Kiss Don’t Tell. Avril Tremayne

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      Danger ahead, he could feel it.

      ***

      Lane’s breath caught as his finger circled each dot in the row of freckles she’d always thought she hated … until now. His touch was so strange—his calloused fingertips like a raspy whisper against her skin. She could feel a spinning sensation inside her, but didn’t know if it was in her head or somewhere else. She wanted to open her eyes, watch what he was doing, learn what he was doing, see his face, but her eyelids felt so heavy. Her arms felt heavy, too. Even her breasts—especially her breasts—felt heavy, the tips so sensitive she wished his questing finger would touch her there and relieve the pressure.

      But he didn’t. His finger dragged upwards, making a slow retreat along the same path, and Lane knew instinctively he would do no more that night. She opened her eyes then, biting down on a sigh of disappointment. Men weren’t supposed to pull away from you when you were making it so easy. Even she knew that.

      Adam’s fingers moved against Lane’s flesh. He was refastening her buttons.

      She sucked in her breath as his hands brushed the tops of her breasts. It was on the tip of her tongue to demand he do what she was paying him for, but the words jammed in her throat. She’d embarrassed herself enough for one night, oozing at him like an overripe Camembert cheese. And she suddenly couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear the thought that she was forcing him to touch her when he clearly didn’t want to.

      ‘Please don’t bother,’ she said. ‘I can do it.’

      She turned her back to him, her own hands moving into action. She was forcing the last button through its opening when Adam’s hands on her shoulders stopped her.

      He turned her around and very deliberately undid the same five buttons. ‘I want to do it,’ he said huskily, and started doing the buttons up again while she stood rigid. ‘Just so you know, at the end of three months, I’m going to know every button of yours intimately. This is just the start.’

      But Lane wasn’t fooled by the sexy voice. The buttoning/unbuttoning was nothing but a lesson in who was the boss. A mechanical lesson, putting her—the student who knew nothing—in her place. A lesson she’d bought and therefore had to value.

      On that basis, she concentrated on not swooning towards him again and tried instead to analyse what it was about the way he smelled, the way his roughened fingertips felt, that made her feel so restless, so … edgy. She came up with nothing. She was clearly going to have to work harder, think more, feel less, divorce her body from her brain, if she was to make these lessons work for her.

      Adam was frowning, his hands sliding up and down her arms as though he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. And then, abruptly, he stepped away, jamming his hands in his pockets.

      ‘I can’t make Sunday,’ he said. ‘If you want to uphold your two-night minimum, you’ll have to reorganize your weekend and meet me on Saturday.’

      Lane said nothing. She was trying to work out why his voice sounded so sexy. It wasn’t as though he was saying anything seductive. It was nothing more than a calendar entry.

      ‘Okay, Lane?’ he asked.

      The way he said her name was slow and husky. Sexy, even when he wasn’t saying anything specifically associated with sex.

      ‘Lane? I’ll come to you, okay? No surprises.’

      It was always kind of gruff, his voice. Even when he was talking softly, like now. No surprises. Sweet of him to reassure her, since she’d told him she didn’t like surprises. Sweet. And sexy. And dark. She wondered if she could get the timbre of her own voice a little lower. Would that automatically make her sexier?

      ‘Lane?’

      And now it was kind of urgent.

      ‘Lane!’

      She blinked. Refocused. Blinked again. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of …’ How your voice will sound up close against my ear, how my voice will sound in your ear, when we— ‘Never mind. Just … thinking.’

      Adam looked at her for a long moment. ‘You need to think less,’ he said.

      ‘Think less, feel more,’ she said. ‘Yes, I got that.’

      ‘So … Saturday?’

      ‘Saturday, yes, all right,’ she said.

      Another long look from Adam. A half-step towards her, and then he said something under his breath, spun on his heel, and strode out of the room.

      Lane heard the front door open … then close.

      ‘Saturday,’ she said, and looked down at herself—at her perfectly buttoned shirt, at her navy blue skirt, at her flat black shoes—and groaned. ‘Oh God, I’m going to have to go shopping.’

      

CHAPTER SEVEN

      Surely the green dress that had just been thrown over the top of the fitting room door was the only remaining untried outfit in the metropolis.

      But apparently not, because two other dresses, a skirt and a satin top followed in quick succession.

      Lane stifled a little scream. She only had herself to blame for this girly shopping trip. She’d thrown herself at Erica the minute Erica had arrived home from Los Angeles last night, garbled out what had happened in her absence and begged for her help choosing an appropriate wardrobe for her sex classes. Erica, with a martial look in her eye, had insisted on inviting Sarah along too, since Sarah had ‘already been so helpful’ in persuading Adam to take Lane on as his private student, and now …

      Well, now, having spent three hours being pelted with assorted items of clothing, with only a black cocktail frock to show for the girls’ combined efforts, Lane was thinking longingly of her navy blue suit. And the fact that Erica and Sarah were whispering furiously to each other every time they banished Lane to a fitting room wasn’t helping to reconcile her to the prospect of any more shopping.

      It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put together the mishmash of phrases Lane managed to overhear and conclude that she was the topic under discussion. Well, her and Adam Quinn and their ‘ridiculous contract’.

      ‘I can’t take much more of this,’ Lane called out to the girls, who answered her by lobbing a leather jacket into the room.

      Dispiritedly, Lane slipped the green dress over her head and stretched it into place. She looked at herself in the mirror and had to stifle another little scream. Awful. Scary, even. She looked like a green bean with breasts.

      How did Erica and Sarah both manage to consistently look like they’d walked off a high fashion runway no matter what they were wearing? Lane was closer to a model shape than either of her friends—Erica being more voluptuous and Sarah being almost too tiny to be real—so why did everything she tried on look silly on her?

      She slipped the leather jacket on over the dress. It didn’t improve the look.

      Time to admit this was a waste of time. СКАЧАТЬ