Christa swallowed uncomfortably, her body suddenly very hot. It disturbed her to think of him looking at her when she was asleep and oblivious to his presence, vulnerable. Her face grew even hotter as she remembered the way her nightshirt had of coming unfastened and sliding off her shoulder.
He had had no right to come into her bedroom, she decided crossly, and when she saw him she would tell him so.
She made herself some coffee, too on edge to want anything to eat, curiosity drawing her outside once she had finished it to make her way across the yard in the direction of the noise she had heard earlier.
It was colder outside than she had expected; the fine wool of the designer trouser suit she had bought as a piece of shameful self-indulgence wasn’t thick enough to protect her legs from the sharp wind, and she regretted leaving the house without her jacket when she felt the gooseflesh lifting her chilled skin beneath the thin cloth on her body.
She was just about to turn round and go back inside for her jacket when a noise behind her stopped her.
Her heart suddenly started to beat faster with nervous apprehension as she recognised the sound of hooves on the cobbles of the farmyard and, sure enough, when she turned round there was Clarence, standing between her and the house, watching her with a malevolent expression.
Christa felt her stomach lurch with fear. As a child she had visited her grandmother who had kept a goat. Christa had been taken by her mother to see the young kids, all white-haired and silky-soft to touch, but the nanny for some reason had objected to their presence and had charged them.
Neither Christa’s mother nor her grandmother had been particularly perturbed, but to Christa it had been a terrifying experience and one she had never totally forgotten.
She had felt a brief resurgence of that fear yesterday, but viewing Clarence from the dual safety of the Land Rover and Daniel’s protective bulk was a very different thing from being alone in the farmyard with him, knowing both that he stood between her and safety and that he could outrun her if she gave in to her fear and fled.
It was almost as though he knew how she felt, Christa acknowledged nervously, as his attention was momentarily diverted from her trousers.
‘One bite out of these and you’re dead,’ she warned him threateningly, but she could have sworn that he was laughing at her, recognising her complete inability to do anything to protect either her trousers or herself.
He took a step towards her, and then another.
Christa could feel her heart racing, her mouth going dry.
‘Shoo,’ she told him shakily. ‘Shoo…go away…go away…’
Her voice sounded weak and thready, as ineffectual against the animal’s malignant supremacy as her words. Was this really her—the same woman who had stood her ground and won the day against the most subtle and skilled bargainers of the Indian subcontinent?
Somewhere on the periphery of her awareness she was vaguely conscious of the fact that the rhythmic tapping of metal against stone had stopped, but she was too afraid of the animal in front of her to recognise what the cessation of noise really meant, so that Daniel’s warm and obviously amused, ‘Ah, you’re up, good…I was just thinking it was time I took a break for lunch,’ came as a complete surprise.
At any other time Christa would have responded instantly and angrily to his teasing, pointing out that if he did indeed have lunch at ten o’clock in the morning he was a very unusual person, but the shock of hearing his voice, combined with her fear, caused her instead to spin round wildly, her fear of the goat momentarily superseded by the humiliation of having Daniel witness her predicament.
Almost as though he had been waiting for it to happen, for her concentration to waver, their eye-contact broken, Clarence took advantage of the opportunity she had given him, charging towards her with Machiavellian glee.
Christa heard the rushing sound of his charge and swung back round, her defensive awareness of Daniel’s watchful amusement forgotten, drowned by the sheer tide of shocked fear that overwhelmed her. Her eyes dilating with terror, she reacted instinctively, turning round to run, to escape; only her thin city shoes were not designed for muddy cobbles, and the small part of her brain that could still function rationally was already telling her that no mere human being on two legs could ever hope to outrun a gleefully malevolent animal on four.
Her heart pounding with suffocating dread, she was once again that small girl at her grandmother’s, knowing that there was no escape, that…
Her heart gave one final terrified bound as the ground suddenly fell away beneath her, only it wasn’t the wet muddy cobbles she found herself lying against, with Clarence breathing hotly over her prone body, but the solid, safe, comforting warmth of another human body and a pair of strong protective human—male—arms holding her tight.
Human…male…Daniel.
Christa opened the eyes she had squeezed tightly shut in panic.
