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As if she had been thinking of anything else for three years! He didn’t have the faintest idea.
‘You’ve got to stop turning this into something personal.’
Scarlet planted her hands on her hips and threw her head back. She was literally trembling with reaction.
‘Wanna bet?’ she drawled.
‘Right, you want personal…fine.’ He covered the space between them and grabbed the back of her head with one hand; with the other he framed her face. She looked at him with eyes wide and shocked; she smelt of flowery soap, shampoo, and warm woman, and Roman’s body reacted violently to the combination.
‘Is this the sort of personal you had in mind?’
Even while he was saying it the voice in the back of his head was telling him he’d been looking for an excuse to do this ever since he’d met her. Once he started kissing her the voice wasn’t telling him anything, because his brain took a back seat.
In the moment before her soft lips parted to allow his tongue to slide deep inside her warm mouth he heard, or rather felt, the broken whimper in her throat. The erotic little rasp sent a lick of heat through his blood and a corresponding jolt through his already rock-hard body.
She melted into him like warm butter. There was no hint of resistance in the body he had drawn against his, just heat and softness and the promise of more. Greedily he accepted the sweetness so unexpectedly offered him and it was only several hot, frenzied heartbeats later that he lifted his head.
The effort to do so was physically painful.
They didn’t immediately step apart, just stood, bodies leaning into each other, breathing hard. Roman’s fingers were still meshed into the shiny strands of slightly damp hair on her head and she had hold of his shirt in both hands.
When the drumming in his ears got quieter he could make out the words she kept repeating over and over. ‘Oh, my God…oh, my God…!’
‘Right, that was stupid,’ he said, leaning his chin against the top of her head. ‘But inevitable,’ he added half to himself. ‘Considering the level of attraction.’
His comment succeeded in jolting Scarlet free from the sensual lethargy that had engulfed her. With a cry she tore free of him and backed away, her angry eyes fixed on his taut features.
‘The only thing that’s inevitable between us is mutual antipathy.’ She rubbed her hand across her reddened, swollen lips. The action was purely symbolic; she didn’t believe for a moment it would succeed wiping away the memory of his searing kiss.
She had never been kissed that way before, not in a way that had made her crave more than air the pressure of someone’s lips on her own. It made her dizzy and breathless all over again to think of his tongue stroking inside her mouth.
His eyes trailed across her face, lingering on the soft, swollen contours of her full lips. He shrugged. ‘If you say so,’ he said thickly.
‘Don’t use that patronising tone with me,’ she flared, wrenching her hungry gaze from his face. This wasn’t the time to indulge in a staring match. ‘And don’t treat me like a child.’
As she glared straight ahead her eye-line was on a level with his powerful chest. A chest that moments ago her breasts had been crushed against, softness against iron hardness. Her body had been plastered so close to his that she had been able to feel the heavy thud of his heart mingled with her own. Her eyes lifted as she tried to drag her thoughts clear of the dangerous memories.
Far from saving her, the retreat brought her eyes into direct contact with Roman’s dark, deep-set, very angry eyes. Her lashes came down but not before a wave of sheer sexual longing had nailed her to the spot.
‘Then don’t act like one,’ he advised, his manner clipped and impatient. ‘I don’t force myself on women.’
Scarlet shook her head to clear the sensual fog that made it hard for her to think straight. ‘Hell, no, you’re irresistible,’ she husked sarcastically. ‘You don’t have to.’ Well, not with me, he doesn’t.
The memory of her total surrender was terrifying. One kiss and she’d been his to do anything he wanted with. She had never relinquished control that way in her life and if the memory of it wasn’t enough to terrify her, the fact that she had liked feeling that way, that part of her wanted to recapture the feeling, was!
His jaw tightened another notch in response to her sarcastic jibe. ‘You can’t pretend that you were some sort of unwilling participant.’
Can and will, Scarlet thought, responding to his claim with a provocative shrug of her slender shoulders.
‘That you didn’t want to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss you,’ he continued between gritted teeth. ‘That neither of us wanted it to stop. You can’t pretend those things and expect me to treat you seriously, can you?’ By the time he had finished the incredulity in his voice had become scorn.
