Bridal Bargains

It was novel; he didn’t think he’d ever been in this kind of situation before in which he was having to out-guess the confusing signals he was being sent. Women usually fell on him—wholesale. Having this beautiful, contrary creature try her best to tie him in knots was stinging to life senses he’d had no idea he possessed.

A taste for the fight. A deeply grudging willingness to play the game for a while just to see where she thought she was going with it. He knew where it was going. Hell, he was already there. She might have earned herself some respite with the injured foot but that was all it was—a brief time-out while the rest of it throbbed and pulsed in the quickened heat of his blood.

Reaching above her head, he opened a cupboard and fished around for a clean cloth and some other bits and pieces he kept up there. He was standing between her legs, her thighs touching his thighs and she wasn’t moving a muscle. Yet another surge dragged on his senses as he dropped his arms and saw the way she was staring at the flexing muscles beneath his shirt. Narrowing his eyes, he watched as the tip of her tongue sneaked out to moisten her upper lip as he ran his fingers lightly down her thighs to go in search of the offending foot.

Mine, he thought as he watched that nervy pink tongue-tip, and let his hands pause so his fingers could draw some light, experimental circles across the soft skin behind her knees. She jolted as if he’d shot her. Her chin came up, their eyes clashed, his carefully unfathomable, hers as dark and disturbed as hell.

‘Foot,’ he said.

Her teeth replaced the tongue-tip, burying into the full bottom lip as she lifted her knee so he could grasp her ankle and remove her shoe. One glance down and he realised she’d offered him the wrong foot.

‘The left not the right,’ he said then began to frown. Something was niggling him about the left and the right side of this aggravating woman. What could aggravate him when they both looked more or less the same?

Beautiful, perfect, ripe for seduction.

She offered him the other foot. Removing the shoe, he dipped his head and used the cloth to wipe away the blood so he could check out the cut.

‘You did this on the hill,’ he recalled and she nodded.

‘It didn’t bleed then. The hot shower I took must have aggravated it—ouch,’ she added when he pressed the pad of her foot around the small cut in search of foreign bodies.

Her toes wriggled, small, pink, slender toes with a shading of gold across their tops from the sun.

Xander’s tongue moistened. ‘Feel anything in there?’

‘No. It’s just stinging a bit.’

‘Clean cuts do.’

‘Speaks the voice of experience,’ she mocked huskily.

Swapping the cloth for a packet of antiseptic pads, he ripped a sachet open with his teeth.

‘I wet-shave,’ he answered, bringing those incredible eyes flickering curiously up to stare at his lean, smooth chin. That pink tip of a tongue returned to replace the teeth as she studied him with a fascination that set the skin all over his body tingling. If this wasn’t the most intimate she’d ever been with a man—not counting the interlude in the cove—then he did not know women as he thought he did.

‘I cut myself sometimes. Usually when I’m—distracted.’

The colour bloomed in her cheeks as she caught his meaning. ‘Hence the antiseptic pads.’ She sounded breathless.

‘And wound strips.’ He ripped the protective cover off a small plaster next and bent to press it over the cleaned cut.

But he didn’t let go, his gaze recapturing hers as his thumb began lightly stoking the smooth, padded flesh at the base of her foot in the same circling action he had used on the backs of her knees. Silence followed. He didn’t think she was even breathing. No two people had ever been more aware as to where this was leading and any second now she was going to disappear in a shower of her own prickling static.

‘Xander …’ His name feathered helplessly from her.

He responded by releasing the foot so he could run his hands back up the length of her legs—only this time he slid them beneath the clingy little dress.

‘You are gorgeous, you know that?’ he murmured softly.

‘You don’t have to say—’

‘Gorgeous eyes, gorgeous hair, smooth, satin skin …’ His hands moved higher in a slow, sensual glide. ‘You have the heart-shaped face of an angel and the mouth of a siren, the blush of a virgin and the teasing skills of a whore.’

‘That isn’t—’

With a controlled tug he slid her towards him across cold marble until she fitted neatly to his front. Her eyes widened when she felt the hardening thickness at his crotch. He felt her revealing little quiver, watched her breasts shift on a stifled little gasp. Then her thighs tightened against him, narrowing his eyes on her very—very expressive face.

‘You like this, don’t you?’ he taunted lazily.