Daniel! Daniel was holding her. Daniel’s arms were wrapped firmly around her body, Daniel’s hand sliding into her hair as he gently pressed her face into the warm curve of his throat, Daniel’s voice, warm and alive, trembling slightly with what might just have been a hint of teasing laughter as he said softly against her ear, ‘Hey, come on, it’s all right. It’s only Clarence, that’s all.’
That’s all!
Indignantly Christa lifted her head and looked at him. ‘He was going to attack me,’ she told him shakily, biting down hard on her lip as she remembered how frightened she had been.
Her whole body started to tremble and go weak; she felt cold all over and slightly nauseous, the tears she had held back earlier betrayingly flooding her eyes.
‘It’s all right for you,’ she told Daniel angrily, ‘you think it’s funny, but…’
Proudly she struggled to fight free of the arm he still had wrapped around her, even though she was acutely conscious of the fact that Clarence was still here, albeit now keeping a polite and almost benign distance from them.
‘No, I don’t think it’s funny,’ Daniel contradicted her. His voice, like the touch of his hand against her face, held something—a quality, an emotion—that made her hold her breath, afraid of either recognising or acknowledging it.
‘Let me go,’ she demanded, but her voice sounded thready and weak, lacking conviction.
‘In a minute, when I’ve got you safely back inside. There really isn’t any need for you to be afraid of Clarence, you know,’ Daniel told her as he turned her round and started to guide her back towards the house.
‘He attacked me,’ Christa told him.
‘He’s a bully; he could sense your fear and made use of it as all bullies do. But it wasn’t just Clarence who frightened you, was it?’ he guessed astutely as he opened the back door for her.
‘No,’ Christa admitted curtly. ‘There was…my grandmother had a goat and I was terrified of it. She used to laugh at me, tell me not to be silly, say that life would hold many more things for me to be afraid of than a bad-tempered nanny goat. She despised weakness in people. She was a very strong woman.’
She frowned as she saw the way Daniel was looking at her.
‘What is it?’ she asked him uncertainly. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I was just thinking about the child you must have been…’
‘Well, don’t,’ Christa cautioned him sharply. ‘I’m not a child any more, I’m a woman, and—’
‘I know…’
Something in the soft, subtle undertone to the words made her look at him, her whole body suddenly enveloped in a sharp sense of awareness, of knowing.
‘Very, very much a woman,’ Daniel told her quietly.
‘No.’
Her denial was automatic, but so weakly ineffectual that Christa wasn’t at all surprised when he ignored it, reaching out to take hold of her, his hands spanning her waist and then moving caressingly up over her back and th
en down again to her hips, a look of such intense sensual pleasure in his eyes that it shocked her into immobility.
If any other man had experienced such intense pleasure just touching her he had certainly never let her know it, never let her see how much the shape of her body, the warmth of her skin beneath his fingertips pleased him.
She knew that Daniel was going to kiss her, knew it and did nothing at all to stop him, and nothing at all either to control the tiny quiver that ran betrayingly through her body.
All her senses focused on what she knew was going to happen, on the slow, long-drawn-out build of anticipation, the careful touch of Daniel’s hands as he cupped her face, his fingertips tracing its shape, leaving hot trails of fire against her skin; she could see the sharp lift of his chest as though he was having trouble drawing the air to breathe, see the intense concentration in his eyes as they darkened with desire. Desire for her.
Her heart jerked dangerously against her ribs, her own breath unsteady and erratic; his mouth touched her skin, his fingers pushing her hair back from her face, stroking the soft skin just behind her ear, making her tremble and close her eyes, the small sound that could have either been denial or pleasure muted in her throat as his lips followed the path of his fingertips.
She could feel her whole body starting to shiver with delight, to come alive, and without making any conscious effort to move she was suddenly standing closer to Daniel, so close that she could actually feel the heavy, unsteady thud of his heartbeat, the tension in his muscles, the warmth of his flesh beneath hands she hadn’t even realised she had raised to touch him.
Dizzily she watched the strong pulse thudding at the base of his throat, felt the heat coming off his body, the subtle change from controlled exploration to less controllable desire in the movement of his lips against her skin—and her own response to it.
She wanted him. Against all logic, all reason, she was conscious of a chemistry between them, a desire for him that was so strong that, even though it ran completely contrary to what she wanted to feel, she was totally powerless to control it.