Even through the pain of her watering eye, Christa was acutely conscious of the slightly rough texture of his palms and the pads of his fingers where they rested against her skin.
She shivered, her nipples peaking, bristling against the thin fabric of her silk shirt, a reaction which had nothing at all to do with being cold.
Had Daniel seen her body’s betraying response to him?
‘Look up…’
Instinctively she fought the calm command, blinking even more rapidly instead and rubbing her eye a second time, causing the dirt trapped against her lid to irritate the tender area even further.
Her eye flooding with tears, she tried to pull away from Daniel’s constraining hold, but he wouldn’t let her.
‘Keep still,’ he told her.
‘Let go of me,’ Christa demanded. ‘All I need to do is blow my nose and that will get rid of it…’
‘I don’t think so,’ Daniel corrected her. ‘I can see what’s causing the problem; there’s some grit lodged under your lower eyelid…’
‘I know that,’ Christa ground out irritably. ‘It’s my eye—remember…’
‘What we need to do is get you inside so that I can bathe it,’ Daniel said to her, ignoring her childish comment. ‘Try not to blink too much, if you can.’
As he released her Christa turned to face the house, and immediately cried out as the grit moved, causing her further pain.
‘Don’t move…’
This time she obeyed Daniel’s brief command, more because she didn’t have any choice than because she wanted to. With both eyes screwed tightly closed against the pain, she could hardly do anything else.
‘Now lean on me,’ she heard Daniel instructing her as his arm came round her, holding her firmly against the side of his body, causing her heart to miss several beats and then thud erratically against her chest wall. ‘You can keep your eyes closed if that feels better. Now, let’s get you into the house…’
‘I can’t,’ Christa protested. ‘I can’t walk with my eyes closed.’
‘You can if you lean on me,’ Daniel told her. His voice sounded far too close to her ear, just as his body felt far too close to her own. She was acutely conscious of the warm weight of his arm around her, of the sound of his breathing, the scent of his skin. ‘All you have to do is trust me…’
‘No…’
Could he hear the sharp panic in her voice as clearly as she could herself? Christa wondered as she fought down the pain and opened her streaming eyes.
‘I can manage by myself,’ she told Daniel huskily.
‘Maybe you can,’ he agreed. ‘But you aren’t going to…’
Christa gasped in outraged shock as she felt him lift her bodily off the ground and into his arms. He was going to carry her into the house…Impossible. He couldn’t possibly do it…
Only it seemed that he could, and with far less effort and exertion than she had expected.
It was only as he put her down in the middle of the kitchen floor that Christa suddenly realised something. She blinked experimentally and then a second time.
‘It’s gone,’ she told him triumphantly. ‘It’s gone…’
‘Let me see…’
Obediently she turned her face up towards him, gulping shakily as she realised just how close to him she was and that the touch of his fingertips against her face had somehow subtly changed and become far less clinical and far more…She gulped in another breath of air, her emotions suddenly in chaos. Her brain and her sense of self-preservation urged her to move away from him just as quickly as she could, while her body, her senses, her other emotions whispered yearningly to her to stay and risk the consequences.
‘Have you any idea at all just how damn much I want you?’ The raw, hungry demand shocked through her. The tiny circles Daniel was tracing against her skin with the pads of his thumbs were setting off a dangerous chain of sensual reaction within her body which urged her to press herself even closer against him, to close her eyes the better to absorb the sensation of his touch against her skin.
‘You can’t want me,’ she protested in a papery whisper of a voice, but somehow her protest lacked conviction, and his words had already ignited a corresponding need within her, so strong that it threatened to obliterate everything else.
She did try to fight it, to cling on to rationality and reason, but she could feel the desire in Daniel’s body…its strength and its hardness.
‘You want me too,’ he told her thickly.
‘No,’ Christa denied, but she knew that she was lying.
And so, obviously, did Daniel, because he ignored her protest to tell her roughly, ‘And if I let my body have its way right now you’d be in my bed, in my arms, under my body, with not a damn thing to come between us but the air I’d have been fighting to breathe.
‘Oh, God, don’t do that,’ she heard him protest in a groan as she responded instinctively to his words, moving her body against his, closing her eyes and letting what he was saying to her shiver against her skin.
‘Do what?’ she asked him huskily, luxuriating with feminine triumph in the knowledge of her power over him.
‘You know damn well what.’
She felt Daniel’s hands slide into her hair, tilting her face upwards.
‘Shall I tell you what you do to me, Christa?’ he whispered, a breath away from her lips. ‘Shall I tell you how you make me feel…how you make me ache?’
His hand left her face, his fingers entwining with hers as he lifted them to his mouth, slowly kissing each individual one of them and then, even more slowly, sucking on them.
Sensual shock flooded her body. She was as powerless to silence her tiny moan of pleasure as she was to stop the shudder of pleasure running through her body.
‘You like that,’ Daniel whispered to her. ‘So do I. I love the way your skin tastes, Christa…I love its texture, its scent. And I love the way you respond to me: that soft little moan, the way your body moves against mine. I want to taste every inch of you like this,’ he told her, his voice roughening and dropping even lower. ‘Every inch, starting right here…’ he kissed her forehead gently ‘…and then here…’ and her mouth less gently ‘…and then here…’ she trembled as his lips touched the base of her throat’…and then here…
Another little moan escaped her as his fingertip traced the hard crest of one breast.
‘But most of all…Most of all I want to touch and taste the real essence of you,’ he told her, his voice suddenly thick and heavy with desire.
It was pointless trying to hide her awareness from him, or her reaction, her responsiveness, the physical and emotional arousal his words had caused.
I want you too, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words. Instead she reached up and touched him, her mouth trembling slightly as she felt the rasp of his jaw beneath her fingertips, her touch mapping him, learning the strong contours of his face while her heart thudded a frantic tattoo of desire against her chest.
‘I’d almost given up believing that I’d ever meet you, do you know that?’ Daniel told her as he turned his face to kiss her fingertips. ‘The woman who can make me feel like this…’
‘Like what?’ Christa asked huskily, her voice almost slurred, drugged, soft and creamy with the satisfaction of her atavistic feminine need to be so intensely desired.
‘Like there isn’t an inch of you I don’t want to know. A thought, a feeling I don’t want to share…a second of your life I don’t want to be part of.’
‘But you can’t feel like that about me,’ Christa protested.