The Seduction Trap Read Online Free PDF Page A

choice, do I?’ she muttered crossly. ‘I’m too ready for a comfortable armchair and a bath to start trudging around and doing mimes on foreign doorsteps. I’ll get my bags.’ He came with her to her bike, insisting on helping her to remove the panniers. There was a silly, polite tug-of- , war, then she gave up and allowed him to sling them on his shoulder. She debated whether to put her jacket on, but she felt so hot and flustered, and she decided that she wasn’t going to be intimidated into doing something against her will. Then, feeling rather like a submissive chattel, she followed in his tracks, blanking out everything but putting one foot in front of the other, each step mercifully one closer to her mother’s house.

 

     
Hewlett-Packard

CHAPTER THREE
    A SILENCE fell between them as they wound their way up a narrow, stepped street she didn’t remember seeing before. They passed a couple of large townhouses with mullioned windows and then a halftimbered cottage, whose walls were bright with highly scented climbing roses and honeysuckle. Tessa’s nostrils were swamped with the heady perfume and she couldn’t resist pausing to stick her nose in the velvety petals of a dark red rose.
    When she straightened and looked around, she had the unnerving impression that they were the only two people for miles. Not even a dog barked. The rays of the late evening sun burned with a final, merciless intensity on the deserted street and she could feel the heat rising from the stone steps and walls, enveloping her in a suffocating blanket. Scary. ‘Where is everyone?’ she asked in a hushed voice, scanning the shuttered houses.
    ‘Finishing their evening meal. Then they’ll go to bed.’ Guy frowned slightly. ‘Most of the young people have moved away because of the lack of opportunities. There isn’t much activity here of an evening.’
    ‘You can say that again! Is it far?’ She sighed, sure that her legs would give up at any moment. ‘These steps are murdering my calves. I’m just about done in. And starving. I think I should have eaten about four hours ago,’ she added mournfully, quite forgetting the chocolate snack.
    ‘It’s only around the corner. Allow me,’ he said, with a show of great courtesy.
    One large male hand moved firmly around her waist, supporting her. Or that was presumably its intention. In fact it made her feel even more unsteady, because his fingers lay on her bare skin beneath the cropped top-oh, what a mistake that had been!-and seemed to have made connections somehow with her entire nervous system.
    The pressure on her spine increased. She could feel the warmth of his palm heating through to her very bones. A strange squiggle raced unheeded through a previously unknown route which ran from her breasts to her toes and made an embarrassing stop on the way, warming her loins with an alarming insistency. Tessa blushed, because she knew perfectly well what that squiggle meant.
    She’d spent five years yearning for the unreachable David. Years of dreams and longings and imagined kisses which had built up in her mind till she’d felt delirious if he so much as looked at her-which he rarely had, because then she had held no attractions for a handsome man.’
    But this-this was a revelation. A total stranger was walking her to her mother’s door, and fire was coursing through her entire body as if she were hell-bent on imminent surrender! Despite her tiredness, her eyes burned with that fire. i Her skin tingled. Parts of her which ought to have known better were alert and ready for action. It was too awful! ! Had she lost her inhibitions along with her weight? More to the point, did the unnervingly sexy Guy know that t her body was responding to some wayward call of nature?
    She stole a nervous glance in his direction, found his warm, contemplative eyes on her, felt unable to look away because of a sudden dizziness-and stumbled on a broken step. In a purely reflex action he caught her up