by Penny Jordan
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.
Her face was burning with mortified embarrassment, and she prayed that Lucas Soames could not feel, as she could, the sudden sensual tensing and swelling of her breasts. Her nipples were tightening and thrusting against her top, as though eager for his attention, whilst her stomach clenched and a slow ache possessed the lower part of her body. The urge to put her hand over her sex to quell its silent demand was so strong that it was just as well that his hold of her prevented her from doing so.
Prevented her from doing that, yes, but it didn’t prevent her from reacting to the intimate pressure of his body against hers, and the soft mound covering her sex began to swell wantonly, a totally unfamiliar desire to grind her hips against him pulsing through her with increasingly demanding intensity.
Engrossed in her own dismay, she heard Lucas saying harshly, ‘Unfortunately for me, on this occasion at least, I prefer to protect human life rather than to destroy it.’
‘Protect human life?’ Suzy demanded scornfully, secretly relieved to be able to focus on something other than her unwanted reaction to him. ‘You were a soldier! Soldiers don’t protect lives,’ she told him with hostility. ‘They—’
She wasn’t allowed to get any further. His hold on her tightened. She could see the anger darkening his eyes as he looked at her, and her heart jolted painfully against her ribs.
‘I suppose I should have expected that kind of ill-informed and gratuitously offensive remark from someone like you,’ he said with scathing contempt. ‘In the modern Army our purpose is to do the job we have to do with as little loss of human life as possible!’
His reaction had been immediate and savage—and surely out of proportion to what she had said, Suzy reflected inwardly, refusing to allow herself to be intimidated by it. He might generally prefer to save lives, but in her case she suspected he would have been more than ready to make an exception, if instinct and training had not been so ingrained in him!
Women reporters! Lucas felt the sour taste of old bitterness clogging his throat. And yet despite everything he was still holding on to her. He was holding on to her because he wasn’t going to risk so much as letting her move a foot from his side, Luke assured himself acidly.
Even so…
‘Time to go,’ he announced, moving so swiftly that Suzy could barely catch her breath.
One moment she was lying on top of him on the ground, the next somehow she was standing up on her own, with Lucas next to her.
That surely wasn’t disappointment that was dampening down her relief, was it?
‘I give you my word that I won’t say anything about the villa to anyone,’ she began to assure him earnestly.
‘Your word?’ Lucas rapped out contemptuously.
‘We both know that your word is as worthless and overused—as…as you are yourself!’
The pain was everywhere. Inside her head, inside her heart, inside her body. With every breath she took she was breathing in its poison, its rank bitterness contaminating her.
Worthless…overused…Immediately Suzy wanted to hit back at him, to hurt him as deeply as he had hurt her, to mark him in a way that would leave him wounded for life, as she knew she herself would be.
Some women might shrug it off and even laugh at such a branding, but she was not one of them.
Overused. That was what he thought of her. She felt sick inside with emotional agony.
Something had changed. Some subtle shifting had occurred that had wrongfooted him, Luke’s instincts told him. But he couldn’t fathom what it was.
Suzy was staring fixedly past him, her body immobile. Was it her silence that was triggering the sixth sense that told him he had overlooked something? Had he expected her to argue with him, try to win him round, convince him that he was wrong and that she was to be trusted?
Frowning, he looked away, and so didn’t see the single tear that welled in each of Suzy’s eyes, to hang glistening on her eyelashes before rolling down her face.
His words had hurt more than if he had physically attacked her—more than if he had turned and walked away from her—more than if he had simply left her to die in a crushed heap of flesh and bones against the jagged rocks from which he had saved her. One day she would be grateful for them, she promised herself. One day she would look back on this and know that what he had said to her had destroyed every minute seed of feeling she might have had for him with the force of a nuclear attack.
One day. But not this day. This day she felt as though she wanted to crawl into a hole and hide herself away, somewhere private and dark, where she and the pain would be alone to confront one another.
CHAPTER FOUR
SUZY could feel her legs trembling as she took a step away from Lucas Soames, her gaze fixed on the path ahead.
Did she really think he was just going to let her walk away? Luke could not credit her woeful lack of reality. He had grabbed her before she had taken more than a few paces, jerking her back towards him.
Suzy only had time to recognise that despite his violent gesture he did not actually hurt her before she was clamped to his side.
‘You’d better get one thing clear,’ Luke told her curtly. ‘From now on where I go, you go. And you can take your choice whether it is by my side, two steps ahead of me or two steps behind. But two steps is going to be as far away as I let you get.’
‘You can’t do that. You can’t make me!’ Suzy protested shakily, real fear in her eyes as she looked at him.
‘I can and will do anything and everything I deem necessary in order to protect the interests I am here to protect,’ Lucas told her uncompromisingly. ‘Now,’ he demanded, ‘where are you staying?’
Mutinously Suzy refused to answer him, compressing her lips and looking away from him. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shrug.
‘Very well then, we’ll go straight to the villa. If you choose to spend the next few weeks with only the clothes you are now wearing, then you may do so!’
Unable to stop herself, Suzy turned towards him.
‘The next few weeks?’ she protested in despair. ‘I can’t—I…’
‘The name of your hotel?’ Luke repeated.
Her lips numb, Suzy told him. Luke watched her in silence.
‘Right, we’ll go there now and get your stuff.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It will soon be dinner time, and that will be a perfect opportunity for me to introduce you. Which reminds me—you had better get used to calling me Luke.’
