Tall, Dark & Rich: His Christmas Virgin / Married by Christmas / A Yuletide Seduction. Carole Mortimer

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      She should have just telephoned Jonas and told him what she thought of him rather than coming back into town to speak to him personally. She certainly shouldn’t—as he had already pointed out so mockingly—have followed him home!

      The wisest thing to do now would be to get back on her motorbike and drive back home. Unwisely, Mac knew she wasn’t yet ready to do that…

      Just looking at Jonas, his dark hair once again ruffled by the breeze outside, the hard arrogance of his face clearly visible in the brightly lit car park, was enough to make her knees go weak. To remind her of the way he had kissed and touched her earlier today. To make her long for him to kiss and touch her in that way again.

      To make her question whether that wasn’t the very reason she had come here in the first place…

      Jonas had been watching the different emotions flickering across Mac’s expressive face. First the fading of her anger, which was replaced by confusion and uncertainty. And now he could see those emotions replaced by an unmistakable hunger in those smoky-grey eyes as she looked at him so intently…

      A hunger he fully reciprocated. ‘I intend to have several glasses of wine as soon as I get up to my apartment—would you care to join me?’ he offered huskily.

      She visibly swallowed. ‘That’s probably not a good idea.’

      Again, here and now, Jonas was more than willing to go with a bad idea. His body physically ached from the hours he had already spent aroused by this woman today; the thought of an evening and night suffering the same discomfort did not appeal to him in the slightest. Besides, he really did want to see her perfect little bottom in those skin-tight leathers! ‘Half a glass of wine isn’t going to do you any harm, Mac.’

      ‘Isn’t it?’

      Maybe it was, Jonas acknowledged with dark humour. If he had anything to do or say about it. ‘Scared, Mac?’ he taunted.

      Her cheeks became flushed. ‘Now you’re deliberately challenging me into agreeing to go up to your apartment with you!’

      He gave her an amused smile. ‘Is it working?’

      Mac knew that her temptation to go up to Jonas’s apartment with him had very little to do with annoyance. Just talking with him like this made her nerve endings tingle, the low timbre of his voice sending little quivers of awareness up her nape and down the length of her spine, the fine hairs on her arms standing to attention, and her skin feeling as if it were covered in goose-bumps. She also felt uncomfortably hot, a heat she knew had nothing to do with the leathers she was wearing to keep out the early evening chill, and everything to do with being so physically aware of Jonas.

      All of which told Mac she would be a fool to go anywhere she would be completely alone—and vulnerable to her own churning emotions—with Jonas.

      Except she ached to be alone with him.

      She nodded abruptly. ‘I—Fine. Will it be safe to leave my helmet down here with my bike?’

      ‘I’m sure your bike and helmet will be perfectly safe left down here,’ Jonas assured her.

      The implication being that it was Mac’s own safety, once she was alone with him in his apartment, that she ought to be worried about.

      CHAPTER SIX

      MAC turned to look at Jonas as he fell into step slightly behind her as she crossed the car park to the lift that would take them up to his apartment. Only to quickly turn away again, her cheeks flaring with heated colour, as she saw the way he was unashamedly watching the gentle swaying of her hips and bottom as she walked.

      He eyed her unapologetically as he stood beside her to punch in the security code that opened the lift doors and allowed the two of them to step inside. ‘You shouldn’t wear tight leathers if you don’t want men to look at you!’ He pressed the penthouse button.

      Mac looked up at him reprovingly as the lift began to ascend. ‘I wear them for extra safety if I should come off the bike, not for men to look at. And you know how hot you are on safety,’ she prodded.

      ‘Hot would seem to be the appropriate word,’ Jonas teased.

      Mac’s cheeks felt more heated than ever at the knowledge that Jonas thought she looked hot in her biking gear. ‘Perhaps we should just change the subject.’

      ‘Perhaps we should.’ He nodded, blue eyes openly laughing at her.

      Mac turned away to stare fixedly at the grey metal doors until they opened onto the penthouse floor. The lights came on automatically as they stepped straight into what was obviously the sitting-room—or perhaps one of them?—of Jonas’s huge apartment.

      It had exactly the sort of impersonal ultra-modern décor that Mac had expected, mainly in black and white with chrome, with touches of red to alleviate the austerity. The walls were painted a cool white, with black and chrome furniture, with cushions in several shades of red on the sofa and chairs, and several black and white rugs on the highly polished black-wood floor.

      Mac hated it on sight!

      ‘Very nice,’ she murmured unenthusiastically.

      Jonas had seen the wince on Mac’s face before she donned the mask of social politeness. ‘I allowed an interior designer free rein with the décor in here when I moved in six months ago,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘Awful, isn’t it?’ He grimaced as he strode further into the room.

      Mac followed slowly. ‘If you don’t like it, why haven’t you changed it?’

      He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t see the point when I shall be moving out again soon.’

      ‘Oh?’ She turned to look at him. ‘Is that why you haven’t bothered to put up any Christmas decorations, either?’

      Jonas never bothered to put up Christmas decorations. What was the point? Only he lived here, with the occasional visitor, so why bother with a lot of tacky decorations that only gathered dust, before they had to be taken down again? For Jonas, Christmas was, and always had been, just a time to be suffered through, while everyone else seemed to overeat and indulge in needless sentimentality. In fact, Jonas usually made a point of disappearing to the warmth of a Caribbean island for the whole of the holidays, and, although he hadn’t made any plans to do so yet, he doubted that this year would be any different from previous ones.

      ‘No,’ Jonas said shortly. Mac really did look good in those figure-hugging leathers, he acknowledged privately as once again he felt what was fast becoming a familiar hardening of his thighs. ‘Come through to the kitchen and I’ll open a bottle of wine,’ he invited briskly before leading the way through to the adjoining room.

      He had designed the kitchen himself, the cathedral-style ceiling oak-beamed using beams that had originally come from an eighteenth-century cottage, with matching oak kitchen cabinets, all the modern conveniences such as a fridge-freezer and a dishwasher hidden behind those cabinets, with a weathered oak table in the middle of the room surrounded by four chairs, and copper pots hanging conveniently beside the green Aga.

      It was a warm and comfortable room as opposed to the coolly impersonal sitting-room. The kitchen was where Jonas felt most at ease, and was where he usually sat and read СКАЧАТЬ