CHASING TROUBLE

Well…of course he had a right to enter the library. Caroline was just surprised, having come to the library with the intention of working again that evening, once she had been upstairs to freshen up after they’d returned from town, to find Nicholas had beaten her to it.

She stood in front of the desk to arch her own auburn brows. “Find anything of interest on my laptop?”

Nicholas sat back. “Your laptop?” he murmured slowly. “I thought it was one of the company’s laptops…. You know, since you’re here for work,”

Caroline smiled at having at last been able to disconcert a man who was so self-confident he made her want to scream. “I prefer to work with equipment I’m familiar with… And while I do have one of those company’s laptops, I didn’t bring it here with me,”Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

There it was again, Nicholas noted with a frown. Caroline Anderson liked her life ordered and predictable, even down to the laptop she used for whatever work she happened to be doing. He grimaced. “I had some emails I wanted to send. Didn’t want to use my phone… small screen and all,”

Damn it, if he had known this was her laptop he might have had a look through some of her other files. Just in the interest of gaining further insight into what made her tick, of course. It was something Nicholas was always careful to do with the people that were around him on a day-to-day basis.

He already knew what Caroline did; it was the rest of the information on her that was still a little sketchy. Where she came from. Who her family was. Who her friends were. For different reasons, most probably, Caroline kept her personal life as close to her chest as Nicholas did his own…

“Sorry about that.” He shut the laptop down before standing up, his eyes narrowing at the instinctive way Caroline instantly took a step away from him.

What the hell? Was this woman scared of him?

No, that wasn’t fear Nicholas could see in her eyes, but something else. Something much more interesting…

Caroline took another step back as Nicholas moved out from behind the desk, once again finding herself overwhelmed by the sheer animal magnetism of the man. He really was like that predator she had been reading about last night, his movements slow and stealthy, soundless on the carpeted floor. The muscles moved smoothly in his legs and beneath his tight-fitting T-shirt as he came ever closer, the very air about him seeming to part in deference to all that rippling power.

Her eyes were wide with apprehension. “I-What are you doing?” she asked him.

He raised dark brows over those inky eyes. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Even his voice sounded lower, husky, purposeful… Caroline swallowed hard. “I came in here to work-”

“Later.”

“Later?” she repeated, with a nervous sweep of her tongue across suddenly dry lips.

The blackness of Nicholas’ gaze locked on to that nervous movement. “Later,” he confirmed gruffly.

He was standing so close to her now that Caroline could feel the heat of his body enveloping her, and that heat and the subtle scent of him were acting like a drug on her already heightened senses. The same senses that had been on alert from the moment she first set eyes on this man. Sight. Smell. Touch… Caroline gave a shake of her head in an effort to clear her mind of the foggy haze that seemed to be encompassing her.

“I don’t know what game you’re playing, Nicholas-”

“I never play games, Care,” he assured her softly.

He had called her by that name again, but for the moment Caroline was too concerned by the threat he represented to her, to her equilibrium, to bother correcting him. “You are playing one right now. And it isn’t funny,” she reproved.

Nicholas didn’t find this situation funny, either. In fact, he deeply regretted having started this, and was no longer sure who was challenging whom.

Caroline’s eyes were such a deep and drowning blue. Those sooty lashes a dark sweep against the creaminess of her cheeks. Her mouth, those full and pouting lips that had just felt the moist touch of her tongue, was tempting him to do the same. She smelled so damned good too: a mixture of some elusive floral scent and a warm and sexy femininity… Nicholas gave a low groan in his throat as he felt his body respond to her, his thighs stirring, hardening, pulsing. Aching!

“Nicholas…?” Even the way she spoke his name, so huskily, so warily, was arousing. Too much so for Nicholas to be able to resist tasting her. Just one taste, he promised himself. One taste of her lips, with the feel of those slender curves pressed against his much harder ones, the crush of the softness of her breasts against his chest, her thighs against his, and he would let her go.

Caroline barely had time to raise her hands, with the intention of warding him off, before his arms moved about her. He pulled her in tightly against the hardness of his body and his head lowered so that his mouth could claim hers.

Fiercely. Hungrily. Crushing, parting her lips beneath his as he deepened the kiss. His tongue surged past her lips and into the heated cavern of her mouth. The hands she had raised to hold Nicholas at bay instead clung to him. Her fingers curled into the front of his T-shirt as she met and returned the intensity of that kiss. Those fingers tightened and she held on to the black material for support as desire ripped shockingly through her body. She could feel her breasts swelling, the nipples hard and aching, the warmth between her thighs becoming a burning sensation as she felt herself becoming wet and swollen with a need she had never known before.

She could feel the pulse of his arousal against the flatness of her stomach as he pressed her even closer against him. Every long, thick, hard inch of him throbbed rhythmically against her, in a promise that would ease the increasing ache between Caroline’s own thighs as he surged powerfully inside her.