‘What does that mean?’ she asked, her breath in her throat.
‘It means… we are not in control.’
‘You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.’ She wanted to kiss him again so desperately.
‘Orla.’
‘What?’
Was she misreading all these signals she felt were firing like bullets all over her skin?
‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ she asked him. She didn’t know if she was ready for whichever answer he gave.
‘It isn’t about that,’ he replied, his face still so close.
‘So you don’t?’ The signals were definitely turning from sharp sexy hitting-the-spot-ammunition to the potential to be misfires now.
‘No! I mean, yes, but… I do not do this.’
‘Do what?’ The tingling was back as his thumb grazed her bottom lip.
‘I do not casually kiss women.’
‘Good to know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’
This time his lips crashed onto hers and it was all she could do to stay upright. When her back hit the wall she lost all air from her lungs but she didn’t care because his body was pressing into hers and his mouth was delivering a kind of passion she’d never experienced before. As his lips moved from her mouth to her neck and then back again she traced her nails acrossthe back of his neck, up through his hair. This was sensual in capital letters. He lifted her by the waist and, on instinct, her legs wrapped around him, drawing his body closer until he was all she could feel. Then his mouth was on hers again, intense, deep…
Suddenly a loud bark cut through the atmosphere and she jumped, shocked. His mouth left hers and she slipped down from his hold as he broke away again. He was looking back at her now almost as if he didn’t know what had just happened between them.
‘It is Hunter,’ he told her. ‘But not his bark of high alert.’ He sighed. ‘It means Tommy or Erin must be coming.’
‘OK,’ she replied, straightening her clothes a little and trying to gather herself together. She was still shaking on the inside, her libido dancing a merengue.
‘OK,’ he said, unnecessarily. ‘We should shut this room up and go to the house.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Let’s do that.’
They both moved together, and the near clash was awkward.
‘Sorry,’ she apologised.
‘No, no, it was my fault. You go first,’ he said.
She smiled. Politely. Like this person whose tongue had just been in her mouth and marking the line of her collar bone was a representative of a company wanting to buy magazine ad space.
‘Thanks,’ she said, stepping towards the door and hastening out.
She sighed as she walked amongst the chickens and gave Noble a pat on the neck. It was one thing to now know a little about Jacques’s past, another thing to feel that he really understood how she felt about her journalism, but it was something else entirely to turn all that into a… She didn’t even know what it was, except a mistake. A delicious mistake maybe. But, fundamentally, still a mistake.
36
‘Hi, Mum.’
It was early and Orla was sitting on Jacques’s sofa, her laptop on the coffee table and a couple of hundred words on screen. Late last night, after she’d gone to bed, but been unable to switch off, there had been an email from Frances asking for an update and some ‘teaser content’, as her boss had called it. When Erin’s phone finally ceased dinging at around 2a.m. and the teen insisting she didn’t want to ‘get into it again’ after their fractious chat before Noble turned up, Orla had chosen sleep and an early wake-up call to get these words down. Except concentration wasn’t her strong suit when her mind was churning over other things – her mum and dad’s stories that didn’t match up, Burim, the fact she had kissed Jacques in a room full of police intel… She’d chosen to tackle one of her parents as soon as she knew her mum would be awake.
