Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘Why have you come back?’ Tabby whispered unevenly.

Christien did not even need to think about that. He had come back because he could not stay away. He closed the door behind him. He reached out and detached her fingers from the colourful blanket. Thick black lashes cloaking his gaze, he slid the blanket slowly down from her narrow shoulders.

‘Christien…?’ she queried unsteadily.

His breath rasped in his throat as he scrutinised her lush, inviting curves. Unquenchable lust gripped him in a hold tougher than any vice. White cotton moulded her high, full breasts and the fabric was too thin to hide the rosy prominence of her nipples. He wanted to touch her, taste her, drive her insane with the same desire that burned in him. ‘If Sean had still been here with you…I think I’d have ripped the bastard limb from limb,’ he confided not quite levelly.

Tabby whipped the blanket back up round her again but her hands were shaking. ‘I don’t sleep around…I never have and I never will. You had no reason to think he’d still be here, but even if he had been it would be none of your business—’

‘But I’d have made it my business, ma belle.’

Although she knew she should not, she looked up at him. The smouldering intensity of his dark golden gaze set off every sensual alarm bell she possessed but she moved not an inch. Indeed, she felt incapable of moving. For almost four years she had concentrated all her energies on being a loving mother to Jake and studying for her degree at art college. She had had to push herself very, very hard to cope as a single parent and a student, who also needed to work a part-time job. There had been little space for dating in her gruelling schedule, but then that had not really been a sacrifice when no ordinary male could dislodge Christien from her mind. Christien with his black hair falling over his bronzed brow, danger flashing gold in his stunning eyes, not a single note jarring the sheer, riveting perfection of his hard, all-male beauty. Christien, the ultimate of impossible acts to follow.

Dry-mouthed, she settled her focus back on the real live male in front of her. ‘Why do you want to make me your business again?’

‘I don’t know.’ A rough, humourless laugh was dredged from Christien. ‘It’s madness…but I’m still here.’

It shook her that Christien should say it was madness to be with her again and yet stay. He was mere inches from her, drop-dead gorgeous and virile and, that close to him, she felt boneless.

‘You should leave—’

‘Should but won’t.’

‘Is that a threat or a promise?’ she whispered.

‘What do you want it to be, mon ange?’

His presence was both threat and promise and she knew it. She had never stopped wanting him, had never learned to hate him. How could she when she understood the very forces that had ensured they stayed apart? The enormity of the tragedy that had engulfed their families that summer had shattered the tenuous remains of their relationship.

‘What do I want?’ She wanted him, only him. It was a truth that was rooted so deep in her that even pride could not make her deny it. ‘Take a guess…’

Eyes shimmering hard and bright, Christien snatched in a ragged breath. He reached out and lifted her right off her feet and up into his arms in a demonstration of confidence and unapologetic masculine strength that made her feel weak and wanton and dizzy.

He took her mouth with stormy hunger and pried her lips apart to ravish the tender interior. A violent shiver of response racked her. Her heart hammering, she stretched up to him to deepen that connection. It felt so good she was instantly, helplessly addicted to her own craving for more. He pinned her up against the wall and his tongue plunged and withdrew between her readily parted lips with fierce, driving hunger.

Wrenching her stinging lips from his with a mighty effort, she shut her eyes, fighting to maintain even a shred of restraint. ‘The whole world’s spinning,’ she mumbled.

In an almost clumsy movement that bore little resemblance to his usual sure, fluid grace, he peeled her back off the wall and clamped her to his big, powerful length. He held her tight, so tight she could barely squeeze air into her constricted lungs.

‘I’m sorry…I feel out of control,’ he grated.

Her arms linked round him then and a smile like the sunrise started inside her where he couldn’t see it. This was the guy who rarely took more than one glass of alcohol because feeling anything other than in total command of himself was anathema to him. To make him feel out of control even momentarily was an achievement of no mean order and to hear him confess it was a joy.

‘I’m never in control with you,’ she whispered back with neither resentment nor pleasure, just acceptance that that should be the case.

Christien felt light-headed with a triumph as old as time itself. She was his, she was still his. He was not a guy who reasoned in what he believed were primitive sexist terms and he had never felt possessive around any other woman. But she was different and, with her, he was different too and that was a conundrum he had never wasted any time agonising over. He set her down in the bedroom where an old Anglepoise lamp burned on an upturned box next to the bed. He did not think of himself as imaginative but he was already picturing the bare room furnished with the kind of pretty feminine clutter she adored.

Eyelids sensually lowered over his dark golden gaze, Christien treated her to a fierce, intent appraisal that fired her very skincells with awareness of her womanhood. ‘I take one look at you and I’m so hungry for you I’m in agony,’ he confessed huskily, sinking down on the edge of the bed and drawing her forward to stand between his spread thighs.

Was that why he was still so very special to her? Tabby asked herself. His ability to look at her with a wondering appreciation that suggested that she was an incredibly gorgeous woman when she herself knew that she was just an ordinary one? A marvel made all the more striking by the simple fact that Christien himself was very much in a class of his own? Even in well-worn jeans and a beige cotton sweater, he exuded exclusive cool and bred-in-the-bone sophistication. He possessed that degree of pure masculine good looks more often seen on a movie screen. Men of his ilk usually gravitated towards classically beautiful women, but she was wildly, humbly grateful that something she couldn’t see and couldn’t begin to understand had brought him to her instead.

Vulnerable and almost dazed by the intensity of her own emotions at that instant, Tabby looked back at him. ‘Christien…?’

‘You’re very lovely, ma belle,’ he said thickly, reaching up to tug the band out of her naturally curly caramel-coloured hair.

‘I’m not—’

‘Shush…’ He finger-combed her hair down onto her taut shoulders, leant forward to let his tongue penetrate between lips as sweet and inviting as juicy strawberries.