ridiculous, she thought. She was hardly a novice to male attention. She’d been planning a wedding, for heaven’s sake! Yet there was something about this man that was more exciting and more dangerous to her than any other man she had ever met.
‘Isn’t it customary?’ she returned somewhat breathlessly in answer to his reference to getting her into bed.
‘Possibly,’ he acceded, ‘but not in this case. And not with someone who has been made to feel so unsure of herself that she blushes at the mere mention of a man and woman finding pleasure in each other. Or a man taking any interest in her. There’s really no need to hide from me, Kayla.’
Perhaps there wasn’t. But when he took the hat she was clutching to her like a shield and his hand accidentally brushed the sensitised flesh above her modest neckline she realised that it was herself that she was afraid of. Of feelings that were too reckless and wild to think about. Purely physical feelings that had surfaced the moment she had first seen him standing on that other beach a few days ago.
Now, with her wet top doing nothing to protect her from his gaze, she could feel her blood starting to surge and the peaks of her breasts tightening in response to his hot regard, so that all she could think about was that hard masculine body locked in torrid sensual pleasure on some bed. And not just any bed. On hers!
‘Are you saying that your interest is purely aesthetic?’ she queried, her voice croaking from her shaming thoughts and the knowledge of how her rapidly rising breasts were betraying her to him.
‘No.’ He had removed his sunglasses and was hooking them onto the waistband of his trousers. Now she could see his eyes clearly.
They were dark and heavy-lidded beneath the thick swathe of his lashes, and glittering with such intensity of purpose that her every nerve went into red alert as he closed the screaming distance between them.
HIS MOUTH OVER hers was like an Olympic torch blazing into life, setting her insides on fire and sending molten sensations of light searing through her blood.
His kiss was passionate, yet tender. Dominant, yet testing. And the mind-blowing expertise with which he lured her mouth to widen for him was the technique of a man who had studied and understood women—a far cry from a man who had such a laid-back attitude to life. A wanderer. A drifter. Without purpose or design.
He smelled of the earth and of the pines that clad the higher slopes of the hillsides. He was burning with everything wild and unfettered, unrestrained. And yet she felt his restraint—a purposeful holding back—as he held her loosely within the exciting circle of his arms.
That was until the hands that were still clutching her camera and the sunscreen bottle against his wide, cushioning shoulders suddenly slid around his neck. Then, with a groan of defeat, his restraint fell away, leaving only raw passion in its wake as he tossed her hat aside and pulled her hard against him.
Kayla heard a gushing in her ears and wasn’t sure whether it was the heavy pounding of her blood or whether she was being captured and submerged beneath the relentless power of the sea.
She could feel the whole hard length of his body—every last inch of it—and she could feel her own responding to the drugging hunger of his mouth.
His back was firm and muscled, and she wished she wasn’t encumbered by her possessions so that she could slide her eager hands across it. There was no such encumbrance though in the way her body locked with his. His chest was a wall of thunder, crushing her aching breasts, while the potent evidence of his hard virility was making her pulse with need.
When he put her from him, holding her at arm’s length, she uttered a strangled murmur of breathless shock and disappointment.
‘Why did you do that?’ she quavered. Why had he kissed her when he had just claimed he had no intention of trying to get her into bed?
He was breathing as heavily as she was, and a deep flush was staining the olive skin across the strong, hard structure of his cheeks.
‘Because you were wondering what it would be like if I did.’
Still trembling, and perturbed by how easily he could not only read her mind but also by how easily he could bend her to his will, she challenged brittly, ‘So why did you stop?’
‘Because, as I told you before, I have no intention of taking advantage of a woman on the rebound,’ he reminded her, even though his breathing was still laboured and his strong face racked from the passion he was struggling to keep in check.
‘And—as I told you before—I’m not on the rebound,’ Kayla protested adamantly, shamed by her response when he was showing such self-control, and when she seemed to have relinquished all of hers in one experimental kiss!
‘Aren’t you?’ he disputed, although there was a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth that softened his challenging remark, before he went on to add, ‘You had a relationship with him, didn’t you?’
‘Well, of course I did,’ Kayla returned. ‘Of sorts.’
‘Of sorts?’ He tilted his head, his brows drawing quizzically together. ‘How am I supposed to interpret that?’
‘Any way you like!’ Kayla tossed back at him, too embarrassed to tell him that Craig’s enthusiasm for her had seemed to go off the boil for several weeks before their break-up, and that she was ashamed of herself now for not suspecting the truth. She had believed him when he had blamed work overload for his not showing enough interest in her. When he’d assured her that things would be different when they were married. When he had got the precious promotion he’d spent all his time working for.
‘Were you living with him?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? If I ever set my mind on a woman I want to become my wife, then she will be firmly in my life—and my bed—before I even ask her.’
‘I didn’t want us to move in together. Not until we were married,’ Kayla emphasised. ‘And Craig was in full agreement with that.’
‘Really?’ Mocking scepticism marked that hard masculine face. ‘You could do without each other that much?’
‘Not that it’s any concern of yours,’ Kayla pointed out, hating having her relationship with her ex scrutinised so closely by this man she scarcely knew, ‘but we wanted to start married life properly. In a place that was our own. I didn’t want to just move into his flat. Anyway, there’s more to a relationship than jumping into bed with each other at every given opportunity,’ she stressed, unconsciously wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her lips still felt bruised and swollen and, like her susceptible body, burning from Leon’s wholly primal, earth-shattering kiss.
‘Is there?’ he asked, and she could feel those perspicacious eyes following her involuntary action, mocking her, disconcertingly aware.
‘Yes!’ She was trembling, knowing that the way she had just behaved with him made nonsense of everything she was saying. And the worst thing was he knew it too. ‘The type of man I let myself get involved with doesn’t just give in to basic animal lust.’
He chuckled under his breath. ‘Is that what I was doing? Then you must forgive me if I fail to live up to the constraints of the type of man you are obviously used to. Although I could hazard a guess that your relationship was sadly lacking in what was required to make a lifetime commitment, and that the lack of passion between you could have been why he was getting his satisfaction elsewhere.’
The reminder hurt, stinging her pride and giving rise to that same feeling of inadequacy she had felt after she’d got over the initial blow of Craig’s betrayal—especially coming from someone who oozed the sort of sexual potency that this man did.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, surprising her suddenly. ‘I didn’t mean to rub it in.’
‘Didn’t