Mistress of Convenience

Suddenly she had had enough.

‘Why are you questioning me like this?’ she demanded wearily. ‘Just because you’re here, guarding some government bigwig, that doesn’t give you the right to…to treat me as some kind of…of criminal. What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?’ she demanded nervously, fear trickling through her veins as she sensed that somehow something had changed, that the anger she had sensed in him before had been replaced by a steely determination.

‘How do you know who is staying at the villa?’ Luke questioned quietly.

For a moment Suzy was too bemused to answer him. Was it that that was responsible for the intimidating change in him?

‘I heard someone talking about it,’ she told him honestly. ‘I thought he was supposed to be here on holiday, but of course now that I’ve seen you, and those men who were leaving, I realise…’

Her voice trailed away, when she saw his expression, and Luke prompted her softly.

‘Yes? What is it exactly that you now realise? Something you know your boss Jarvis would be very interested in? Something that you just can’t wait to report to him?’

Suzy stared at him aghast.

‘No! No—nothing like that. He isn’t my boss anymore,’ she denied. ‘I’ve already told you that.’

Something about the way he was watching her made her feel very afraid.

‘So I was right.’

Suzy could feel her heart bumping heavily against her ribs as the deceptively soft words penetrated her awareness.

‘You realise, of course, what this means?’

Suzy stared at him uncomprehendingly. He had lost her completely now, she acknowledged, and she fought to drag her unwilling mind away from her worry about the physical effect Lucas Soames was having on her emotions to what he was saying to her.

‘What what means?’ she asked.

Lucas’s mouth thinned. He had no time for games, no matter how much Suzy Roberts might enjoy her play-acting. One minute the ingénue, another the femme fatale. A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw as he tensed his body against memories he didn’t want to have. Memories of the feel of Suzy’s body against his own, the taste of her mouth, the scent of her skin…

Savagely he turned away from her. This—she—was a complication he just did not need. It was bad enough that Jarvis had sent anyone here at all—but that it should be her!

Angrily, he examined the facts—and his options! Yes, they both knew why Suzy was here, but just how much did she know? How much information did she actually have?

He had destroyed the photographs she had taken of the African President’s private guards, but he could not eradicate that information from her memory. And he certainly could not allow her to pass it on to anyone else—and most especially not to Roy Jarvis, to publish in his wretched magazine!

There was only one thing he could do now, little as he relished the prospect!

Luke had had his fill of reporters, both male and female! He had seen at first hand the damage, the devastation their single-minded determination could cause. He had seen fighting men’s lives risked and innocent civilians’ lives lost for the sake of a ‘hot’ story. And he had seen…His mouth twisted, his expression hardening even further.

He’d seen children under school age, half starved, fighting for water and food…whilst excited reporters tried to film their pitiable situation. And worse! Much, much worse! He moved, and the scar low on his belly pulled against the wound it covered.

He had learned over the years to mistrust the media at large.

And Ms Suzy Roberts was not going to be an exception to his rule that all media personnel were to be treated as guilty and kept under strict surveillance!

Luke’s gaze narrowed.

Despite the fact that he was trained to keep his body still for hours on end, he suddenly felt he needed to move, step back a little from Suzy, and he grimly suppressed the unwanted knowledge that her proximity was affecting him.

‘You realise, of course, that I can’t let you tell anyone what you’ve seen?’ Luke informed her.

A cold thrill of horror ran through her.

‘But I’m not going to tell anyone,’ she protested.

‘I suppose the best and easiest thing to do would be for me to confiscate your passport and then have you thrown in jail,’ Luke said calmly.

‘What?’ Suzy’s face paled. ‘No—you can’t do that…’ She could hardly believe what she was hearing, but one look at Lucas Soames’s face assured her that he was deadly serious.

‘Oh, I think you’ll find that I can,’ Luke assured her.

‘But, knowing what you are capable of doing in order to get what you want, I think the best place for you right now is where I can make sure you aren’t able to make any kind of contact with Roy Jarvis.’

‘What—what are you going to do?’ Suzy asked anxiously,

‘I’m going to take you back to the villa with me—as my partner.’

CHAPTER THREE

‘WHAT?’

Suzy was totally lost for words as she struggled to comprehend what he had said. His partner! But that meant…Fear and then longing shot through her like a firework showering her insides and touching every single nerve-ending she possessed. Partners…lovers…soul mates! No. She just wasn’t strong enough to withstand this kind of torture!

‘No—no! You can’t do that. I won’t!’ she protested shakily.

He had already released her wrist, and as she spoke she was backing away from him, adrenalin pulsing through her veins. She had to get away! She had to!

As soon as she was out of his arm’s reach she turned and started to run, driven by her instinct to flee, to protect herself, to hide herself from the danger she knew lay waiting for her!

Intent on her escape, she did not even think about sticking to the path which led back to the resort, instead plunging headlong straight down the steep hillside, sending up a shower of dry earth and small stones as she did so.

Luke watched her, knowing how easily he could catch her, his grim look turning to a frown as he saw the obstacle ahead of her—a large boulder, right in her path. He waited for her to change direction to avoid it, knowing that if she didn’t—if she ran right into it—which she was going to do!

He caught her with a couple of yards to spare, knocking the breath out of her body as she fell towards the ground. But somehow, to Suzy’s astonishment, before she hit the ground their positions were reversed, and it was Lucas Soames who was lying on the hard earth, with her held fast on top of him. His arms were fastened around her like iron bands, one gripping her body the other cradling her head.

Winded and frightened, Suzy tried to free herself—only to find that she could hardly move.

‘Let go of me!’ she demanded, struggling frantically.

‘Stop that, you little fool, otherwise we’ll both be—’ Lucas began, and then stopped as one of Suzy’s flailing hands caught the side of his mouth.

Against instinct, certainly against training, and surely against wanting, he opened his mouth and caught hold of the two offending fingers.

Heat and shock poured through Suzy’s body.

Lucas Soames had her fingers in his mouth and he was…

She completely forgot what had been happening, and her own desperate attempt to break free of his imprisonment of her. Her body, her mind, her heart—all flooded with pure undistilled pleasure as his tongue slowly caressed her flesh.

The warm, wet slide of his tongue against her fingers caused images of shocking and unfamiliar sensuality to burst into her head. She wanted to replace her fingers with her mouth, her tongue. She wanted…Suzy could feel the dangerous familiarity of the ache inside her, in her breasts and low down in her body.

Desperate to protect herself, she wrenched her fingers away.

Deprived of the feel of her soft, sweet flesh against his tongue, Luke reacted immediately. The hand at the back of her head forced her towards him, and his mouth covered hers in devastatingly sensual punishment.

Suzy tried to resist but it was too late. Her lips were betraying her, softening beneath those of her captor!

And it was no wonder Lucas Soames was taking their reaction as an indication that she was inviting him to investigate their closed line, to torment it with the firm flick of his tongue. He probed the effectiveness of her defence and discovered that it was all too easily penetrated.

Held fast on top of him, his hands controlling her ability to move, there was nothing Suzy could do other than submit.

Submit? This was submission? This eager opening of her lips? This hungry greeting of his tongue with her own? This feeling that was spiking through her, impaling her on a rack of tormented feverish longing and need, whilst her hands gripped his shoulders and she forgot every single word of the promises she had made to herself. She was responding to him! Allowing herself to be deceived that the fierce, demanding pressure of his mouth on hers meant something! That the feeling possessing her was also possessing him. That they were…soul mates?

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.

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