Mr. (Not Quite) Perfect (12 page)

And especially not about the way she had kissed him back.

There was a disquieting prickle still at the nape of her neck where his hand had rested. Her lips felt tender, as if his had seared hers, and she kept running the tip of her tongue over them, as surreptitiously as she could, checking that they hadn’t swollen.

The jolt of sensation when their mouths met had shaken her. Kissing Max wasn’t supposed to feel like that. It was supposed to be a meaningless peck of the lips, the kind of kiss she gave out every day to her colleagues at
Glitz
.

It was hard to tell what Max thought about it. For one breathless moment afterwards they had stared at each other, but then his eyes had shuttered and now he was immersed in a technical discussion with Bob. He was talking about
concrete
. It wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t be able to kiss her and then calmly carry on discussing road building!

Karen and Bob were entertaining company and the meal was delicious, but Allegra couldn’t enjoy it. She was too aware of Max, who was his usual taciturn self, and who, having kissed her and dropped her in it with Karen, had proceeded to ignore her for the rest of the evening.

It wasn’t good enough, Allegra thought crossly, tapping her Jimmy Choos under the table. She had done everything he’d asked of her. She’d been charming, but Max hadn’t even
tried
. If it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t even
have
his rotten job, Allegra decided, but now he’d got what he wanted he had obviously decided he didn’t need to bother with her any more.

Her smile was brittle by the time they said goodbye to Bob and Karen outside the restaurant. The Laskovskis were walking back to their hotel and, after one glance at Allegra’s shoes, Max didn’t even bother to suggest the Tube. Instead he put his fingers in his mouth and whistled at a passing taxi. If it had been Allegra, the taxi would have sailed on past in the other direction and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or put-out that it responded instantly to Max’s whistle, turning across the traffic and drawing up exactly in front of them.

Her feet were definitely relieved.

Haughtily, she got in and made a big performance of putting on her seat belt. Max told the taxi driver the address and settled beside her, apparently unperturbed by the taut silence. Allegra folded her lips together.
She
wasn’t going to break it. She had made enough small talk for one night, thank you very much! She turned her head away and looked pointedly out of the window, but she was so aware of him sitting just a matter of inches away across the seat that she might as well have turned and stared right at him.

It wasn’t even as if he was doing anything. He was just sitting still, his face in shadow, his eyes fixed on the ticking taxi meter. He could at least jiggle his leg or do something annoying so that she had an excuse to snap at him. As it was, she was just getting crosser and crosser, and more and more frustrated.

Why, why, why had he had to kiss her like that? It had been all right up to then. The pretence had been fun and she had been able to dismiss her bizarre awareness of him as a temporary aberration, a passing symptom of sexual frustration. Nothing that meant anything, anyway. She’d been able to think of him as just Max.

He’d spoiled everything by kissing her. It had been so perfect, as if her whole life had just been about getting her to that place, that moment, where everything else had fallen away and there had just been her and Max and a longing for it never to end gusting through her.

How could she think of him as just Max now?

She wished he’d never kissed her.

She wished he’d kiss her again.

The realisation of just how much she wanted it made Allegra suck in her breath. This was mad. She was furious with Max. She couldn’t want to kiss him at the same time. She couldn’t want him to reach across and pull her towards him, couldn’t want his hands on her, his mouth on her, not when he’d ignored her all night and clearly had no interest in kissing
her
again.

But she did.

The silence lengthened, stretched agonizingly. Just when Allegra opened her mouth to break it, unable to bear it any longer, Max let out a sigh.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply.

At least it gave her the excuse to turn and look at him. ‘Sorry?’ she echoed, unable to stop the pent-up frustration from tumbling out. ‘I should think so! Do you have any idea how hard I worked all evening to suck up to the Laskovskis? I got you your bloody job all by myself!’

‘I know,’ Max began, but Allegra wasn’t stopping now that she had started.

‘You hardly said a word all evening—oh, except to embarrass me by telling Karen I was going to write a book! What did you do that for?’

‘I think you should write one. I think it would be brilliant.’

