Every Breath You Take Read online

Moments before, she’d been afraid to touch him for fear she’d go up in flames. Now she leaned her forehead against the same rock-solid male chest that had made her breasts tingle and she laughed helplessly. “You might have mentioned that you intended to dance with me, not try to ravish me.”

  “But I do intend to ravish you,” he warned quietly, his lips so close to the top of her head that his breath stirred her hair.

  Kate’s laughter fled and her senses flared to life. With the sensuous samba melody pulsing in the night and his long legs shifting against hers, it was a full minute before Kate realized that he danced the way he did everything else—with effortless ease and competence. No doubt he would be just as expert in bed, she thought—just as demanding and tender and irresistibly male as he was out of bed.

  Her traitorous body turned warm and pliant, and Kate struggled against an overwhelming temptation to yield to the subtle pressure of his hand on her spine and move closer to him. What about after she went to bed with him, she asked herself sternly. He was so casual about sex that he undoubtedly forgot a woman as quickly and effortlessly as he seduced her. If so, then he’d find it doubly easy to forget about her. On the other hand, she was going to have a terribly difficult time forgetting him now, even if she didn’t go to bed with him. If she did go to bed with him, she might not be able to forget him for months or even years.

  Trying to focus on that dampening thought, Kate stared straight ahead, but that gave her a close-up view of his tanned throat and the vee of his open white shirt, where tiny dark hairs peeked out invitingly just above a button. Hastily, she shifted her glance to the right and found herself gazing at long, masculine fingers lightly entwined with hers. He had beautiful hands with short, well-manicured nails. Strong, knowledgeable hands that would unerringly seek out and explore her body’s most intimate places if she let—

  Kate surrendered to defeat. She was going to let him. Regardless of the consequences, she had to find out for herself what was waiting for her in his arms. She had to know. She had to understand why he could evoke this combustible combination of heady desire and warm friendship in her within a few hours of meeting him.

  Laying her cheek against his chest, Kate closed her eyes and matched his movements as effortlessly as if they’d been dancing together forever.

  Mitchell tipped his chin slightly, smiling at the sensation of her cheek resting against his chest and her body relaxing fully against his in silent anticipation of what was soon to come. Tilting his left wrist slightly, he looked at his watch and saw that it was 11:25. Within the next five minutes, the hotel’s efficient room service staff should arrive to clear away the remains of their meal—assuming they arrived at the time Kate had specified earlier. She may have forgotten about their impending arrival, but Mitchell hadn’t, and he didn’t want another aborted kiss like the last one. Besides, he was in no great hurry now. As he’d learned from experience, anticipation of any intimate act—including a first kiss between soon-to-be lovers—was often as enjoyable as the act itself. Lately, the anticipation was frequently more enjoyable.

  On the beach, the musicians finished playing and paused for a round of applause from their small audience. In his arms, Kate stopped moving and looked up at him with moonlight and surrender in her green eyes.

  She expected to be kissed, Mitchell realized, and in an abrupt reversal of his last decision, he decided the time was right for a light, short kiss—a brief little kiss to seal what was to come.

  As soon as he bent his head, Kate braced herself for some sort of demanding sensual onslaught, but his kiss was surprisingly light—merely a friendly, tentative stroke of his mouth on hers—his smiling mouth, Kate realized, and she smiled a little, too, as she curved her hands over his shoulders and returned the “get-acquainted” kiss.

  And then the kiss started to change as he began smoothing his lips back and forth over hers, subtly increasing the pressure of each sliding stroke until her lips parted beneath his. When they did, his fingers shoved deep into the hair at her nape, holding her mouth locked tightly to his, and his free arm angled across her hips, clamping her against his rigid length.

  Kate was so lost in the hot demanding kiss that the knocking sound she heard seemed to be coming from inside of her, until Mitchell finally pulled his mouth from hers and scowled at something over her shoulder. “Room service,” he said in a strained voice. He dropped his arms. “You told room service to come back at eleven-thirty to clear away the remains of dinner.”

  Kate finally registered what he was telling her and quickly turned away from him, heading for the door to let the waiters in.

  Mitchell watched her walk away and swore under his breath, trying to get his rampaging lust under control. When the physical evidence of it wouldn’t diminish even slightly, he turned on his heel and left the terrace, forced to retreat into the darkness of the garden to conceal a rigid arousal that shouldn’t have resulted from just one relatively chaste kiss. Or six of them.

  Chapter Ten

  KATE OPENED THE DOOR TO TWO SMILING WAITERS, ONE of them in his late twenties, the other in his late forties. “How was your dinner, miss?” the younger waiter asked as he wheeled in a cart.

  “Wonderful.” She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for dinner and she sounded a little breathless.

  “The wine was satisfactory?” the older waiter inquired, stepping carefully around the sleeping dog.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Very,” she added with a quick smile, trying to recover her equilibrium. She checked to be sure Max was all right; then she smoothed her hair down and stepped back outside onto the terrace. Mitchell was standing in the garden with his hands shoved in his pockets, staring out across the moonlit water as if lost in thought.

  The music had begun again, and as Kate moved around the table, the younger waiter paused in his struggle to force the cork back into the unfinished bottle of red wine. “There’s a private party down there,” he said. “I hope the music has not disturbed you and your husband.”

  “We—I’ve enjoyed it very much,” Kate said, but the word husband made her falter momentarily, not because Mitchell wasn’t her husband, but because she realized how awkward this situation would feel tomorrow night, or the night after, if these same waiters served Evan and her a meal. It hit her then that the same possibility might have occurred to Mitchell and that was why he’d moved off into the darkness at the far end of the garden.

  Kate forced her worries about the future aside and stepped off the terrace onto the grass. Soon enough, she would have to cope with the ramifications of her decision to be with Mitchell tonight, but for now, that decision was made. She couldn’t turn back. She didn’t want to turn back. Not after their kiss. There had never been a kiss like that—not for her—and she had the thrilling feeling that Mitchell had been almost as surprised and carried away by it as she’d been.

  He turned toward her, and Kate searched his features for some sign that the kiss had affected him as much as she thought it had. She wanted to believe it had been no ordinary kiss to him. She needed to believe it, and yet in the pale moonlight, he almost seemed to be frowning at her. However, he was too far away for her to gauge his expression accurately, so Kate smiled tentatively at him and tried to decide what to say to him when she was close enough. He didn’t smile back at her, and she wondered why.

  Mitchell wasn’t smiling because he was studying the woman who had just managed to drive him to the brink of uncontrollable, possessive lust with one kiss, and he wasn’t entirely happy with what he saw. With her hands clasped behind her back and the breeze teasing her long hair and ruffling the hem of her long pants, she reminded him of an Irish choir girl, and the beguiling outfit she was wearing—which he’d mentally stripped off her during dinner—now struck him as being virginal white.

  Kate Donovan was not at all in his normal style, and neither was his profound physical reaction to a single kiss. Earlier, when she dumped that Bloody Mary on him, his desire to see her again had been a