MacAllister's Baby (11 page)

Touching his hair wasn’t enough. Elisabeth put her hands on his shoulders, as she’d been dying to, stroked the soft material of his suit. Down his arms and to his hips.

His mouth was wonderful. Their kisses were fierce and desperate. And with him holding her like this, Elisabeth could feel every inch of his body against her, as lithe and strong as she’d thought it would be.

They were going to get caught any minute. But she needed more. She let her hand fall to the curve of his backside and dug her fingers into his firm flesh. Angus made a rough sound in his throat, pulled up her leg around his hip, and she felt him pushing even harder against her. With her thigh lifted around him, her dress riding up, her sex rubbed intimately against his erection.

They were in a refrigerator, and she felt as if she were burning up.

When they broke apart, their breaths came in jagged clouds.

‘Now
that
was carnal,’ she gasped.

‘I was turned on by romantic, too.’ He dropped another kiss on her lips, touched his tongue to hers briefly before parting to look in her eyes again.

‘I noticed,’ she said, letting her gaze fall to where their crotches were glued together.

He let his hand creep underneath the hem of her skirt, rest on the back of her thigh.

‘Trust me yet?’ he said.

‘No.’ She couldn’t resist nipping at his bottom lip.

His smile. ‘We should probably get out of here before the kids finish their tour.’

Oh. She’d forgotten about Danny and Jennifer.

With an even greater sense of shock, she realised that this had probably been the longest she hadn’t thought about the kids she taught in months.

Elisabeth put both her feet on the floor, but she kept her hands on his waist. He kissed her on the cheek this time, and on her forehead. Each kiss cooled quickly in the chilled air.

‘We’ve only got dessert to get through. And that won’t take long. When is your friend picking them up?’

She had to stop touching him with one hand, but she checked her watch anyway. Quarter past eight. ‘In fifteen minutes.’

‘Brilliant. You’ll come back to my house with me.’

It was a statement, not a question. Punctuated with more kisses. And it was an arrogant thing to say, something a celebrity would say, someone who expected to get women with a crook of his finger.

Except when she didn’t reply he stopped pressing his lips to her temple and looked her in the face. His forehead was creased and his grey eyes seemed almost pained.

‘You will, won’t you, Elisabeth? You do trust me a little, don’t you?’

His raspy voice held something she hadn’t quite heard there before. Something she was sure she’d heard in her own voice before, once upon a time. An earnestness she’d felt, and couldn’t believe that he could feel.

‘For a night?’ she said lightly. ‘That’s not a whole lot of trust.’

He caught her hands in his again. ‘Stay for a night. Stay for a week. I want to get to know you, in every way I can.’

His words promised pleasure. She thought about the biblical sense of the word ‘know’. ‘I’d like to know you too,’ she said.

He exhaled in a long rush, and kissed her lips. ‘Okay. You go ahead out and I’ll join you at the table. I think I’d better stay in here for a minute or two to calm down.’

Now that she wasn’t pressed against him, she could see that the line of his erection was clearly visible in his trousers.

Another wave of desire swept through her. She swallowed, hesitating, hating to leave him even for a moment.

He stroked down her back, once more. ‘Go. And, Elisabeth…?’

‘Mmm?’ She wiped a trace of lipstick from his bottom lip with her thumb, and wanted to put it back there all over again.

‘Try to trust me. For tonight, at least.’

He looked as serious and as earnest as he had during that first lesson, when he’d shown them his hands and his scars. She remembered him throwing Danny his car keys.

She nodded and pushed open the refrigerator door.

As soon as she was gone, Angus let out the breath he’d been holding in a long stream of condensation, and leaned back against a shelf of lettuce.

She’d nodded. She was going to try to trust him.

And the reason he was leaning against lettuce, his legs barely able to hold his body up, was partly because he was more turned on than he had been in his entire life, just from kissing Elisabeth and touching, briefly, her naked skin.

But that was only part of it. The other part was an overwhelming, heart-thumping feeling of relief.

