Free A Little Seduction Omnibus by Penny Jordan Page A

‘All this is new territory for me, you know. I’ve never actually felt like this before, experienced anything like this before. I always knew that one day I would fall in love just as passionately and permanently as my grandfather fell in love with my grandmother, but I have to confess I didn’t expect it to be so...’
    Heavens, but he was quick, clever... Beth acknowledged as she forced herself to be detached and step outside her own feelings to admire the adroit way he was handling not just the situation but her as well.
    First the advance, now the back-off. No doubt he expected her to feel chagrin and to start pursuing him . And as for that schmaltzy comment about his grandparents...!

CHAPTER FIVE
    ‘I’ M SORRY THAT none of the factories we visited today came up to your expectations.’ Alex joined her in the hotel’s gift shop and looked at his watch. ‘It’s too late for me to organise anything now, but why don’t I give my cousins a ring and arrange for you to visit their factory? We could...’
    They moved back into the hotel foyer, which was very busy with business-suited people who Beth assumed must be attending one of the conferences in the hotel the manager had told her about. She felt tired and disappointed, but those feelings weren’t the real cause of the desire she felt to snap sharply at Alex.
    Why, when she knew exactly what kind of man he was and exactly what he was after, was she experiencing this sense of new panic and fear that her self-control might not prove strong enough for her to hold him at bay? What was the matter with her? Surely she had enough intelligence to know that once one had been struck by lightning a first time one did not return to the same tree in a thunderstorm and stand there waiting for it to happen again. Not unless one was a very peculiar sort of person who thrived on suffering pain.
    Was she that kind of person, the kind of person who only attracted the sort of relationship, the sort of man who would hurt and humiliate her? Beth knew from the strength of her own inner abhorrence that she wasn’t.
    So why, then, did she feel the way she did?
    She felt the way she did because she was sexually attracted to Alex, she told herself brutally; she was chemically and hormonally responsive to him. That was all... It crossed her mind as the movement of the crowd pushed her up against him and he reached out automatically to hold her that it might almost be worthwhile actually giving in to what she was feeling, what she was wanting , and simply having sex with him. Perhaps once she had done so, once he had realised that she was able to separate her feelings of sexual desire for him from her emotions, that just because she went to bed with him it didn’t mean she was going to allow him to persuade her to give his cousins her business or him her money, he might stop trying to pressurise her. After all, she already knew that the only real interest he had in her was a financial one, despite the attention he was paying her and the compliments he was giving her.
    ‘It’s too crowded in here. We could talk more easily in your room.’
    Alex’s words, whispered so temptingly against her ear, mirroring so closely the intimate sensuality of her own thoughts, threw Beth into feminine panic.
    ‘No. No...’ she denied quickly, frantically trying to make some space between them. Could Alex feel the tumultuous, uneven thudding of her heartbeat as clearly as she could feel the deep male pounding of his? And, if he could, was it having the same intense effect upon his senses as his was upon hers? Beth closed her eyes, struggling to break free of the tide of hungry need she could feel welling up inside her. All day long she had been fighting against this; all day long she had been struggling to hold both Alex and her own unfamiliar responsiveness to him at bay.
    Now, pressed up against him in the airless atmosphere of the hotel lobby, she was terrifyingly aware of how readily her senses