His jaw tightened. ‘Why do you work so hard? What are you running from?’
‘Why have you decided to shut yourself off from everyone and everything? What are you running from?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s not my problem.’
‘So what is your problem?’ she asked, her blood heating to a simmer.
‘You are.’
‘Then you should have let me stay in a hotel.’
‘I know.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said roughly. ‘Maybe I didn’t want you to come to any harm by fainting again and falling into a canal. Maybe I wanted to uncover your secrets the way you’re so determined to hunt down mine. Maybe for some inexplicable reason I felt responsible for you.’
For a moment a flame of pleasure flickered into life inside her but she swiftly extinguished it because none of that could be true. If it was it would mean she was somehow beginning to matter to him, which couldn’t be the case when he was detachment personified. And the very idea of him being responsible for her was ridiculous. ‘Distracting me won’t work.’
‘Then what will?’ he said, putting down the spoon and stalking round to her side of the island, his eyes glittering and his shoulders rigid. ‘What will it take to stop you talking?’
She could think of something. She could think of lots of things, all of them accelerating her pulse and heating the simmer to a boil. He could give her a smile—a real one—that would drain the blood from her head and suck the breath from her lungs. He could pulverise her thoughts with a touch and stop her mouth with a kiss, and he would barely have to even try.
‘Agreement to go and see Finn,’ she said a bit breathlessly, struggling to block out the images of him doing all of that.
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Answers, then.’
‘You’re getting them,’ he said softly, taking one step closer to her, trapping her against the island and looming over her in a way that should have felt threatening and should have triggered a need to escape but was instead having the opposite effect.
‘Not the ones I want.’
‘So what do you want, Carla?’
Something she really shouldn’t but was finding it increasingly hard to resist, she thought, burning up in response to his size and proximity. Because Rico might be a threat to her self-control and an attack on her defences, but right here, right now, with her thoughts spinning and her body on fire, she couldn’t quite remember why.
All she knew was that she wanted him and he wanted her. Heat flared in the inky blue depths of his glittering eyes. She could feel the tightly leashed power and tension tightening his body. Her heart thundered. Her breath hitched. The intensity with which he was looking at her was stealing her wits and stoking the desire whipping around inside her and she didn’t even care.
‘You know what I want,’ she said, giving him the option to interpret her words in one of two ways, trying to tell herself she was still talking about Rico meeting Finn but actually meaning she wanted him, and practically erupting with excitement when he got it.
Whether it was the way she’d jutted her chin up in silent challenge or whether he was equally at the mercy of the attraction that flared between them and could no longer deny, she neither knew nor cared. He took her in his arms and with a muffled curse brought his mouth down on hers and all that mattered then was kissing him back as fiercely as he was kissing her.
With a moan she wrapped her arms around his neck and wound her fingers through his hair, which was as thick and soft as she’d imagined, and pressed herself so close that there was barely an inch of her that wasn’t touching him. The heat and skill of his mouth, his lips, his tongue sent shock waves of desire shooting through her, fogging her brain and focusing all her attention on him and what he was doing to her.
She moaned again and he tightened his hold on her, deepening the kiss as he put his hands on her waist and lifted her onto the island as if she weighed nothing. She instinctively opened her legs and he stepped between them, and she could feel the thick, hard length of his erection pressing against the spot that was aching and desperate.
She tilted her hips to increase the pressure and writhed against him, needing him closer, inside her, while his hands were in her hair, on her back, large and warm against her body, holding her in place, scorching through the thin fabric of her dress.
With a harsh groan he moved his mouth to her neck, to the sensitive spot beneath her ear, and a hand to her breast, which instantly tingled and tightened and made her wish there was no material in the way either on her or him.
Suddenly desperate to discover what she’d denied herself by not checking him out in the pool earlier, she tugged at his T-shirt, he reared back and pulled it over his head, and there was his chest in all its naked glory. Tanned. Muscled.
And scarred.