ he drawled, with the teasing inflection which made her feel hot and edgy. ‘And I always finish what I start. It’s sort of a trademark of mine. Besides, they’re acquaintances, not friends. My friends know better than to bore me.’

      ‘What happens when you’re bored?’ she dared to ask.

      ‘I behave like a complete boor,’ he said languidly.

      ‘Oh…Oh!’ A hiccup of startled laughter erupted from Nora as she belatedly recognised his pun, her eyes crinkling into merry crescents. ‘The insensitive and ill-mannered person, or the male pig?’ she asked with pretended confusion.

      ‘Actually a boar is an uncastrated male pig.’ He corrected her second option, and watched her eyelashes flutter and her freckles fight against a rising tide of pink. ‘I feel that’s an important distinction, since my answer is…yes to both.’

      ‘Really?’ She wasn’t about to let a man get the better of her—not tonight. ‘Then you must have a lot of very tolerant friends.’

      He laughed. ‘Or a few very interesting ones.’ He held aloft a yellow-handled tool and shot her a compelling lift of his dark eyebrows. ‘A screwdriver?’

      ‘I like to be prepared for every eventuality,’ she told him, plucking it out of his hand, noticing that his fingers were long and supple and his nails beautifully manicured.

      ‘So I see,’ he murmured, as he spied the last stray item, almost hidden by a fold of her dress flaring away from her knee. He handed her the small foil package with grave ceremony.

      She stared at it lying on the palm of her hand, stricken by a chilling thought. Thank God she was unable to take oral contraceptives and therefore had had to insist that Ryan always used a condom. What if Kelly wasn’t the first woman he had slept with during the year that their relationship had been sexually intimate? She would have been forced to wonder whether her health was at risk.

      With a jolt she realised that it had been ages since she and Ryan had actually made love…. He had been away on business, then he had gone on a skiing trip to Colorado with his rugby mates, and after he got back he had been busy with work, or she had, and their social life had got busier. There had always seemed to be a ready enough reason not to make love, and Nora admitted that she had barely noticed their extended bout of celibacy—on her side at least!

      ‘It is yours, isn’t it?’ he said, intrigued by the parade of expressions across her abstracted face.

      ‘What? Oh…yes.’ She blushed, dropping it hurriedly into her bag. ‘But don’t let it lead you to jump to any hasty conclusions about me,’ she added, putting her drink down carefully on the carpet while she fished about to find the fuse-wire and quickly wound a 15-amp strand in a figure of eight around the worn clasp.

      ‘The only conclusion I’ve come to is that you’re probably a highly organised person in a disorganised kind of way,’ he said wryly, watching her complete the makeshift repair with a deft twist of the fragile wire. ‘Shall we rejoin the party before people start wondering what we’re getting up to down here?’ He rose smoothly to his feet, showing no signs of stiffness from his prolonged crouch, whisking away her bag and wineglass and placing them on the edge of the window table behind him, next to his own drink, before stooping to offer both his hands to Nora.

      His palms were slightly rough, the friction of his skin sliding against hers producing sparks of heat that fanned hotter as his fingers tightened, totally encompassing her slender hands, making her momentarily feel trapped and helpless and alarmingly vulnerable. A quick flex of his legs and he hauled her upright in one fluid, easy movement. Alarm turned to a rush of unexpected excitement, the sparks leaping from the point of contact to sizzle up Nora’s arms and razzle-dazzle around her body with electrifying speed, making it difficult to breathe, let alone coordinate her movements. The force of her forward momentum plastered her against his shirt front and she flailed on her precarious heels to find her balance, gasping when she felt an ominous downward drag on her breasts.

      ‘Oh, stop! Don’t move!’ she hissed at him as she realised what was happening. ‘I think I’ve caught one of my heels in the hem of my dress!’ she groaned, hopping on one wobbly foot like a drunken stork.

      He uttered a smothered curse, threaded with laughter, obediently freezing in position.

      ‘This isn’t funny!’ she whispered fiercely into his ear. ‘I’ll be topless in a moment if we’re not careful.’

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