The Devil and Miss Jones. Kate Walker

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      When she looked up into his face she saw something change there too. A whole new expression suddenly came over his features, softening them, changing them in the most dramatic way. His eyes warmed so that their shadowed green now looked like the colour of the fields where the rainclouds had parted and let the rays of the sun shine through, illuminating them. And his mouth—dear heaven, how sensual was that mouth? It was firm and strong but the fullness of the lower lip gave it a sexy curve that made something tingle right through her body, particularly when he let a tiny hint of a smile curl at the corners just for a moment. His grip on her hand tightened, briefly, conveying a message of support and encouragement that she was anxious enough to welcome hungrily. She even let herself wonder just for one brief heady moment just what it might feel to have that mouth on hers, feel it caress her skin.

      ‘So now can we get on?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m getting tired of standing here in this wind, getting soaked.’

      ‘Of course!’ Guilt at the way she had kept him hanging around, the rain soaking into his hair and shirt, made her sound over-enthusiastic. ‘But how do I get on that—in this?’

      Her gesture took in the long white silk skirt, sleek and clinging at the waist, hips, around her legs, with just the tiniest flare of material at her ankles. Her delicate veil, soft and flowing when she had put it on an hour or so before, now hung limp and weighted with rain around her face and head.

      ‘I’m not sure I can manage it.’

      Why did women wear those skin-tight skirts? Carlos wondered. He was surprised that she could even walk in that dress, let alone do anything else. It was sexy as hell though, in the way that it shaped her breasts, exposing just a hint of creamy cleavage, the suggestion of seduction so much more enticing than a full-on plunging neckline. The silk then clung to the swell of her hips, taking the eye down the length of her body to the point where the flounces of material kicked out around the knees. Was there anything more calculated to emphasise the womanly shape, the curves that some—mostly other women, he suspected—might consider to be rather fuller and more lush than current fashion demanded?

      Not him. He liked a woman to be a woman and that meant that she had to have a female shape. And this Miss Jones certainly was all woman.

      ‘We’re going to have to do something about that.’

      She hadn’t expected to walk very far in the designer dress, he reminded himself. Only down the aisle… Just what the hell had happened to make her run out on her wedding? The need to know was like an itch in his mind though he didn’t feel that she would be prepared to answer if he questioned her about it. Not the woman who only gave her name as ‘Miss Jones’. So what was she so determined to hold back on? What did she have to hide?

      And what sort of a groom would be fool enough to let a beautiful woman like this slip through his fingers when she had already agreed to marry him?

      ‘And what would that “something” we have to do be? How exactly do you expect to manage…?’

      ‘Easy,’ Carlos drawled. ‘Nothing to it.’

      He had enough experience of getting women out of their clothes to have some understanding of how female garments worked. Admittedly, the women concerned had been only too eager to help him. He had never had to plan on dealing with a woman’s clothing so that he could help her run away from another man.

      But from his memory of dealing with silk dresses in the past, they offered little resistance to strong hands. Just how hard could it be to get rid of some of that unwanted material?

      ‘Leave it to me.’

      In a moment he was on his knees on the wet road at her feet, long brown hands reaching for her dress, tanned skin dark against the pale material. He gathered it into his fingers, twisting, bunching slightly so that it pulled against her legs, making her take an awkward step back and then forwards again, forced to stay where she was, held prisoner by his firm grip.

      ‘Just stay there,’ he muttered, a note of command in his tone, one that made her freeze where she stood.

      But the small movement she’d made had been enough to make him freeze too—though in a very different sort of reaction. In the same moment that she’d stepped back and forward he had bunched the fine silk of her skirt in his hands, lifting it ready to get rid of the constricting skirt. And that had exposed the slender length of her legs.

      Infierno! She was actually wearing stockings and suspenders, the nervous twitch of her body taking the skirt up higher so that the delicate pale blue lace of a garter too was exposed. Clinging round the top of her thigh. For a couple of heart-thudding seconds Carlos’s throat dried shockingly, his hands tightening in the slippery material.

      ‘Stand still!’

      His voice was gruffer this time, and he didn’t care if she thought he was ordering her around. The struggle for control of his own senses, his own body, had put the rough note into his tone. This Miss Jones was one of those women who believed that the pulse point at the back of the knee was a good spot to spray some of her perfume. And she was damn right about that too if the heady, spicy scent that hit his nostrils was anything to go by. Not for Miss Jones the delicate floral perfume the lace and silk of her clothing and the fine blonde hair might suggest. Instead she wore something that spoke more of enticement, of sensuality. Obviously she had been planning on sharing that sexuality with the man she was supposed to have been marrying.

      It was damned difficult to concentrate on what he was doing with his body hardening in instinctive response to the closeness of her delicate flesh, the scent of her skin combined with that sensuous perfume. A hot wave of jealousy of the unknown man she had planned to share this delectable body with tonight swept through him, making his fingers clench even more tightly on the white silk. He had to be a total fool to have let her get away—to have driven her away from him.

      Well, maybe the fool’s loss was his gain. Miss Jones as a prospective bride he would have had to leave well alone. This woman as a bride who had clearly had more than second thoughts about marrying the man she was promised to and who obviously wanted to put as much distance between her and her groom as possible was a very different matter.

      ‘I said stand still!’ he repeated as another twitch of her body brought that sexy scent to torment his senses all over again.

      ‘I am standing still.’

      Martha had to mutter the words between clenched teeth in order not to betray the way she was feeling. She just wished he would hurry up and get the job done as soon as possible. She didn’t feel that she could take the screaming tension of her nerves and every one of her senses for many moments longer.

      He wasn’t actually touching her, only the material of her skirt, and yet the surface of her skin seemed to tingle as if he was actually stroking it, as if his breath was warm against her exposed flesh. The cold, miserable dampness of the afternoon seemed to evaporate in a second, leaving her body heated from the inside so that she felt sure that she would actually see steam rising from her clothes where the warmth dried them. But she couldn’t drag her eyes away from the man at her feet. Looking down at his dark head as he bent over his task, her gaze was grabbed and held, drawn by a sensual magnetism, and her fingers actually twitched against her sides as she fought the impulse to reach out and touch, stroke the black, disordered strands back into smoothness against the strong bones of his skull.

      She wanted to touch him. No, it was more than a want—it was something СКАЧАТЬ