Mistress of Convenience

Determinedly she started to look away, but he had turned his head, and her heartbeat went into overdrive whilst a surge of explicit and bewildering arousal and longing raced though her. Longing for a man she had only looked at? How could that happen?

And yet Suzy couldn’t help watching him. He wasn’t looking at her, but past her, she recognised. However, whilst he did so, Suzy was able to stare at him and greedily absorb every tiny physical detail. Tall, dark and handsome went nowhere near describing his full male magnificence. He was more than that. Much, much more! Suzy could feel her whole body responding to just about the sexiest man she had ever seen and was ever likely to see. Her heart gave another small nervous flurry of thuds when he turned his head again, as though he knew that she was now looking at him. He was now staring straight at her, imprisoning her almost, so that she felt unable to move!

She felt as though she was being X-rayed—and that there wasn’t a single thing he didn’t know about her! Pink-cheeked, she realised that his incisive gaze had finished sweeping her and was now fixed on her mouth. She felt her lips starting to part, as though they were longing for his kiss. Hurriedly she closed them, her face still burning.

His eyes were a shade of intense dark blue, his skin tanned, his hair so dark brown that it was almost black. His profile was that of a Greek god and, as though that wasn’t enough, Suzy was forced to acknowledge that he had about him that indefinable air that whispered into the female ear sex. And not just any old kind of sex either, but dream-breaking, heart-stopping, mind-blowing wonderful sex! In fact the kind of sex…

Somehow she managed to get her wayward thoughts under control just in time to hear Jeff telling her curtly, ‘You’re going to have to distract the Colonel’s attention whilst I get my picture.’

‘What?’ Suzy asked, anxiously scanning the crowd packed tightly around the Prince.

‘Where…where is he…?’

‘Over there—next to the Prince and the Secretary of State.’

Wildly Suzy looked from the photographer’s face to the man he had just indicated. The man. Her man…

‘But…but you said he was a colonel. He isn’t in uniform.’ She was stammering like an idiot—behaving like a woman who had fallen passionately in love! Now she knew that she was crazy.

‘Uniform?’ Jeff’s voice was impatient, contemptuous of her ignorance. ‘No, of course he isn’t in uniform. He isn’t in the Army any more. Where have you been? He works on his own, freelance, providing a bespoke protection service for those who need it. Not that he needs to work. He’s independently wealthy and well connected; his father was the younger son of an old county family, and his mother was American. He’s ex-Eton. Cut his teeth in Northern Ireland and got made up to Major, then was decorated for service above and beyond the call of duty in Bosnia—that’s when he got his next promotion. Like I just said, he isn’t in the Army any more but he still does the dangerous stuff—acting as a personal bodyguard. He’s in great demand on the “I’m an important person and I need a top-class protection service” circuit. Visiting politicians and heads of state, et cetera.’

All this had been relayed to Suzy in a grim whisper, but now suddenly Jeff exclaimed excitedly, ‘Look at that! Get that picture and I won’t ever need to work again. Yes, you stay right there, baby,’ he crooned to himself, before commanding Suzy, ‘Come on! You’ll have to distract the Colonel so that I can get this shot.’

‘What? What am I supposed to do?’ Suzy asked anxiously, and she looked to where the Colonel was standing casually in front of the two men, screening them from interruption.

Jeff gave her an exasperated look. ‘Why the hell did they land me with you instead of someone who knows the ropes? I’ve heard that Roy has only taken you on as a favour, and because he likes your legs—he probably interviewed you imagining what they’d look like wrapped around him.’

Suzy struggled not to let Jeff see how upset she was by his comments. Her boss’s openly sexual and often crude remarks to her were just one of the reasons why she was becoming increasingly unhappy about her job.

‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? Go over there and do what comes naturally!’ Jeff grunted, before pushing his way through the crowd, leaving Suzy to follow him.

Do what comes naturally! Oh, yes, she could quite easily do what came naturally with Colonel Soames…A thrill of dangerous emotion spiked through Suzy as she looked into the face of the man who was now standing right in front of her. He was, Suzy acknowledged, quite definitely the sexiest man she had ever seen. Those broad shoulders, that handsome face!

She was beginning to feel seriously alarmed by her reactions to him! Her friend Kate was always scolding her, telling her she didn’t get out enough, and now Suzy thought she might be right. To be affected like this, to react like this simply at the sight of one specific man…She closed her eyes, willing herself to be sensible, and then opened them again.

What was it about a man in a dinner suit? What was it about this man in a dinner suit? Well, for one thing he was wearing his with an unselfconscious ease that said he was used to doing so, and for another it fitted him somehow as though it were a part of him. What had he looked like in his dress uniform? In combats? A tiny shudder ripped through her.

And as for that tan and those teeth…teeth that she was sure gleamed nearly as white as his shirtfront! And she was sure there were real muscles beneath all that tailoring as well.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jeff glowering at her. A little uncomfortably Suzy took a deep breath and stepped forward, a muddled plan of action forming inside her head. A smile of recognition at the Colonel then a brief apology for having mistaken him for someone else. A few seconds’ work, but long enough, she hoped, for Jeff to get his picture.

Gritting her teeth against the knowledge that this kind of behaviour was quite definitely not her style, Suzy ignored the nervous churning of her stomach and stepped forward.

