Free Emergency Doctor and Cinderella by Melanie Milburne

her stomach clenched as if a hand had snatched at her insides. ‘Why do you ask that?’ she asked in her best cool and controlled tone.
    He lifted one shoulder in a shrug-like movement. ‘Instinct. Intuition. Gut feeling.’
    ‘I didn’t know there was such a thing as male intuition,’ she said, trying to keep her expression bland and her tone even. ‘I thought that was the special domain of women.’
    ‘Let’s put that to the test.’ He got up from the arm of the sofa and came and sat beside her. ‘What’s your intuition telling you now?’ he asked, pinning her with his gaze.
    Erin sat very still, but the surface of the wine in her glass rippled with her underlying apprehension. Her mouth was dry and she had to moisten her lips with her tongue in order to speak, an action that his all-seeing gaze closely followed. ‘Um…I get the feeling you’re going to make a move on me,’ she said. ‘But I would strongly advise against it.’
    He raised one of his brows. ‘Are you warning me you’ll slap my face if I do?’
    ‘I don’t believe in using violence to get a message across.’
    His eyes went to her mouth for a beat or two before slowly coming back to hers. ‘So, no slapping if I kiss you.’ He rubbed at his jaw, the scrape of his palm across his light stubble clearly audible in the pulsing silence. ‘Now, that’s tempting.’
    Erin swallowed. ‘D-don’t even think about it,’ she said; her voice didn’t sound strong and assured, however, but soft, hesitant and slightly breathless.
    ‘I’ve been thinking about it since I ran into you when I came out of the lift.’ His voice was a deep burr of sound that made the hairs on her scalp prickle with sensation.
    ‘S-surely not.’ She moistened her lips again. ‘I was positively rude to you.’
    His mouth tilted in a little half-smile. ‘Are you apologising for that or just stating a fact?’
    Erin was feeling more and more out of her depth. He was within touching distance. She could smell his clean, male scent. She could feel his body warmth. She could reach out and touch his chiselled jaw. She could reach out and run a fingertip over his lips. She could lean forward and meet his mouth halfway…
    Or she could be sensible and get off the sofa.
    ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said softly, taking one of her hands before she could use it to lever herself upwards.
    Erin drew in a breath, feeling it rattle all the way down into her lungs like loose change in someone’s pocket. She looked down at her hand encased in his. She wondered how many lives those long, clever fingers had saved. Or how many women he had tempted intohis arms and into his bed. ‘This is not a good idea, Dr Chapman,’ she said, still looking at the stark contrast of her lighter toned skin with his.
    ‘What’s not a good idea?’ he asked in that sexy, deep baritone.
    She met his gaze and then wished she hadn’t. Intimate possibilities swirled around them like a heavy fog. She could so easily lose her way.
    So very easily.
    ‘You. Me. Us,’ she said. ‘It would never work.’
    ‘What makes you so certain about that?’ he asked. ‘You’ve only known me a couple of days.’
    ‘The work thing…’ Her teeth savaged her lip. ‘It…it always complicates things.’
    His thumb began a mind-numbing stroke across the back of her hand, each lazy slide of his warm flesh against hers heating her to the core. She felt the slow melt of her resistance, and vainly tried to stop it. It would be so easy to give in to the eroticism of the moment, so easy to lap at the pool of longing, to dive beneath its rippling depths, to feel the pulse of his pounding blood within her silken cave.
    ‘Maybe you’re thinking way too much, Dr Taylor,’ he said, bringing her hand up to his mouth.
    Erin held her breath as she felt his lips brush against her fingertips. She felt the slight graze from his evening stubble, the brazenly intimate contact sending a shock wave of reaction through her