‘Luke?’ Suzy checked him, confused. ‘But I thought your name was Lucas?’
‘Officially, it is,’ he agreed coolly. ‘Lucas is an old family name, from my father’s family, but my mother always called me Luke.’ His expression shadowed a little, and against her will Suzy felt an emotional tug on her heartstrings. ‘My friends call me Luke, and as my partner so must you.’
‘As your partner…’ Suzy began shakily. Her heart was thumping, and not solely because of the speed with which Luke was forcing her to walk down the hill alongside him.
‘Partner as in living together. Partner as in lovers!’ Luke answered calmly.
Lovers? Suzy heart jerked frantically. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t!
‘I…Will I have my own room?’ Suzy could hear the wobble in her voice.
Luke stood still and looked at her. What kind of game was she trying to play now? The Little Miss Innocent nervous act certainly didn’t fool him, and he was surprised that she should try it.
‘Of course you will have your own room,’ he said silkily.
Suzy began to exhale in a rush.
‘However, it will also be my room,’ Luke informed her grimly. ‘And let me warn you right now that I am a very light sleeper, and trained to wake at the slightest sound. If there’s one thing I hate it’s having my sleep disturbed, so if you were rash enough to try to leave the room during the night I warn you that I am not likely to react with either charity or gentleness. Do I make myself understood?’
Suzy lingered mentally over a handful of biting retorts before reluctantly abandoning in favour of safety and silence.
‘And whilst we are on the subject I might as well point out to you that there are guards posted at every exit from the villa and my men patrol the grounds.
Trying not to look afraid, Suzy demanded, ‘Won’t it look odd for me to suddenly turn up at the villa? I mean, you’re here on business, and you don’t strike me as the kind of man who would allow his partner to just appear and expect…’
He was watching her with a narrow-eyed intensity that unnerved her.
‘We had a quarrel about how much time we have to spend apart before I left London,’ Luke told her smoothly. ‘You’ve realised how idiotic you were being and you’ve come here to apologise to me.’
‘I was being idiotic?’ Suzy stopped him wrathfully, her fear forgotten as she leapt to the defence of her sex. ‘And now I’m apologising…?’
‘Since I’m here on holiday with an old friend and his children—’ Luke ignored her outburst ‘—what could be more natural than that you should join us?’
‘You’re here on holiday?’ Suzy shook her head challengingly. ‘I saw with my own eyes those men and that car and—’
‘You may have seen them,’ Luke said with cold menace, ‘but I intend to make sure you do not get the opportunity to say so—to anyone. And most especially not to Roy Jarvis!’
‘Why won’t you accept that I do not work for the magazine any more?’ Suzy demanded in frustration.
‘And as for the men I saw—’ She gave a dismissive shrug. ‘I just saw them, that’s all.’
‘You just saw them? I saw you photographing them,’ Luke reminded her damningly.
‘Because I thought it would make a good photograph to show my friends. They run a holiday company,’ Suzie told him in frustration. ‘Look, I can give you their name and phone number and you can ring them and—’
‘Credit me with some intelligence.’ Luke stopped her dryly. ‘Of course Jarvis will have set up an alibi for you!’
‘No. You can ring them now. Look, I’ve got my mobile,’ Suzy insisted, putting her hand in her pocket to retrieve it.
Instantly Luke’s hand clamped over her own. ‘I’ll take that, thank you,’ he announced, removing her hand from her pocket and then sliding his own into it to remove the phone.
The sensation of his hand pressing against her hipbone
made her whole body burn. Warily, Suzy held her breath, exhaling with relief when Luke removed his hand, along with her phone.
But, to her shock, once he had transferred her mobile into his own possession he reached out and took hold of her hand as they approached the resort.
To anyone else they would look like a couple enjoying the warmth of the Italian sunshine, Suzy recognised. But of course they were no such thing. Experimentally she tried to remove her hand, wincing as she felt the crushing pressure of Luke’s imprisoning response.
‘Where is your hotel?’ Luke asked.
He might be addressing her, but his gaze was measuring everything and everyone around them, Suzy saw as she glanced up at him. He was scanning the happy crowd of holidaymakers surrounding them.
Even in casual holiday clothes there was still an aura of command and authority about him. Suzy could see the way women’s heads turned towards him, their glances lingering on him.
Had they really been a couple…A quiver of emotion ran through her.
‘Where’s your hotel?’ Luke repeated, shooting her a cold, impatient look.
Suzy wondered wrathfully how she could allow herself to be vulnerable to a man like this. A man who could not recognise the truth when it and she were standing here beside him!
‘It’s here,’ Suzy told him reluctantly, nodding in the direction of the drive which led up to the discreetly elegant boutique hotel where she was staying.
‘You’re staying here?’
She could see Luke frowning as though he was surprised.
‘Where did you think I’d be staying?’ Suzy taunted as they walked through the entrance, their progress noted by the sharp-eyed doorman who seemed instinctively to know who was resident at the hotel without having to check. ‘Somewhere brash and flashy?’
‘Well, that would certainly be more in keeping with your boss’s tastes,’ Luke agreed coolly.
They had reached the hotel now. Originally a private villa, it had only recently been converted and extended into its present form. A cool tiled hallway led into the reception area and the clerk on duty smiled at Suzy in recognition, reaching for her room key before she had to ask.
