Piers was drawing her nipple deeper into his mouth, and the shivers of pleasure his caress was causing her were turning into deep, fierce shudders of female reaction.
As Piers released her nipple from the sensual captivity of his mouth and tongue, feeding its hunger with the pliant caress of his fingertips, he whispered thickly to her, ‘Undress me, Georgia. I want—’
‘Woof!’
Both of them froze as Ben suddenly came into the room and gave one firm bark.
Ben!
Guiltily Georgia pushed Piers away. How on earth could she have forgotten not just the dog but her entire sense of reality as well?
Equally swiftly Piers moved back from Georgia. Just what the hell was he doing? Every instinct he possessed told him that Georgia was quite definitely a serious commitment type of woman. Georgia had already managed to worm not just her way, but also that of that wretched dog as well, into his godmother’s affections, and now here she was, performing an equally dangerous trick on his own emotions.
‘Ben!’ Georgia exclaimed at the same time as Piers instructed sharply, ‘Downstairs...now...’
Placidly Ben wagged his tail and headed towards the open bedroom door, but once there he simply sat down and looked at Piers.
Angrily Piers glowered at him as he got up off the bed and picked up his shirt, pulling it on before walking towards Ben. If he hadn’t been far too sensible to think anything so foolish he might almost have imagined that the dog had come upstairs with the deliberate intention of interrupting them, and that he was making it equally plain that there was no way he was going to go back downstairs and leave Piers alone with Georgia.
Georgia, meanwhile, as soon as Piers had got up off the bed, had reached for her robe and pulled it on.
What on earth had come over her? There was no rational explanation for what she had done—or for what she had wanted to do.
* * *
Some hours later, on his way to bed, having checked that all the doors and windows were locked and the alarm was on, Piers paused outside Georgia’s bedroom door. It was all very well for her to have claimed earlier that she wasn’t suffering any after-effects from her wetting; he still...
His hand was on the door handle when Ben suddenly came padding upstairs and very determinedly lay down outside Georgia’s bedroom door. Was it just his imagination or was the dog really looking at him, not just reproachfully but almost a little reprovingly? It was his imagination, of course, Piers assured himself, just as the only logical reason that Ben had come upstairs was not really to guard Georgia but simply to try and get a more comfortable bed to sleep on than the one he was officially allocated downstairs in the kitchen.
Nevertheless, Piers didn’t make any attempt to return Ben to the kitchen—or to open Georgia’s bedroom door.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘BEN!’
Georgia tensed as she heard the wrathful warning in Piers’s voice as he called Ben’s name.
She had spent the whole of the previous day, her first day’s leave, working with the English setter, and she had been very pleased with the results.
Ben wanted to learn, to please, but he was an energetic dog who got easily bored. Now, as she saw the way his ears went down and he looked anxiously at her before going under the table to hide as he, like her, recognised the anger in Piers’s voice, all Georgia’s protective instincts came to the fore.
She had been keeping as much distance as she could between her and Piers since the night of her ignominious fall into the river. After Ben had interrupted them and Piers had gone to take him downstairs Georgia had forced herself to look closely and analytically at what had happened between them, and she hadn’t liked the conclusions she had had to reach.
Piers was a man, and men thought about, felt about, reacted differently to sexual intimacy than women did. Men’s sexual responses did not need to be touched, coloured or enhanced by their emotions. Men, by their very natures, tended to seize the sexual moment. Who knew what interpretation Piers had put on her own behaviour? Heavens, he might even have thought that she had deliberately allowed her towel to slip from her grasp—he was cynical enough, worldly enough; Georgia was sure of that.
It wasn’t that she felt that he had deliberately set out to seduce her; she wasn’t so naive nor so melodramatic. No, she felt sure his primary intention had simply been to bring her a hot drink and to check that she was all right. Maybe, too, he had welcomed the opportunity to reinforce to her his views on Ben’s behaviour; but that was all.
No, she couldn’t blame him. Not entirely. She could have resisted, protested, withdrawn from him, but instead she had—It had taken every ounce of courage she possessed for her to say to him the next day, ‘About last night... I...it... It was a mistake,’ she had told him firmly, unable to lift her gaze to meet his, as she’d walked into the kitchen and found him engaged in making his breakfast. ‘It shouldn’t have happened and I don’t—’