Mistress of Convenience

She gave a small gasp.

Luke wrenched his mouth from Suzy’s, his fingers biting into her soft flesh as he tried to find a logical explanation for what he had done.

And for what he was feeling!

He could feel his muscles straining as he willed his aroused body into submission. What the hell was happening to him? Physically he might be able to contain what he was feeling—the urgency of his arousal, the savage need he had to hold her and possess her—but it was what was going on inside his head, not his body, that was causing him the most concern. He had never mixed his professional life and his private life. And he had certainly never needed anyone with the intensity with which he had just been driven to possess Suzy Roberts’s mouth!

Angrily he fought to ignore both the ache the loss of contact with Suzy’s body was causing him and the inner voice that was urging him to continue, to possess the soft warmth of her breasts with his hands, to stroke and explore their feminine softness until he could feel the tight buds of her nipples rising to his touch…

Furious with himself, Luke checked his erotic thoughts.

‘Let go of you?’ he challenged Suzy, as if the kiss had never happened, angling their bodies so that she could see the rocks below them. ‘Take a look! You were heading right for them, and if I hadn’t stopped you right now you would be down there.’

Lifting her head cautiously, Suzy looked down the hillside, her stomach lurching as the saw the jagged rock less than a yard away from them.

‘I wasn’t anywhere near it,’ she lied.

But she was shuddering, and for some reason she was closing her eyes and turning her face into his shoulder.

Immediately Luke stopped her, his fingers digging into her arms as he held her away, a look of tightly reined anger compressing his mouth.

‘If I’d any sense I should have let you go ahead,’ she heard him muttering. ‘It would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble.’

He loathed and despised her that much?

‘Then why didn’t you? I can assure you that as far as I am concerned it would have been preferable to what I’ve just been subjected to!’

Luke had an almost violent need to take her back in his arms and prove to her that she was lying, but instead he derided, ‘If that’s your way of trying to persuade me you’re someone who’d choose death before dishonour, you are wasting your time!’

It wasn’t him who was causing her such pain, it was her own anger, Suzy told herself fiercely.

She couldn’t bring herself to look down at those rocks again, and she couldn’t escape from the knowledge that if he hadn’t actually saved her life then he had certainly saved her from hurting herself very badly.

No, she couldn’t escape from that knowledge, and it seemed that she couldn’t escape from him either. Right now, whilst the solid protection of his hard body beneath her own and the equally hard feel of his arms around her body might be protecting her physically, emotionally this kind of intimacy with him was not doing her any favours at all.

Emotionally? What was she thinking? Suzy knew perfectly well what she was thinking, even if she did not want to acknowledge it. With just one searing kiss Lucas Soames had shown her that, far from being over what she had fought so hard to convince herself had been a moment of uncharacteristic silliness the first time she had seen him, she was if any thing even more vulnerable to him now.

But not for much longer, Suzy promised herself determinedly.

She made a small movement, impatient to be free of him, and then froze with disbelief at the speed with which her flesh reacted to her careless action.