Princes of the Outback: The Rugged Loner / The Rich Stranger / The Ruthless Groom. Bronwyn Jameson

as if he’d surprised the breath right out of her. Hell, he’d surprised himself even though the words had come out of his mouth!

      “Have you changed your mind?” she asked.

      “Have you?” he countered.

      “About making a baby in some sterile clinic?” With a glancing brush of fingers, she took the book from him and tossed it onto the desk. “Absolutely not.”

      “I meant about helping me.”

      “Does it matter? Since we don’t see eye to eye on the method, my offer of help is moot.”

      “Maybe we can compromise. About the method.”

      “Really?” Eyebrows arched, she regarded him steadily for a drawn-out second. “How would that work, do you suppose?”

      Tomas shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t have an answer. Until this last minute he hadn’t fixed on what he’d hoped to achieve by coming up here. Making sure she didn’t get tangled with his hound of a brother, yeah, but as for how—

      “Yeesh, Tomas.” She interrupted his thoughts with obvious irritation. “You don’t know why you’re here, do you? Nothing’s changed from last week.”

      “You don’t know that.”

      “I know that you couldn’t even stand me kissing you, so why chance anything more intimate?” She blew out a short, impatient breath, and when she started to turn away Tomas reacted instinctively, stopping her retreat with a hand on her arm. For a long moment she just stood there gazing up at him, her eyes widened with surprise.

      Good.

      He’d caught her on the back foot for a change, and with subtle emphasis he shifted his grip on her arm, not exactly tightening but…adjusting. Just so she knew he meant to keep her there until he was done. Whatever he had to say, whyever he’d changed his mind and come upstairs, he had to put into words. Now. “You caught me by surprise last week.”

      “So—” she lifted her chin “—if I’d given you more notice you wouldn’t have minded me kissing you?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “You don’t know,” she repeated softly, her gaze narrowing and darkening. “Do you want to find out? Or do you want to let go of my arm so I can get back to work?”

      The challenge gleamed hot in her eyes, daring him to make that choice. It’s only a kiss, he told himself, but that phrasing didn’t help. Not when her words from last week twined sinuously through his consciousness.

       It’s only sex.

      And this was a test. If he could kiss her, if he could just bend his head to hers and go through the motions, then maybe he could do the sex part, too. Maybe.

      He heard the huff of her exasperated breath, felt her start to pull away and blocked her escape with his body. Their eyes met and held. An awareness of what they were about to do charged the air between them, but a breath away from her lips, he paused, too charged with tension to breach that final inch of space.

      “Go ahead,” she said softly. “I won’t bite…unless you want me to.”

      His head reared back, dumbfounded when he should have expected no less. This was Angie, after all. Angie who was shaking her head with renewed exasperation.

      “I was kidding. A joke, you know. Humor.”

      Yeah, he knew, he just wasn’t in a kidding mood, not by a long shot.

      And that she must had read on his face because she sighed, a soft relenting whisper, as she leaned forward and touched her thumb to his chin. Then she shocked the hell out of him by reaching up and kissing him there. He felt the softness of her lips, the moist warmth of her tongue and then her retreat.

      A small smile hovered on her lips as she whispered, “Sorry.”

      Sorry for the joke? Or for striking him dumb with that one swift touch of her tongue. Tomas tried to wrap his astonishment into words, to ask what she meant, but she took his face between her hands—the same as she’d done at the plane—and looked right into his eyes, her gaze dark and steady and serious.

      “That was your notice.” She stretched to kiss one corner of his mouth and then the other. “I’m going to kiss you now, okay?”

      Before he could begin to recover his equilibrium, she moved her lips against his with soft restraint, as if she was expecting his withdrawal…or waiting for him to take a more active role. A raw, male part of him itched to take over, but a stronger, harsher voice hammered away in resistance. It wouldn’t let him forget that this was Angie, and he had no business wanting to close his eyes and immerse himself in the lush temptation of her lips.

      “Relax,” she whispered, her breath a shiver of sensation on his skin and in his blood. Her thumbs stroked his cheeks, down to the corners of his mouth. “It’s only a kiss.”

      And then she kissed him the same way she tackled everything—with the same energy and heat and wholehearted passion. She kissed and she willed him to open up, to unwind, to let go. She made a sound low in her throat, a kind of smoky humming that rolled through him in one long, hot wave of desire that caught him totally unprepared, completely at a loss. All he could do was close his eyes and thread his hands into the thick softness of her hair and kiss her back.

      Lord, how he kissed her back. With a hunger he couldn’t control, with a thoroughness he no longer wanted to control, with a yearning for all the intimacies he’d missed in the last years.

      Since Brooke died.

      That thought stalled his senses, slammed at his conscience, dragged him out of the drugging depths of that hot, wet contact. Intimacy was not what he wanted. No way. This was only a trial, proof that he could close his eyes and forget himself for long enough to do what had to be done. A means to an end and that was all.

      He hauled himself back into his own space and switched his expression to deadpan. Not difficult—he’d had a lot of practice in recent years. Angie had slumped back against the desk. She shook her head as if to clear it and her eyes looked a little dazed. Her hair was a wild tumble, her lips kissed naked and pliant, and when she crossed her arms under her breasts, he couldn’t help but notice the outline of her nipples right through her respectable white shirt.

      Heat tightened his skin, itched in his hands, swelled in his flesh. He looked away, forced himself to focus on the next step, now he’d conquered the first.

      “So,” she said on a breathy exhalation. “That didn’t seem to go too badly.”

      His eyes met hers, held, didn’t let go. “Do you still want to help me?”

      For a long second she didn’t react, and he wondered if she hadn’t cottoned on to his meaning, if he needed to spell out what he was asking. Again. Then her hand drifted to her throat, and she twisted the fine chain around her index finger. Her throat moved, as if she’d swallowed. “My way?”

      “Yes.”

      “Wow.” She eyed him a moment, her expression circumspect. “That’s a big step up from a kiss.”

      “I know that.”

      “And you think you can take your clothes off and climb into bed with me? That you can do—”

      “I don’t know, okay?” And he sure as hell didn’t need her talking him through every step. He could feel the heat in his face, the tightness in his jaw, in other places he didn’t want to acknowledge, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, rearranging his weight and the tightness and the jumble of words in his brain. “I don’t know, but I want to try.”

      “Because you want a baby?”

      “Because I need a baby.”

      “Right.”

      There was a sting in her tone, a darkness