Playing With Fire

Chapter Two

‘Hurry!’ Annabel gasped.

The only response Aidan was capable of giving was an urgent, animalistic growl of frustration deep in his throat as he buried his face in the crook of her neck. The smell, the feel, the taste of her had his blood fired and his senses reeling. If only she’d keep still, he could do as she asked. Hurry, as he so badly wanted to do. 

But it appeared she was as far gone as he, caught in the grip of a frantic physical need that had them groping at each other like horny teenagers. Bodies rubbing and hands everywhere – sliding over smooth planes, moulding curves, fumbling in their haste to get past the barriers of clothing and revisit the pleasures of naked flesh their separation had denied them.

So much for taking things slow, Flynn. Despite wanting to do the noble thing, his good intentions were no match for the force of the attraction he felt for Annabel Frost. One second they’d been offering each other a tentative goodnight as she’d stepped over the threshold of her flat. The next he’d been inside too, his hands grasping the sides of her head as he’d pinned her tight between his body and the entrance-hall wall, lips fused, tongues sparring. All before her door had even had the chance to swing shut.

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.