Partners by Contract Read Online Free PDF Page B

name and responded with all the passion she’d been forced to deny for so long. Her knees buckled and it was only the strength of his arms that controlled her fall onto the sofa.
    He fell to his knees beside the sofa and his body curvedover her. He lifted the silky strands of hair that fanned out from her face and let them fall through his fingers.
    His scorching glance moved hungrily over the soft contours of her face before dropping lower to where her breasts strained with each tortured breath against the thin fabric of her top.
    ‘I want to touch you.’
    His hoarse announcement sent a sizzling surge of sexual excitement through her body. Expectation stretched every nerve in her body to breaking point. She ached for his touch, and told him as much in a voice that didn’t sound like her own.
    His head moved, allowing his lips to brush against the hand she’d laid on his face, then abruptly he froze. ‘Dear God...Phoebe!’ He acted like a man who’d just woken up from a dream—or maybe a nightmare.
    ‘What the hell are we doing?’ he groaned, jackknifing to his feet. He continued to stagger backwards until his back hit the wall on the opposite side of the room. Grey-faced, he continued to gaze at her in a dazed kind of sick disgust. ‘You’re both so mixed up in my head I can’t... Just go away, will you? Go away and don’t come back!’
    Phoebe took a deep breath and steadied herself. After all, she’d come a long way in the last four years. She turned a deliberately deaf ear to the small voice in her head that pointed out that all that progress had amounted to a fat nothing the instant she’d seen him again.
    ‘I suppose there’s a moral somewhere in what happened...’ she suggested lightly.
    ‘And that would be?’
    ‘If you’re going to have mindless sex to forget your troubles, do it with a total stranger—there are fewer repercussions.’
    ‘Is that the sort of advice you give your patients?’
    ‘I wasn’t speaking literally...’
    ‘No, just stupidly,’ he snarled.
    ‘We didn’t have sex. And don’t worry, Con, I forgave myself some time ago.’ This was only partially true, but it made her sound suitably rehabilitated. She didn’t expect his forgiveness. Carefully she manoeuvred the car through the awkwardly angled Marlow farm gate.
    ‘And did you ever get around to forgiving me?’
    His brooding tone was filled with a depth of self-loathing she recognised extremely well. Phoebe had got so used to blaming herself that the fact that it was possible he might have shouldered the responsibility had got lost somewhere along the way.
    ‘Forgive...me...you...?’ Fortunately there were no obstacles in the way as her hands left the steering-wheel for several startled moments. ‘I keep telling you, you didn’t do anything!’ She had to establish once and for all that he’d been the innocent party in all this.
    Connor reached across and with a judicious touch on the steering-wheel saved the lazy farm cat sprawled in a patch of winter sun from being crushed. Phoebe took control, of the car at least, and parked it behind a tractor.
    ‘No forgiveness required,’ she insisted in a calmer voice as she fiddled with the clasp on her case. She didn’t look at him—she was working up to that. ‘We both needed...comfort, that’s all.’
    ‘And you were completely untraumatised by the entire comfort thing? So much so, in fact, that you couldn’t risk coming within a hundred miles of me!’
    ‘If you’re implying that I was worried you’d... you’d...kiss me again, you couldn’t be more wrong!’ She laughed to demonstrate how crazy the idea was. ‘If there’s been any hint of...attraction between us,’ she gulped, ‘I think it would have showed up when we lived together.You were hurting like hell, missing Penny. I was there...’ She swallowed and smiled through the pain. ‘I look like Penny,’ she added simply.
    ‘It’s taken you four years to come up with that explanation?’