British Bachelors: Perfect and Available: Mr. Jessica Hart

unperturbed by the taut silence. Allegra folded her lips together. She wasn’t going to break it. She had made enough small talk for one night, thank you very much! She turned her head away and looked pointedly out of the window, but she was so aware of him sitting just a matter of inches away across the seat that she might as well have turned and stared right at him.

      It wasn’t even as if he was doing anything. He was just sitting still, his face in shadow, his eyes fixed on the ticking taxi meter. He could at least jiggle his leg or do something annoying so that she had an excuse to snap at him. As it was, she was just getting crosser and crosser, and more and more frustrated.

      Why, why, why had he had to kiss her like that? It had been all right up to then. The pretence had been fun and she had been able to dismiss her bizarre awareness of him as a temporary aberration, a passing symptom of sexual frustration. Nothing that meant anything, anyway. She’d been able to think of him as just Max.

      He’d spoiled everything by kissing her. It had been so perfect, as if her whole life had just been about getting her to that place, that moment, where everything else had fallen away and there had just been her and Max and a longing for it never to end gusting through her.

      How could she think of him as just Max now?

      She wished he’d never kissed her.

      She wished he’d kiss her again.

      The realisation of just how much she wanted it made Allegra suck in her breath. This was mad. She was furious with Max. She couldn’t want to kiss him at the same time. She couldn’t want him to reach across and pull her towards him, couldn’t want his hands on her, his mouth on her, not when he’d ignored her all night and clearly had no interest in kissing her again.

      But she did.

      The silence lengthened, stretched agonizingly. Just when Allegra opened her mouth to break it, unable to bear it any longer, Max let out a sigh.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply.

      At least it gave her the excuse to turn and look at him. ‘Sorry?’ she echoed, unable to stop the pent-up frustration from tumbling out. ‘I should think so! Do you have any idea how hard I worked all evening to suck up to the Laskovskis? I got you your bloody job all by myself!’

      ‘I know,’ Max began, but Allegra wasn’t stopping now that she had started.

      ‘You hardly said a word all evening—oh, except to embarrass me by telling Karen I was going to write a book! What did you do that for?’

      ‘I think you should write one. I think it would be brilliant.’

      Allegra wasn’t going to be mollified. ‘It would not be! It would be stupid! I had to sit there and pretend that I was all excited about it and now Karen’s expecting me to send her a copy when it’s published! It’s not funny,’ she added furiously, spotting the ghost of a smile hovering around Max’s mouth. ‘I felt an absolute fool. As if it wasn’t bad enough pretending to be in love with you!’

      ‘You did it really well,’ said Max. ‘You were brilliant at that too, and you’re right, you got me the job. Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘Really, Allegra: thank you.’

      Perversely, his gratitude just made her feel worse. She hunched a shoulder. ‘I only did it so that you’d do the article.’ She sounded petulant, but that was how she felt.

      ‘I know.’

      ‘But you could have helped,’ she grumbled. ‘You were useless! I can’t believe the Laskovskis were taken in. A real fiancé would have looked at me, maybe smiled occasionally, taken every opportunity to get close to me, but not you! It was like you couldn’t bear to touch me.’

      ‘That’s not true,’ said Max tautly. ‘I kissed you.’

      As if she could have forgotten!

      ‘Only when I threw myself into your arms! Pretending to be a loving fiancée, thrilled for her future husband’s promotion,’ Allegra added quickly, just in case he had misinterpreted her instinctive reaction. She had been so pleased for him too, she remembered bitterly. ‘Although I don’t know why I bothered. You gave the impression you’d rather have been picking up slugs!’

      ‘What?’ Max sounded so staggered that Allegra wondered if she might have exaggerated a little, but she had gone too far to back down now. Besides, she had been bottling it up all evening and it was good to get it off her chest.

      ‘I might as well have been a pillar of your precious concrete for all the notice you took of me all evening!’

      Max uttered a strangled laugh and dragged a hand through his hair. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he began.

      ‘Then why did you ignore me?’

      ‘Because I didn’t trust myself, all right?’ he shouted, goaded at last. ‘Because if I hadn’t ignored you, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off you! I’d have kissed you again and again and I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I’d have dragged you down under the table and ripped that bloody dress off you so I could kiss you all over your body and to hell with my boss sitting there with his wife and the rest of the restaurant...’

      He broke off. His chest was heaving and he looked wild-eyed as he glared at Allegra. ‘So now you know. There, are you satisfied now?’

      ‘But...but...’ It was Allegra’s turn to gape.

      ‘Of course I wanted to touch you!’ Max said furiously. ‘I’ve wanted it ever since you opened the bathroom door. I haven’t been able to think about anything else all evening. I had to sit there, trying to talk to my boss, when all I could think about was how easy it would be to slide my hand under your dress, about how it would feel to unzip it, all the time knowing it would never happen! And you wanted me to do chit-chat as well?’

      He was glowering at her as if he hated her, but a treacherous warmth was stealing along Allegra’s veins, dissolving her own anger into something far more dangerous, while the spikiness in the atmosphere evaporated into quite a different kind of tension.

      He wanted her.

      Desire twisted sharp and sure in her belly. His hair was standing on end where he had raked his hand through it and he looked cross, rumpled, gorgeous. When had he become so...so...so hot? Why hadn’t she noticed?

      Allegra’s heart thudded in her throat and her mouth dried with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. She had been sent once to try bungee jumping for an article and she had felt just like this when she’d stood on the edge of the bridge: terrified, thrilled, longing to be brave enough to jump but afraid that she would never have the courage.

      She had done it, though. She could do this too, if she really wanted to. Allegra moistened her lips.

      Max wanted her.

      She wanted him.

      Allegra’s mind was still busy calculating the risk when her mouth opened and she heard herself say, ‘How do you know?’

      Thrown, Max stared at her. ‘How do I know what?’

      ‘That it would never happen.’ Allegra watched, appalled, as her body took over, shifting towards him, reaching out for his hand, setting it on her knee, all without a single instruction from her brain.

      What was she doing? she thought in panic, but her hands seemed to have acquired a will of their own. Stop it, she told herself frantically, but the message wasn’t getting through, and now her legs were getting in on the act, quaking with pleasure at the warm weight of his hand.

      Max swallowed. ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, Legs,’ he said in a constricted voice, but he didn’t seem to have any better control over his hands than she did. His fingers were curling over her knee, pressing through her sheer tights into the soft skin of her inner thigh, and she couldn’t prevent the shudder of response clenching at the base of her spine.

      ‘I’m not sure either,’ she admitted with difficulty.