Allegra wasn’t going to be mollified. ‘It would not be! It would be stupid! I had to sit there and pretend that I was all excited about it and now Karen’s expecting me to send her a copy when it’s published! It’s not funny,’ she added furiously, spotting the ghost of a smile hovering around Max’s mouth. ‘I felt an absolute fool. As if it wasn’t bad enough pretending to be in love with you!’

‘You did it really well,’ said Max. ‘You were brilliant at that too, and you’re right, you got me the job. Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘Really, Allegra: thank you.’

Perversely, his gratitude just made her feel worse. She hunched a shoulder. ‘I only did it so that you’d do the article.’ She sounded petulant, but that was how she felt.

‘I know.’

‘But you could have helped,’ she grumbled. ‘You were useless! I can’t believe the Laskovskis were taken in. A real fiancé would have looked at me, maybe smiled occasionally, taken every opportunity to get close to me, but not you! It was like you couldn’t bear to touch me.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Max tautly. ‘I kissed you.’

As if she could have forgotten!

‘Only when I threw myself into your arms!
Pretending
to be a loving fiancée, thrilled for her future husband’s promotion,’ Allegra added quickly, just in case he had misinterpreted her instinctive reaction. She had been so pleased for him too, she remembered bitterly. ‘Although I don’t know why I bothered. You gave the impression you’d rather have been picking up slugs!’

‘What?’ Max sounded so staggered that Allegra wondered if she might have exaggerated a little, but she had gone too far to back down now. Besides, she had been bottling it up all evening and it was good to get it off her chest.

‘I might as well have been a pillar of your precious concrete for all the notice you took of me all evening!’

Max uttered a strangled laugh and dragged a hand through his hair. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he began.

‘Then why did you ignore me?’

‘Because I didn’t trust myself, all right?’ he shouted, goaded at last. ‘Because if I hadn’t ignored you, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my hands off you! I’d have kissed you again and again and I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I’d have dragged you down under the table and ripped that bloody dress off you so I could kiss you all over your body and to hell with my boss sitting there with his wife and the rest of the restaurant...’

He broke off. His chest was heaving and he looked wild-eyed as he glared at Allegra. ‘So now you know. There, are you satisfied now?’

‘But...but...’ It was Allegra’s turn to gape.

‘Of course I wanted to touch you!’ Max said furiously. ‘I’ve wanted it ever since you opened the bathroom door. I haven’t been able to think about anything else all evening. I had to sit there, trying to talk to my boss, when all I could think about was how easy it would be to slide my hand under your dress, about how it would feel to unzip it, all the time knowing it would never happen! And you wanted me to do chit-chat as well?’

He was glowering at her as if he hated her, but a treacherous warmth was stealing along Allegra’s veins, dissolving her own anger into something far more dangerous, while the spikiness in the atmosphere evaporated into quite a different kind of tension.

He wanted her.

Desire twisted sharp and sure in her belly. His hair was standing on end where he had raked his hand through it and he looked cross, rumpled,
gorgeous
. When had he become so...so...so
hot
? Why hadn’t she noticed?

Allegra’s heart thudded in her throat and her mouth dried with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. She had been sent once to try bungee jumping for an article and she had felt just like this when she’d stood on the edge of the bridge: terrified, thrilled, longing to be brave enough to jump but afraid that she would never have the courage.

She had done it, though. She could do this too, if she really wanted to. Allegra moistened her lips.

Max wanted her.

She wanted him.

Allegra’s mind was still busy calculating the risk when her mouth opened and she heard herself say, ‘How do you know?’

Thrown, Max stared at her. ‘How do I know what?’

‘That it would never happen.’ Allegra watched, appalled, as her body took over, shifting towards him, reaching out for his hand, setting it on her knee, all without a single instruction from her brain.

What was she
doing
? she thought in panic, but her hands seemed to have acquired a will of their own.
Stop it
, she told herself frantically, but the message wasn’t getting through, and now her legs were getting in on the act, quaking with pleasure at the warm weight of his hand.

