A Convenient Husband. KIM LAWRENCE

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СКАЧАТЬ innocent as those far-off occasions he was referring to, she had nothing to worry about. She’d have felt even more relieved if Rafe didn’t have the sort of voice that could make something as innocent as a nursery rhyme sound suggestive.

      ‘Is the old walnut tree still outside the bedroom window?’

      These days women usually opened the door for him…except for Claudine…His eyes grew chilly as he recalled that significant door that had been closed firmly in his face. Pity it hadn’t closed before he’d made a total fool of himself!

      ‘No, it was diseased, we had to have it chopped down,’ Tess told him in a brisk tone that didn’t even hint at how upset she’d been by this necessity.

      ‘Time gets to us all,’ he sighed mournfully.

      Her eyes made a swift, resentful journey over his large, virile person. Sure, he looked really decrepit! To add insult to injury, she suspected that even in this sizzlingly spectacular condition he was some way off his prime just yet.

      ‘It doesn’t seem right,’ he continued. ‘A Walnut Cottage without a walnut tree.’

      The same thought had occurred to her but she didn’t let on. ‘You’re not going all nostalgic on me, are you? If it makes you feel any better,’ she conceded, ‘I planted several seedlings after they cut the old one down. And in the interests of accuracy I ought to point out that this was Gran’s room back then; so was the bed.’

      The one he had shared with her had been a narrow metal-framed affair that would probably collapse under him these days, she thought, letting her eyes roam over his lengthy, muscular frame.

      Who’d have thought that skinny kid would turn into something as perfectly developed as this awesome specimen? Aware that her breath was coming faster as her eyes lingered, she took a deep breath and passed the tip of her tongue over her dry lips. When she swallowed, her throat was equally dry and aching as if she wanted to cry—only she didn’t.

      It was all right to notice that a man oozed sexual magnetism; it was quite another to let the fact turn you ga-ga. Rafe had enough people raving on about his physical perfection without her joining the fan club! She looked up anxiously to see if he’d noticed her drooling display and saw his eyes weren’t on her face at all.

      ‘A lot of things have changed since then.’ His deep voice was warmly appreciative as he continued to stare at the up-tilted outline of her small breasts.

      He lifted his head and his eyes were slumberously sexy. Her breasts responded as though he’d touched the soft mounds of quivering flesh with his warm mouth. The startling image banished all rational thoughts from her head for one long, steamy moment. Nostrils flared, cheeks burning, she fought her way back to sanity.

      ‘Some things don’t change—things like your complete disregard for other people’s feelings.’ It was a whopping big lie, so to justify it she began to feverishly search her memory for some example to prove her point. Triumphantly she discovered one. ‘Your family must have worried like crazy about you when you went missing all those times…?’ Looking at it now through adult eyes, she saw aspects to Rafe’s frequent nocturnal wanderings that her childish eyes had never seen.

      ‘If concern is expressed by the vigour of the punishment, they were deeply concerned.’ Something in his cynical voice made her search his stony face.

      The memory of the bruises she’d once seen on his back when they had all gone swimming popped into her head. Suddenly all those times he’d refused to take off his heavy, long-sleeved sweater on a hot summer day made horrible sense. Everything clicked into place and she felt sick.

      Tess forgot her throbbing head; she jerked herself upright.

      Outrage glowed in her eyes. ‘He hit you!’ She thought of Guy Farrar with his mean little mouth and big meaty fists and her skin crawled. ‘You never said!’ she began angrily.

      Nobody, not her dimly remembered parents or dear gran Aggie had ever laid a finger on her. Her chest felt tight and her eyes stung. She knew now what should have been obvious to her ages ago: their efforts to force Rafe to fit the mould of a perfect Farrar had gone beyond the verbal chastisements she’d heard often enough for herself…they’d tried to beat him into submission!

      ‘Leave it, Tess,’ Rafe said curtly.

      ‘But—!’

      ‘You’re hyperventilating,’ he told her, studying with clinical interest the agitated rise and fall of her small but shapely breasts. So, he’d noticed she had breasts! It was no big deal. However, noticing was one thing, staring was another. He firmly averted his eyes.

      Tess wasn’t about to apologise for her emotional response; she couldn’t understand his lack of it! ‘I’m not!’ she denied breathlessly. ‘Doesn’t it make you mad?’ she persisted incredulously.

      For a long time it had, but Rafe had no intention of explaining how much effort and determination it had taken him to finally shelve the resentment that had simmered for years.

      Her firm jaw tightened and her smouldering eyes narrowed. ‘I’d like to—!’ she began hotly.

      Rafe took hold of her hands and, inserting his thumbs inside her clenched fingers, slowly unfurled her white-knuckled fists. ‘I can see what you’d like to do…’ he remonstrated softly.

      Rafe frequently thanked his lucky stars that his only personal legacy from a father who’d automatically raised his fist on the frequent occasions when his troublesome younger son had annoyed him was a deep revulsion for violence and individuals who used it to control those who were weaker and more vulnerable. He was well aware that all too often the pattern repeated itself in each successive generation.

      There had only been the one occasion when he’d used his physical strength to punish someone else—actually there had been three of them, sixth formers who had been making the life of another fourth former a living hell.

      It was a sad fact of life, he reflected, but some kids had victim written all over them, and bullies of all ages could smell fear. You only had to be a little bit different—different but desperate to be the same as everyone else.

      Rafe had walked into the common room one day to find them holding the kid up against a wall taking it in turns to punch him. He’d literally seen red; a red haze had actually danced before his eyes. That day he’d rid himself of several devils, and got expelled.

      The touch of his thumb against the skin of her palm made Tess grow very still. The odd shivery sensation deep inside brought a troubled frown to her smooth wide brow as, warily, her eyes encountered his rather dark, rather luscious velvety orbs.

      She hadn’t been prepared to discover this sort of intensity in the searching quality of his dark glance. Quite suddenly the quality of the tension that gripped her altered. If anything, this fresh, tingling jolt of sexual awareness was even more intense than before. It left her incapable of doing anything but staring dry-throated and breathless back at him.

      ‘I know you’re aching to ask…’

      Tess ignored the melting sensation low in her belly. It was perfectly understandable—Rafe’s low drawl was pitched at an intimate, toe-curling level guaranteed to bemuse, bewilder and befuddle just about any female with a hormone to call her own. Tess’s hormones, after years of wilful neglect, were staging an ill-timed comeback. She was aching all right, in СКАЧАТЬ