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“Don’t you have another dress?” he asked irritably. “Every time you come over here, you wear that one.”
She lifted her chin haughtily. “I work six days a week to put myself through college, pay for gas and utilities and groceries. What’s left over wouldn’t buy a new piece of material for a mouse suit.”
“Excuses, excuses,” he murmured. His eyes narrowed on the low cleavage. “And I still don’t like that neckline,” he said shortly. “It shows too much of your breasts.”
She threw up both hands, almost flinging her small evening bag against the ceiling. “Listen, what’s this hang-up you have about my breasts lately?” she demanded.
He was frowning as he stared at her bodice. “You’re flaunting them.”
“I am not!”
“It’s all right to do it around me,” he continued flatly, “but I don’t want Vivian’s sex maniac boyfriend to start drooling over you at my supper table.”
“I don’t attract that sort of attention,” she muttered.
“With a body like that, you’d attract attention from a dead man,” he said shortly. “Just looking at you makes me ache.”
She didn’t have a comeback. He’d taken the sense right out of her head with that typically blunt remark.
“No sassy reply?” he taunted.
Her eyes ran over him in the becoming suit. “You don’t look like a man with an ache.”
“How would you know?” he asked. “You don’t even understand what an ache is.”
She frowned. “You’re very difficult to understand.”
“It wouldn’t take an experienced woman five seconds to know what I meant,” he told her. “You’re not only repressed, you’re blind.”
Both eyebrows lifted. “I beg your pardon?”
He let out an angry breath. “Oh, hell, forget it.” He turned on his heel. “Are you coming in or not?”
“You’re testy as all get out tonight,” she murmured dryly, following him. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t Glenna get rid of that…ache?”
He stopped and she cannoned into his back, almost tripping in the process. He spun around and caught her by the waist, jerking her right against him. He held her there, and one lean hand went to the small of her back and ground her hips deliberately into his.
He held her gaze while his body tautened and swelled blatantly against her stomach. “Glenna can’t get rid of it because she doesn’t cause it,” he said with undeniable mockery.
“McKinzey Donald Killain!” she gasped, outraged.
“Are you shocked?” he asked quietly.
She tried to move back, but his hand contracted and he groaned sharply, so she stood very still in the sensual embrace.
“Does it hurt you?” she whispered huskily.
His breathing was ragged. “When you move,” he agreed, a ripple running through his powerful frame.
She stared at him curiously, her body relaxing into the hard curve of him as both his hands went to her hips and held her there very gently.
He returned her quiet stare with his good eye narrowed, intent, searching her face. “I’ve never let you feel that before,” he said huskily.
She was fascinated, not only with the intimacy of their position, but also with the strange sense of belonging it gave her to know that she could arouse him so easily. It didn’t embarrass her, really. She felt possessive about him. She always had.
“Do you have this effect on Markham?” he asked, and he didn’t smile.
“Dave is my friend,” she replied. “It would never occur to him to hold me…like this.”
“Would you let him, if he wanted to?”
She thought about that for a few seconds and she frowned again, worried. “Well, no,” she confessed reluctantly.
“Why not?”
Her eyes searched his good one. “It would be…repulsive with him.”
She felt his heartbeat skip. “Would it?” he asked. “Why?”
“It just would.”
His lean hands spread blatantly over her hips and drew her completely against him. He shivered a little at the pleasure it sent careening through his body. His teeth ground together, and he closed his eyes as he bent to rest his forehead against hers.
Natalie felt her breasts go hard at the tips. Her arms were under his now, her hands flat against the rough fabric of his jacket. Her small evening bag lay somewhere on the wooden floor of the porch, completely forgotten. She felt, saw, heard nothing except Mack. Her whole body pulsated with delight at the feel of him so close to her. She could feel his minty breath on her lips while the sounds of the night dimmed to insignificance in her ears.
“Natalie,” he whispered huskily, and his hands began to move her hips in a slow, sweet rotation against him. He groaned harshly.
She shivered with the pleasure. Her body rippled with delicious, dangerous sensations.
“Mack?” she whispered, lifting involuntarily toward him in a sensuous little rhythm.
His hands slid to her hips, her waist and blatantly over the thin fabric that covered her breasts in the lacy little long-line bra she wore under the dress. As she met his searching gaze, his hands went inside the deep V neckline and down over the silky skin of her breasts. She caught her breath at the bold caress.
“This,” he said softly, “is a very bad idea.”
“Of course it is,” she agreed unsteadily. Her body was showing a will of its own, lifting and shifting to tease his lean hands closer to the hard tips that wanted so desperately to be caressed.
“Don’t,” he murmured quietly.
“Mack?”
His forehead moved softly against hers as he tried to catch his breath. “If I touch you the way you want me to, I won’t be able to stop. There are four people right inside the house, and three of them would pass out if they saw us like this.”
“Do you really think they would?” she asked in a breathless tone.
His thumbs edged down toward the tiny hardnesses inside the long-line and she whimpered.
“Do you want me to touch them?” he whispered at her lips.
“Yes!” she choked.
“It won’t be enough,” he murmured.
“It will. It will!”
“Not nearly enough,” he continued. His mouth touched her eyelids and closed them while his thumbs worked their way lazily inside the lacy cups. “You have the prettiest little breasts, Natalie,” he whispered as he traced the soft skin tenderly. “I’d give almost anything right now to put my mouth over them and suckle you.”
