Kat Black - Playing With Fire

But it still wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Anticipation had been building all through their nightcap as he’d expected it would. How could it not, when coffee had been their drink of choice and they’d found themselves in Chinos, the café where she’d first touched him, albeit by accident, all those months ago? During the six long weeks he’d had without her, that encounter, and every increasingly intimate one after, had replayed in his mind over and over and over, filling him with the constant dull ache of need and longing. And as if that hadn’t been temptation aplenty, Annabel had ordered a slice of chocolate cake, reminding him of how much of a sweet tooth she had; every pleasure-driven flicker of her eyelids, every lick of her red lips and the icing-smeared spoon had shot straight to his groin.

‘Hurry!’ she urged again, the word a breathy spur right into his ear, robbing him of any last hope of reining things in. Raising his head, he smashed his lips over hers, plunging his tongue into her mouth to taste that chocolate sweetness as he wrestled with the buttons of her coat.

If he’d wanted to keep things slow, he shouldn’t have let himself come to the door. With the sexual tension that had been thrumming through him since their reunion yesterday, he should have stuck to his original plan of staying in the taxi out in the street while she let herself through the security doors of the modern, multi-storey residential block, before continuing the journey across town to his own place.

But after they’d shared a semi-chaste kiss on the back seat his honourable resolve had been overridden by an altogether more primal surge of protectiveness. Watching her walk away brought flashbacks of the last time he’d dropped her off – high and happy from the weekend they’d spent in Vienna – when she’d refused to let him see her to her door. The price she’d nearly paid for that … He’d never forget the moment he’d caught a glimpse of Tony Maplin’s face at her window as the taxi had pulled away, never forget the split-second timing of his intervention that had saved her from even worse injuries than she’d already sustained. The remembered horror of that day had gripped him as effectively as a choke-hold around the throat, making it impossible for him to stay sitting there while she went up alone.

Shit! He tore his mouth away from the kiss. ‘The taxi.’ He’d told the driver he’d be back in a few minutes.

‘Send it away. Now,’ Annabel ordered, even as her questing hands ran down his back to grasp his arse cheeks and pull him impossibly closer. It seemed whatever the circumstances that had led to his current loss of control, she wasn’t complaining. ‘Hurry,’ she demanded again, this time grinding herself against the rock-hard ridge of his erection.

‘Fuck,’ he gasped harshly, head snapping back as hot needles of pleasure lanced through him. One look at Annabel’s half-closed green eyes and half-open smudged red lips had him crushing their mouths together again as his hands tunnelled beneath her overcoat. Under it, she was dressed in her usual severe work attire – a black skirt suit so sharply tailored he was surprised not to feel his fingers sliced to bits. Her hair was pulled back in its trademark perfect twist, leaving her looking as impeccably, formidably stunning as the first time he’d seen her in Cluny’s dining room. She hadn’t been at all happy that day, returning to work from a week’s leave to find he’d been taken on as head barman without her consent. Yet even as he’d endured the full blast of her icy disdain, he’d known he’d do almost anything to muss up that perfection she wore as armour.

And that thought was all it took to have the caveman part of his brain stomping its big hairy feet to know why the hell she wasn’t mussed right now. He retracted his hands from the recesses of her coat and raised them again to her head to hunt out and remove the clips that held her hair tightly tamed. Spearing his fingers into the long, heavy mass, he fanned them through to the ends.

Pulling back to watch the soft locks cascade over her shoulders, he realised he had a correction to make. Annabel wasn’t as stunning as she’d been the first time he’d seen her. She was more so. The colour of her hair then had been a dyed ruby red, but she’d allowed it to return to its natural flaming riot of spun gold and copper and cinnamon – a sight that made him very happy indeed. He’d always had a thing for redheads, but most especially for this one.

Before he could lean in to claim her mouth again, Annabel used the small distance he’d put between them to push a hand against his chest. ‘Taxi,’ she panted. ‘Now.’

He’d already forgotten. ‘Wait right there.’ He tore himself away, heaved the door open and raced for the stairs before his synapses could relay the urgent message to stop and turn around.

He was back in less than five minutes. And she was waiting for him. Watching through her little spyhole. Flinging the door open before he had to knock.

Then he was inside again, noticing she’d ditched the coat as, without a word, he pushed her back up against the wall and kissed her hard until neither of them had any breath left.

She pulled away first, sucking in air through lips his rough kiss had left red and swollen. Her hands were busy with the remaining buttons of his coat while his skimmed down over the tailored curves of her waist and hips.

‘Off!’ She wrenched the lapels back over his shoulders. He took his hands from her only long enough to help shake the coat from his arms and then he put them right back where they’d been.

‘Your turn,’ he ordered, bending to kiss her jawline while his fingers began gathering the fabric of her skirt, rucking it up. ‘Lose the jacket.’

Annabel moaned and let her head drop back against the wall, surrendering to his mouth as it closed over the pulse banging below her ear.

Hands working urgently in the tight space between their torsos, she managed to wrestle her jacket off while he got her skirt bunched up around her hips. As he felt her palms clasp his shoulders, his own slid downwards over her newly exposed thighs. What his touch discovered there had him smiling against the tender skin of her neck.

Straightening, he looked down into her upturned face. ‘Tights, Ms Frost?’ he questioned with a whiff of disapproval, as he’d done once before – on the day he’d decided that the only way he’d ever get past his manager’s frosty defences was to risk something daring. ‘Really?’

Her eyelids snapped open at the words and, when she would have lifted her head, he wrapped a hand around her throat, setting the pad of his thumb against her chin to hold her where she was.

‘Remember what happened the last time I found you in tights?’ he asked, because he sure as hell did. He recalled every heart-pounding second of the scene that had started as a tease and had spun way out of control down in the wine cellar of Cluny’s, leaving Annabel standing in a ruined pair of tights and him wondering if he’d lost his job as well as his sanity.

Her throat moved against his palm as she swallowed. ‘How could I forget? You were so over the line I should have had you charged with indecent assault.’

He flashed a grin. ‘Indecent?’ He leaned close to bring his mouth to hers and licked slowly from one corner of her bottom lip to the other. ‘I doubt you have the first clue of just how indecent things would have become if I’d not called a halt to that little episode – if I’d carried on and done all the things I’d wanted to do to you.’

‘I would have stopped you,’ Annabel said, baited no doubt by his deliberately cocky tone.

Although the heat sparking in her eyes had little to do with anger.