‘I’ve brought you a cup of coffee,’ he told her shortly, disliking the direction his own thoughts were taking almost as much as, he told himself, he disliked Georgia herself.
‘Er...thank you...’ Georgia husked, looking round frantically for somewhere to put it which would keep a seriously safe distance between them. Not that she actually felt she had anything to fear from him. Of course she didn’t. She knew that, and she was certainly not going to fling herself headlong into his arms—was she? So why had it become so overwhelmingly necessary not to allow herself to get too close to him? Just because there had been that shockingly sensual moment between them when he had kissed her and she had reacted...wanted... Well, that didn’t mean that she was automatically going to...that she wanted him to...that anything like that was ever going to happen between them again, Georgia reassured herself quickly.
Even so, she couldn’t prevent the sharp shiver of sensation that memory evoked, causing a delicious and dangerous quiver of excitement to run through her body. She trembled openly in the grip of it, and a small soft sound of protest strangled beneath her breath as her face flushed with guilty colour at what she was thinking.
Piers, completely unaware of what was running through her mind, saw the shudder and the flush and totally misinterpreted them as signs that Georgia had suffered much more than a mere wetting and an embarrassing loss of face during her unplanned ‘paddle’ in the river. Quickly looking for somewhere to put down her coffee so that he could insist, physically if necessary, that she get straight into bed and stay there until he could find some means of checking her temperature, he realised that the only place for it was on the bedside table, just a few inches from where Georgia herself was standing.
Transfixed, Georgia stood there, her arms still wrapped around her body, as Piers came towards her, putting down the coffee mug before commanding, ‘Bed...now...’
‘Bed...?’ Georgia’s mobile features betrayed her, illuminating what she was thinking, shock turning her already pink face crimson and driving a warm tide of colour up over her body, her eyes widening and darkening as she looked helplessly from Piers’s determined face to the bed and then back to him again.
She had heard stories from other young women of men who were sexually masterful, but to be ordered into bed like that...as though...
As he saw the expression in her eyes, and realised just what she was thinking, Piers cursed silently under his breath.
‘You’re shivering; you might have caught a chill. I just wanted...’ he began, but as he spoke he involuntarily moved closer to her.
Georgia immediately stepped back from him, protesting shakily, ‘No, don’t come any closer.’ But as she lifted her hand from her body to ward him off she inadvertently stepped back on to the hem of her big towel.
Only loosely secured around her body, and without the added security of her crossed hands, and aided in loosening further by being trapped by her foot, the towel unwrapped itself from her body.
Immediately Georgia made a despairing grab for it, and just as immediately Piers launched himself across the gap that separated them, every instinct propelling him to do the gentlemanly thing and protect her modesty. The towel, though, and perhaps fate, too, had other ideas, so that all Georgia’s hands encountered was empty air whilst Piers’s were unexpectedly and explosively filled with warm, silky, damp-fleshed woman.
‘Oh!’ Georgia’s little squeak of protest somehow or other became a soft gasp that sounded much more like an invitation as she felt Piers’s hands grazing her arms and then her breasts, both her towel and her initial rejection of him forgotten as her body reacted to his as though it had suddenly been filled with liquid pleasure.
As he heard her ‘Oh!’ change to a soft ‘Mmm...’ Piers reacted instinctively, wrapping his arms around her.
‘I’m wet...your clothes...’ Georgia managed to protest, but to tell the truth the dampening effect of her naked skin against Piers’s clothes was really the last thing on her mind as her body, apparently of its own accord, nestled itself alluringly into the deliciously warm protection of Piers’s embrace.
‘Mmm...’ she repeated on an even more breathless note as Piers’s mouth came down over her own. Perhaps, she decided dizzily, he thought she needed a little extra help with her breathing, and obligingly she opened her mouth beneath his in order to assist him.
‘Mmm...’
This time when he felt the shiver run through her body Piers did not make the error of mistaking it for a shiver of cold, but he still tightened his hold on her, wrapping her even more closely against his own body—no doubt trying to warm her, Georgia assured herself. And since he was being so helpful and such a good Samaritan the least she could do was to facilitate all that he was doing to assist her.