The Surgeon's One-Night Baby. Charlotte Hawkes
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Название: The Surgeon's One-Night Baby
Автор: Charlotte Hawkes
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Эротическая литература
Серия: Mills & Boon Medical
isbn: 9781474075336
isbn:
As if the intensity of his stare had finally reached her, she lifted her head, met his gaze and froze. Even from this distance, in this light, he could see the sweetest bloom staining her cheeks and down the elegant line of her neck, her chest rising and falling rapidly in a way that had nothing to do with the fact she’d been dancing. Or perhaps it was just the vividness of his imagination. Remembering the way she’d flushed in the plane the other day.
Either way, he was certain she was consumed by the same greedy fire as he was. The fire that had brought him here tonight, against every shred of logic.
And then she moved, heading off the floor and away from him. His stomach lurched in a way that was all too alien to him and before Kaspar knew what he was doing, he had set his untouched drink down on the bar behind him and was shifting his feet, ready to move. Not prepared to lose her.
Abruptly, her friend caught her and pulled her back. He kept waiting for them to glance in his direction, maybe share a giggle, which he’d seen from women time and again. A part of him almost welcomed it. It might help to topple her from whatever invisible pedestal on which he’d set her, help remind him that she was a woman like any other.
But it didn’t happen. If anything, Archie studiously avoided meeting his gaze again, and had clearly omitted to mention him to her friend, and her dignified discretion only seemed to add to her allure. Especially when she resumed dancing, only to be a little more self-conscious, a fraction stiffer than she had been before. It was the tell he needed, knowing now she was indeed equally attracted to him.
It should concern him more that it felt like such a victory.
Alarm bells were sounding but too faint, too distant to have the impact he suspected they should have had. To jolt him back to reality. To warn him that she didn’t look like the kind of woman who did one-night stands. She looked like the kind of woman who did walks along beaches, and romantic meals, and talking until dawn. Relationships. Love. It was such bull.
He’d seen first-hand the toxic depths to which such emotions could plunge. His parents’ explosive marriage had been equalled only by their acrimonious divorce. And him, in the middle of it all his life. Their pawn. The tool they’d used to goad and taunt each other. The burden they’d each tried to make the other one bear.
And not just his parents. What about his own explosiveness? That out-of-control side of him that had only had to emerge once to completely ruin someone’s life. He’d sworn it would never happen again, and it hadn’t. Some might call him emotionally detached, or unavailable. He wasn’t. Where his patients were concerned he felt as much empathy as he could, for patient and family, without it impairing his ability to do his job. It was only in his personal life where he exerted such emotional...discipline.
So he did sex. He did fun. He did mutual gratification.
He didn’t do intimacy and he didn’t do complications.
Something told him that this Archie woman was both, and the best thing he could do, for both of them, would be to stay away.
Turning back to the bar, Kaspar picked up his drink and tried not to be irritated by the group of preening, simpering women who had begun to cluster around his part of the bar. It was about as easy as pretending he wasn’t searching out blonde hair and a metallic shimmer in the reflection of the mirror behind the glasses.
Apparently, his skydiving butterfly was now edging her way off the opposite side of the dance floor. About as far away from him as she could get.
He didn’t give himself time for second-guessing. For the second time that evening, he set his untouched drink down and gave in to temptation.
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