Mari had no control over the series of breath-catching butterfly kicks in her stomach; she had never imagined a man could be so rampantly male. Before she had time or the ability to form anything approaching a rational thought, the cocktail of apprehension and excitement coalesced into a heavy ache low in her abdomen.
‘I was looking for a glass of milk,’ she heard herself say. ‘I saw a ghost...’ The protective screen of her lashes lifted. ‘Not really but—’
‘There are probably a few ghosts knocking around the place.’ Holding her eyes, he pushed the half-open door closed with his foot.
Mari’s glance went to the door and back to his face in a jerky, half-scared movement.
She was nervous. He was the one who should be feeling nervous, Seb thought... Very nervous. She was the one creeping around the place in the dead of night dressed like... Well, actually if she had not been dressed at all it could not have been any more provocative than the near transparent floaty number she had on.
The thing might be some modern take on Victorian primness, long-sleeved and fastened high at the throat with a little ribbon, but back-lit by the golden light from the lamp the white material became effectively transparent, the fabric so gossamer fine that if he tried, actually even if he tried not to, he could make out the dark perimeter of her rosy areola and the shadow between her thighs.
Mari ran her tongue across her lips to moisten them, struggling for some composure, and missing the resultant hot flare in his hooded glance.
She cleared her throat and turned her head, saying conversationally, ‘My, this is a big room.’ Big room—my God, could I sound any more inane?
He had a cameo view of the classic purity of her profile, her hair a glorious fiery halo glowing under the subdued artificial light in the hallway, appearing dark against the pale and almost transparent whiteness of her provocative nightclothes.
She brought to mind one of the impossibly desirable virgin sacrifices in an old-fashioned horror movie that every dashing hero was determined to rescue and the villain wanted to lay.
As a fist of lust tightened in his groin Seb discovered his sympathies lay with the villain. He dragged a frustrated hand over his hair and reacted to the emotions spilling from her with a sardonic smile. This woman seemed to go from one emotional crisis to another. Did she not understand the meaning of restraint?
He understood it—he valued it because he had seen the sort of selfish excess and chaos that came with it—and yet understanding the meaning of restraint did not prevent his rampant hormones exploding. They overrode his iron control as his dark smouldering stare travelled slowly over her body.
‘So what couldn’t wait until the morning? Where’s the fire?’ He struggled to inject some amusement into his voice, but the combination of vulnerability and sheer unadulterated feminine sexiness had got to him in a place Seb had thought he’d hermetically sectioned, sealed off...when...
He couldn’t remember exactly what age he’d begun to worry he’d inherited his parents’ genes. It had kept him awake nights until he had realised that recognising your weaknesses meant they weren’t going to trip you up; it was all about control.
Control, he told himself, struggling to recall the meaning of the word as he breathed his way through the conflicting needs to comfort her and tear off her clothes and sink into all that luscious softness.
‘Fire?’ she echoed, blinking up at him.
If there wasn’t one, there would be—she looked hot enough to ignite anything within a fifty-yard radius, he decided, dragging his gaze from the plumpness of her trembling lips as he reminded himself that she might be as attractive as sin and twice as tempting, but Mari Jones was not destined to share his bed. Even if it hadn’t been essential that he kept things on a professional footing, she was not the sort of woman he would have entertained having any sort of relationship with.
Even so, it would have been much simpler if she had been unattractive or, for that matter, had one single flaw physically. His eyes moved from the fabric that had begun to cling with an electrostatic charge to the long shapely length of her legs, drawing his attention once more to the suggestion of shadow at their apex, and he forced himself to focus instead on the many flaws she had personality-wise.
The temper, he thought, sweating now, the mulish obstinacy, but most of all the sheer emotional excess in everything she did. She cried, she laughed, she screamed, she fought, and none of these things she did in moderation—he doubted she was even capable of it.
It didn’t matter how pretty the packaging, he pitied the man who eventually tried to domesticate this red-headed witch. It would take a saint or someone equally capable of making a walk in the park a full-blown drama.