The restaurant he took her to was down a narrow side street between the harbour and the town square.
To reach it they had to walk past the town's charming pastel-washed Georgian houses.
The restaurant was surprisingly busy. Nick explained to her that the town was a favourite retirement area for the middle classes which explained the pre-ponderance of hearty tweed and twin-setted couples at the other tables Sara recognised.
The waiter was waiting to show them to their table and Sara started to remove her fleece.
'Let me,' Nick offered, immediately turning to help her. Sara already had one arm out of her jacket and as she felt Nick's fingers curl round it as he helped her, her body reacted to him immediately, goose bumps lifting on her skin as a hot wave of explicit sensation shot through her. For a moment neither of them moved, their gazes meeting and meshing. The naked hunger she could see in Nick's eyes both shocked and excited her.
'For God's sake, don't look at me like that,' she heard Nick muttering thickly under his breath.
'Like what? I'm not—' Sara immediately denied defensively.
But Nick cut her short telling her rawly, 'Oh, yes, you are. For goodness sake, Sara, I know how much you're enjoying this but I'm not as fireproof as you obviously are. And if you don't stop right now it's going to be as obvious to everyone else here as it must be to you that the only thing I'm hungry for right now, the only thing I want to eat,' he emphasised with sexual explicitness, 'is you.'
Discreetly the maitre d' had stepped back from them whilst he showed some other diners to a table. Sara could feel her whole body burning with a heat that had nothing whatsoever to do with embarrassment.
Shockingly she knew, too, that if Nick were to take hold of her right now and lead her through the restaurant's reception area to where the stairs led to the rooms she had noticed they advertised she wouldn't want to stop him. But instead he was ushering her grimly into the dining room, one hand cupping her elbow as she tried to keep as much physical distance between them as she could—not easy when the spaces between the tables were so narrow, but every time she felt the heat of his body against her own her flesh reacted so explosively that she could feel herself physically trembling.
They both ordered lobster and whilst they waited for their meal to be served Sara studied the other diners. Middle class and middle-aged in the main, they exuded the air of placid calmness that only seemed to underscore the highwire tension of her sexual arousal.
'Do you eat here often?' she asked Nick, trying to bring a measure of calm ordinariness to the situation.
'It's a good stopping off point when I'm travelling back from Cheshire,' Nick responded. 'It's a journey I make fairly frequently.'
'To see your married...friend...?' Sara questioned him immediately.
'My what?' Nick frowned and then realised who she meant. 'Oh, you mean Bobbie.' He smiled whilst Sara seethed with impotent jealousy.
Their food had arrived and Nick waited until the waiter had gone before leaning across the table and telling Sara dulcetly, 'Bobbie is married to Luke Crighton—and very happily married to him I might add.'
'But you were with her at Camden Place,' Sara argued.
'We bumped into one another by accident, she was there with Luke but he was playing golf.'
Sara put down her cutlery, the blood draining from her face. 'You mean you aren't... She isn't...'
'No, I'm not,' Nick confirmed cooly. 'And she most certainly isn't. I can assure you that if I was already in that kind of relationship I wouldn't...'
'You wouldn't what?' Sara challenged him sharply.
She was still trying to come to terms with the shock at discovering that her jealousy, the jealousy which had led her to where she was right now, was apparently totally unfounded. 'You wouldn't want me.'
'You didn't really think I was involved with Bobbie, did you?' Nick marvelled, ignoring her comment Leaning across the table he told her quietly, 'Well, for your information...' He paused and frowned. He had almost been on the point of admitting to her that she was the first woman he had ever invited back to his home, the first woman he had ever wanted so strongly that he wanted to take her there and be completely and totally alone with her.
'For my information what?' Sara demanded.
Nick's frown deepened. Perhaps he should be honest with her. 'This is the first time I've ever invited a woman to stay at the cottage. How's your lobster?' he asked her, determinedly changing the subject.
WHEN THEY LEFT the restaurant an hour later it was almost trying to snow, the air much colder and the rain turning to sleet.
Sara shivered inside her fleece, giving a small gasp of dismay as she started to lose her balance as they crossed the now deserted square.
Immediately Nick reached out to steady her. His touch making her skin prickle with heady excitement.
She was beginning to feel very afraid, Sara recognised, not of Nick himself but of the way she felt and her inability to control the strength of her reaction to him.
The discovery that he was not having an affair with Bobbie—or anyone else—seemed to have projected her into an untrammelled surge of sensual longing and responsiveness making her ache for him with an intensity and an immediacy that thoroughly unnerved her.
Now, suddenly, panic hit her.
'I've changed my mind,' she burst out in a tremu-lous voice. 'I...'
'You've what?' Nick demanded, almost jerking her off her feet as he swung her round and anchored her against his body using his own to protect her from the wind-driven sleet as he looked inimically down into her eyes.
'Don't play games with me, Sara,' he warned her.
'Because right now...'
She was trembling from head to foot, unable to tear her gaze from him. Helplessly it slid from his eyes down to his mouth, her heart giving a body-rocking lurch against her ribs.
'Sara...'
She saw his chest rise and fall with the deepness of the breath he took and watched helplessly as he lowered his head, not able, not wanting, to escape the inevitability of his mouth covering her own.
Somewhere in the distance she could hear the forlorn cry of the seagulls, the sound as sharply piercing as the ferocity of the pain-cum-pleasure that exploded through her.
She could feel herself trembling, leaning helplessly into Nick, needing his support against the weakness that he himself was causing as their mouths clung and meshed. Her lips were as hungrily greedy for the taste and feel of his as his were for her.
Recklessly she opened her mouth beneath his, inviting, pleading, for an intimacy that shocked her even whilst his answer to it turned her bone
s to water and made her give a pitiful mew of strangled longing deep in her throat.
They were kissing like teenagers, so hungry for one another that they were oblivious to everything else, she recognised dizzily. And how and when had she wound her arms around his neck like that so that her body was pressed as close to his as it could possibly get?
So close that she was perfectly well aware of the effect she was having on him.
'It's damn near another thirty miles to the cottage,'
she heard him groaning against her mouth between kisses. 'And right now I don't think I can take another thirty seconds of this without...'
He moved, shifting both their bodies, his taking the weight of hers and for one delirious moment Sara actually thought he might touch her intimately. Her breasts ached for him to do so, ached for the touch of his hands, his mouth. She wanted...
The noisy sound of some people emerging from a pub on the other side of the square into the fresh air brought her to her senses and to the mortified realisation of what she was doing—and feeling.
'Are you all right?' she heard Nick asking her as they made their way to their parked cars.
'Of course I'm all right. Why shouldn't I be?' she rejected his concern challengingly.
'Do you really need me to answer that?' Nick returned as he waited for her to unlock her car.
No, of course she didn't, Sara admitted as she waited for him to pull out onto the main road. If she wanted to do so now there was nothing to stop her turning in the opposite direction and changing her mind. Nick couldn't make her go with him. Nick wouldn 't make her go with him she acknowledged.
But...
But if she didn't, for the rest of her life she would wish...wonder... And for the rest of her life, too, she knew a part of her would always ache for him and for what might have been.
It's just sex, she reminded herself grimly. That's all.
Bitterly she wondered how on earth she could dare to even try to put the words just and sex together in thinking about what she wanted.