.
her, this five-foot-nothing bundle of aggressive womanhood with her tangle of curls and her amazingly coloured eyes, that somehow set his pulses racing and despite all his good intentions made him feel... made him react...?
‘Then what do you want?’ Mollie demanded.
Heavens, what was the matter with her? What was it about the man that made her behave so...so femininely...? She could actually feel her toes curling inside her shoes as she fought valiantly to control the dangerously awakening flood of awareness that swamped her as she stood there on her doorstep.
He represented everything she most disliked in a man, and yet here was her body telling her the opposite, luring her. Even more angry with herself than she was with him, Mollie took a step backwards, intending to close the door, but to her chagrin Alex had stepped inside before she could do so.
‘How dare you? This is my house—’ she began, only to have him cut her short.
‘No, it isn’t, it’s mine,’ he said cynically.
Mollie gaped at him.
‘You’re my landlord?’ she guessed, determined not to be caught out the same way again.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am,’ Alex agreed. ‘But...’
What on earth was going on? The whole situation was rapidly getting totally out of hand. He hadn’t come here to argue with her, dammit. He had come to...
To Mollie, his arrival so soon after she had finished writing her article only served to add fuel to her already turbulent emotions.
‘You might be able to browbeat and...and terrorise your other tenants, especially those unfortunate enough to owe their living to you, but I’m not—’ she began, but Alex had heard enough. He had never known a woman get under his skin so quickly or so thoroughly, and of all the wrong-headed and totally unjust accusations he had ever heard hers certainly took some beating.
‘Now just a minute—’ he began, but Mollie was in no mood to listen to him.
‘You’re trespassing,’ she told him dangerously. ‘And if you don’t leave immediately I shall...’
Alex, she realised, wasn’t listening to her. He was staring at the article she had so recently finished printing out and which she had left on the table in front of which he was now standing.
Attached to the front of it was a boldly handwritten note bearing his name, which she had underlined thickly, adding three heavily drawn exclamation marks. His earlier frown had become a black-browed scowl, and the very air around them in the small room seemed to have taken on a thunderous, sulphurous atmosphere.
‘Would you mind explaining to me what the hell this is supposed to be?’ she heard him demanding slowly as he spaced out each separate word with infinite care and ice-cold fury.
‘I should have thought it was obvious. It’s an article I’ve just written on the dreadful and iniquitous way farmworkers are treated at the end of their working lives...’ Mollie responded, determinedly tilting her chin as she met his furious glare head-on. She refused to give way either to his very obvious ire or her own quivering inner reaction of excitement and alarm at what she had caused.
‘Are you trying to imply that my farmworkers are badly treated?’ Alex asked her.
Mollie’s chin lifted even higher.
‘And if I am,’ she demanded. ‘Are you going to deny that you have turned people out of their homes to make room for new, younger employees?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Mollie blinked. She hadn’t been expecting such a categoric and totally barefaced misappropriation of the truth.
‘You’re lying,’ she told him positively.
Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Her accusations were so ludicrous and so far off the truth that if they hadn’t been such a damned insult, and if she hadn’t been so positive that she was right, then he would have been more inclined to laugh than get angry. However...! Clenching his jaw, he told her ominously quietly, ‘I do not lie.’
‘Liars always say that,’ Mollie replied sweetly.
‘This is impossible. You are impossible,’ Alex retorted. ‘And if you think for one moment that anyone with a shred of intelligence is going to publish this...this rubbish, then...’
As he spoke he was reaching for the article. Instinctively Mollie acted to protect it, to stop him reaching out. Alex got there first, crumpling up the sheets in his fist as Mollie tried to tear his fingers from around them.
Instinctively Alex started to turn away from her, but Mollie, who had reached up on her toes, stretching her body out precariously to try to retrieve the article, started to lose her balance, causing Alex to do the only possible thing he could do.
Mollie’s small, instinctive cry of alarm was smothered against the solid wall of his chest as he dropped the article and reached instead for her.
‘Let me go. Let me go,’ Mollie demanded, hammering hard against his chest with two small bunched fists, oblivious to the fact that but for his chivalrous gesture she would probably have been lying ignominiously in a heap at his feet instead of being held protectively and safely against the marginally less ungiving hardness of his body.
Both the floor and his muscles might be equally tough, but her body was certainly reacting very, very differently to the muscles than it would have done to the floor. The quivering, jelly-like shakiness which had invaded her limbs was certainly not the kind of reaction she could ever remember having after coming into contact with any kind of inanimate object. Come to think of it she couldn’t remember ever having experienced such a mind-boggling reaction to coming into contact with anything or anyone at any time in her whole life before. It really was too bad of her body to react to him in this wretchedly puerile fashion, she told herself sternly. He was, after all, only a man.
‘I hate you. Let me go at once,’ she told him furiously—just to make sure that he understood that the by now openly visible trembling of her body meant nothing whatsoever, and that if he was unwise enough to think that it did...
‘Likewise,’ she heard him telling her through gritted teeth.
So, given that both of them had expressed their dislike of one another so plainly, why was it that they were now locked in one another’s arms, kissing like a pair of starving lovers who had been apart for centuries?
Mollie had no idea. She only knew that the angry, passionate, devouring kisses their mouths were hungrily demanding from one another seemed to feed the need she could feel boiling up inside her rather than satiate it.
She had never dreamed that she could feel like this about anyone, that she could desire anyone so passionately, so intensely, so...so insanely...and so compulsively that she knew that if she didn’t somehow find a way to put a brake on what she was experiencing it wouldn’t be Alex who might be tearing off her clothes in order to make love to her, but she who was tearing off his.
That was what he did to her... That was how he made her feel. It wasn’t love; it wasn’t even lust... What exactly it was she couldn’t even begin to put a name to... She only knew it was something explosive. Something dangerous... Something over which she was totally without controt—a starving, famished, aching need that twisted tormentedly through her as she alternately pushed him away and then pulled him closer, her mouth biting hungrily at his, her lips closing around his hot, hard tongue, her hips grinding into his as he grasped them and held her, his body mirroring the fiercely sensual movements of hers.
She could feel his arousal and her own body ached and pulsed in response. A series of frantic mental images crowded her brain, sharply clear flashes...images of the two of them entwined together, their bodies naked, his skin glistening with sweat, sleek, tanned, roughened with soft dark hair, hers paler, softer but no less aroused.
She could feel her nipples hardening, thrusting against her clothes. Her teeth worried at his