Her eyelids dropped across her eyes, veiling him from sight. She was reduced only to the kiss he was easing across the mouth she lifted to his... Reduced only to the feathered silk of his touch, the hand at her nape cradling her skull, the fingers woven into her hair.
It was like that lingering wrist-kiss all over again, but a thousand times more so. A million sensations swirled within her at the sheer velvet sensuality of his kiss...
his mouth moving on hers, tasting her, exploring her. She was helpless—helpless to resist. The heady scent of his aftershave, his body, was in her senses, in the closeness of him as he shaped her mouth to his.
She felt herself leaning into him, letting her own hands glide around the strong column of his back, feeling the play of muscle and sinew, with only the sheer cotton of his shirt to separate her palms from the warmth of his flesh.
She could not stop—would not. Blood was surging in her...her pulse was soaring. She was drowning in his kiss, unable to stop herself, unable to draw away, to find the sanity she needed to find...
And then, abruptly, he was pulling away from her. Stepping away so sharply that her hands fell from him, limp at her sides, just as her whole body felt limp.
Dazedly, Tara gazed blankly at him. She had no strength—none. All her limbs were slack and stricken. Inside her chest her heart was pounding, beating her down.
She heard him speak, but now there was no husk in his voice, no low, sensual timbre. Only a starkness that cut like a knife.
‘That should not have happened.’
She felt it like a slap—but it was a sudden awakening from her deathly faint and her eyes flared back into vision, her mind into full consciousness of what she had permitted...given herself up to...
She saw him standing there, stepped back from him. There was a darkness in his face, in his eyes, and his features were pulled taut—as forbidding and shuttered as she had ever seen them.
Then, with the same sharp movement with which he’d pulled away from her, he was turning away, body rigid, his expression still tight as steel wire, walking with heavy, rapid strides to the door. Walking through. Snapping it shut behind him. Without another word.
Leaving her alone, heart pounding, lungs airless, his words echoing in her head—resonating as if it had been she who’d uttered them.
Dismay hollowed her.
* * *
Marc plunged down the staircase. Dieu, had he been insane to let that happen? Hadn’t he warned himself repeatedly that he must keep his response to her hammered down, where it could not escape?
Anger with himself consumed him. Anger he welcomed—for it blotted out more than any other emotion could, blotted out the memory of that irresistible kiss.
Well, you should have resisted it! You should—and must—resist her! She is not here for such a purpose! It would be madness to indulge yourself. Indulge her...
Every reason for his warnings to himself about the dangerous folly of letting the desire that had seized him from the first moment her show-stopping beauty had hit upon his senses marched through his head at his command.
He kept them marching. He must allow nothing else to occupy his mind. Nothing except work. That would keep him on the straight and narrow.
Gaining the hallway, he yanked open the door to his office. The Far Eastern markets would soon be starting up. They would absorb him until he was sufficiently tired to risk heading for bed. Tout seul.
His mouth tightened. Most definitely alone.
And it must stay that way. Anything else was a folly he would not commit.
Would not.
CHAPTER FIVE
TARA STOOD IN the over-hot garden of the over-ornate villa they’d just toured, feigning an enthusiasm she did not feel in the slightest. But that was preferable to letting her thoughts go where she did not want them to go. To the memory of that disastrous kiss last night.
She gave a silent groan. Had she been crazy to let Marc Derenz kiss her? Why had she let him? Why hadn’t she stopped him? Why hadn’t she told him to go to hell? Why...?
Why did I kiss him back?
That was what was so disastrous—that she’d let him kiss her. And returned it!
Angrily, she catalogued all the reasons why she had been so insanely stupid as to have let that kiss happen. Capping it with the one she’d always had to remember, ever since she’d made the mistake of trusting Jules.