‘And then I’d touch you here...’ he told her, his hand just lightly skimming the junction of her thighs, the lightest, briefest touch imaginable, but it was enough to make her melt with longing, to burn with need and to show every bit of what she was feeling in her eyes.
‘And you’d look at me...just the way you’re looking at me right now,’ Piers told her thickly, ‘and I’d want you so much that I’d almost be afraid of hurting you, knowing that the way I wanted to have you would be hot and passionate, and it wouldn’t be over for a long, long time; that I’d want to explore every inch of you... touch you...stroke you...know you...eat you...’
‘Piers...’ Georgia managed to protest chokily.
‘Piers what?’ he asked her, his fingers already sliding inside the fastening of her shirt and hooking round the buttons. ‘Do you want me as much as I want you, sweet Georgia?’ Piers asked her, his fingertips tantalising her as they slid sensually against her skin.
Her breasts ached so for his touch...his mouth... Georgia shivered in mute pleasure as she heard him whispering to her, ‘Do you lie in bed at night thinking of me the way I think of you...imagining the soft silkiness of your skin, the sweet taste of you...that sexy little purr you make when you’re aroused...?’
In another second he would be touching her nipple, and once he did... He was just toying with her, amusing himself, that was all; he didn’t really feel anything for her. Right now he might say he wanted her, but tomorrow he would be behaving horribly to her again; she knew it. Frantically Georgia clung to what she knew to be reality.
‘We can’t,’ she protested thickly. ‘We don’t... We’re enemies, Piers,’ she reminded him.
‘Enemies?’
His fingers stilled on their sensual journey across her skin. Slowly he withdrew them from her body as he stood up, releasing her.
‘Enemies? Is that how you see us? Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ he agreed curtly, and then he walked away from her, opening the kitchen door and then very quietly closing it behind him.
Georgia ached to call him back, but somehow she managed to prevent herself from doing so. As though he sensed what she was feeling, Ben climbed out of his basket and came across to lean against her. Automatically Georgia stroked his fur, wondering why it should suddenly feel so damp and then realising that she was actually crying. Crying? Over Piers? What a fool she was being. The next thing she knew she would be thinking she had fallen in love with him! And she was far too sensible to allow anything like that to happen. Far too sensible!
CHAPTER SIX
IT HAD never been destined to be recorded as one of the best days of his life right from the start, Piers was to acknowledge grimly, twenty-four hours after the event which was to change his life for ever.
For a start he did something he could never remember having done before. He overslept. He never overslept. Never. But this morning he had done, waking up abruptly with the beginnings of what promised to be a bad headache and an even worse mood.
And it didn’t make him feel any better to be forced to acknowledge that at least part of the cause of his mood was the fact that in his dreams his desire for Georgia had given him such an ache of longing for her that on waking he’d actually felt as though she had physically been there in bed with him, deliberately arousing him and then withdrawing from him, teasing him, tormenting him with the alluring promise of her softly naked body whilst, at the same time, refusing to allow him to touch her.
Angrily he pushed back the bedcovers. Lying in bed mentally going over his dreams wasn’t going to do anything to change them, or the message they were no doubt trying to give him.
Scowling, he headed for his bathroom.
* * *
Georgia wasn’t having a much better day. During his walk Ben had run off, dancing around her just out of her reach whilst she alternately tried to coax and order him back to her. In the end it had only been with the aid of a fellow walker whose pretty sheltie bitch Ben had taken a shine to that she had managed to get his lead back on him.
Back at the house she had fed him, and answered a telephone call from work concerning the disappearance of some papers she knew for a fact she had given to the office manager to be filed.
Now, as she concluded her telephone call, she realised that Ben was nowhere in sight—just like Piers, who presumably had got up early and left the house before she had come down.
His comments, his behaviour towards her had left her not just aching with longing for him but having to confront as well the reasons why she was reacting to him the way she was, the reasons she wanted him the way she did.