He cupped her chin and tilted her face up to his so that she couldn’t hide her expression. ‘And I bet you will be too,’ he told her quietly.
His soft words dropped into the hollow of her heart.
‘I’m nearly thirty-one!’ she pointed out, her hazel eyes brimming.
‘Oh, dear—then you’d better make sure you take a younger lover, with plenty of lusty enthusiasm and stamina,’ he murmured, looking down into the deep V of her dress, where her ripe breasts nestled in mouth-watering splendour. ‘What a coincidence there’s someone on hand who happens to meet the specifications.’
His mouth came down on hers, smothering her squeak of outrage that he should make such a mockery of her pain, but she was swiftly appeased by the steamy pleasure of his soul-deep kisses. His arm tightened around the back of her waist and she angled her mouth against his to give him even greater access, crushing the lapels of his jacket in her eager hands. Her tears dried up completely, her aching awareness of loss replaced by a sense of straining fullness, the temperature in the air-conditioned back seat steadily rising as the limo wound its way back across town.
When Rachel resurfaced, conscious of the sudden cessation of engine vibration, she was aghast to find herself plastered astride Matthew’s lap; his hands were burrowed inside her halter, his head thrown back against the headrest, his parted mouth wet with her kisses, his eyes behind his fogged spectacles shut tight and his face drawn into a rictus of agonised restraint.
‘Just—don’t move for a moment,’ he instructed in a stifled voice.
Glancing out of the window, Rachel saw she was back home, and felt a traitorous stab of disappointment as she ignored his plea, pushing away his hands and scrambling frantically off his lap, lunging for the door.
She nearly fell out of the car in her eagerness to alight, and dashed up the path, only to pull up short at the front door when she realised she didn’t have her keys.
She turned and found Matthew, walking with preternatural care, bringing her her bag and the gauzy jacket she had shed some time on the feverish return journey.
He had smoothed down his wildly disordered hair but his eyes still had a hectic glitter behind the silver frames.
Rachel had intended to shut the door in his face, but he was on her heels as she stepped inside, and instead of taking him to task she froze, a prickle running down her spine, her senses swiftly changing focus.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RACHEL frowned, and began a swift prowl of the rooms.
Matthew, alert to every nuance of her expression, stuck close. ‘What’s the matter?’
It took her a little while to figure out why she was getting a feeling of wrongness. ‘Someone’s been here in the house while we’ve been gone.’
‘Are you sure?’
Rachel adjusted a file on the desk in the corner of the lounge. ‘Things have been moved, doors left in a different position…’
‘Maybe Robyn or Beth—’
‘No. I rechecked the whole house before we left and I have an excellent visual memory.’ She pushed in a drawer of the desk that wasn’t quite closed and shivered. ‘Nothing too overt, but someone’s definitely been in here, going through my things. I know it. I can feel it.’
He didn’t deride her intuition, as Frank would have done. Instead he insisted she go through the house with him again, pointing out the subtle evidence, discovering the slight rearrangement of clothing in her drawers. ‘Whoever it was has done a very neat job,’ he commented. ‘Can you tell if anything is missing?
‘There doesn’t seem to be,’ she said, nibbling her lower lip and finding it embarrassingly tender. ‘There’s no sign of a forced entry-point, either, so it’s not a run-of-the-mill B&E; it has to have been a skeleton-key job…’
‘You don’t have an alarm?’ He frowned.
She shrugged. ‘We don’t get much crime in this area—it’s a friendly neighbourhood—and, anyway, I don’t have a great deal of stuff worth stealing—the computer, the microwave and video are usually first to go in a burglary, but it looks as though they haven’t even been touched.’
‘Probably not a burglary, then. Someone looking for something else? Do you keep any of Westons’ security-sensitive stuff here?’
‘Certainly not—Frank’s very strict about that kind of thing.’
‘What about this mysterious harasser Robyn was talking about? Could he or she have turned to stalking?’
‘It simply doesn’t fit the pattern—all the other things have been impersonal ways of getting at me from
afar, without running any risk of a face-to-face confrontation.’
‘Then what is worth someone running that sort of risk for?’