Nikki Logan - Awakened By His Touch

They parted just slightly before she could leave them, and breath heated her finger-pads for half a heartbeat.

‘So there you go,’ Elliott rumbled, then cleared his throat. ‘Now you’ve really seen me. You know how I sound, how I smell and how I feel. That’s pretty much all your available senses taken care of.’

‘Well,’ she began, ‘I haven’t—’

Stop!

‘You haven’t what?’

His voice, his breath, seemed impossibly closer, yet he hadn’t moved the rest of his body one inch.

‘Nothing. Never mind.’

‘Were you going to say tasted?’

‘No.’ The denial sounded false even to her.

‘Really?’ His soft voice was full of a smile. ‘Because it sounded like you were.’

‘No. That would be an inappropriate comment to make in the workplace.’

‘I agree,’ Elliott murmured. ‘Then again, that ship sailed when I asked you to touch my face, so what else do I have to lose?’

His lips—the ones she’d gone to so much trouble to avoid touching—pressed lightly onto Laney’s, half open, soft and damp and warm, before moulding more snugly against her. Sealing up the gaps.

Elliott Garvey was kissing her.

Awakened

By His Touch

Nikki Logan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

NIKKI LOGANlives next to a string of protected wetlands in Western Australia, with her long-suffering partner and a menagerie of furred, feathered and scaly mates. She studied film and theatre at university, and worked for years in advertising and film distribution before finally settling down in the wildlife industry. Her romance with nature goes way back, and she considers her life charmed, given she works with wildlife by day and writes fiction by night—the perfect way to combine her two loves.

Nikki believes that the passion and risk of falling in love are perfectly mirrored in the danger and beauty of wild places. Every romance she writes contains an element of nature, and if readers catch a waft of rich earth or the spray of wild ocean between the pages she knows her job is done.

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For Jackie—protector of all creatures great and small. (No bees were harmed during the making of this book)

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

EXCERPT

CHAPTER ONE

ELLIOTT GARVEY LEANED on the bleached timber boardwalk like a seasoned stalker, watching the woman frolicking with her dog where the coastal rock slid down into the aquamarine ocean.

It didn’t matter that this lookout and the long, sandy path leading to it were public, the map in his hands and the occasional sign wired to the fence lining the gravel track in this remote, picturesque spot reminded him very clearly that the property all around him was upper-case P private. So, technically, was the beach below. In fact, it barely qualified as a beach since—private or not—it was only about twenty metres long. More a cove, really, eroded out of the hard rock either side of it, protected and quiet.

Back home they’d have turned this into a boat-launching area, for sure. It was perfect for it.

Then again, back home they wouldn’t have had anything even remotely like this. Where he was from, further north up the coast, the ruling landform was sand, not the stunning limestone rock forms of the Morgan property. The lookout under his feet ‘looked out’ over the cove about twenty metres away, as it happened, but its intended view was the spectacular Australian coastline beyond it. Rugged and raw and beaten to death by pounding seas in the off season.

But today the sea was flat and gentle.

His eyes dropped again.

Judging by the very determined way the woman was not looking up at him, she was either trying very hard to pretend he wasn’t there, spoiling her serenity, or she wasn’t supposed to be there. A tourist, maybe? That would explain the long cotton dress that she’d hiked up her bare legs instead of the swimsuit a local would have turned up in. And clearly this was a tourist who liked to travel with her dog. The soggy golden retriever bounded around her, barking and celebrating life in a shower of droplets, and the size of the lead bundled in the woman’s right hand suggested her dog was a handful most of the time. But right now it just circled her excitedly as she danced.

Danced? More flowed, really. She practically ebbed in time with the soft waves washing onto the beach and retreating again, her feet lightly skipping in the wet sand. The wet bottom of her long summer dress wanted to cling to her legs, but she kept it hiked up, out of the way, as she splashed in and out of the water with her movements. Dipping and twisting and undulating her whole body to music he couldn’t hear.

Out of nowhere, a memory surged into his crowded mind. Of him and his mother, the only trip they’d ever taken away from the city when he was about eight. He’d hung his lean little body half out of the open window of the car she’d borrowed from a friend, overwhelmed to be doing something as exciting as leaving the city, hand-surfing on the wind that whipped past. Riding the current, rising and dipping on it with both hands. Dreaming of the places it would take him if only he were light enough to catch its updraft.

Just as that woman was dancing. There was no wind to speak of down below in the protected little cove, but that didn’t seem to cause her the slightest trouble as she moved on air currents no one else could feel. Not him. Not the still coastal wildflowers lining the tiny sandy strip. Not the barely interrupted surface of the water.

Just her, her dog and whatever the heck drugs she must be on to put her in such a sublimely happy place.

Elliott used his camera lens to get a surreptitious look at her while pretending to photograph the bigger view. Her long hair was as wet and stringy as the golden retriever’s, and not all that different in colour, and the water from it soaked anywhere it touched: the fabric of her strappy dress where it criss-crossed her breasts like a bikini top, the golden stretch of her bare shoulders, her collarbones. It whipped and snapped as she circled in the retreating water, her head tipped back to worship the sun, staring right up into it for a moment.

He adjusted the lens just slightly.

The paleness of her skin and the liberal dusting of freckles across it fitted perfectly with the strawberry blonde hair. Maybe if she did this less often out in the harsh Western Australian sun she’d have fewer marks on her skin. But then, maybe if she did this less often she wouldn’t have that smile on her face, either. Blazing and almost too wide for the pointed shape of her jaw.

He lowered the lens and stepped back, conscious, suddenly, of his intrusion into her private moment. As he did so, the weathered timber under his left foot creaked audibly and the retriever’s sharp ears didn’t miss it. Its sandy snout pointed up in his direction immediately, joyous barking suspended, and it crossed straight to the woman’s side. She stopped and bent to place her free hand reassuringly on the dog’s shoulder but—luckily for Elliott—she didn’t follow the direction of its intent stare.