Max swallowed. ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea, Legs,’ he said in a constricted voice, but he didn’t seem to have any better control over his hands than she did. His fingers were curling over her knee, pressing through her sheer tights into the soft skin of her inner thigh, and she couldn’t prevent the shudder of response clenching at the base of her spine.

‘I’m not sure either,’ she admitted with difficulty. She willed her knees to press together and squeeze out his hand but they wouldn’t cooperate.

‘It could be that we’re just getting carried away by the pretence,’ Max said but he didn’t lift his hand. Instead his knuckles nudged aside the hem of her dress so that he could stroke higher inside her thigh.

Allegra felt lust crawling deeper, digging in. It would take over completely if she didn’t regain control, but his skimming fingers were searing such delicious patterns on her skin she couldn’t think clearly.

‘Bound to be that,’ she agreed breathlessly. ‘And the whole article thing. It’s getting a bit out of hand. We’re spending too much time together.’

‘Yep,’ said Max, as his fingers played on the inside of her thigh, higher, higher, higher, until Allegra squirmed in her seat. ‘We should stop right now.’

‘We should,’ she managed.

‘Unless...’

‘Yes?’ Her breathing was too choppy to get anything else out.

‘Unless we get it out of our system,’ Max suggested. Had his voice always been that deep, that darkly delicious? ‘Just one night, and then we can forget all about it. What do you think?’

Think? How could she be expected to think when his fingers were stroking so exquisitely that she couldn’t breathe properly and she was giddy with the dark pleasure of it? Oh, God, if his hand went any higher, she would come apart.

If it didn’t, she would explode. Either way, they would end up with a horrible mess all over the taxi seat.

Struggling to stop herself pressing down into his hand, she scrabbled for some words to put together. ‘I think...that’s...a good idea...’ she gasped and Max smiled, a wicked smile she hadn’t known he possessed.

When he withdrew his hand, Allegra almost moaned in protest before she realised that the taxi had stopped in front of the house. Max paid the driver while she made it waveringly to the front door on legs that felt boneless.

She was still fumbling with the keys as Max came up behind her. Wordlessly, he took them from her and opened the door.

‘After you,’ he said, but there was a telltale hitch in his voice that made Allegra feel obscurely better. So it wasn’t just her having trouble breathing.

She didn’t want to put on the hall light, so she waited, trembling with anticipation, in the dark until Max had closed the door behind them. A muted orange glow from the street lights outside filtered through the glass pane above the door. It was enough to see him turn, see the gleam of his smile as he moved towards her, and then his hands were on her and at last—at last!—his mouth came down on hers, angling desperate and demanding.

This time there was none of the piercing sweetness she had felt in the restaurant. Instead his kiss was hot and fierce, and Allegra felt need explode inside her, vaporising the last lingering remnants of rational thought. Her mind went dark and she kissed him back, wild with hunger, wanting his hands on her harder, hotter,
harder
.

No, there was no sweetness now. It felt like more of a struggle as to who needed most, who could give most, who could take most. Allegra scrabbled for his tie, at the buttons on his shirt, while his hands pushed up her dress urgently and his mouth blazed a trail to her breast. The hunger rocketed through her, so powerful it thrilled and terrified her in equal measure, and when they broke apart the narrow hallway echoed with the rasp of their ragged breaths.

Chest heaving, Max pressed their palms together and lifted their arms slowly above her head so that he could pin her against the wall.

‘We’re going to regret this,’ he said, even as he bent his head to kiss her throat, making every cell in her body jolt, turning her insides molten.

‘I know.’

‘It’s crazy.’ His lips drifted downward in a searing trail over her skin that left her breathing in tatters.

‘You’re right,’ she managed, sucking in a gasp as he explored the sensitive curve of her neck and shoulder and arching into the wicked pleasure of his mouth.

When he released her wrists to jerk her closer, she whimpered with relief. Now she could tug his shirt free so that she could slide her palms over his firm, smooth back, letting herself notice how his muscles flexed beneath her touch. He was gloriously solid, wonderfully warm. She wanted to burrow into him, lose herself in him.