Summer Beach Reads. Natalie Anderson

best part of love.’

      ‘Spoken like a true man,’ she grunted. ‘Somehow, I thought you’d be a devotee of the meeting of intellects being the purest form of love.’

      He looked down on her. ‘You think Plato or Socrates didn’t consider mental sparring as a kind of seduction?’ She wanted to deny it—he could see it in her troubled expression.

      ‘Surely there has to be a physical attraction?’ she pressed.

      ‘It’s a bonus but not essential.’

      Keen green eyes fixed on him and he could see her sharp brain taking hold exactly as it had at the dolphins. Her mind was engaged. Great, he could work with minds.

      ‘So how would you start a seduction of a complete stranger?’ she asked. ‘If I brought the question to Molon Labe as a business hurdle?’

      He folded his arms and pretended to consider it. He didn’t need to. This stuff came so naturally to him after all this time. In fact, even before that, human nature had always been so very obvious to him. The links between people, their motivations and drivers. It had taken him years to realise the rest of the world was more or less oblivious to that.

      ‘You have to start with the ultimate goal. Do you want to feel desired? Get married? Be loved?’ He locked his eyes on hers. ‘Or do you just want to scratch that itch that burns like fire-ants under your skin?’

      She swallowed hard, but her pupils grew bigger. ‘Let’s keep this tasteful. Let’s say married.’

      So Shirley Marr blushed like a schoolgirl at the thought of sharing a room with him and wanted to be desired and loved but wasn’t saying so.

       Interesting.

      He thought about it for a few moments, for effect. ‘Marriage is a commitment. So your first step is to find a way to get a man to commit to the idea of commitment itself.’

      ‘How?’

      He searched the air for ideas. A hundred came to him immediately. ‘Start a project together. Travel. Buy a puppy. Put a vegetable patch in. Get him to give you a space for your toothbrush at his place. Anything that requires him to lock a part of himself into something.’

      The dark hair mounded on her head tipped as she considered that.

      ‘Once he’s made the mental shift towards commitment, then it’s just a series of incremental rises until he’s totally on-board with the idea of a permanent commitment.’

      She stared at him. ‘No wonder you’re so cynical. If that’s what you believe people do.’

      ‘I’m not saying it’s conscious, necessarily.’

      ‘Surely being aware of it means it wouldn’t work?’

      He laughed. ‘You wanted me to commit to the list and I did. Knowing what was happening didn’t stop it from working.’

      She chewed her lip. Suddenly two hundred per cent of his focus centred there.

      ‘A demonstration, perhaps?’ he murmured.

      Her eyes darkened and widened within their kohl smudges as she stared up at him warily.

      ‘I find myself very interested in the shape and taste of your lips,’ he said theatrically. ‘And I’m declaring that to you so you’re aware of the direction of my thoughts and so you can plan to resist when the moment comes.’

       And because success will be so much more satisfying that way.

      He reached down and pulled her to her feet. She rose to stand before him.

      Shirley had to push extra-hard to get words past her suddenly tight chest. ‘This is hypothetical, I assume?’ Hayden’s smile reminded her of the Huntsman-wolf in Red Riding Hood. All the better to eat you with …

      ‘If that makes you feel better about your chances of resisting,’ he said.

      He pulled her a little closer. Closed his arms around her, hot and strong. Her heart went berserk. ‘So the question is, Shirley … knowing what I’m doing and knowing what my goal is—’ he breathed down on her ‘—are you any less inclined to let me kiss you?’

      She licked her lips. Struggled for air. ‘You’re assuming you already have my buy-in?’

      Hayden blinked, slow, confident. That caused Shirley’s own lids to follow suit, growing heavier. She tried to glance away to break the contact.

      ‘A kiss is the touching of flesh on flesh. You started to buy into me touching you months ago … the first time you let my glance rest on your porcelain skin. Then later, when you let my fingers graze your hair. Then take your hand. Even now … my eyes are roaming where my lips cannot and you’re allowing it.’

      Sure enough, his veiled gaze browsed her mouth and made it part in breathless anticipation. She forced it closed.

      ‘And now, even knowing what I plan to do and why, you’re still in my arms. I think I’d call that buy-in.’

      ‘Pretty clever,’ she breathed, desperate to preserve some dignity. ‘Assuming it’s going to be any kind of kiss at all.’

      His teeth flashed white and dangerous. ‘And there it is. Full commitment.’

      He took her weight on his arm and leaned her back into it, his mouth pressing down confidently onto hers, sliding against it, still half-smiling in his victory. She held firm against the heavenly feel and smell of him so close, refusing to give in.

      She would have loved to stand, unmoved, in his hold. To let him kiss her senseless and then to emerge untouched. Indifferent.

      But that wasn’t going to happen.

      Not in this lifetime.

      The moment she resisted, holding her own—barely—against the breathless spin of her mind, he upped the ante. Plying her with the technique that must have unzipped many a skirt in its time. His mouth glided over hers, alternating pressure, his tongue teasing the firm line she maintained where her lips met. His flesh blazing against hers. Her head spun wildly.

      He pulled back a little, breathed words against her flaming skin, and something about the shift of colour in his eyes told her he wasn’t playing a game any more. ‘I’m going to kiss that dark gloss off until I reveal what’s underneath it.’

      A sudden erotic lance speared way down deep inside. He set to work doing just that, pressing himself more fully into her, binding them close and kissing the living daylights out of her. Her fingers, pressed against his chest to stop him getting closer, curled, of their own accord, into the fabric of his shirt. Her feet, which she’d positioned to help her push against Hayden, subtly shifted weight so that she leaned more fully into him.

      Into his kiss.

      Her head, which should have been screaming resistance, swam uselessly in the wash of scent and sensation pumping off the human hormone holding her up.

      And her mouth opened.

      Instantly he was in, his triumph punctuated by the thrusts of his tongue and the heaving breaths they both stole between kisses. Her whole body flamed with desire and she speared her fingers up into his hair, keeping him close. He backed her up against the wall.

      ‘Witch,’ he pressed into her hungry lips. ‘There was never any other avenue for us.’

      Something about speech. Something about the incendiary way the two of them had burst to flame the moment they touched and the way the oxygen they sucked in only fuelled it more. Something finally drew her attention to what they were doing and where.

      She pulled back, chest heaving. ‘You assume that was all your doing,’ she whispered the moment her lips were free. ‘What if I’ve been angling for a kiss since the beginning?’

      His eyes darkened, dropped. Then his hands followed suit. Then he