“You’re going to hate me for this in the morning, you know,” he murmured in a rough-edged voice that made it as much a turn-on as a warning. She shook her head.

“No, I won’t. Why would I?”

“I guess we’ll just have to see.” His eyes moved over her face, fastened on her mouth. Then his lips slanted across hers and he tipped her head back against his shoulder and took her mouth, and she was lost to everything except him, and the way he made her feel.

He kissed her with a fierce passion that made her blood sizzle and her bare toes curl into the sand. His mouth was hard and hot and demanding, taking possession, taking control.

Fire shot through her body as he explored her mouth with a voracious hunger that was greedy and domineering and completely enthralling all at the same time.

He knows his way around women, she thought, and it shows.

She kissed him back as if she would die if she didn’t. Her senses went into instant meltdown. The hot spiral of arousal that had been building inside her for what seemed like days spun into a blazing whirlwind that threatened to consume her in the flames. As they kissed, lightning struck and thunder rolled, and Charlie felt herself being swept away by a blistering storm of passion that was like nothing she had ever experienced.

Those experts in sexual attraction, the French, have an expression: coup de foudre. Thunderbolt. That’s what she felt. He was kissing her like he could never get enough of her mouth, and for her the heavens split and the earth shuddered, and everything she had ever thought she knew about the depth and breadth and height of her own capacity for sexual desire flew out the window.

She saw now that as far as her own sexuality was concerned, she had never had a clue. Something about him—his kiss, his touch, the feel of his body against hers, she didn’t know—roused her to a fever pitch of excitement. He kissed her, and she burned for him. She lusted for him. She craved him.

His mouth was fierce on hers. His tongue staked bold possession. She kissed him back with abandon. She loved the taste of him, the heat of his mouth, the feel of his body against hers.

By the time she pulled her mouth from his, she was shaking. Her knees had gone weak and the hot rhythmic throbbing deep inside her body was too urgent to ignore.

“Michael. Let me go.”

His eyes opened, narrowed, and he looked down at her with a frown that couldn’t quite mask the hungry glint in his eyes.

“Getting cold feet, Doc?” His face was hard and tight with passion, and a faint flush rode his cheekbones as she unlocked her hands from around his neck and set her hands against his chest and pushed a little away from him. Calling her “Doc” was, she felt, an effort to distance himself from the attraction blazing between them now that he thought she was calling a halt. He didn’t quite let her go—she remembered his concern about that—but he did loosen his grip enough that she could put a few inches between them. His next question was a growling taunt: “Ready to turn tail and run already?”

She shook her head. Not in a million years. “No.”

Then she did what she had been meaning to do all along: grasped the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up over her head. When it was off, when she was naked except for her panties, she dropped the gossamer flutter of blue to the sand. The sea breeze caressed her skin. Glancing down, she saw that, bathed in silvery moonlight, she looked slender and pale. Her breasts stood up full and firm, with her nipples proudly erect. His hands were big and dark against the suppleness of her waist. The delicate triangle of blue clinging to her hips was the only interruption to the long slim line of her hips and legs.

If this was her dream, her sexual fantasy, she wasn’t going to be half-assed about it. She would have what she wanted, and she would have it all.

His eyes were riveted on her. They were hot and dark as they roamed her body. That perfect masculine mouth of his firmed into a hard, sensuous line.

“You’re beautiful.” She could feel his tension in his hands gripping her waist, and see it in the bunched muscles of his powerful arms, and hear it in the guttural undertone to his voice. “I’ve been imagining you like this since the moment I first laid eyes on you.”

Remembering the steely-eyed, honey-voiced convict chained across the table from her, she shivered, then put up her chin. “You think I didn’t know?”

His mouth quirked. His eyes met hers with tender mockery. “You were a real ball-buster. Sexy as hell, though. If you knew, why didn’t you run away screaming?”

Charlie gave a delicate shrug. “I wanted to psychoanalyze the heck out of you. Plus, I had a lot of faith in those shackles.”

He laughed, looking like the sound was surprised out of him. Then he pulled her toward him. Charlie’s heart hammered and her breath caught and her body went up in flames.

She caught just a glimpse of his eyes, glittering with the thrilling promise of what was to come, before his arms closed around her. Then the two of them were kissing and her hands were moving up under his T-shirt to slide over the taut muscles and warm, sleek skin of his back and he was scooping her up and then sinking down with her onto the sand. It was soft and warm and faintly damp, the perfect mattress. She felt it give beneath her even as she surged against him. He rolled onto his back and pulled her on top of him, to protect her from the ground, she thought, until his mouth on hers stopped her from thinking at all. He kissed her like he was never going to get enough of her mouth. The feel of his hot, strong body beneath hers drove her wild. Then his hands closed on her rib cage and he lifted her a few inches higher. His mouth, scalding hot and hungry, slid down her throat and over the upper slopes of her breast in search of her nipple.

She waited with breathless anticipation. His lips were crawling over her skin. He was taking his time, taking it slow. Closing her lips on a groan, she buried her hands in the tawny thickness of his hair.

“I want you,” he said in a voice that was like nothing she had ever heard from him before.

She wanted him, too. So much that she could no longer form words, or get them out. So much that she felt everything in the world that wasn’t connected to sex and him start to spin away.

“Michael,” she breathed, writhing against him shamelessly as every single inhibition she had ever possessed fell away. She needed him to hurry, needed him to …

A sound jolted her. It was loud. Shrill. Intrusive. Charlie’s eyes snapped open as abruptly as if someone had slapped her in the face. For a moment she simply lay there, blinking dazedly into the dark, not knowing quite where she was or what was happening. She was breathing in ragged little gasps. Her legs moved restlessly, and her body burned. She felt hot all over, like she had a fever. Her lips felt swollen and tingly. So did her breasts. Deep inside, she felt a desperate wanting. She throbbed. She quaked.

Oh, God, Michael’s—no, Garland’s—mouth had been just about to close over her nipple. Even now, awake, she wanted it there so badly that her back was arching up as if to offer it to him.

Where is he?

A long shudder racked her, along with a surge of searing heat. I want you was what he had said. Well, she wanted him, too.

Now. Hot and hard and …

Charlie took a deep, shuddering breath. She diagnosed her problem at just about the same time she realized the darkness she was staring up into hid a plain white ceiling and not a night sky full of an improbably large moon and millions of stars. The surface she lay on was a bed, not a beach. What was twisted around her were the covers, not Garland’s gorgeous body. What she smelled wasn’t sea air, but a hint of fabric softener combined with bleach.