Penny Jordan Collection: Just One Night (20 page)

‘I don’t...’ Georgia began, fully intending to tell him that she wasn’t a child and that she didn’t need him to tell her what she ought to do, but then she had to stop as she felt a huge sneeze overwhelming her, and she could see from the expression in Piers’s eyes that he wasn’t going to listen to any arguments. Besides, the thought of a delicious warm bath chasing the icy chills from her cold body was too tempting to resist. Even so...

‘Ben needs drying...’ she said, but Piers shook his head.

‘I’ll deal with Ben,’ he told her grimly.

For a moment Georgia hesitated. Ben was soaking wet and needed rubbing dry, and he hadn’t had his evening meal as yet, but then another huge sneeze overwhelmed her, at the same time as Piers took what almost looked like a small, threatening step towards her, and instinct took over. She was in the hallway and halfway up the stairs before she knew it.

In the kitchen Piers found the towels that his godmother used for just such a purpose to briskly rub Ben dry. The dog quite happily stood still whilst Piers dried him, even, a little to Piers’s surprise, obligingly lifting his paws so that they too could have the river mud removed from them.

In fact, as Piers was forced to admit, Ben’s manners whilst Piers performed these unplanned chores was nothing short of exemplary, even to the extent of going immediately and obediently to his bed when Piers commanded him to and waiting there patiently whilst Piers prepared his food.

Was it a coincidence or had Georgia made far more progress with the dog’s training than Piers had anticipated?

Georgia! Piers’s mouth tightened into a stern line as he recollected the moment when he had seen her being dragged into the river. Despite the fact that he knew perfectly well that it was safely shallow at that point, Piers had had to resist a serious urge to go in after her, but whether or not that urge had been caused by a desire to rescue her or a strong temptation to drown her, he didn’t know. More likely drown her, Piers told himself irritably. He had never known anyone cause such havoc in his life before. It was becoming increasingly obvious to him that wherever Georgia and Ben went trouble automatically seemed to follow, but that
didn’t
mean that he had to be on hand to rescue them or protect them. Why should he?

Ben was his godmother’s dog, he reminded himself immediately. He had promised her that he would look after him for her, and if looking after him meant that he also had to look after the irritating young woman who had dared to challenge his determination to remove Ben from his godmother’s life, then so be it. And it was absolutely totally impossible for him to have any kind of hidden motivation or secret subconscious agenda for his decision to bring Georgia closer into his own orbit.

Having her living here in the house with him had been a totally logical decision—given all the circumstances. True, it might have been a little foolish of him to allow her to provoke him into giving her the opportunity to prove him wrong about Ben—not that there was any possibility that she
could
do so. It was obvious to anyone that the dog was a totally unsuitable pet for his godmother. No, it had simply been his fair-mindedness that had forced him to at least give her the opportunity to prove him wrong. That was all. That was totally and completely all, and, of course, it
wouldn’t
have made any difference whatsoever to his decision had she been a different type of woman...

Piers frowned as he realised how long Georgia had been upstairs and how quiet it was. She had been shivering when they’d come inside, quite plainly suffering from cold and shock. Frowning even more fiercely Piers filled the kettle.

It wasn’t
his
duty to look after her. She wasn’t
his
responsibility. The kettle was starting to boil; swiftly he spooned coffee into a mug and added a generous spoonful of sugar.

* * *

Never had a bath felt so welcome and restorative, Georgia felt sure as she lay floating blissfully in the piping-hot water. She had washed her hair under the shower and also rinsed off the worst of the river water, but the temptation to soothe her chilly body in the warm water of a deep-filled bath had proved too tempting to resist—as had her impulse to add a few drops of her favourite relaxing aromatherapy oil.

Now its heavenly scent mingled with the warm, steamy atmosphere of the bathroom, totally releasing all the tension from her body...her body, but not her thoughts, she acknowledged as she reflected ruefully on the unwelcome outcome to her evening’s training session with Ben. And he had been doing so well too. If it hadn’t been for those wretched geese...

