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He pouted, and to her horror she found herself wondering what it would be like to suck on that sullen lip. ‘I’m cold.’
She immediately felt a surge of guilt. What if his enforced swim had a further ill effect on his weakened immune system?
‘You were hot only a minute ago,’ she protested weakly.
He gave a dramatic shiver and she caved in, refusing to acknowledge the forbidden pleasure she took in removing his shirt, peeling the thin silk away from his damp body. His chest and upper arms were hard and smooth, the muscles twitching with tension as she picked up the thick peach-coloured towel and briskly blotted him down, trying not to notice the tingling in the tips of her fingers whenever they brushed his overheated skin.
As a masseuse, her sense of touch had become highly refined and her tactile skill made her very aware of the subtle changes in his body as his muscles began to relax. She instructed him to bend his head and vigorously attended to his hair, and when she moved around to deal with his back and shoulders he sighed with contentment, flexing his spinal column and rotating his shoulderblades, purring like a big cat.
‘I like being rubbed,’ he told her, his ability to communicate apparently reduced to simple expressions of sensory acknowledgement.
‘Most people do. It stimulates the blood supply which in turn helps removes toxins at cellular level,’ she said clinically, with a final dust down his lumbar vertebrae.
‘It feels good, too,’ he insisted, pulling the bunched towel back towards his abdomen, which was already perfectly dry. She let go of the plush folds and he staggered, the back of his knees hitting the edge of the bed. He sat down, letting the towel flop onto his squelchy shoes.
‘For goodness’ sake, you’re going to make a watermark on the covers!’ With a huff of annoyance Rachel knelt to slide his custom-made shoes off his feet and remove his wringing black socks. His feet were long and narrow, his toes straight and marvellously even. He wriggled them sensuously in her sequinned lap and she pushed them back to the floor, and sat back on her haunches, looking up at him expectantly.
He looked expectantly back, and she finally accepted the fact that he was so plastered that he wasn’t going to do anything for himself.
‘Perhaps I should get a man to do this…’ she said, even as she knew she wouldn’t. There was something too elementally satisfying in having the man who was causing such strife at Weston Security virtually helpless in her hands. On a personal level there was an even more primitive response operating, one that Rachel didn’t wish to dwell on too deeply.
He clenched his hands on his splayed knees, glowering at the suggestion. “No—no one else. Only you.’
‘You’re the boss,’ she said wryly, her conscience somewhat quieted by the arrogance of his plea.
His narrow white silk cummerbund had twisted on his hips when he had pulled out his shirt-tails, giving her easy access to the fastenings. Undoing the small silver hooks, she pulled it off and draped it over the edge of the brass bedhead, taking a deep breath as she reached out for the top of his trousers. Discovering the succession of tiny buttons was a shock, but she struggled on valiantly, even when it became obvious that the delicate bump and brush of her busy fingers was having an enlivening effect on his depressed nervous system. She heard him groan, and nearly leapt out of her skin when he cupped his hands on either side of her bowed head and began massaging the sensitive skin behind her ears with his thumbs.
‘Matthew—’
His hands tightened on her scalp. ‘Oh, Rachel…’ He whispered a phrase that made her hasten hysterically to her task. Her fingers became more and more clumsy as they negotiated the changing contours of his lap, and as soon as the last button yielded to her feverish persuasion she scrambled to her feet and tugged off his sopping trousers with a final, punishing jerk that sent him sprawling back on the mattress.
His white designer briefs were moulded transparently to his form, and the sight of his still burgeoning arousal was indelibly printed on her brain in the few seconds that it took to scoop up the towel and toss it across his lap.
If she’d thought the most awkward part was over she was wrong, for, freed of the constriction of his clothes, Matthew experienced a burst of hyperactivity and decided that Merrilyn would be furious at them for missing her dinner. It took some fast talking, combined with body-blocking techniques learned from years of self-defence classes, to stop him from marching out of the guest-house, virtually au naturel, to deliver his apologies to the party at large.
Dismissing the shower as a practical impossibility, Rachel tried to convince him that he needed to lie down and rest while he waited for his change of clothes to arrive, hoping that once his head was on the pillow he might lapse into a natural stupor. She coaxed him back onto the bed by turning down the covers and slyly offering to give him a massage, but her cleverness backfired and turned into a physical tussle during which he became feverishly amorous.
She had figured that it would only take a few minutes of slow, gentle kneading for her to induce a sense of such physical well-being that he would doze off, and when she had informed him that he must lie absolutely still for his massage he had meekly lain back on the cool white sheets. But when she had knelt at his side and tried to get him to turn onto his stomach he had stubbornly refused.
‘I want to watch,’ he said huskily. ‘I’ve never had a massage before.’ He pulled her hand from under his shoulder and placed it on his chest, covering it with both of his as he pressed her fingers into the skin over his rapidly beating heart. ‘What big hands you have,’ he discovered in surprise, lifting his captured prize to inspect it.
Once upon a time such comments had used to hurt.
She gave her standard tart response. ‘All the better to slap you with.’
His eyes sparkled darkly with innocent curiosity. ‘Are you into spanking? Is that one of your “unusual vices”?’
His brain might be partially on hold, but there was evidently nothing wrong with his short-term memory.
‘Certainly not!’
‘Oh.’ He had the nerve to sound slightly disappointed. ‘Look,’ he murmured, meshing their fingers together to measure their length. ‘We’re both the same size.’
‘No, we’re not,’ she refuted. ‘I’m taller, stronger and fitter than you are.’
But not smarter. His darting smile was the only warning she got before he pulled her sharply across his chest, sweeping one lean leg around the back of her knees and trapping her legs together within her narrow skirt as he rolled them both over until she was squashed beneath him, her hands pinned on either side of her head. She felt a brief shudder of sick panic as her mind slipped back into the distant past, and then her superb conditioning kicked in and they were rolling back and forth in a brief struggle for ascendancy.
Brief, because Rachel almost instantly realised that, whatever strength Matthew Riordan possessed, his stamina was sorely depleted and his alcohol-impaired motor skills made it simple to speedily counteract his clumsy moves. Never having wrestled with a semi-naked man before, she was seriously distracted by the slippery threshing of his limbs and the sinful pleasure that came from riding his squirming body, feeling all that latent male power quivering beneath her bare hands.
