Modern Romance Collection: February 2018 Books 1 - 4. Lynne Graham

you we’d still be in the lift!’

      ‘No. I would’ve pushed you away,’ she insisted with cool assurance.

      She gave him her address, although he didn’t seem to need it, and the journey through heavy traffic was silent, tense and unnerving. He pulled up at the kerb outside the ugly building where she lived. ‘You could afford to live in a better area than this,’ he censured.

      ‘I have a healthy savings account,’ she told him with pride, releasing her seat belt at the same time as he reached for her again.

      His wide sensual mouth crushed hers with burning hunger and no small amount of frustration. Her whole body leapt as though he had punched a button detonating something deep down inside her, releasing a hot surge of tingling awareness in her pelvis that made her hips squirm and her nipples pinch painfully tight.

      Angel lifted his tousled dark head. ‘I’m still waiting on you pushing me away. You’re all talk and no action,’ he condemned.

      ‘I don’t think you’d appreciate a slap,’ Merry framed frigidly, her face burning with mortification.

      ‘If it meant that you ditched the icy control I’d be begging for it,’ Angel husked suggestively, soft and low, the growl of his accent shaking her up.

      Merry launched out of his sports car as though jet-propelled, uncharacteristically flustered and shaken that she had failed to live up to her own very high principles on acceptable behaviour. She should’ve pushed him away, slapped him, thumped him if necessary to drive her message home. Nothing less would cool his heels. He was a highly competitive, aggressive male, who viewed defeat as an ongoing challenge.

      His car stayed at the kerb until she stalked into the building and only then did she breathe again, filling her compressed lungs and shivering as though she had stepped out of a freezing snowstorm. She felt all shaken up, shaken up and stirred in a way she didn’t appreciate and almost hated him for.

      The feel of his mouth on hers, the taste of it, the explosive charge of heat hurtling at breakneck speed down into her belly and spreading to other, more intimate places she never ever thought about. How dared he do that to her? She would lodge a complaint of sexual harassment! Didn’t he know what he was risking? But being Angel, he wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even stop to consider that he was playing with fire. Indeed, the knowledge would only energise and stimulate him because he loved to push the limits.

      She curled up tight in her bed that night, overwhelmed by her first real experience of sexual temptation. When he kissed her she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. A kiss had never had that effect on her before and she was unnerved by the discovery that a kiss could be that influential. She toyed with the idea of complaining about sexual harassment, pictured Angel laughing fearlessly in the face of such a threat and finally decided that she didn’t want the embarrassment of that on her employment record. Particularly when such a claim would fail because she hadn’t pushed him away, hadn’t given him an immediate rejection.

      The next day she was very nervous going into work, but Angel didn’t do or say anything that was different and she was strangely irritated by that reality: that he could act as though he had never offered to take her home to bed for the night and, afterwards, simply treat her like everyone else. But those same moments of intimacy had carried a higher price for her. It was as though he had stripped away her tough outer layer and chipped her out of her cautious shell to ensure that she began feeling physical and emotional responses she had comfortably held at bay until she’d met him.

      During the week that followed she was feverishly aware of Angel to a degree that sent her temperature rocketing. When he looked at her, it was as if a blast of concentrated heat lit her up inside and her bra would feel scratchy against her tender nipples and a dull ache would stir between her thighs, her every tiny reaction in his presence like a slap in the face that shamed her. It was a terrible destructive wanting that wouldn’t go away. He had lit the spark and she seemed stuck with the spread of the fire licking away at her nerves and her fierce pride.

      At the end of that week, Angel asked her to stay behind after everyone else had left to go for drinks.

      ‘Next on the agenda...us,’ Angel murmured sibilantly.

      Merry shot him a withering appraisal. ‘There is no us.’

      ‘Exactly,’ Angel pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Scratch the itch and it goes away and dies, ignore it and it festers.’

      ‘Your seduction vocabulary needs attention,’ Merry quipped, standing straight in front of him, grudging amusement dancing in her crystalline eyes.

      Angel grimaced. ‘I don’t do seduction.’

      ‘I don’t do one-night stands.’

      ‘So if I make it dinner and sex I’m in with a chance?’ A sardonic ebony brow elevated.

      ‘No chance whatsoever,’ Merry contradicted with pleasure. ‘I’m a virgin and I’m not trading that for some sleazy night with my boss.’

      ‘A virgin?’ Angel was aghast. ‘Seriously?’

      ‘Seriously,’ Merry traded without embarrassment, reflecting on how her mother had fallen pregnant with her and determined to make every choice that took her in the opposite direction. ‘Sex should mean something more than scratching an itch.’

      Angel sprang upright behind his desk, all supple, graceful motion, the fine, expensive fabric of his suit pulling taut over powerful thigh muscles and definable biceps. Her mouth ran dry, her eyes involuntarily clinging to his every movement. ‘It’s never been anything more for me,’ he admitted drily. ‘But I take offence at the word “sleazy”. I am never sleazy and... I don’t do virgins.’

      ‘Good to know,’ Merry breathed tightly, watching his shirt ripple ever so slightly over his muscular chest as he exhaled while cursing her intense physical awareness of him. ‘May I go home now?’

      ‘I’ll drop you back.’

      ‘That’s not necessary,’ she told him coolly.

      ‘I decide what’s necessary around here,’ Angel pronounced, throwing the door wide and heading for the lift. ‘You realise you’re as rare as a unicorn in my world? Are you holding out for marriage?’

      Involuntarily amused by his curiosity, Merry laughed. ‘Of course not. I’m just waiting for something real. 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.’