Rosalie Ash - Original Sin

To her mortification she discovered that she was close to tears. Spinning desperately away from him, cursing her tiredness, her emotional state, the wine, the whole tense, edgy evening, she willed him to melt away and leave her alone to weep a few therapeutic tears and collapse into bed.

Instead, she felt strong hands on her shoulders, and she was twisted into the hard warmth of Christian Malraux’s arms, and held firmly against the muscular wall of his chest.

‘You are trembling. Emily, I apologise if I offended you. You are quite safe here...’

The deep voice was cool, with a trace of anger beneath the surface. Was he angry with her? Or with himself, for suggesting that nasty twist to what might have happened?

She tensed, panic-stricken, rigid with furious denial as he slid one hand up to the narrow nape of her neck, casually and confidently caressing her hair. He stroked the back of her head in a calming, brotherly fashion. It could have been Ben, hugging her better after some minor accident at home. She felt herself relax against him involuntarily as the warmth of his body transferred itself to her.

And then, with no warning, the warmth subtly changed. Secure and fraternal it suddenly wasn’t. Searingly aware of every intimate detail of the hard, clean-smelling male body so close to hers, Emily found all her reassurance vanished.

When Christian gave an abrupt, astonished expletive and crushed her harder to his body, she lifted her head and blindly proffered her lips to his demanding, exploratory possession of her mouth...

She parted her lips with a sort of compulsive curiosity. The exquisitely raw sensations rippled through every nerve of her body. His tongue fenced with hers, then plunged hungrily deeper. He slid his hands up her slender back and cupped her head, his fingers tangling in the short, feathery rose-gold curls of her hair.

Dragging trembling hands across his ribcage, she spread her fingers across the width of his chest, superficially going through the motions of trying to push him away. Her lack of conviction must have been pathetically obvious, she decided dimly, shivering as her fingers encountered the strong ridges of his pectoral muscles. She clenched her fingers into small fists, fighting her feelings with every ounce of her strength, but then of their own volition her hands slid to his shoulders, spanning the firm column of his neck, seeking the strong pulse beating at his throat, the texture of his hair at his nape.

His hair was thick and clean, crisp to the touch. His body, through the light cotton of his clothes, felt lean and spare, powerfully muscled. A fresh wave of fire swept through her as he traced the narrow indentation of her spine with one firm hand. He caressed lightly all the way down to her small buttocks, and with shocked awareness she felt the heavy shaft of his sex, confined by clothes but nevertheless rampantly male, powerfully and unmistakably aroused, pressing against the flatness of her stomach through the silk of her sarong-skirt. A shudder of need seemed to resonate through her, but alongside it came a faint return to sanity.

The shudder seemed to transfer itself to Christian, and with a thick curse under his breath he abruptly separated himself from her. One hand on her shoulder, he caught her chin with the other, to lift her flushed face for inspection. The smoky blue eyes were darker. The sleepy, lidded gaze was shuttered, and unreadable.

‘ Je m’excuse , Emily. I did not intend that to happen. I did not seek to light a conflagration between us...’ His breathing was erratic, his deep voice was harder, but ruefully amused as well. As if he’d been taken genuinely by surprise.

‘I...you didn’t...’ Her voice sounded disembodied. She was trembling from head to foot.

‘Now I think I have frightened you even more than Greg Vernon.’

She made a determined effort to laugh it off, backing away and twisting her chin free from the disturbing warmth of his fingers. ‘Don’t worry, I doubt if I’ll have nightmares!’

‘Good.’ He was smiling wryly now, a wary, watchful light in his eyes. ‘We would not want any complications to hinder our working relationship, would we?’

‘I’ll be sure to lock my door!’ she said tartly.

‘That would be advisable.’ His blue eyes held such a gleam of dry humour that it twisted a fresh knot in the painful muddle of her emotions. Some inner parts of her body she had never even known existed until now were aching and shimmering and melting, and behaving in an outrageously unladylike fashion. ‘You’re quite a little sex siren, aren’t you, Emily?’

‘I assure you I am not !’ she snapped, incensed at his laughing mockery. ‘And what a typical sexist male comment! Blaming the female for his own lack of control!’

‘I count myself fortunate. At least I have not been immobilised by one of your terrifying judo techniques. Bonne nuit , Emily. Dors bien .’

She clenched her fists at her sides, opened her mouth to speak, but found it impossible. She was too choked with anger.

When he turned away and she closed the door on his cool, retreating lope down the landing she stood quite still, staring at the panelled dark oak door, filled with such a savage intensity of reaction that she felt like screaming and sobbing and hammering furiously against the wall.

* * *

Lisette Duvert woke her, with a tray of breakfast which she set down, none too graciously, on the table beside her bed.

‘Christian said I’d find you in here,’ she announced without prevarication. ‘What happened between you and Greg last night?’ She spoke in French, and her tone was decidedly unfriendly.

Emily blinked, rubbing her eyes, and struggled to sit up in bed, staring at her uninvited visitor. Lisette was an intensely pretty girl, with an oval face and the sort of ethereal pallor which men would doubtless find fascinating. Her eyes were as green as the sloping lawns visible through the rear windows of the bedroom. With her shoulder-length black hair and heavy fringe, and wearing a short, figure-hugging black sundress, she had a faintly witch-like air about her.

‘Didn’t Christian...Monsieur Malraux tell you?’ She managed to keep her voice level, and polite.

‘He told me some unlikely story of Greg bursting into your room and trying to molest you!’

Lisette sounded as if she had no doubt that Emily had made the whole thing up. Emily swung her legs out of bed, and stood up, facing the French girl. She was thankful for her relatively modest nightwear, an oversized white T-shirt with a yellow sun printed on the front. And she felt grateful, too, for the fact that even in bare feet she was an inch taller than Lisette.

‘I gather you hired Greg Vernon?’ she queried calmly. ‘So I’m sorry if you feel upset that he was fired straight away! But I can assure you the story is no exaggeration...’

‘No? Or perhaps you simply twisted it around to suit yourself?’ Dislike blazed out of Lisette’s green eyes.

Emily blinked involuntarily under the heat of the other girl’s temper. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘I mean, perhaps Christian came back and caught you in an embarrassing situation, and you threw the blame on Greg?’

This was so close to Christian’s cynical conjecturing last night that Emily felt a sick tightening in her stomach.

‘That’s simply not true—’ she began furiously.

‘On the contrary...’ It was Christian’s husky, cuttingly amused voice from the door, making both of them swing round. ‘Emily did not throw the blame on Greg, she threw Greg . Over her shoulder.’

His dark face was sardonic as he assessed Lisette’s dismayed reaction to his sudden appearance. ‘Emily is a judo expert, Lisette. We shall all need to tiptoe carefully around her while she is working here.’