Free No Longer Forbidden? by Dani Collins

didn’t get out much and it was my birthday.” If she kept slapping coats of whitewash on it perhaps he wouldn’t see it for the act of lifelong yearning it had been.
    “All those years of batting your lashes and trying to get a rise out of me … It wasn’t more of that same nonsense?”
    She had to drop her gaze then, because it had very much been a culmination of that long, infernal effort to catch his interest.
    His hand came under her jaw, forcing her chin up so she couldn’t hide from his penetrating glacier-blue eyes. “Because I can forgive a teenager for baiting a grown man, but at twenty you should have known better.”
    “So you said then, and I wasn’t doing that.” Impatience got the better of her and she tried to pull away, dying inside as she recalled his angry kiss and his merciless rejection.
    His hand moved to the side of her neck, long fingers sliding beneath the fall of her hair so his fingertips rested on the back of her neck, keeping her close.
    “And today?” he asked, his tone dangerously lethal.
    “Today you kissed me .” It took guts to hold her ground, especially when she was flushed with self-disgust as she recalled how she’d reacted: as if she still thought kissing him was a good idea. Her nails cut into her palms as she made herself face him and the crushing truth. “Or rather you tried to manipulate me with what mechanically resembled a kiss.”
    He gave a little snort. “I’m long past the age of playing games. It was more than mechanics. We kissed each other.”
    He made it sound like something to be savored. When he dropped his gaze to her mouth her stomach tightened. Her whole body tingled and her lips began to burn.
    “We started something two years ago that wants finishing.”
    Her hand came up instinctively to the middle of his chest. He hadn’t moved any closer, but she suddenly felt threatened. Her arteries swelled as all her blood began to move harder and faster. “Wh-what do you mean?”
    “I’m not blind, Rowan.” He glanced down to where her still-bandaged hand pressed against his chest. His strong heartbeat pounded into her palm. “I noticed in the last few years that you weren’t a kid anymore. The only thing that stopped me taking what you were offering that night was a certainty that you didn’t mean it. If you had …”
    She sucked in a breath and jerked back, pulling her hand into her breasts as though his glance at her knuckles had branded them.
    Nic folded his arms across his chest, his shoulders hardening. “ Did you mean it?” he demanded. “Are we finally being honest or still playing games?”
    This was moving too fast. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Nic!”
    “Because you still want to tie me up in knots for kicks?”
    Was he feeling tied up? Insidious heat flooded into her pelvis, licking with wanton anticipation at her insides. He couldn’t be serious. She told her feet to run, but they refused. “We can’t have some kind of fling and then carry on as if …”
    She trailed off, the little cogs in her head making hard, sharp connections that stuck long enough to reverberate painfully in her skull before clicking over to the next one as she took in the way Nic’s brows lifted in aloof inquisition.
    She was a virgin, not sophisticated and experienced enough to have flings. Nic was experienced, though, and when he had flings he carried on just fine afterward because he never saw his partner again. Which was exactly what he intended with Rowan.
    How had she not grasped that? He had come here intendingto kick her out and never see her again. She’d won a stay of eviction, but after the two weeks were up they would not cross paths again—not unless it was by chance.
    She would never see Nic again. Ever. How had she not taken that in?
    Because she had subliminally believed that when she was ready she would seek him out. Never once had she thought there would be no Rosedale to come back to—no Nic prowling the grounds where she