She looked away from his relentless hard stare and gulped. It had been pretty foolish of her to assume that a man who possessed his vast experience of women would not know how she had felt.
‘Like you said, it was stupid.’ It was clearly pointless to keep up the illusion that she hadn’t kissed him back.
A speculative expression slid across his dark features. ‘Possibly…’
She shot him a startled look. ‘What do you mean, “possibly”?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘There is no way we can go around kissing without it…’ Roman raised a quizzical brow as she stopped, flushing to the roots of her hair with mortification.
‘Not without it leading to other things,’ he finished for her smoothly. ‘I realise that.’
Her chin lifted. ‘It’s not that I couldn’t have stopped.’ The question was when?
‘You just didn’t want to.’ A faint, strangled sound was the only thing that could get past the emotional thickness in Scarlet’s throat. ‘Neither did I,’ he added.
Her eyes widened at his earthy admission.
Their eyes locked. His were filled with a raw hunger that snatched the breath from her lungs. She felt dizzy, and her stomach dipped as though she’d just stepped into a bottomless black hole. The whooshing sound in her ears intensified the sensation of light-headedness.
‘You didn’t…?’ She flushed with mortification to hear the amazed delight in her voice.
It doesn’t take much to please you, does it, Scarlet? A man saying he didn’t want to stop. As if that is such a life-changing occurrence? Of course he hadn’t wanted to stop. Men never did; it was in their nature. They took what was on offer.
Well, I’m not on offer! Once more with a little more conviction, Scarlet.
While she was still thinking he took action and a step that brought him closer, close enough for her to smell the warm male scent that rose from his body. The smile, the dangerous confident smile on his face kick-started her pulse. Now was the time to tell him she wasn’t interested, spell it out once and for all.
She instinctively knew that with Roman saying no would be enough.
She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out to break the silence. His movements were unhurried, deliberate even, but for Scarlet he seemed to move in slow motion. She wasn’t aware that she had been holding her breath until he took her face between his big hands.
Her breath escaped in a series of uneven gasps as his brown fingers moved along the curve of her jaw.
‘You have lovely hair,’ he rasped, releasing the clip that confined her curls on top of her head. Quite deliberately he fanned it out around her face, running his fingers through the silky damp strands.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s brown.’
Roman paused in the act of sliding his hands down her back. A baffled expression crossed his handsome face. ‘This is something you need to apologise for?’
‘And it’s too fine. I can’t do anything with it.’
She felt his laughter. ‘Brown and fine suits your face.’
He tilted her head back to inspect the face he referred to. Scarlet was very conscious of his other hand, which was resting very firmly on the curve of her bottom.
‘A nice face,’ he decided just before he kissed her.
Scarlet gave a sigh as all the strength left her limbs. She had no choice or, for that matter, desire to do anything but let her body mould itself to his lithe, lean male frame.
‘Please…Roman,’ she moaned when his head lifted. She buried her own in his shoulder with a muffled sob.
He placed a finger under her chin and tilted her face up to him. ‘Please what?’
‘This is stupid. You know this is stupid. Things are complicated enough without putting…’ the colour deepened in her cheeks ‘…this,’ she added with an agonised grimace, ‘into the equation.’
‘This is not going to complicate things,’ he contradicted, running a finger over the downy soft curve of her cheek. A distracted expression drifted over his hard, strong-boned features. ‘God, but your skin is so soft,’ he marvelled, his voice a deep, throaty purr. ‘So incredibly soft.’
Scarlet dragged his hand from her face. It was so large compared to hers, his brown fingers long and tapering, she could feel the definite suggestion of calluses on his palm. These were not the hands of a man who was desk-bound.
As if reading her mind he offered an explanation. ‘The gym bores me. I prefer to climb; it helps me concentrate.’
Once he’d said it she had no problem seeing him clinging to a rock face, using a combination of skill, strength and recklessness, pitting himself against a rock face and the elements, solo because he was not a natural team player.
‘There’s not much climbing to be had in London.’
‘There are some very good climbing walls, though, and I don’t live in the city all the time.’
Responding to a sudden crazy impulse, she raised his hand to her mouth and pressed an open-mouthed kiss into his open palm.
