At first when she heard Piers calling out Ben’s name, Georgia, still half asleep, imagined that he must have somehow spotted the dog, but when she looked automatically towards the bedroom window Piers wasn’t standing there and the curtains were closed.
Fully awake now, she sat up in bed, switching on the bedside lamp.
Piers was lying in bed beside her, obviously in the grip of a nightmare, his forehead beaded with sweat as he lunged to the other side of the bed as though trying to catch hold of something or someone.
‘Piers...’ Instinctively Georgia reached over to him, reaching for his shoulder and shaking him.
‘Piers,’ she repeated a little more anxiously as she heard him whispering brokenly,
‘Ben... No... Please, no...’ His voice was raw with pain and guilt.
As she shook him a little harder his eyes opened, and she could see quite clearly in them his anguish and guilt.
‘Georgia?’ He looked at her in confusion, frowning as he turned his head and stared round the farmhouse bedroom.
‘It’s all right,’ Georgia reassured him gently. ‘You were having a dream.’
‘A nightmare,’ Piers corrected her tersely, sitting up in the bed and pushing his hand through his hair as he came fully awake.
‘You called out Ben’s name,’ Georgia told him sombrely. ‘At first I thought you must have seen him, but then I realised that you were still asleep.’
As he had sat up in bed Georgia had seen that he was wearing a thick towelling robe, but he must have left it unfastened, she recognised, because as he turned towards her it gaped open, revealing the bronze breadth of his chest.
Was it really only last night that she had...? The sudden surge of heat that hit her made her look away from him, biting sharply on her bottom lip as she tried to suppress her reaction to him.
‘Don’t do that,’ she heard Piers begging her huskily.
‘What?’ she asked him in confusion, releasing her lip and looking automatically back at him.
‘That,’ Piers told her, touching the spot on her lip where the impact of her teeth had left a small, tender swelling.
The unexpected sensuality of his fingertip brushing against her lip was heart-stoppingly intimate.
‘Why...why shouldn’t I do it?’ she managed to ask him shakily as she felt his burning gaze slide over her skin.
‘Because it makes me want to do this,’ Piers told her in a thick voice that had the same effect on her senses as if she were being licked by the rough tongue of a tiger.
Her body completely still, Georgia watched the descent of Piers’s mouth, knowing what was going to happen even before she felt the velvety, hot stroke of his mouth caressing her own. Helplessly she closed her eyes, and then opened them again in deprivation as Piers lifted his mouth from hers.
‘I would never have hurt Ben,’ he told her rawly. ‘I want you to believe that, Georgia. I may not have thought he was a suitable pet for my godmother but I never...’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘I should never have put him in the car. I should have brought him back to you before going to see the estate agent. I wish to God I had,’ he told her vehemently. ‘Because then he would have been safe.’
‘As I’ve tried to reassure you before, it isn’t your fault,’ Georgia said, but Piers shook his head.
‘Neither of us believes that,’ he told her grimly.
To her own surprise Georgia heard herself not just saying but meaning as well, ‘I believe it, Piers.’
‘You’re so sweet,’ she heard him telling her thickly. ‘So sweet and so...’
Georgia shuddered in delight as his mouth opened over hers in a kiss of fierce passion and promise. She wanted to tell Piers that he must stop what he was doing, that he mustn’t encourage her to betray herself and her love to him by kissing her the way he was doing, but somehow the words were never uttered. Instead, she was clinging to him, wrapping her arms around his neck as she opened her mouth to his kiss, seeking, finding and claiming the hot thrust of his tongue with a female urgency that made Piers stiffen and then shudder.
Wrenching his mouth away from hers, he told her rawly, ‘If you keep on kissing me like that there’s no way I’m going to be able to stay here in this bed with you and not give you with my body what you’re asking me for with your mouth.’
For a moment Georgia was too shocked to say anything, heat scalding her skin as she took in the full meaning of what he was saying. In the lamplight she could see the hot sheen of his torso.
‘I...I wasn’t asking for anything,’ she denied huskily, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to look into Piers’s eyes, and she knew that the little tremors of sensation thrilling through her body were making a mockery of her verbal denial.