He’d planned the evening to be one of subtle seduction. Nothing too overt, just little touches, lingering glances, stuff that would fall below the students’ radar. And then an invitation for coffee at the end of the evening, a chance to talk with Elisabeth and spend some time with her.

Then she’d shown up in that dress, and the ‘subtle’ plans had gone out the window.

Elisabeth Read in a little black dress was more temptation than any rational man could take.

As soon as he’d seen her in that dress, demure and incredibly sexy, he’d known he would never be satisfied with coffee and conversation. Like the moment when he’d touched her lips with his finger, flirtation had suddenly become need. If he hadn’t dragged her into this refrigerator, he would have spontaneously combusted from pure frustration at not being able to touch her.

And yet touching hadn’t been enough. As soon as they’d been alone, he’d discovered that he needed more.

Angus’s breathing gradually slowed and he stood up straight, brushing down his suit and rearranging the collar of his shirt.

What was going on with him? Since when had he begged a woman for anything, let alone her trust?

He already had Elisabeth’s admiration and her desire. She followed his lead in the kitchen, and worked well with him with the kids. He was even, after a very shaky start, reasonably sure of her friendship. He’d worked hard to gain all of that with her. And that was, normally, enough for him.

But instead he’d wanted her to know everything he felt. He wanted her to trust him with her body and with her emotions, too. If only for one night.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and saw, with a smile, that Elisabeth had missed some of her lipstick.

Angus thought about Elisabeth’s mouth. Throwing back one of her tart comments. Pressing itself together, trying to resist smiling. Twitching at the corners with humour. And kissing him so passionately and gently, and then so passionately and strong.

He didn’t know what was happening to him, why he felt differently about her than any other woman he’d ever known.

The breast pocket of his suit buzzed, and in an automatic movement, his mind still on Elisabeth’s mouth, he flipped out his mobile phone and pressed the ‘answer’ button.

‘MacAllister.’

‘Angus, good news. I’ve set you up the interviews about your school charity work. I’ve got the
Journal
and the
Herald
on board and someone’s coming over from the
New York Press
next week to—’

His publicist. ‘Christine, I’m in a refrigerator and I’m busy. Call me tomorrow.’

He took the phone away from his ear and pressed the ‘power off’ button.

Then he looked at the dead state-of-the-art mobile phone in his hand, realising what he’d just done.

He’d never turned off this phone before. Or the phone he’d had before this one, or the one he’d had before that. Or any phone he’d ever owned in his life.

He’d known logically that they had ‘off’ buttons. But he’d never pressed one. He’d needed to stay available every minute of the day, in case there was an emergency at his restaurant, in case somebody needed him, in case there was a publicity opportunity he had to take advantage of.

Tonight, he’d broken the habit of his entire adult life without even thinking about it because Elisabeth Read was more important than any phone call he could ever get.

Angus replaced his phone in his pocket, checked his suit again for wrinkles, looked at his reflection in the steel door to check for any stray lipstick marks, and grinned at himself.

He didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t know what was going to happen. But he was looking forward to finding out.

From a cold, hot, quiet intimacy to a room full of clangs, shouts, steam, sizzles. Elisabeth felt as if she’d stepped into a different world.

But it wasn’t the world that had changed. It was her.

She spotted Jennifer, Danny and Damien, and she touched her green glass necklace as she dodged her way across the kitchen.

Be here now.

Try to trust me. For tonight, at least.

Same message.

The teenagers were so absorbed in what Damien was telling them that they didn’t glance in her direction when she joined them, and she guessed they’d hardly registered her and Angus’s absence. Damien made no comment either.

She wondered if Angus had set up this whole thing with Damien, had planned on getting her alone in the refrigerator. But then she pushed the thought aside. She’d promised to trust him, she reminded herself.

Plus, she rather liked the idea that Angus had gone to elaborate lengths to find a way to touch her in private. Like their first kiss, it was romantic. And for most of her life, Elisabeth had only found romance in books.

The dining room was another world again: calm, hushed, welcoming. The candles and the orange walls made her feel like Cinderella in her pumpkin carriage riding toward her one magical night.

