The Pregnant Bride. Catherine Spencer

can you need someone you don’t even know?”

      “For precisely that reason! When you look at me, you don’t see a pathetic bride without a groom, or a daughter who’s made a laughing stock of her family. You see me— an ordinary woman, just like any other.”

      Ordinary, my hind foot! She was a lovely, sensitive, tenderhearted creature who felt other people’s pain as deeply as her own. A woman in desperate need of the kind of loving which would restore her faith in herself—the kind of loving his brain told him she’d do better to seek elsewhere, but which his less cerebral components clamored to accommodate. Another good reason to put an end to things before they grew even more seriously out of hand!

      “I can’t give you what you’re looking for, sweet pea,” he said hoarsely. “I come with too much excess baggage of my own.”

      Briefly, she sagged against him as if all the fight and courage had been blasted out of her. Then, with a flash of the courage which had drawn him to her from the first, she pushed herself away from him. “Of course you can’t,” she whispered, her voice tinted with shame and her body—every slender, desirable inch of it—poised for escape. “Whatever possessed me to suggest that you could?”

      For the second time in as many minutes, he had the chance to cut and run out of her life as easily as he’d blundered into it. So what the devil prompted him to haul her back into his arms, and stroke the soft, dark hair away from her face? What sort of masochist was he to search out her mouth and kiss her as if she was the last woman on earth and there was no tomorrow?

      The insatiable kind, that’s what, and she’d have done them both a favor if she’d smacked him across the head for his nerve. Maybe that would have spared them both a lot of grief. Instead, her mouth softened beneath his and she sank against him in total surrender.

      To his credit, he tried to put a halt to the situation. But when he went to break the kiss, her little whimper of distress scored a direct hit to…

      What? His heart? Impossible! He was thirty-five, for Pete’s sake, not fifteen, and knew better than to buy that kind of codswallop on the strength of a twenty-four-hour acquaintance with a pretty woman. His conscience? Hell, it was nothing more than a dying whisper desperately trying to make itself heard over the caterwauling of rampant lust! Good deed for the day? Fat chance! He’d been telling her the truth when he said he was no Boy Scout.

      “I shouldn’t have done that,” he muttered, dragging his lips away from hers before he made things even more dangerously volatile by bringing his tongue into play. “It was a very bad idea.”

      She didn’t argue, at least not in so many words. She just brought her soft, smooth little hand up to his cheek and touched him as wonderingly as if she’d just discovered her own personal guardian angel.

      “Jenna,” he croaked, afraid that the distant thunder echoing in his blood boded no good for either of them, “you’re pushing your luck.”

      She slid both arms around his waist and leaned her head on his chest. “My luck,” she said dreamily, “hit rock bottom yesterday. But thanks to you, it’s starting to improve.”

      If his survival instincts weren’t all tangled up in hunger for something he had no right wanting, he’d march her back to The Inn, pack her off to bed by herself, in her own room, then hightail it out of her life before he compounded his already manifest sins.

      If he possessed one ounce of decency, he wouldn’t be tracing a path from her chin to her throat and fantasizing about how she’d look without any clothes on.

      If he had a grain of self-respect, he’d back away from her instead of letting her know he was primed for seduction in the most obvious way a man could convey such a message to a woman.

      And if the damned Inn weren’t so fixated on honeymooners, it wouldn’t have made it so easy for a couple to be alone at every turn. There wouldn’t be shadowed spotlights pearling the night, or a lullaby of surf whispering ashore, or the scent of cedar and fir and hemlock sweetening the air.

      “Maybe,” he said, wrestling with vanishing control, “we should figure out what’s happening here before we let things go any further.”

      “Oh, Edmund,” she murmured, her hands wreaking havoc over his rib cage, “I’m so tired of trying to look for answers that aren’t there. Sometimes, things happen without reason or warning. Just this once, can’t we live for the moment and never mind about tomorrow?”

      “So what are you suggesting?” He forced the question past a throat gone dry as sandpaper.

      “That we follow our feelings, whether or not they make sense.”

      And just in case he hadn’t picked up on what she meant, she tilted her hips against him and lifted her mouth to his again.

      He made one last stab at rational argument. “Your feelings are all tied up with another man, Jenna, and I’m not interested in being his stand-in.”

      “Nor am I,” she said, her lips so close that the words brushed his mouth.

      Her skin was smooth and warm to his touch. She smelled of flowers, she tasted of innocence, she trembled with need. Her breathing was almost as ragged as his own. He could feel her pulse racing.

      “Please make love to me,” she whimpered, taking his hand and closing it over her breast. “Please, Edmund, make me feel whole again!”

      “Not here,” he said thickly, urging her back toward The Inn. Whatever else he might be, he wasn’t such a lowlife that he’d risk their being discovered by other guests. If they were going to make love—and he knew that, barring some cataclysmic natural disaster, nothing would stop them now—it would be in private. Not in her room but in his. Removed from anything that might remind her of the man whose place he was taking.

      The lobby lay deserted, the elevator doors stood open. Pulling her after him into the empty car, he pressed the third-floor button. The doors had barely glided closed before he was searching for her mouth again, the fever to discover her more intimately roaring at fever pitch now that it had been given free rein.

      She melted against him, opened her lips to him, clenched her fingers in his hair as his tongue probed the depths of her mouth. So moist, so sweet. So like that other part of her which taunted him with urgent little pelvic thrusts.

      She was driving him crazy! How else to justify the insane urge to hit the Stop button and take her, right there on the elevator floor? How otherwise to contain the aching fullness testing his control beyond anything a mere man should have to withstand?

      The doors whispered open with a melodious ding! “Talk about saved by the bell,” he panted, fairly racing her down the hall.

      Moonlight left the corners of his room dark, and swathed the bed in drifts of purple shadow. Her skin took on the luster of pale silk, her hair the sheen of dark satin. He framed her face in his hands and bent his mouth again to hers, hoping to imbue his seduction with at least a little finesse.

      But the feel of her, the touch of her, defeated him at the outset. Driven by unwise hunger, he tugged at her clothing, flinging aside one item after another until, at last, he could feast his gaze on her breasts, cup their slender fullness in his hands and take their dusk-tinted peaks in his mouth.

      She sagged, as if he were drawing the last ounce of strength from her. Uttered his name on a long, despairing breath. A tremor raced through her.

      The same frenzied urgency that possessed him was tearing at her, too, stripping her more naked than he ever could, and reducing her dignity to ashes. They were clawing at each other, their hands delineating every curve, every angle. He heard the soft hiss of ripping fabric. His shirt? Her panties? Egyptian cotton, fine French lace?

      It didn’t matter. Nothing was more immediate than that they cleave to one another, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat. Nothing, that was, except the primeval tide which had stalked him from the moment he’d kissed her and which, patience at last outrun, refused to hold back a moment