Free Wild and Willing! by Kim Lawrence Page A

fingers clear of her skin, but they flexed as if they wanted to return.
    ‘Different?’ she echoed, feeling as strange as this conversation.
    ‘But they’re not!’ The high, sharp lines of his cheek-bones seemed more prominent as his expression tautened. Denial warred with want in his eyes, and no victor emerged. ‘I have responsibilities, commitments; I can’t permit myself…
    ‘It’s wrong of me to blame you.’ She was literally shaking under the onslaught of deep, primitive need. ‘You can’t help being who you are, what you are… You go through life reacting to stimuli without any thought of the consequences.’
    His words stunned her. Her heart was thudding so hard she could hardly breathe. ‘What am I?’ Other than totally unfitted to having a relationship with such an elevated personage as Adam Deacon, she added silently.
    ‘You’re unorthodox, spontaneous, erratic and…’ she could see the muscles in his throat working… ‘sinfully sensual.’
    ‘And that’s bad?’ She reached up and pushed her fingers into his hair until her fingertips met at the back of his neck. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for ever,’ she admitted, indulging in some dangerous honesty of her own. Honesty was a luxury these days.
    If this was what ‘reacting to stimuli’ felt like, she could recommend it. She felt the muscles in his neck bunch beneath her fingers. She wasn’t being fair, but then, she thought with a sudden flurry of anger, neither was he.
    ‘You’re an adventure I’d have welcomed before,’ he said hoarsely, allowing her hands to draw him lower. His lips nuzzled the soft flesh at the side of her mouth.
    Anna gasped silently as rivulets of sensation followed the sensual stroke of his tongue. She recognised the warm, musky scent of his skin and stared with fascination at the gold flecks in his marvellous eyes.
    ‘Before you lost your sense of adventure?’ she whispered back. She was having trouble forming words by this point. Every fibre of her being was screaming outfor attention from that stern, yet incredibly sensitive mouth.
    ‘I have a family now.’ The strain cracked his voice, and he allowed his head to come to rest against her chest. ‘I owe it to them. Stability…’ he added almost vaguely. He lifted his head and seemed unable to tear his eyes away from the physical evidence of the tingling she could feel in her breasts.
    ‘Jessica.’ She made a last-ditch attempt to do the right thing. Part of her hoped it would work, but the other part…!
    ‘They need a mother, a stable influence. Ben and Tess were fantastic parents.’
    ‘I’ve heard a lot about what they need. What do you need?’ she persisted. Her soft brown eyes, fierce and hugely dilated, were fixed with reproachful anger on his face.
    ‘This sort of passion burns itself out as quickly as it…’ He spoke as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
    He let out a groan as she ran a questing hand over the taut muscles in his thigh. He caught it and redirected it until she couldn’t mistake his needs.
    ‘I need you! Is that what you want to hear?’ he demanded bitterly as he thrust her hand away. ‘Well, I do, as badly as some adolescent in the first throes of infatuation. No fool like an old fool, is there?’
    ‘You’re not old.’ The undertone of anger and resentment in his voice sobered Anna. No wonder he thought her a wanton baggage; she hardly recognised herself these days.
    She hadn’t been shocked by the intimacy of moments before, but she had been excited in a dry-throated, heart-pounding, reckless sort of way. It might have been easier to come to terms with indifference! she thought despairingly.
    ‘When I look at you I feel it.’
    ‘You’re so stupid!’ she wailed angrily. He spoke as if the foundations of his future were set in cement. He obviously didn’t love that dratted woman—this situation couldn’t exist if he did.
    If he loved Jessica, Anna reasoned, he wouldn’t want me. To