She cried out, shocked at the delicious images the words produced in her mind.
“I ache,” he breathed into her lips, even as his thumbs finally, finally, found her and pressed hard against the little peaks.
She sobbed, pushing her face against him as she shivered in the throes of unbelievable sensation.
He made a rough sound and maneuvered her closer to the dark end of the porch, away from the door and windows. His hands cupped her, caressed her insistently while his hot mouth pressed hungrily against her throat just where her pulse throbbed.
“Yes,” she choked, lifting even closer into his hands. “Yes, Mack, yes, please, oh, please!”
“You crazy little fool!” he moaned.
Seconds later, he’d unzipped the dress and his mouth was where his hands had been, hot and feverish in its urgency as it sought the soft skin of her breast and finally forced its way into the lacy cup to fasten hungrily on the hard peak.
Her nails bit into the nape of his neck like tiny blades, pulling his mouth even closer as she fed on the exquisite demands it made on her innocence. She lifted against him rhythmically while he suckled her in the warm darkness, his arms contracted to bring her as close as he could get her.
The suddenness with which he pushed her away left her staggering, so weak that she could hardly stand. He’d moved away from her to lean against the wall, where one big hand pressed hard to support him. He was breathing as if he’d been running a race, and she could see the shudders that ran through his tall body. She didn’t know what to say or what to do. She was overwhelmed. She couldn’t even move to pull up her dress.
After a few seconds he took a harsh, deep breath and turned to look at her. She hadn’t moved a step since he’d dragged himself away from her. He smiled ruefully. She was, he thought, painfully innocent.
“Here,” he said in a husky tone, moving to pull up her dress and fasten it. “You can’t go inside like that.”
She looked at him like a curious little cat while he dressed her, as if it was a matter of course to do it.
“Natalie,” he laughed harshly, “you have to stop looking like an accident victim.”
“Do you do that with her?” she asked, and her pale green eyes flashed.
He mumbled a curse as he fastened the hook at the top of the dress. “Glenna is none of your business.”
“Oh, I see. You can ask me about my social life, and I can’t ask you about yours, is that how it works?”
He frowned as he held her by both shoulders and looked at her. “Glenna isn’t a fuzzy little peach ripening on a tree limb,” he muttered. “She’s a grown, sophisticated woman who doesn’t equate a good time with a wedding ring.”
“Mack!” Natalie exclaimed furiously.
“I don’t even have to look at you to know you’re blushing,” he said heavily. “Twenty-two, and you haven’t really aged a day since I held you in your bedroom the night of Carl’s wreck.”
“You looked at me,” she whispered.
His hands tightened. “Lucky you, that looking was all I did.”
Her eyes searched his face in the dim light. “You wanted me,” she said with sudden realization.
“Yes, I did,” he confessed. “But you were seventeen.”
“And now I’m twenty-two.”
He sighed and smiled. “There isn’t much difference,” he murmured. “And there still isn’t any future in it.”
“Not for a man who just wants to have a little fun occasionally,” she said sarcastically.
“You certainly don’t fall into that category,” he agreed. “I’ve got two brothers and a sister to take care of here. There isn’t room for a wife.”
“Okay. Just forget that I proposed.”
His fingers trailed gently across her soft, swollen mouth. “Besides the responsibilities, I’m not ready to settle down. Not for years yet.”
“I’m sure they’ll take back the engagement ring if I ask them nicely.”
He blinked. “Are we having the same conversation?”
“I only bought you a cheap engagement ring, anyway,” she continued outrageously. “It probably wouldn’t have fit, so don’t worry about it.”
He started laughing. He couldn’t help it. She really was a pain in the neck. “Damn it, Natalie!” He hugged her close and hard, an affectionate hug with bare overtones of unsatisfied lust.
She hugged him back with a long sigh, and her eyes closed. “I think it’s like baby ducks,” she murmured absently.
“What is?”
“Imprinting. They follow the first moving thing they see when they hatch, assuming it’s their mother. Maybe it’s like that with men and women. You were the first man I was ever barely intimate with, so I’ve imprinted on you.”
His heart jumped wildly and his arms tightened around her. “The world is full of men who want to get married and have kids.”
“And I’ll find one someday,” she finished for him. “Have it your own way. But if you really want me to find someone else to fixate on, I have to tell you that dragging me into dark corners and pulling my dress half off isn’t the way to go about it.”
He was really laughing now, so hard that he had to let her go. “I give up,” he said helplessly.
“It’s too late now,” she returned, going to fetch her purse from the floor. “You’ve said you don’t want the ring.”
“Let’s go inside while there’s still time,” he replied as he moved toward the door.
“Not yet,” she said quickly. She moved into a patch of light and looked into her compact mirror, taking time to replace her lipstick and fix her hair.
He watched her calmly, his gaze narrow and intense.
She put the compact in her evening bag and moved toward him. “You’d better do some quick repairs of your own,” she murmured after she examined his face. “That shade of lipstick definitely doesn’t suit you.”
He gave her a glare, but he pulled out his handkerchief and let her remove the stains from his cheek and neck. Fortunately, the lipstick had missed his white collar or there wouldn’t be any disguising it.
“Next time, don’t put on six layers of it before you come over here,” he advised coolly.
