massive mirror that filled the entire wall the opposite end of the corridor, laughed back at her.
Shaking with reaction, she grabbed the nearest thing for support; it was the big heavy metal handle of the door she stood beside.
‘Ghosts don’t have red hair.’
* * *
Even if he had been asleep the scream would have woken him; the visceral sound of terror made his blood run cold.
‘Mari...?’ Heart pounding, grim faced, he threw back the thin cover on the big carved oak bed that, had the room not been vast, would have dominated it and leaped out.
Seb hit the ground running, moving as if the devil himself were at his heels. Luckily the room was not in total darkness; a small lamp still burned on a desk in the corner of the room where the book he had abandoned earlier lay open. It illuminated the corner, casting a series of dappled shadows across the vaulted ceiling.
He grabbed the heavy oak door, pulling it hard enough to wrench the ancient wood off its hinges; it held even though it carried the extra weight of someone who was attached to the handle.
Unprepared for the violent lurch, Mari found herself dragged without warning into the room behind the big door. She managed to keep her balance by holding the handle for dear life.
She barely registered the room itself. Her wide eyes developed a severe case of tunnel vision. Spectres were one thing, but flesh and blood and very real Seb clad in what seemed to be a pair of black boxers that hung low on his narrow hips and nothing else was another and far more disturbing proposition!
Her glance moved up in a slow sweeping arc from his bare feet. The farther she travelled, the hotter she got and the more squirmy the feeling in her stomach; her heart was beating harder than it had when she had faced the prospect of a ghostly haunting.
He was magnificent. He looked like some sculptured statue brought to life in glowing golden tones. There wasn’t an ounce of surplus flesh on his body to blur the muscle definition of his ridged belly, shoulders and thighs.
Mari had no control over the series of breath-catching butterfly kicks in her stomach; she had never imagined a man could be so rampantly male. Before she had time or the ability to form anything approaching a rational thought, the cocktail of apprehension and excitement coalesced into a heavy ache low in her abdomen.
‘I was looking for a glass of milk,’ she heard herself say. ‘I saw a ghost...’ The protective screen of her lashes lifted. ‘Not really but—’
‘There are probably a few ghosts knocking around the place.’ Holding her eyes, he pushed the half-open door closed with his foot.
Mari’s glance went to the door and back to his face in a jerky, half-scared movement.
She was nervous. He was the one who should be feeling nervous, Seb thought... Very nervous. She was the one creeping around the place in the dead of night dressed like... Well, actually if she had not been dressed at all it could not have been any more provocative than the near transparent floaty number she had on.
The thing might be some modern take on Victorian primness, long-sleeved and fastened high at the throat with a little ribbon, but back-lit by the golden light from the lamp the white material became effectively transparent, the fabric so gossamer fine that if he tried, actually even if he tried not to, he could make out the dark perimeter of her rosy areola and the shadow between her thighs.
Mari ran her tongue across her lips to moisten them, struggling for some composure, and missing the resultant hot flare in his hooded glance.
She cleared her throat and turned her head, saying conversationally, ‘My, this is a big room.’ Big room—my God, could I sound any more inane?
He had a cameo view of the classic purity of her profile, her hair a glorious fiery halo glowing under the subdued artificial light in the hallway, appearing dark against the pale and almost transparent whiteness of her provocative nightclothes.
She brought to mind one of the impossibly desirable virgin sacrifices in an old-fashioned horror movie that every dashing hero was determined to rescue and the villain wanted to lay.
As a fist of lust tightened in his groin Seb discovered his sympathies lay with the villain. He dragged a frustrated hand over his hair and reacted to the emotions spilling from her with a sardonic smile. This woman seemed to go from one emotional crisis to another. Did she not understand the meaning of restraint?
He understood it—he valued it because he had seen the sort of selfish excess and chaos that came with it—and yet understanding the meaning of restraint did not prevent his rampant hormones exploding. They overrode his iron control as his dark smouldering stare travelled slowly over her body.
‘So what couldn’t wait until the morning? Where’s the fire?’ He struggled to inject some amusement into his voice, but the combination of vulnerability and sheer unadulterated feminine sexiness had got to him in a place Seb had thought he’d hermetically sectioned, sealed off...when...
He couldn’t remember exactly what age he’d begun to worry he’d inherited his parents’ genes. It had kept him awake nights until he had realised that recognising your weaknesses meant they weren’t going to trip you up; it was all about control.
Control, he told himself, struggling to recall the meaning of the word as he breathed his way through the conflicting needs to comfort her and tear off her clothes and sink into all that luscious softness.
‘Fire?’ she echoed, blinking up at him.
If there wasn’t one, there would be—she looked hot enough to ignite anything within a fifty-yard radius, he decided, dragging his gaze from the plumpness of her trembling lips as he reminded himself that she might be as attractive as sin and twice as tempting, but Mari Jones was not destined to share his bed. Even if it hadn’t been essential that he kept things on a professional footing, she was not the sort of woman he would have entertained having any sort of relationship with.
Even so, it would have been much simpler if she had been unattractive or, for that matter, had one single flaw physically. His eyes moved from the fabric that had begun to cling with an electrostatic charge to the long shapely length of her legs, drawing his attention once more to the suggestion of shadow at their apex, and he forced himself to focus instead on the many flaws she had personality-wise.
The temper, he thought, sweating now, the mulish obstinacy, but most of all the sheer emotional excess in everything she did. She cried, she laughed, she screamed, she fought, and none of these things she did in moderation—he doubted she was even capable of it.
It didn’t matter how pretty the packaging, he pitied the man who eventually tried to domesticate this red-headed witch. It would take a saint or someone equally capable of making a walk in the park a full-blown drama.
The thought triggered an image, a memory he’d thought he’d forgotten. The day his parents had managed to make such a harmless outing a front-page headline. The moment his mother had pushed his father into the lake had been caught on camera for posterity, as had been their making up, but what Seb remembered was the nauseous, churning sensation of shame in his stomach and the desire to vanish.
When he had run away from the scene, his passionately reunited parents had not noticed their three-year-old son was missing until later that night.
The memory enabled him to claw back some semblance of control. He took a step back and stood there waiting.
Her stomach went into free fall as she glanced up at him through her lashes. He looked like the modern-day flesh-and-blood version of some sort of Greek god in his close-fitting boxers that did a very poor job of concealment, his dark hair standing up spikily, his jaw deeply scored with stubble. A primitive thrill shot through her body as she drank him in, in great greedy gulps.
‘I’m sorry. It was a m-mistake.’
‘Probably,’ he agreed huskily. ‘Calm down, you’re shaking.’ He caught her slim hands