‘Interesting,’ he remarked truthfully.

Abbey hovered. She wanted him to kiss her again and despised herself for her weakness. She could no more have walked away and denied that temptation than she could have stopped breathing. The tip of her tongue slid out to moisten her full lower lip. She saw his attention drop to her mouth and linger and she tried the tongue trick again. Even as she did it quite deliberately to attract, she was shocked and incredulous at the way she was behaving. He groaned something in his own language and hauled her to him, a long-fingered hand splaying across the swell of her bottom to gather her close. The expert dart of his tongue into the moist cavern between her lips set her on fire as much as the unmistakable hard male heat of his erection. She shivered violently against his lean muscular physique, her knees trembling under her. It had never occurred to her that wanting might hurt so much or that she might be quite so hungry for a man’s passion.

Nikolai scored the pad of his finger along the swollen curve of her lush lower lip in wonderment: he couldn’t believe she was sending him away unsatisfied. Her pupils were dilated, her breathing as fractured as his own. She was as hot for him as he was for her. ‘You burn me up,’ he confided. ‘When can I see you again?’

‘This was a one-off,’ Abbey reminded him uncomfortably.

‘You can’t be serious.’

Abbey stiffened and pulled back from him, imposing the physical separation that her every sense and urge protested. ‘I’m afraid that I am.’

Smouldering dark golden eyes assailed her evasive gaze. ‘Let me stay…’

‘No.’ Her breath snarled up in her dry throat while her imagination took erotic wing. She envisaged her body entwined in intimacy with the lean hard potency of his and her tummy contracted, tiny burning sensations stabbing low in her pelvis.