Janice Maynard - Millionaire Under The Mistletoe

How the hell did he expect her to reply with a dirty great paw over her mouth…? It seemed her assailant’s thoughts were running along similar lines.

‘I’m going to take away my hand, but if you try and yell to your mates you’ll regret it. Understood…?’

Heart pounding, Darcy shook her head as vigorously as her position would allow. If she hadn’t known this was Reece she’d have already died of heart failure. To her relief the suffocating hand lifted.

‘For heaven’s sake, get off me, you idiot; I can’t breathe!’ she gasped.

‘Darcy!’

The pressure across her ribs eased but he didn’t shift completely. ‘Of course Darcy,’ she grumbled crossly. ‘Who did you think it was?’

‘A burglar.’

She heard sounds of him searching for something just before a strong light was shone in her face.

‘Will you take that out of my eyes?’ she pleaded, screwing her watering eyes up tight. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

She felt a hand tug at the knitted cloche she wore on her head and pull it off. The same hand ran gently through the soft waves that had been crammed beneath. Suddenly the pressure over her middle was gone, as was the hand… Disturbingly she had mixed feelings about her release; there had been something very soothing about those probing fingers—no, that wasn’t quite the right word…

She struggled to sit up and managed it with both hands braced behind her for support on the dusty floor.

‘I had a torch but I lost it when you leapt on me like that.’ She squinted into the dusty corners, hoping to relocate it.

Reece regarded her incredulously. ‘Well, what did you expect, woman, creeping up on a man in the middle of the night?’

Fair question if you stopped to look at it from his point of view—something that Darcy hadn’t done up to this point. She realised how foolish her impulsive behaviour might seem.

She watched nervously as he got to his feet and moved towards the fire, pausing to choose a couple of dry logs. The fire immediately began to sizzle as the flames licked the wood. Picking up a box of matches from the shoulder-high age-darkened oak mantel, he began to light half a dozen or so candles which were laid out there in various stages of demise. As they took hold he switched off the torch and slid it into his pocket—it came as no surprise that he’d been sleeping fully clothed.

‘Don’t you just love candlelight?’ he drawled.

‘Not especially.’ His dark hair was mussed up and what had been the suggestion of a shadow over his strong jaw earlier was now a well-developed dark stubble. Neither of these factors altered the fact he looked devastatingly attractive—well, looking at him made her feel fairly devastated at any rate.

‘Now,’ he said in a don’t-muck-me-about sort of voice, ‘you can tell me what you thought you were doing.’

What had seemed a perfectly logical step to take at the time suddenly seemed extremely difficult to explain to her critical audience.

‘If you don’t speak I’ll just have to assume you couldn’t bear to be parted from me any longer…’ he warned.

The satiric taunt made the colour flare in Darcy’s pale cheeks. ‘In your dreams,’ she grunted, catching her lower lip between her teeth.

‘Talking of dreams, you owe me one—you rudely interrupted a particularly…’

‘I don’t want to know anything about your dreams,’ Darcy assured him, drawing herself up on her knees and dusting the seat of her trousers with a vigorous hand.

‘Even if you were involved…?’

He seemed to take a malicious delight in winding her up. ‘Especially if I was involved.’ Thank goodness she had a thick sweater and a windcheater over her pyjama top, because things were happening to her nipples that couldn’t be blamed on the temperature.

Reece laughed then and went to sit down on an upturned packing case. ‘I’d offer you a seat, only this is the only one.’ He fingered the rough surface. ‘It’s the only table too, for that matter.’

Darcy gathered the drifting threads of her wits—she hadn’t come here to talk furniture. ‘I only came to look at you,’ she gritted, wondering why she had ever cared if he expired in his sleep.

‘Not touch…?’ he muttered.

‘Will you stop interrupting me?’

‘Sorry,’ he responded meekly.

Meek, him…? That was the best joke she’d heard in ages.

‘I shouldn’t have let you spend the night alone just because you irritated me.’

Now that she had his complete attention, Darcy wasn’t sure that was what she wanted… She didn’t trust that innocent expression in those green eyes either.

He rapidly proved her distrust was well-placed!

‘So you decided to spend the night with me after all, Darcy. I don’t know what to say…’

Her jaw locked tight as she tried to act as if his wolfish grin didn’t do anything to her at all.

‘I’m sure you’ll manage to come up with something suitably smutty,’ she predicted acidly, rubbing her sweaty palms against her jeans.

His low chuckle was not only genuinely amused, it was also deeply, devastatingly sexy.

‘The doctor said you needed to be carefully observed. I just thought I’d pop round and see if you were all right.’

‘You thought you’d pop round at,’ he glanced down at the slim-banded wristwatch on his wrist, ‘three a.m.,’ he read incredulously.

‘I didn’t know if you could cope, with your ribs and the shoulder…’ She gave an exasperated sigh. ‘If you must know,’ she said, gathering up the flask and blanket and thrusting them out to him, ‘I was worried about you.’

Reece looked from her angry, flushed face to the offerings in her hand and back again. ‘I’m touched.’

‘There’s no need,’ she said with dignity, ‘to be sarcastic.’

‘I’m not.’

Darcy tapped a pearly fingertip nervously against a white tooth and eyed him with an exasperated frown. ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ she began to explain patiently. ‘I was lying there, listening to the wind, thinking about you…’

‘Snap.’

It took two seconds’ exposure to his wickedly explicit eyes to extinguish the innocent look of enquiry on her face. ‘I wasn’t doing that sort of thinking,’ she gasped, horrified.

‘What sort of thinking would that be, Darcy…?’

‘If you’d got ill in the night nobody would have known. I would have felt responsible.’

‘You’ve got a thing about responsibility, haven’t you, Darcy?’ he mused softly. ‘Don’t you ever get the urge to do something irresponsible?’ The humour faded abruptly from his eyes.

Darcy swallowed, and waited for the worst of the spasms in her belly to pass. It must be the candles, she reasoned desperately. ‘No, never.’ Her stern denial emerged as a hollow whisper.

Her fingers, still curled around the blanket and Thermos, trembled. It didn’t occur to her to release her grip on them as he pulled them—and her—slowly towards him. Finally he removed them from her weak grasp and placed them on the floor. His eyes never left hers all the time.

An image of the livid bruising she’d seen on his body came into her head, but her imagination didn’t limit itself to damage; it conjured up some impressive muscles, smooth olive-toned flesh and crisp body hair too. She ran the tip of her tongue over her dry lips to lubricate them and gave her head a tiny shake, but neither act totally dispelled the disturbing image.

‘Did I hurt you?’ she asked hoarsely. She knew she hadn’t been a submissive victim.

He touched the side of her face softly and sent an illicit little shiver through the tense body. Darcy couldn’t afford the time to worry if the tremor had been transmitted through his fingertips—it was taking all her energy convincing her knees they didn’t want to fold under her. To make matters infinitely worse, the debilitating weakness wasn’t just affecting her limbs…at best, her brain was functioning on a very basic, fuzzy level.