The Secret Valtinos Baby. Lynne Graham

I’m not a fan of casual or meaningless.’

      Angel lounged back fluidly against the wall of the lift, all naked predator and jungle grace. ‘I’m casual but I’m very real,’ he told her huskily, his deep dark drawl roughening and trickling down her taut spine like a spectral caress.

      ‘Oh, switch it off,’ Merry groaned. ‘We’re like salt and pepper except you can’t mix us.’

      ‘Because you’ve got too many rules, too many barriers. Why is that?’

      ‘Like you are actually interested?’ Merry jibed.

      ‘I am interested,’ Angel growled, dark golden eyes flashing as the lift doors sprang back. ‘I want you.’

      ‘Only because you can’t have me,’ Merry interposed drily, her skin coming up in gooseflesh as he flashed her a ferocious appraisal capable of flaying her skin from her bones. ‘That’s how basic you are.’

      ‘You’re becoming rude.’

      ‘Your persistence is making me rude,’ Merry told him.

      ‘I want to see your hair loose,’ Angel bit out impatiently. ‘It’s unusually long.’

      ‘My mother kept on cutting it short when I was little because it was easier to look after. Now I grow it because I can,’ she said truthfully, her stomach flipping as he shot a sudden charismatic smile at her, his lean, darkly beautiful face vibrant with amusement.

      ‘You’re a control freak,’ he breathed lazily. ‘Takes one to know one, glikia mou.’

      ‘That’s why we don’t get on,’ Merry pointed out.

      ‘We don’t get on because you have a very annoying sort of pious vibe going,’ Angel contradicted. ‘You’re smug.’

      ‘No, I’m not,’ she argued instantly as they crossed the half-empty car park.

      ‘You think you’re superior to me because you’re not at the mercy of your hormones...but you were when I touched you,’ Angel breathed, caging her in against the passenger door of his car, the heat of his lean, powerful body perceptible even through the inches separating them and the rich, evocative scent of husky male and exotic cologne filling her nostrils. His hands braced either side of her, not actually touching her quivering length, and her knees turned weak at the thought that he might touch her. ‘You can hardly breathe when I’m this close to you. I see that, I know that...every time I try to step back, it sucks me back in.’

      He was like an impenetrable force field surrounding her. She knew she could push him away, she knew he wouldn’t fight, she knew he wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want him to do and a weird sense of unexpected power engulfed her. He was still coming back at her because he couldn’t resist the pull between them and she couldn’t resist it either. It was a weakness deep down inside her that she couldn’t suppress. Nobody had ever made her feel the way he was making her feel and that was a thrill on its own, a shot of adrenalin in her veins to match the feverish pound of her heartbeat. She wanted him. The knowledge ploughed through her like a battering ram, casting everything she had thought she knew about herself into a broken jumble of messy pieces.

      ‘You’re not my type,’ she whispered in dry-mouthed protest.

      ‘You’re not my type either,’ Angel admitted thickly. ‘But I’d still have sex in a car park with you any time you cared to ask.’

      ‘Not about to ask,’ Merry confided shakily. ‘Take me home...back off.’

      ‘You’re making a major production of this again,’ Angel accused, flashing his key fob to open the car. ‘Stop doing that. It’s...it’s bizarrely unnerving.’

      She climbed into his car in a daze, the throb between her legs angry and unsettling, the sensual smoulder in the air almost unbearable, every nerve ending painfully aware of it. She didn’t know how he did that using only words and looks. It was terrifying. He had wiped her mind clean, made her feel stuff she didn’t want to feel, rocked the foundations of her security.

      ‘I don’t like you,’ she admitted.

      ‘Thee mou...you don’t have to like me, you only have to want me...and you do.’

      And it was agonisingly true, she registered in dismay. Her brain didn’t seem to have anything to do with the equation. She thoroughly disapproved of everything he was and yet the chemistry between them was wild and dominant.

      ‘We have one night together and sate the craving. Then we put it away and bury it,’ Angel intoned in a driven undertone.

      ‘I thought you didn’t do virgins.’

      ‘Evidently you were born to be my single exception.’

      ‘Is this an actual negotiation?’ Merry enquired incredulously.

      ‘We have to sort this out. You’re taking my mind off work,’ Angel complained. ‘I can’t handle watching you all day and fantasising about you all night. It’s bad for business.’

      ‘What’s in it for me?’ Merry whispered unevenly.

      ‘I’m superlative at sex.’

      ‘Oh...’ Her lashes fluttered, her tummy somersaulting again as she wondered if she really was about to do what he wanted her to do, what she herself wanted to do. And that was the answer there and then when she was least expecting to see or understand it.

      He would make a great introduction to sex for her, she thought dizzily. It would end the insane craving he had awakened inside her and maybe then she could return to her normal tranquil self. That prospect had huge appeal for her. The need would be satisfied, the intolerable longing ended. All right, it wasn’t the big romance with hearts and flowers that she had dimly envisioned, but then possibly that had never been a very practical aspiration. What he was offering was basic and honest even if it was casual and uncommitted and everything she had once sworn she would never participate in. It was not as though she had been saving herself for a wedding ring. She had been saving herself for love, but love hadn’t happened.

      ‘So, you’re suggesting that I just use you,’ Merry remarked grittily as he pulled into another underground car park.

      ‘We use each other,’ Angel exhaled in a rush and, killing the engine, stretched out a long powerful arm to enclose her in almost the same moment.

      His mouth crashed down on hers with a hunger that blew her away. Somehow he made it that she didn’t remember getting out of the car, didn’t remember getting into a lift or emerging from it. There was only that insane, greedy melding of their mouths and the frantic impatient activity of their hands in a dimly lit hall. Her coat fell off or maybe he helped it. His jacket disappeared at similar speed. She kicked off her shoes. He wrenched off his tie and cannoned into a door as he lifted her off her feet.

      ‘We have to slow down,’ he told her roughly, dark golden eyes shimmering like gold ingots, his sexual excitement patent. ‘Or I’ll screw this up for you.’

      He laid her down on a wide, comfortable mattress and stood over her, stripping without inhibition. All she wanted was his mouth on hers again, that magical escape from the limits of her own body that sent her flying higher than she had ever known she could fly. He shed his trousers and her attention locked warily on the very obvious bulge in his boxers while she struggled to accept that she could, even briefly, be with a man who was chronically untidy and dropped clothes in a heap on the floor. Not her type, not her type; she rhymed it like a mantra inside her head, her bulwark against getting attached in any way. It was sex and she didn’t want to regard it as anything else.

      He unzipped her dress and flipped her over to remove it with deft precision and release her bra, before pausing to carefully unsnap the clasp in her hair and let his skilled mouth roam across her pale shoulders. He tugged her round and up to him then, long fingers lifting to feather her curtain of dark coffee-coloured hair round her shoulders, thready shimmers of lighter caramel appearing in the light filtering in from the hall.