She felt his sharp inhalation and with a self-condemnatory groan dropped his fingers as though burnt, which in a way she was. The expression ‘playing with fire’ could have been created specially to cover this situation.
‘Sorry!’ she said in an agonised whisper. ‘I shouldn’t have. This is not sensible.’
A reckless-sounding laugh was wrenched from his throat. ‘Who needs sensible?’
Scarlet lifted her head. ‘Me.’
His dark, glittering eyes scanned her face. ‘Fine, then look at it this way. Let’s use what we’re feeling.’
Scarlet managed to drag her eyes from his mouth. Her brain felt slow and stupid as she parroted, ‘“Use” it? Use what?’
‘The fact there is a strong sexual attraction.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What do you normally do when you feel this way?’
A difficult question to answer honestly when she had never felt this way before. She had never longed to plaster herself against a man she barely knew; she had not fantasised about feeling his weight on top of her or wanted to explore every inch of his body with her hands and lips. Honesty was clearly not an option here.
‘I don’t do anything. I’m too busy for relationships and I don’t do one-night stands.’ She could understand it if he found her last claim difficult to believe after the way she’d behaved.
‘I doubt if one night would be sufficient.’ Roman slanted her a heavy-eyed look of such sensuous promise that her knees trembled. ‘You would date the guy…right?’
‘“Date…?”’ she echoed as though he were talking a foreign language. ‘You’re not suggesting me going to dinner or the movies with you is going to help anything?’
‘When you are attracted to a man and the feeling is reciprocated that is what most people do…though dinner is not essential and personally I’m adaptable and could skip this preliminary stage of the mating ritual.’
‘Too much detail!’ she interrupted, holding up her hand to halt the flow of information and shaking her head vigorously from side to side.
‘Think about it. Sam needs to get to know me, but not in a forced, fake way. If we were dating—’
‘Which we’re not.’
‘If I was the new boyfriend we’d be bound to spend time together.’
He sounded so damned pleased with himself Scarlet was torn between laughter and hysterical tears. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You want me to pretend we’re going out together so you can get to know Sam.’
Me the girlfriend of Roman O’Hagan—sure, and the world really is going to believe that. Heavens, even a three-year-old would see through that one!
‘Not pretend, no.’
The colour seeped out of her face and then flooded back. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Sam must be used to seeing your boyfriends around the place?’
She shook her head, still stunned by his suggestion. ‘No, he isn’t.’
‘Don’t you have a social life, then?’ he asked, clearly not taking her statement at face value.
‘Of course I have a social life. I go to a yoga class and I belong to a quilting—’
His dark brows twitched. ‘Quilting? I frequently can’t tell if you’re on the level or you’re trying to wind me up.’
‘I don’t see why me talking about quilting can possibly be considered trying to wind you up.’
‘I’m not talking about quilting!’ he exploded.
‘Quilting is very relaxing,’ she informed him with dignity. ‘And you have something pretty and practical to show for your efforts at the end of the day. I’ve not got very far yet, but just because you’ve no aptitude for something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick with it.’
‘I am sticking with it but I can’t guarantee for how long. Will you quit talking about quilting?’ he revealed in a low, driven tone. ‘I’m talking about sex, unless you’ve taken some vow of celibacy. Please tell me you’ve not,’ he begged.
An expression of shock spread across his face when, instead of sharing the joke, she looked away. ‘You don’t date…not at all?’
‘Of course I date.’
‘I don’t see what the problem is, then. Why not date me?’
When he said ‘date me’ she was pretty sure it was a euphemism for sleep with me. ‘You don’t see the problem because you’re a sandwich short of a picnic and unused to dealing with rejection.’
‘Rejection I can deal with, but not from a woman who starts trembling with desire and undressing me with her eyes every time she’s in the same room as me.’
The mortified heat rushed to her cheeks. ‘My God, you are so colossally arrogant,’ she breathed.
A wolfish grin split his dark lean features as he looked down into her outraged face. ‘Maybe I am, but also I’m right. Aren’t I, Scarlet?’
Scarlet wasn’t going down that road.
‘You want reasons? Let me see—where shall I start? How do you know I don’t already have a boyfriend?’
