The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [110]
‘It’s a good theory,’ he told her grimly, ‘but it’s the wrong fit. Try this for size instead.’
Diane tried to protest, but it was too late. The slight discomfort of his embrace was forgotten as he started to kiss her. And not just a little ‘let’s be friends’ kiss either; not even an ‘I’m an angry man, and I’ll kiss you if I want to’ kiss, Diane acknowledged dizzily. This was a real man-to-woman, ‘I want you badly’ kiss, the kind of kiss that couldn’t be faked, the kind of kiss that her lips must have been sorely missing, to judge from the way they were responding…
Somehow the major had swung her round so that she was leaning up against the door, his body a hard weight against her own. She ought to put a stop to this, and right now. Her brain was demanding that she do so, but her body seemed to have developed a will of its own. It had been so long since she had been kissed like this…held like this…wanted like this, Diane acknowledged. So long since…
She gave a small gasp that could have been a protest when the major lifted his mouth from hers. His hands were cupping her face, forcing her to look up at him. The heat she could see in his gaze was transferring itself to her own skin, making her face burn.
‘I’ve been wondering what you’d look like with your hair down,’ the major told her softly. And then before she could say anything he kissed her again, slowly and tenderly this time, so that her heart bounced crazily against her chest wall, sending her a message as potentially damaging to her future safety as any German bomb.
‘Now,’ he told her when he finally released her, ‘don’t tell me again that any kiss we share means nothing.’
Diane could feel the backs of her eyes burning with emotion. What was wrong with her? This was crazy. Hadn’t she learned anything from what had happened with Kit? And this was worse – a hundred, no, a thousand times worse – because Lee…the major, was married.
‘I don’t want this,’ she heard herself telling him emotionally. ‘We can’t…you’re married…’
‘Do you think I don’t know all that?’ He was still holding her, pulling her into his body now, and cradling her as tenderly as though he did understand what all of this was doing to her. ‘Do you think I didn’t tell myself the first time I set eyes on you that what I was feeling wasn’t something I had any right to be feeling?’
‘The first time you saw me?’ Diane protested. ‘But you were so hateful to me.’
‘Believe me, that was nothing to the way I behaved towards myself. I swore I’d be all kinds of a fool to get the hots for a pair of blue eyes and a mouth so perfect that just looking at it made me want.’ His voice had dropped and become soft and slurred with a need her body immediately recognised. ‘And then I saw you at that dance hall, drunk as a skunk, and coming on to another guy—’
‘I was not coming on to him. I thought…I thought he was Kit.’
‘I didn’t care who you thought he was, all I cared about was that it wasn’t me you were looking at like that with those big blue eyes. I told myself to get a grip; I reminded myself of all the reasons why what was going through my head was unthinkable, and then I found out that the two of us were going to be working together on our own.’
‘You could have asked for someone else.’
‘Yeah, I could. Doesn’t it tell you anything that I didn’t?’
Diane closed her eyes helplessly, caught up in the undertow of her own emotions and desires. You know that you wanted this, an inner voice was telling her, you know you’ve looked at him and wondered…imagined…Yes, yes, she had