resist touching her, holding her, and it could only lead to the pathway now forbidden for all eternity.
An honourable man did not seduce a woman, leave her pregnant, then seduce her all over again at the first opportunity. Especially after she’d rejected and dismissed him for the second time.
Regret speared through him for the passion he would never taste again. Per carita. What had he ever done to deserve this?
He noticed they’d turned off the route they’d come, down behind the shops and cafes and galleries, and had plunged into a maze of leafy little personal streets. He was insanely tempted all at once to take her hand, feel her slim palm in friction with his, but he controlled himself. That would be too much like affection. Affection was not what he could afford. She had made her embargoes clear. She didn’t want him in her life. Not now, and never again.
They were passing what looked like a schoolyard, with painted swings and slides and childish paraphernalia. She turned her head, then paused as something inside the brick-and-iron fence caught her attention, causing him nearly to bump into her. The sudden proximity brought him an intoxicating whiff of her hair.
‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘Damn. See that? They’ve forgotten to cover the sandpit.’
‘What?’
He hadn’t meant to growl. It was probably the unwelcome realisation of what the place symbolised. Six years ago she’d never have paid the slightest attention to something as mundane as a schoolyard. He supposed mothers cared about such things.
His lip made an involuntary curl, and he decided for his sanity’s sake to cull all thoughts of the situation from his mind. Concentrate on the here and now.
To make up for his impatience he made a polite display of peering into the dimly lit grounds with interest.
Across the playground, brick buildings loomed, grim and Victorian in the shadowy dark, lit by occasional security lights protruding from under their eaves. The yard looked ghostly, with shifting drifts of moonlight under big, spreading pines.
He followed her gaze and managed to determine a pale patch under the trees. Before he could make proper sense of it, she had lodged a toe onto the base of the fence, and was hoisting herself up onto the brick fence post. In another second she was down on the other side.
He had to admit, reluctantly swinging over after her a few resistant seconds later, she seemed as lithe and supple as she’d been six years before. No one would ever suspect she’d been swollen with child, as the saying went. The curve of her hips and long, slim legs still looked every bit as graceful in jeans. In fact, for a few seconds, when the feminine swell of her bottom had been deliciously defined as the fabric had tightened against her, he’d been reminded…Smooth and taut as a peach.
If only…If only his memory of seeing her nude weren’t still so sharp.
She cast him a glance over her shoulder, alluring as sin while at the same time innocent, and it struck at his memory with an almost visceral bittersweet punch.
It was just the way she’d looked at him that faraway summer. Exactly the way.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Look.’
In a few strides he caught up and stood beside her, bemusedly gazing down at a large rectangular depression filled with sand. ‘So?’
‘It should have its cover on. I s’pose the janitor must have forgotten.’ She glanced about her. ‘I think I know where they keep it. I’ll just run over and see if it’s there.’
She turned and walked away in the direction of the buildings. As she receded from him and stepped into a pool of dark shadow her pale fall of hair remained a visible, beckoning gleam. Then she disappeared around a corner.
He took off after her, cursing, wishing it had all been different. As they had been before, without complications. Why did she have to bother with schoolyards? Why couldn’t they just be lovers again, with the world on a string?
‘It’s around here,’ she called. ‘Do you mind giving me a hand?’
Perhaps it had been a mistake to kiss her in the brasserie. This was a school, hardly an erotic setting, but as he followed her into a shadowy alcove under a staircase in the deserted place the air suddenly sprang alive with sexual overtones. In spite of the taboo aspects of the occasion, echoes of rules and discipline and good behaviour, even worse, her now being a mother, that kiss simmered in his blood like a provocation.
Whatever she said, she couldn’t deny her response to it. She’d wanted him.
‘Oh, look, it’s here.’ She turned for an instant to glance at him, and the awareness in her eyes sparkled with as much promise and exhilaration as the bubbles in a fine prosecco. His heart rate quickened.
In the dull light cast by the security lamp he saw a wooden frame with a tarpaulin nailed across it, leaning against the rear wall.
She reached out to seize an end of it, then let it go at once with a little exclamation, sinking her teeth into her plump lower lip, then sucking at one of her fingers.
His blood stirred.
‘Here,’ he intervened, stepping forward to lift the modest frame from her, unavoidably brushing her with his body. Electricity thrilled through him, and he guessed she’d have felt the same little frisson.
‘Careful of splinters.’ There was huskiness in her voice, a sensual inflection she couldn’t conceal.
He carried the frame easily across the asphalt to the grassy spot where the sandpit lay under the pines. ‘You’re very public spirited,’ he observed. ‘It’s a fine night. Would it matter so much to have left it?’
She took the opposite end and helped to slide the cover into position. Then she straightened up, dusting her hands, wiping them on her shapely, denim-clad thighs, and gazed at him across the pit. In the moonlight her eyes were shadowy and unknowable, her face a pale heart shape.
‘It keeps the cats out. Vivi plays in here with her friends.’
Vivi. The name seared his heart with a violent pang, but he ignored it and maintained his smooth expression.
Still, the name must have flared in there like an incendiary device, because somehow it sparked a wave of conflicting reactions. Regret was one of them, almost a savage, furious grief, and, underneath it all, the elusive old magic that had drawn him to Lara in the first place, now more potent than ever.
Sacramento, admit it. Desire.
Somehow in the hour since she’d informed him and shattered his peace of mind, she’d managed to acquire an added mystery, a primitive feminine power that attached to her being a mother. The mother of his-
He quickly suppressed that sentimental add-on. His nothing. His mistake.
Still, it had all created some upheaval inside him at a deep level. Despite his anger, the hurt, he felt possessed with a need to touch her, to make claim of her in the shadowy deserted schoolyard.
They stared at each other across a silence taut with vibrations.
Lust took a sweet ferocious hold of his loins, and against all reason he took a step towards her. A breeze stirred the pines and ruffled her pale hair, but she didn’t move from her spot as he approached. She watched his advance around the children’s playpit, her eyes glittering with awareness in her white face, her ripe mouth grave and expectant.
She was still too achingly beautiful. His beautiful, elusive torment.
‘Lara,’ he said thickly. ‘Larissa…’
He seized her arms and pushed her back into the shadows, up against the trunk of a pine, and kissed her wine-sweet mouth fiercely. She didn’t resist. Her soft lips delivered their own fiery response, and parted to invite him in. She raised her arms and linked them around his neck, and to his intense, grateful pleasure he felt her soft, pliant body yield to him in encouragement.
Like a starving man he covered her face and throat with his kisses, plundering her mouth with his lips and tongue until he was drunk with the taste and scent of her.
In this deserted, pine-scented place there was no watcher present to inhibit him. His hungry hands roamed free and bold, and he could have groaned with the pleasure of the feel of her curves under his palms. Her little sighs and moans, her erotic writhing drove him on to explore her pale body under her clothes, but he willed himself to maintain control, and firmly kept her hands from wandering.
He broke from her lips to swiftly unbutton her shirt. He heard her gasp as her bra was laid bare, and it spurred his passion for the glistening pale beauties swelling from the confining lace, their skin translucent in the