Danny had been as silent as Jennifer with Damien but as soon as the chef left them at the door of the dining room he erupted into speech. ‘Oh, my God, that was so wicked, did you see what they were doing with the blow torch, I wanna use one of those I’m gonna ask Angus, and did you see that thing they were doing with
hay
I mean can you believe it old dried-out grass, and did you see when that guy poured in the brandy and it like exploded in the pan, I want to do that in the contest, like
boom
and then it sort of melts into a sauce, d’ you think they would let me do that, miss? And—’

‘Were you impressed by anything except the explosions, mate?’ Angus slipped into his seat beside them, his voice amused, his appearance unruffled. Elisabeth, who had thought she’d calmed down a little, throbbed and felt her breasts tighten. His knee touched hers under the table.

As soon as Angus appeared the dessert did, too, borne by waiters as silent as ghosts. ‘I love this one,’ Angus said to all of them. The white plates each held five little white pots. ‘Damien made it for me because I’m an ice-cream fiend. Taste them all and try to guess the flavours.’

The spoon she’d been given was tiny, a slender curve of silver, and Elisabeth thought that her hands were still too unsteady to handle it gracefully. She watched the other three try their desserts. Jennifer and Danny were concentrating fiercely. Angus, the teensy silver spoon balanced in his sensitive fingers, had an expression of pure pleasure on his face as he ate.

It was nearly the same expression he’d had when he’d touched her for the first time. After he’d kissed her. Elisabeth swallowed.

She wondered if she’d ever watch him eating anything again without thinking of that.

Jennifer and Danny guessed the flavours; she barely heard them. Angus turned to Elisabeth. ‘You should try it. We’ve only got ten minutes left.’ He winked almost imperceptibly.

He was so cocky, and her first response was the self-defensive one.
I haven’t agreed to come home with you yet.
But it wouldn’t be true. She’d decided to trust him and part of that was trusting her feelings about him.

She’d agreed to go home with him already.

She picked up her spoon, tried her dessert, tasted five types of ice cream and Angus. There was a flavour that wasn’t on her plate: tasted on his lips, the air electric, heart hammering with desire and the danger of being caught.

Angus reached underneath the table, ran a swift touch up the outside of her thigh, and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

It was the slowest and the fastest ten minutes of her life. If she’d thought she’d been hyperaware during dinner, she was twenty times more so now. Every second was full of sensations and emotions, every bit of it saturated with the thought,
I’m going to spend the night with Angus.

He checked his watch and his surprise at the time was so exaggerated to Elisabeth’s eyes that she had to stifle a laugh. ‘Is it that late? Kids, Miss Graham is going to be waiting for you outside. Come on, I’ll take you out to see if she’s there.’ He stood and pretended to inspect Elisabeth’s plate. ‘Why don’t you finish your dessert, Elisabeth, and I’ll get a taxi for you afterwards?’

Smooth operator. She said goodbye to Jennifer and Danny. The girl was smiling, the boy was still running over with chatter she could hear all the way out of the restaurant.

And then she was alone at the table with three empty seats, five styles of ice cream, and her own thoughts.

What on earth was she doing?

This wasn’t like a date. This wasn’t meeting a man, doing something together, getting to know each other better to see if they wanted to embark upon a relationship.

This was going home with a man she barely knew to have sex with him.

This wasn’t
Be here now.
It was
Be here stupid.

Elisabeth stood up and pushed her chair back.

‘Don’t even think of running away.’ Angus’s arm was around her shoulders, his voice in her ear. He pressed a kiss to her temple and Elisabeth breathed in his lemony, masculine scent.

‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ she said.

‘I think it’s a very good idea indeed,’ he replied. ‘How about we get in a taxi back to my place and debate it on the way?’

‘We don’t need to debate.’

‘Great. Let’s go home, then.’ He kissed the hollow beneath her ear and a shiver went down Elisabeth’s spine. ‘Or are you trying to tell me you’ve chickened out?’

The word hit in exactly the right place. She turned, out of his arms, and faced him. ‘You and your bloody chickens—’