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ing to grab on to something to stabilize him. However, the only thing within reach was Kayla herself.

When he caught her arms, she instinctively clutched at him and lost her own footing. They landed in a tangled heap on the floor, just inches away from Kristina's glass coffee table.

Winded and stunned by the tumble, they both lay silently for a moment or two. Kayla recovered first. After all, she'd had Matt to break her fall, landing on top of him. '*You oaf!" she cried. '*We almost crashed through the glass table. We could've been cut to pieces!"

Matt gingerly drew a breath. He'd hit the wood floor with his back and his head and both were throbbing. *'You're the one who knocked me over." A humiUating admission; she was so much smaller but he'd gone down Uke a bowling pin.

*'Well, you tackled me!" she accused indignantly.

*'I did not. You lunged at me. Ouch." He disentangled his hand from beneath her hip to rub at his head. *'Damn, that hurts."

Without thinking, she touched the spot he was rubbing. His hair felt thick and clean, her fingers tangled with his. * There might be the beginnings of a very small bump," she said tentatively.

*'Small? It's swelling so fast, it'll be the size of a tennis ball soon." He swallowed hard. The pain was actually subsiding very quickly. The touch of her hand massaging his head was a blissfully healing balm. Their fingers collided again. The lump on his head might be swelling, but Matt was excruciatingly aware that something else, somewhere else, in his body definitely was. Given the intimacy of their positions, she had to be aware of it, too.

Their eyes met and held. Both were acutely conscious of the soft weight of her breasts pressing into the muscular breadth of his chest. They lay together, her atop him, stomach to stomach, thigh to thigh, loin to loin. And neither of them moved. They didn't dare.

*'Kayla." He whispered her name in a husky, gravelly voice that sounded so sexy to her that a sharp glowing ache began to tighten deep inside her. A hungry fire blazed in his dark blue eyes.

His gaze electrified her. Her hands trembling, she skimmed her fingers over his high cheekbones, along the sharply defined line of his jaw. She was achingly aware of his burgeoning male arousal and a syrupy warmth flowed through her in response. She felt his arms come around her and it felt so natural, so right that she didn't even question it, let alone attempt to stop him.

''This is crazy," he growled. He was reeling from the instantaneous force of his desire for her, of his wild response to her. Why, why did he have to want her so much? He'd never been governed by sexual need; for years he had channeled his intensity and his energy into causes. No woman had ever come close to breaking the wall of self-control that guarded his passion—no woman until Kayla McClure. Who was everything he wanted and everything he despised combined. A tormenting paradox.

'Tve been crazy since the night I met you," he groaned.

Kayla tried to think of a snappy comeback, a biting or funny remark to lessen the fiery sexual tension gripping them. But her mind went blank. She could only stare into his deep blue eyes, knowing that a corresponding hunger was reflected in her own.

It seemed inevitable. Their mouths came together with breathtaking impact. Her lips parted for his tongue that surged bold and insistent into her mouth. They kissed deeply, fiercely, possessively, again and again. Kayla clung to him, her nails digging into his back, her mouth ardent and tender under his. The heady passion erased all sense of time and place. Forgotten as well was the war she and Matt had been waging, their mutual vows to stay away from each

Other, to end whatever was between them before it could really begin.

Except that it had already begun, much as a spark smolders quietly and unnoticed until suddenly it blazes into a conflagration too strong and too wild to control.

Seven

Later that evening, as she drove back to Washington through a steady, heavy rainstorm, Kayla wondered what would have happened if, while ardently absorbed in one of those long deep kisses, they hadn't heard voices right outside the door, then the sound of a key being inserted into the lock. If she and Matt had been left alone for the evening, would those hungry kisses they'd shared have progressed into a full-fledged session of lovemaking?

Though it shamed her to admit, Kayla knew she wouldn't have stopped Matt from making love to her. She couldn't have stopped him. She'd been too far-gone, her common sense and her self-control overwhelmed by the raging needs Matt so effortlessly evoked in her. And from the intensity and force of his own responses, she doubted that he could have stopped, either. So it was a safe bet that she and Matt would have ended up in bed again—that is, if they'd made it that far and hadn't satisfied their tempestuous desires right there on the living-room floor.

A flash of heat streaked through her. Kayla shifted uncomfortably, clutching the steering wheel tightly. She dragged her mind from the tantalizing fantasy she was beginning to spin and thought about what had actually happened as she and Matt had lain together, wild and uninhibited, on that hard, wood floor.

Female voices, cheerful and laughing, had sounded through the door, and Kayla had instantly recognized one of them as her sister's. She pulled away from Matt and jumped to her feet, her body shaking with aroused desire and unmet needs.

'*It's Kristina!" she'd exclaimed huskily, and Matt had groaned and slowly sat up, just as the front door opened.

Kristina and two other women came in. There stood Kayla, tousled and trembling, her mouth swollen from the ardent force of Matt's kisses while he sat on the floor, looking dazed, his blue eyes glazed.

''Oh dear," exclaimed Kristina in dismay. ''I didn't mean to—I never thought that—" She exhaled and started over again. ''You see, when I got to the restaurant, I realized that I'd forgotten my wallet. Wasn't that stupid of me? I forgot to put it in this bag when I changed purses tonight and so Lorraine and Diane and I decided to—"

"Kristina, you're babbhng," Kayla interrupted softly.

"Well, can you blame me? I'm mortified! Kayla, Matt, I'm so sorry for barging in on you like this."

Matt rose slowly to his feet. Ever aware of implications, Kayla knew that he couldn't be happy to have three lobbyists find him in—well, not exactly in flagrante dehcto, but sort of close to it. She felt compelled to offer him a way to save face, to smooth over the situation and put everybody at ease.

"You're not interrupting anything, Kristina. Matt tripped and nearly fractured his skull on your glass coffee table. Luckily, there was no harm done, but he... uh... needed a little time to regain his bearings."

Too late, Kayla saw the icy disapproval in his eyes and the sardonic smile twist his lips. She could almost read his mind: there she was, the image-maker at work, distorting the truth to control perceptions, a slick facile liar who couldn't even be honest with her own twin sister! // isn't like that! she wanted to protest. Fm not like that!

But Matt was akeady heading rapidly toward the door, as though he couldn't get out of there—and away from her?— fast enough. He turned, pausing long enough to bid a polite goodbye to Kristina and her friends. He didn't bother to even glance in Kayla's direction.

Kayla mumbled something about finishing her packing and hurried from the room, refusing invitations from the three other women to join them for dinner. She was out of the apartment and heading back to D.C. in record time.

And now here she was, driving in the rain on the dark interstate highway, a melancholy song about lost love playing softly on the radio. Scowling, Kayla turned it off and put in an audiocassette, a reading of a horrific, hair-raising murder mystery. It certainly fit her mood better than a love song. Love was a mystery she had to beware of and sex was a danger she didn't care to risk. As for Matt Minteer...