‘So moving down the road to serve finger food at the Barbiers’ summer party is a step up?’
Anger sizzled in Maggie’s belly and she welcomed it as an antidote to the awful crazy urge she had to plaster herself against this man and beg him to kiss her.
‘I’m doing a lot more than just serving canapés. I’m actually making them.’
Nikos took a step closer.
Maggie refused to move back.
‘You could have stayed at Kildare House. You didn’t have to leave.’
Maggie shook her head. ‘No, staying was never an option.’
Why was she suddenly breathless? As if she’d been running.
He tipped his head slightly to one side. ‘Actually maybe it is better that you left.’
Maggie’s brain wouldn’t function properly. She couldn’t take her eyes off Nikos’s firmly sculpted mouth. ‘Why?
‘Because now there are no issues around me being your boss.’
She dragged her gaze up. ‘Why would there be issues?’
‘For when we do this...’
He was so close now she could see those hazel glints in his eyes, slightly more gold than green. His hair was a little shorter than last year. There was a day’s worth of stubble on his jaw. She had an urge to reach up and feel the prickle against her palm. She curled her hand into a fist.
He reached out and caught a lock of her hair which had escaped the rough bun she’d put it into earlier. She hadn’t had her hair cut in...months. It was seriously untamed. Unstyled.
He said, almost to himself, ‘I can’t believe you’re here, right in front of me. You’ve been a thorn in my side for a year, Maggie Taggart.’
She shook her head, feeling as if she was in a dream. This couldn’t be real.
‘How...? Why?’
He put his hands on her arms and tugged her towards him gently. ‘You’ve haunted me, mind and body, and I can’t exorcise you until I have you again.’
‘Have...have me?’ She was stuttering now, the meaning of what he was saying too huge to compute.
He nodded. ‘Not one other woman has made me want her the way you did from the moment I saw you. The way you still do. We have unfinished business...’
Maggie was stunned into silence. This was the man who had left her sleeping in his bed a year ago with only a note telling her she should have ‘no
regrets’ and to contact him through his team if she needed anything.
A million things bombarded her—chiefly indignation. But as his scent wrapped around her she was hurtled back in time and there was a beat thrumming through her blood, drowning out those concerns.
Nikos’s head came closer, and then his mouth was covering hers, and as the reality of him flooded her senses Maggie couldn’t deny that he’d haunted her too—even though she’d die before admitting it.
His mouth moved over hers as expertly as she remembered, all-consuming. Heat and madness entered her head and body. Need. His tongue swept in and sought hers, demanding a response that came willingly, rushing up through her body before she could stop it.
Her hands clutched at his jacket, either to pull him closer or steady her legs—she wasn’t sure which. All she knew was that she never wanted the kiss to end. The hunger she felt was greedy, desperate.
But a sense of anger added an edge to her desire. The anger that had been bubbling under the surface at the way he’d left her a year ago, because it had hurt her when it shouldn’t have.
Their bodies cleaved together—when had they even moved that close?—chest to chest, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. She felt unbearably soft—liquid next to his steely strength. She was reminded of how small and delicate he made her feel.
He surrounded her, and when he shifted his hips subtly, so she could feel the press of his arousal against her, her lower body clenched in reaction and a spasm of pleasure caught her off guard. It was as if she’d been primed for the last year for exactly this moment, and now it was here and she was ravenous.