On the beach, the musicians finished playing and paused for a round of applause from their small audience. In his arms, Kate stopped moving and looked up at him with moonlight and surrender in her green eyes.
She expected to be kissed, Mitchell realized, and in an abrupt reversal of his last decision, he decided the time was right for a light, short kiss—a brief little kiss to seal what was to come.
As soon as he bent his head, Kate braced herself for some sort of demanding sensual onslaught, but his kiss was surprisingly light—merely a friendly, tentative stroke of his mouth on hers—his smiling mouth, Kate realized, and she smiled a little, too, as she curved her hands over his shoulders and returned the -acquainted” kiss.
And then the kiss started to change as he began smoothing his lips back and forth over hers, subtly increasing the pressure of each sliding stroke until her lips parted beneath his. When they did, his fingers shoved deep into the hair at her nape, holding her mouth locked tightly to his, and his free arm angled across her hips, clamping her against his rigid length.
Kate was so lost in the hot demanding kiss that the knocking sound she heard seemed to be coming from inside of her, until Mitchell finally pulled his mouth from hers and scowled at something over her shoulder. service,” he said in a strained voice. He dropped his arms. told room service to come back at eleven-thirty to clear away the remains of dinner.”
Kate finally registered what he was telling her and quickly turned away from him, heading for the door to let the waiters in.
Mitchell watched her walk away and swore under his breath, trying to get his rampaging lust under control. When the physical evidence of it wouldn’t diminish even slightly, he turned on his heel and left the terrace, forced to retreat into the darkness of the garden to conceal a rigid arousal that shouldn’t have resulted from just one relatively chaste kiss. Or six of them.
Chapter Ten
KATE OPENED THEdoor to two smiling waiters, one of them in his late twenties, the other in his late forties. was your dinner, miss?” the younger waiter asked as he wheeled in a cart.
.” She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for dinner and she sounded a little breathless.
wine was satisfactory?” the older waiter inquired, stepping carefully around the sleeping dog.
,” Kate said. ,” she added with a quick smile, trying to recover her equilibrium. She checked to be sure Max was all right; then she smoothed her hair down and stepped back outside onto the terrace. Mitchell was standing in the garden with his hands shoved in his pockets, staring out across the moonlit water as if lost in thought.
The music had begun again, and as Kate moved around the table, the younger waiter paused in his struggle to force the cork back into the unfinished bottle of red wine. ’s a private party down there,” he said. “I hope the music has not disturbed you and your husband.”
—I’ve enjoyed it very much,” Kate said, but the wordhusband made her falter momentarily, not because Mitchell wasn’t her husband, but because she realized how awkward this situation would feel tomorrow night, or the night after, if these same waiters served Evan and her a meal. It hit her then that the same possibility might have occurred to Mitchell and that was why he’d moved off into the darkness at the far end of the garden.
Kate forced her worries about the future aside and stepped off the terrace onto the grass. Soon enough, she would have to cope with the ramifications of her decision to be with Mitchell tonight, but for now, that decision was made. She couldn’t turn back. She didn’t want to turn back. Not after their kiss. There had never been a kiss like that—not for her—and she had the thrilling feeling that Mitchell had been almost as surprised and carried away by it as she’d been.
He turned toward her, and Kate searched his features for some sign that the kiss had affected him as much as she thought it had. She wanted to believe it had been no ordinary kiss to him. She needed to believe it, and yet in the pale moonlight, he almost seemed to be frowning at her. However, he was too far away for her to gauge his expression accurately, so Kate smiled tentatively at him and tried to decide what to say to him when she was close enough. He didn’t smile back at her, and she wondered why.
Mitchell wasn’t smiling because he was studying the woman who had just managed to drive him to the brink of uncontrollable, possessive lust with one kiss, and he wasn’t entirely happy with what he saw. With her hands clasped behind her back and the breeze teasing her long hair and ruffling the hem of her long pants, she reminded him of an Irish choir girl, and the beguiling outfit she was wearing—which he’d mentally stripped off her during dinner—now struck him as being virginal white.
Kate Donovan was not at all in his normal style, and neither was his profound physical reaction to a single kiss. Earlier, when she dumped that Bloody Mary on him, his desire to see her again had been an ordinary response to a captivating face framed by a beguiling mass of red hair. Tonight, however, his attraction to her had intensified so fiercely with everything she did and said that a simple kiss—which he’d intended to be nothing more than an expression of languid desire soon to be gratified—became something much different: a kiss of wild urgency.
He watched her as she stopped to pluck a white flower from a bush covered with white blooms. She held the bloom to her nose, inhaling its fragrance as she looked out across the water. Suddenly, Mitchell was catapulted ten years back in time to a party he’d attended at the home of a Greek businessman. Bored with the party, Mitchell had taken his drink outside, where he eventually wandered down a path that ended at the entrance to a small, torchlit garden at the edge of the cliff. In the center of the garden stood a life-size statue of a young woman with flowing hair holding a flower in her hand. Based on the garments she was wearing, the statue was fairly recent, but something about her had captivated him. you mind if I join you?” he’d asked the statue as he studied her features.
That question had been as idiotic, Mitchell realized, as the fact that he was now comparing a redheaded Chicago girl to a Greek statue carved in alabaster. His response to Kate Donovan was not only fanciful, it was unpredictable, and although Mitchell had no idea why she affected him that way—or exactly where all this was heading—he was suddenly a little wary of the general direction it had taken him. He resolved to chart the remainder of the course more carefully and on his terms.
Kate stopped in front of him and glanced over his shoulder toward the beach, where the musicians were starting to play another samba. have music again,” she remarked lightly, trying not to feel uneasy about the fact that he was looking at her with a rather cool smile and keeping his hands in his pockets. waiter told me there’s a private party down there,” she added.