November Harlequin Presents 1(133)

‘How do you feel?’ she asked and in spite of her attempt to look relaxed he could hear the note of constraint in her voice that was always there when he moved the conversation away from the ordinary, everyday subjects they talked about.

Just what was it she was so uptight about? Was there something she was hiding? Something she didn’t want him to know? It gave him the most disturbing feeling that the one person in the world he felt really comfortable with—someone he knew he had shared the missing part of his life with—might be deliberately holding something back from him.

‘I feel fine! Never better!’ he snapped, the edgy feeling getting the better of him, and he watched the change in her eyes, the way that the warm sensuality died, turning instead to a careful, defensive distance. Silently he cursed himself for his over-hasty reaction.

‘And the doctor said you were OK at your check-up this morning?’

‘You mean he didn’t give you a full report? After all, your role as my nurse seems to be the only one you’re interested in fulfilling.’

‘I thought you’d done away with that idea? To tell you the truth…’ Becca pulled herself up against the wooden back of the lounger so that she was sitting upright and looking him straight in the face ‘…I’m not at all sure what you want from me.’

‘You know only too well what I want.’

Andreas made no attempt to disguise the blatantly sexual double meaning behind his words.

‘How I want you—where I want you.’

There was that wary flicker in her eyes again. A momentary glance into his face and then away, fast, to stare out at the horizon. She affected an intense interest in the ocean that lapped lazily against the shore beyond the sunlit terrace.

‘I thought we—agreed to take that slowly.’

‘We agreed to be sensible. It’s not the same thing.’

‘To me it is. For one thing, I have no idea whether you have anyone else in your life—and you can’t promise that you don’t,’ she pointed out.

‘But if we’re a couple…’

‘I’ve been in England a long time…’ Becca hedged.

So that was it. They’d been apart, and she wasn’t sure she could trust him. That he could understand.

‘There isn’t anyone else in my life.’

‘And you can swear to that, can you?’

‘Well, for one thing I think she’d have turned up by now if there was someone. She’d have heard of my accident. And for another, then Leander would have told me if I was married or anything stupid like that.’

Now what had he said to make her mouth tighten as if against something she’d thought better of saying? And her eyes had moved to the swimming pool, studying the water there as if she had never seen anything like it before.

‘And I doubt if Medora is going to sit back and watch me make a fool of myself over you if she knows I was committed to anyone else.’

‘So that’s what you think you’re doing, is it?’ Becca’s tone was tart. ‘Making a fool of yourself?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ Irritation at the way she wouldn’t look at him, as much as at her tone, roughened the edges of the words. ‘I don’t know if I’ve behaved—or felt—this way before.’

He couldn’t have felt this way before, he’d decided that already. If he’d ever felt this heat of desire for a woman, the sort of burning hunger that made his days impossible to get through without being with her, seeing her, touching her, and turned his nights into sweat-drenched, sleep-deprived endurance tests, then surely he would remember that?

And how could he wipe away the memory of the brief moments of restless sleep that he’d finally managed? Sleep in which his dreams were so vivid, so hot, so passionately erotic that they were almost unendurable. And yet waking to find that they had only been a dream had left him gasping for breath and struggling to regain any trace of his lost control.

He couldn’t have forgotten those feelings. Not if he had ever experienced anything like them for anyone else before.

‘And I believe that in England you have some saying about kettles and pans…’

‘Pots,’ Becca corrected automatically, still using that stiff little voice that scraped over his nerves. ‘Pot calling the kettle black—so what has that got to do with me?’

She sounded so English, so controlled, so sensible that it set his teeth on edge and made him determined to shake her out of that mood. He wanted back the Becca he had seen under the prim and proper exterior on the day of her arrival. The sensual Becca, the hotly responsive Becca. The Becca whose soft, full mouth had felt so wonderful, tasted so delicious under his. Whose firm, high breasts had fitted so perfectly into his hands, the tight nipples pushing against the palms. The Becca who would have been in his bed there and then if she hadn’t had ridiculous, apprehensive, sensible second thoughts.