A Passionate Affair. Elizabeth Power

her. ‘That’s as bad as a peeping Tom.’

      ‘Maybe.’ If he agreed with her it didn’t bother him an iota. ‘But you looked so tempting lying there, and I’ve never pretended to be a saint. Mortal man can only take so much when confronted with Aphrodite at—’ he consulted the gold Rolex on his tanned wrist ‘—eleven o’clock in the morning.’

      ‘What?’ The mention of the time deflected her wrath, as he had known it would. ‘It can’t be eleven o’clock.’ She made a move to spring out of bed and then remembered she was naked. ‘Why didn’t someone wake me, for goodness’ sake? I have a meeting first thing this morning, and a report which has to be on Jeff’s desk by noon. I can’t believe—’

      ‘Calm down.’

      It was the last straw. He could sit there as calm as a cucumber—or was it as cool as a cucumber? She couldn’t remember now, but it was all the same—and act as though she should be pleased to discover she was hours late for the office. ‘Where are my clothes?’ she asked stonily, forcing herself not to give way and yell at him.

      ‘In Hannah’s tender care. She thought your suit needed pressing. Of course you have a wardrobe full, still in our room,’ he reminded her innocently, before adding, ‘How’s the head this morning?’

      ‘Fine. I told you last night, it was just a headache. If you had let me walk home—’

      ‘You wouldn’t have made it. Not with all the stuff you’d pumped into yourself.’

      He made her sound like a drug addict, and she resented it bitterly—that and the fact that he was right. She looked into his face now and saw he was watching her intently, his eyes like polished amber, with a disturbing gleam at the back of them. She swallowed, feeling hot and flustered. ‘Thank you,’ she said grudgingly, ‘for taking care of things.’

      ‘My pleasure.’ The carved lips twitched a little.

      ‘But I need to phone the office and explain why I’m late.’

      ‘You aren’t late. You’re having the day off because you are ill, probably because they are working you too hard. I phoned and spoke to Jeff first thing.’

      She stared at him, her expression altering as she absorbed his words. ‘You had no right to do that.’ Her voice rose with her indignation. ‘Not without asking me first.’

      ‘You were asleep,’ he pointed out mildly, ‘and I thought you’d just thanked me for taking care of things?’

      ‘This is different.’ She wished he would stand up and move away. It was more disconcerting than she could express having him sitting inches away from her, fully dressed, when she was stark naked under the questionable protection of the bedcover.

      ‘You would rather have let them think you just hadn’t bothered to call in?’ he asked with a puzzled frown.

      She counted silently to ten. ‘What exactly did you say?’

      ‘Exactly?’ He shut his eyes for an infinitesimal moment, as though he was trying to recall the conversation, but Marsha was not fooled. That computer brain forgot nothing—ever. ‘Merely that you were taken ill last night and would not be fit to work today. I said I would phone before five this evening with an update,’ he added helpfully.

      Great. Just great. Now Jeff would be thinking all sorts of things—mainly about whose bed she had spent the night in—and she really couldn’t blame him. Would he be discreet? She was not sure.

      ‘Stop frowning.’ His deep husky voice had laughter somewhere at the back of it, although the chiselled face was perfectly serious. ‘You’ll have wrinkles before you’re thirty at this rate.’

      ‘I have some already,’ she snapped back curtly. And the odd grey hair, although she was not about to point that out.

      ‘Not that I can see.’ He bent forward on the pretence of looking more closely, invading her air space with the warmth and scent of his body.

      The muscled strength that padded his chest and shoulders was very apparent under the thin silk of the shirt he was wearing, and Marsha had to force herself not to wriggle back against the pillows.

      She would not give him the satisfaction of knowing how much he bothered her, she told herself furiously. But she wished she had had time to at least brush her teeth and wash her face before he had decided to come in. She tried to stop looking at his mouth. It was a very sexy, cynical mouth, and had always had the power to make her bones melt.

      ‘If you would like to tell Hannah I’m ready for my clothes, I can at least make an appearance before lunch and work on the report for this afternoon,’ she said stiffly.

      ‘I wouldn’t—like to tell Hannah, that is,’ he said without moving an inch.

      ‘Taylor, I’m going into the office today.’

      ‘Marsha, you are not.’

      His use of her Christian name warned her that, however calm and laid-back he appeared, he meant business, as did the glint in his eyes.

      ‘This is quite ridiculous. You can’t keep me here against my will and—’

      Anything else she might have said was swallowed up as his mouth came down quickly on hers, a deft turn of his body bringing his hands either side of her slim shape as he pinned her beneath him. She wriggled and tried to fight him, only to realise that any movement brought the duvet dangerously close to slipping right down her body. She stopped squirming and immediately the kiss became subtly deeper, his mouth and tongue doing incredible things to her.

      Heat was racing through her bloodstream and she felt the length and power of his arousal, her nerve-endings becoming sensitised as he moved his hips over her shape in a way which forced her to recognise his dominance. But his mouth was all persuasion. He probed, he sipped, he nipped, moving down from her lips when he felt her trembling submission and heard the little moans she couldn’t hide, to rain burning kisses on her throat, her neck and the smooth silky skin beneath.

      Her breath caught in her throat as he peeled the cover back enough to expose the twin peaks of her breasts, his hands cupping and shaping the engorged flesh and his thumbs teasing her nipples into hard life even as his mouth took her gasps.

      ‘I want to eat you alive.’ His voice was a husky growl. ‘Do you know that? Devour you…’

      She had missed him so much. Even as the thought took shape a polite knock sounded on the bedroom door. ‘Hannah.’ With a sound deep in his throat, which could have been a groan or a sigh, Taylor straightened up, moving the cover up to her neck as she just stared at him dazedly. ‘You were supposed to be drinking that—’ he indicated a now cold cup of tea on the table at the side of the bed ‘—while she prepared your breakfast.’

      As the knock came again, he said, ‘Okay if she comes in?’ brushing back a lock of her hair which had tumbled across her face as he spoke.

      ‘Of course.’ She jerked her head away from him, humiliation and self-contempt making her voice sharp. He clicked his fingers and she came to heel like an obedient puppy—was that what he was thinking? Why on earth had she allowed him to kiss her like that, caress and touch her? Why hadn’t she resisted more forcefully?

      His eyes narrowed slightly at the tone of her voice, but other than that he gave no sign that he was aware of her discomfiture, merely rising from the bed before he called for Hannah to enter.

      Hannah fussed and babied her as she plumped the pillows for her patient and settled the tray on the invalid’s lap, but Marsha didn’t mind the other woman’s attention. Hannah had been widowed in her native Jamaica after only fifteen months of marriage, the shock of her husband’s death through drowning, when his fishing boat had been sunk in a storm, bringing on the birth of their first child over two months early. The baby, a little girl, had lived for an hour, and had been buried in her father’s arms.

      Hannah had told her the story one afternoon,