The Forbidden Innocent by Sharon Kendrick

could make her escape—when Jack walked across the room and sat down beside her.
    Up close, he looked even more magnificent, his aristocratic features seeming to have been hewn from marble and his raven hair gleaming blue-black in the firelight.
    ‘You’re very quiet tonight,’ he observed.
    ‘Am I?’ She gave a little shrug. ‘Everyone else is so bright and chatty that I hardly think my silence will be noticed.’
    He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you make a habit of always putting yourself down, Ashley?’
    ‘I prefer to think of it as being realistic.’
    ‘Do you?’ There was a pause as he studied her. Why was she being so damned
unresponsive
—as if the woman he had held in his arms on the windswept moor had been replaced with a waxwork replica? ‘You know, you didn’t give me a very satisfactory answer when I asked you a question earlier.’
    ‘And which particular question was that, Jack?’
    He gave a low laugh. ‘When I asked whether you’d missed me.’
    Quickly, Ashley glanced across the room—where Barry was in the process of pouring liqueurs for the two women. ‘Do you want our conversation overheard by the whole room?’ she whispered. ‘Don’t you think it might make them wonder why you’re asking your secretary a question like that?’
    ‘That’s extremely unlikely to happen,’ he drawled. ‘Unless you’re planning to break the habit of a lifetime by raising that soft voice of yours.’
    ‘Whether I missed you or not is irrelevant,’ she managed, her voice sounding little, and lost.
    ‘Is it?’ A smile touched the edges of his lips as he leaned forward. ‘So what’s the matter, Ashley? Your lipsare trembling as if you’re cold, yet the fire is blazing and the room is warm.’
    You’re making me want you and it is wrong to want you. We both know that.
‘You’re… you’re neglecting your guests,’ she whispered.
    His laugh was as soft as it had been before, but now it was tinged with something else, something dangerous, which made the little hairs on the back of her neck prickle with a sense of the unknown.
    ‘There goes that hypocrisy again,’ he taunted. ‘Your eyes are saying something which your lips are contradicting. You look like a hungry bird which has escaped the winter chill and hopped onto the window sill to find a whole heap of crumbs waiting there—and yet something stops you from reaching out to take them. You wanted me that day on the moor—but then you clammed up and pretended that you didn’t.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘I don’t really need a lesson in etiquette from you, Ashley, but perhaps you’re right—I
am
neglecting them. So you’d better excuse me and I’ll get back to them and leave you alone in your little ivory tower over here.’
    With that, he stood up and went back to the others—leaving Ashley feeling even more isolated than ever and yet knowing she had only herself to blame. Her head was whirling from the bizarre conversation they’d just shared and all she wanted to do was to escape.
Was
she a hypocrite? she asked herself distractedly. Was that how she came across—as some kind of tease who liked to play games? Didn’t he realise that she had simplybeen trying to protect herself and to maintain an air of professionalism between them? Yet now it seemed as though she had wrecked even that—wouldn’t the worst of all possible scenarios be that she lost her job without ever having known what it was like to have Jack make love to her?
    Quietly, she rose to her feet—though she noticed that Jack barely lifted his head to say goodnight as she excused herself and slipped from the room.
    Once she was safely back in her bedroom, she undressed—but she noticed that her hands were shaking. And so was her body. Shivering violently, she climbed into bed, curling herself into a ball in a desperate attempt to warm herself, but inside she felt like a cold block of ice. From downstairs she could hear the distant strains of laughter and she pulled