Christmas Eve Wedding. PENNY JORDAN

      His teasing kiss was beginning to aggravate her. He was treating her like a girl, not a woman—not like the woman she knew she could be with him. All fire and passion, need and hunger. A woman to whom nothing else mattered more than her man, the feelings and desires they were generating and creating between them. Her made her feel…He made her feel alive, primitive, sensual—all woman! His woman!

      Reaching up, she wrapped her arms around him, boldly tangling her tongue with his, drawing him into a kiss of fierce passion.

      ‘Uh-huh, so that’s what you want, is it?’ he demanded thickly against her mouth as he responded to her. ‘Well, in that case, hon—’

      Jaz gasped as he picked her up as easily, as though she were a child, making his way sure-footedly towards the bed like a mountain cat.

      As he laid her down he was already undressing her, and she made no move to stop him. She had known the moment they stepped into the lift together that this was going to happen. Had wanted it to happen. As it had happened with this man so many times since she’d arrived in New Orleans. She positively longed for Caid’s now familiar touch.

      Moonlight streamed in through the unclosed curtains, silvering her exposed breasts. She gasped in pleasure as he touched them, running the slightly coarse pad of his fingertip round the exquisitely sensitive flesh surrounding each pouting nub.

      Excitement, as hot and sweet as melting chocolate, filled her with shocked pleasure. Her body arched like a bow as she offered her breasts to him in the silent heat of the shadowy room, its stillness broken only by the raw tempo of their aroused breathing.

      This was what she had been imagining them doing in the lift—she’d been picturing their naked bodies entwined in the still heat of the Louisiana night.

      Fiercely she reached for him, her fingers tugging at buttons and fastenings, not stopping until she was able to touch the hot skin that held the muscled tautness of his naked body.

      Just touching him unleashed within her a driven hunger she was half afraid to recognise. It was far, far outside the boundaries of her normal emotions. A reckless and alien, dangerous and wild wantonness that refused to be controlled or tamed.

      As he reached for her, covering her body in fierce, rawly sensual kisses, she sobbed beneath the onslaught of her own response—which was immediate, feral and unstoppable.

      Passionately they clung together, stroking, touching kissing, devouring one another in their mutual driving need. In the moonlight Jaz could see the scratches she had scorched across his back, and in the morning she knew her own body would bear the small bruise-marks of his hotly male demands on her, his desire for her. Then perhaps she would wonder at her own behaviour, but right now her thoughts were elsewhere.

      ‘Ready, hon?’ he demanded as he gathered her closer, so close that she could feel the heavy thud of his heart as though it were beating within her own body.

      Wordlessly she answered him with her body, lifting her legs to wrap them tightly around him as he thrust into her.

      The sensation of him filling her, stretching her, made her shake with almost unbearable pleasure.

      Each movement of his body within hers, each powerful thrust, increased the frenzy of need that was taking her higher, filling her senses with the immensity of what was happening. And then abruptly the fierce, breath-catching ascent was over, and she was cresting the topmost wave of her own pleasure, surfing its heights, awed by the power of what she was experiencing. She cried out unknowingly, clinging to the body covering her own, feeling the male release within her; her body accepting the satisfaction of knowing it had given him completion whilst her exhausted senses relaxed.

      

      Caid leaned up on one elbow and gently tickled the impossibly delicate curve of Jaz’s jaw with his fingertips. She was so tiny, so fragile, and yet at the same time so breathtakingly strong, this Englishwoman who had walked so unexpectedly into his life and his heart.

      He had had his doubts—one hell of a lot of them, if he was honest—and with good reason. But then he had overheard her godfather talking to his mother about her background, and Caid had started to relax. Knowing that she came from farming stock—that she had been raised in a country environment and that her role within the store was simply a temporary one she had taken on to show her independence until she was ready to settle down and return to her roots—was all he had needed to lower his guard and stop fighting his feelings for her.

      Which was just as well, because there was no way he could stop loving her now. No way he would ever contemplate settling down with a girl who did not share his deep love of country living and his determination that their children would be raised on his ranch, with their mother there for them, instead of travelling all over the world in the way his own mother had done. She had never been there when he had most needed her, and his parents finally divorced when his father had grown tired of his mother’s constant absences, her single-minded devotion to the family store. Caid had never been in any doubt that the store mattered more to his mother than he did. She had always been frank about the fact that his conception had been an accident.

      As a young boy Caid had been badly hurt by his mother’s open admission of her lack of maternalism. As a teenager that hurt had turned to bitter resentment and as Caid had continued to grow his resentment had become an iron-hard determination to protect his own children from the same fate. Like many people who’d experienced a lonely and painful childhood, Caid had a very strong desire to have his own family and create the kind of closeknit unit he felt he had missed out on.

      One of the most painful episodes of his childhood had been the time when his mother had not even been able to be there for him when his father—her ex-husband—had been killed in a road accident.

      Caid had been eleven at the time, and he had never forgotten just how it had felt to be taken to the mortuary to identify his father…How alone, how afraid and how angry with his mother he had felt.

      He had made a vow then that there was no way anything like that was ever going to happen to his kids. No way!

      Consequently he had been very wary of becoming emotionally involved, despite the number of women who had tried to coax and tempt him into falling in love with them.

      Until now…Until Jaz.

      He had walked into the restaurant where the family, including his mother, was having dinner with Jaz and her godfather, and the moment he had set eyes on her he had known!

      He had known too, from Jaz’s dazed expression and self-conscious pink-cheeked colour, that she was equally intensely aware of him.

      It hadn’t taken him long to skilfully detach her from the others, on the pretext of showing her the view of the Mississippi from the upper floor of the restaurant, and even less time to let her know how attracted he was to her.

      That his behaviour had been somewhat out of character was, he recognised, an indication of just how strong his feelings for her were.

      Ironically, he had almost not met Jaz at all.

      Although Caid had now established a workable and accepting adult relationship with his mother, one of the legacies from his childhood was his intense dislike of the family business. Had he been able to do so he would have preferred to have nothing whatsoever to do with the stores at all. However, that simply wasn’t possible. His maternal grandfather had left him a large portfolio of shares in the family business, which he held in trust, and as a further complication his mother had put emotional pressure on him to take on the role of the business financial adviser, following the completion of his Masters in Business Studies, claiming that if he didn’t she would never be able to believe he had forgiven her for his childhood.

      Rather than become involved in painful wrangling Caid had given in, and of course the family had insisted that he further his role as financial adviser on their proposed purchase of the English store his mother was so keen to acquire—to add to the portfolio of highly individual and specialised stores already operating in Boston, Aspen and New Orleans.

      Unlike the