The One That Got Away. Kelly Hunter

childish, Logan. You’re letting your fear of behaviours long gone colour your vision of the present. You need to learn how to deal with the person I am now. I need to learn how to deal with you.’

      ‘Childish?’ he said incredulously.

      Was that really as far as he’d got with her words? ‘Don’t forget fearful.’

      He pinned her with a fierce gaze.

      ‘Why else would you be running away?’ she pointed out as gently as she could.

      And received silence in reply.

      ‘Do you feel guilty about some of the things we did together? Is that it? Because you shouldn’t. You had my consent.’

      ‘I know that, Angie.’

      ‘Is it because you exposed your deepest desires to me, and I just fed them to your family?’

      ‘Those desires started—and finished—with you. They don’t belong to me any more. And, yeah. You could have kept them to yourself.’

      ‘Maybe I thought your family needed a better explanation than the one they’d been served. I didn’t realise you were only interested in being truthful up to a point.’

      ‘You should have.’

      She wanted to rattle him, Evie realised. Pick away at his anger and his armour and see what was underneath. ‘You can’t dominate me any more, Logan. You need to realise that.’

      ‘I don’t want to dominate you,’ he muttered. ‘I never wanted that.’ He shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and looked away. ‘But it happened.’

      ‘I thought I was in love with you. Week one of an intensely sexual, sensual relationship,’ she argued. ‘So much to feel and to learn and, yes, my focus was on pleasing you. I like to think I’d have regained my equilibrium at some stage. That the relationship dynamic would have evened out in time. But I guess we’ll never know.’

      ‘I don’t want to dwell on the past, Angie. I just want you gone from my life now.’

      ‘Which is in itself an exercise in enforcing your will over mine.’ Evie moved forward until she was crowding his space; nothing weak about that move. ‘That seem right to you?’

      ‘You can’t marry him, Angie.’

      ‘You really think Max would still have me after the fuss you just made?’

      ‘He’s got fifty million reasons to ignore the fuss I just made,’ said Logan gruffly. ‘You don’t. You need to end this now.’

      Logan’s hand went to the back of his neck. From there, it was only too easy for Evie to let her gaze run over the hard angle of his jaw, the stubble just starting to show, and from there to his lips. A woman could fixate on those lips.

      ‘Don’t,’ he warned huskily.

      ‘Don’t what?’ Wonder if she could coax them open? Wonder what it would take to make them say the name Evie instead of Angie? ‘Don’t tempt you? Don’t wonder what we might have had if you’d stuck around long enough to find out? Because I do wonder what we might have had together, Logan. I can’t help it. And I’m sure as hell wondering it now.’

      ‘Nothing good.’

      ‘You don’t know that. You barely know me. What if I am a match for you now? Ever thought of that?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Maybe you should,’ she cautioned gently, and touched her fingers to his lips and he went still as a statue but he let her do it. ‘What if we could bring this passion between us under control?’

      ‘We’d get lost,’ he muttered as her fingertips strayed to his jaw. ‘I’d get lost and I can’t afford to, Angie. I can’t.’

      ‘What if I know the way?’

      ‘Do you?’ he asked, and then his hands were on her waist, dragging her towards him, and his lips crushed down on hers, desperate and tortured, no half-measures with this man and there never had been. It was all or nothing, and his kisses inflamed her as desperation turned into desire hot and sweet. And then he took his tongue to her mouth and lit an inferno.

      A step backwards towards the bed for him as Evie set her palms to his chest and drank deeply of his passion and his pain. A step forward for her, and then they were falling, and he was beneath her, and his eyes were closed and his ravenous mouth never left her skin.

      Her dress proved a poor barrier against Logan’s clever hands, the thin shoulder straps sliding down, and then he swept the bodice down to reveal the swell of small breasts and the tips of her nipples. He set his tongue to one, and then lips, and suckled hard and Evie gasped as he took her to the edge of pain, and he knew exactly where that edge began, damn him, and when to retreat and bring pleasure coursing in its wake.