And then stopped! One step was all she had taken—so how come she now had her nose virtually against the Colonel’s pristine white shirt? How had he moved without her being aware that he was doing so? When had he moved? Suzy wondered frantically. In less than a blink of the eye he had somehow gone from standing a couple of yards away to being right in front of her.

Suzy’s sensitive nostrils started to quiver as she breathed in a discreet hint of cologne, underwritten by something very male and subtle that sent her self-control crashing into chaos.

He reached out and took hold of her arm, his grip firm and compelling. Suzy could feel her blood beating up around his encircling fingers as her body reacted to his hold.

Like someone lost in a trance she looked up at him. An instinct deeper than any thought or action seemed to have taken control of her, and she was powerless to do anything other than give in to it. The navy blue gaze fastened on her own. Her heart jerked against the wall of her chest, and the polite social apology she had been about to make died unspoken on her lips.

In a haze of dizzying desire Suzy felt her gaze slide like melting ice cream from the heat of his eyes to the curve of his mouth. Her whole body was galvanised by a series of tiny tremors and she exhaled on a small, soft, female sigh of wanton pleasure.

Without knowing what she was doing she lifted her free hand to trace the hard, firm line of his mouth—to see if the flesh there felt as erotic as it looked. But then her hand dropped to her side as another even more pleasurable way of conducting her survey struck her.

She had to reach up on her tiptoes in order to press her mouth to his, but the hand holding her arm seemed somehow to aid and balance her. The busy hum of conversation in the room faded as her lips made the discovery that just touching his mouth with her own was opening a door for her into a whole new world.

Blind and deaf to everything and everyone else around her, Suzy made a soft sound of pleasure deep in her throat. An aching whisper of female recognition.

Closing her eyes, she leaned into the male body, waiting hungrily for the Colonel to return the pressure of her lips, to part them with the swift, hard thrust of his tongue, to share with her the devouring intensity of need and longing that surged through her.

As she sighed her pleasure and hunger against his mouth she felt its pressure, his kiss heart-joltingly male. One of his hands slid firmly into the thick softness of her red-gold curls whilst the other pressed into the small of her back, urging her body closer to his own!

Suzy knew she was not very sexually experienced, and what was happening to her now was way out of her league! The way his mouth was moving on hers—firm, warm, knowing—the way his tongue-tip was laving the eager softness of her lips, was rewriting the logbook of her sexual history and adding a whole new chapter to it!

Lost in the rapture of what was happening to her, Suzy pressed closer, caught up in a cloud of hormone-drenched fantasy.

This was it! This was him! Her dragon-slayer and protector, the magical lover she had dreamed of in her most vulnerable moments. The hero she had secretly longed for all her life in her most private dreams. Her soul mate.

Suzy ached to tell him how she felt, how filled with delirious joy she was that he was here, how…

She gave a small shocked gasp as suddenly she was being pushed away.

Confusion darkened her eyes as she looked up at him, at a loss to understand what was happening until she saw the way he was looking back at her.

Instantly her joy was replaced with pain and despair. Shock gripped hold of her with icy fingers as she recognised the anger and loathing in the navy blue gaze boring into her.

‘No!’ She heard herself whisper the agonised denial, but it was no use. There was no mercy or softening in the hard, contemptuous gaze. Her whole body felt as though it was being drenched in shame and humiliation. Her soul mate? He was looking at her as though she were his worst enemy!

Anger, contempt, hostility, Suzy could see them all glittering in his eyes, before they were hidden away from her with a blank look of steely professionalism.

What on earth had she done? Why had she done it? She had made a complete and total fool of herself! What stupidity had made her resurrect that idiotic old dream of a soul mate? She’d thought she had had the sense to recognise it had no place in reality! It was a dream she had clung to for far too long anyway, like a child reluctant to relinquish the security of a worn-out teddy bear.

Her face was burning painfully—and not just because of the way he had looked at her. The shaky, sickly feeling invading her was surely a form of shock, a physical reaction to an emotional trauma. And she was traumatised, she admitted unwillingly. And not just by the Colonel’s contempt and dislike!

Her own feelings had left her even more shocked and distressed…

She could feel his concentration on her, but she refused to look back at him. Because she was afraid to? Somewhere inside her head she could still feel the unspoken words ‘I love you’ banging frantically against the walls of their cage, like a tiny wounded bird desperate to escape. But Suzy knew they could never be set free. They had to be kept imprisoned for ever now, to protect her own sanity and self-respect!

“‘Down and Dirty magazine.”’ She could hear him reading the name-badge she was wearing. ‘I should have guessed. Your tactics are as cheap and tasteless as your articles.’

Savage pain followed by equally savage anger spiked into her heart. Illogically she felt as though somehow he had actively betrayed her by not recognising the person she really was, by misjudging her, not caring enough to recognise what had happened to her.

‘I think your friend is waiting for you.’

The curt words were distinctly unfriendly, his voice clipped and incisive, and the look he gave her was coldly dismissive. But deep inside her Suzy could still feel the hard pressure of his mouth on hers.

Shaking, she turned to make her way towards the door, where Jeff was standing, an impassive bouncer holding his arm—and his camera.