Georgia sighed and closed her eyes, trying to recapture her earlier mood of delicious relaxation, but it was no use. Sooner or later she was going to have to go downstairs to face Piers. What a sight she must have looked as she’d dragged herself out of the river. No wonder he had looked so angrily at her, his eyes, she was sure, filled with an expression of contemptuous disdain.

Reluctantly she stepped out of the bath and reached for the towel, wrapping it sarong-wise around her body. Then she realised she had neglected to bring her robe into the bathroom with her.

Securing her damp curls on top of her head with a tortoiseshell clip, she opened the bathroom door and stepped into the bedroom just at the same time as Piers, unable to get any response to either his brief knock on her bedroom door or to calling her name, anxiously pushed open the door and walked into the room.

As she stared at Piers Georgia wasn’t aware of the way she instinctively crossed her hands over her towel-covered breasts, but Piers was, his mouth twisting a little sardonically as he wondered what she would say if he told her that, far from protecting her, her action had actually done more to focus his attention on her body and communicate to him—as though he hadn’t already been aware of it—the fact that her insecurely wrapped towel was the only thing covering her naked body...

‘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.

Obviously it would be much easier for him to keep her warm with his own body heat if she wrapped her arms around him, and she could quite understand why it was necessary for him to run his hands up and down the length of her naked back. Their touch was deliciously warm—and the things it did to her spine and her nerve-endings...! Heavens, she had had no idea that her flesh could be so extraordinarily sensitive, and if the way he was kissing that small, pulsing cord in the side of her neck was perhaps just a little unorthodox, well, it was still having the most deliciously pleasurable effect on her senses, which surely was far more restorative than had he adopted a more traditional means of warming her—such as proffering a hot-water bottle or a heated blanket.

Thinking of hot-water bottles and heated blankets inexplicably reminded Georgia of the fact that the bed was right there, only inches away from them, and inexplicably she had the oddest need to lie down on it. Probably because she was feeling so light-headed and weak, she told herself.

Through the fine softness of Piers’s shirt Georgia could feel the heavenly warmth of his chest, and when she opened her eyes she could see the soft darkness of his body hair. A thrill of sensation ran right through her, a shocking female awareness of Piers’s maleness; her fingers itched to stroke their way through that inviting silkiness and to explore the flesh that lay beneath it. A hundred unfamiliar and highly erotic impulses flashed their tantalising messages to Georgia’s senses, flattening immediately the tentative and semi-shocked resistance her brain put up to the wantonness of such thoughts.

Weakly Georgia told herself that it was the very unfamiliarity of such thoughts that made her feel so vulnerable towards them, so unable to deny or reject their provocative allure. The temptation to unfasten just one of the buttons on Piers’s shirt, just to see if actually touching him would prove to be as deliciously erotic as she imagined, was proving impossible to resist. Just one button, she promised herself, that was all, but as her mouth meshed with Piers’s responding to and returning the increasing passion of his kiss, ‘just one’ became two, and then three, and then, before she knew it, Piers was murmuring to her that he wanted her to take his shirt off completely. What was more, he was helping her to do so. And then, blissfully, the hard, naked warmth of his upper body was hers to touch and explore.

Vaguely Georgia was aware of how odd it was that she should want to touch Piers like this when she had never once felt even remotely tempted to explore or caress her first lover in the same almost frenziedly hungry way, but she dismissed the thought as an unnecessary and unwanted distraction from what she was doing. The silky arrowing of Piers’s hair ran right down the centre of his chest—and lower—and Georgia’s fingertips followed it all the way to where his belt obstructed her progress.

She heard Piers catch his breath as she stopped, lifting his mouth from hers whilst he looked deep into her eyes.

Georgia held her breath, conscious of the solemnity of the moment, and then, as Piers lifted his hand to touch her face, she saw his gaze drop to her naked breasts and stay there.

Very gently he reached out and touched her, his fingertips just stroking the merest feathering of touches along the outer curve of her breast.