The Lancaster Men by Janet Dailey Page A

change—and people change with them,” he answered curtly.
    “Maybe so,” she shrugged. “But you’re still my brother.”
    Something seemed to snap in him. The anger that had been held in check suddenly erupted. Shari blinked in shock when he roughly grabbed her arms and gave her a hard shake. A dark fury raged in his hard eyes.
    “Dammit, I am not your brother!” His voice was husky with his effort to keep its volume down. “What is it going to take to get it through your head that we are not related?”
    “But—” How could he say that? They were, too.
    Whit read her thoughts before her befuddled mind could speak them. “It means nothing that my father married your mother. There’s no blood tie between us. You aren’t my sister. You’re a woman, and a damned beautiful woman at that!”
    A little shiver of sensual alarm ran down her spine. She couldn’t deal with this kind of talk—not from Whit. She tried to push away from him but he simply tightened his hold to bring her closer to the bare wall of his chest.
    Her hands were discovering a new sensation as they spread across the hard flesh of his shoulders inan attempt to keep some distance between them. His body heat seemed to burn them and the warmth radiated through her sensitive nerve ends.
    “Whit, let me go.” The breathless quality in her voice kept the request from being an order.
    “If I were your brother, I wouldn’t let you go.” His hooded look roamed over her face. “I’d turn you over my knee for parading into a man’s bedroom in that skimpy pair of frilly pajamas. But I’m not your brother so you’ll get no spanking from me.”
    The glint in his eye warned her to expect an entirely different form of punishment. Until this moment, Shari hadn’t believed he was capable of using physical force. Now, she was conscious of his sheer brute strength. She started trembling, even though part of her knew he wouldn’t hurt her.
    “I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” she murmured in an effort to appeal to the reasonable side of his nature.
    “I’ve been saying it for a long time, but you haven’t been listening to me,” Whit accused. His arm circled her waist to hold her within its steel band while his fingers caught a handful of black hair in their grip. “You’ve been expecting too much from me, Shari. I’m a man—with the most human flaw of all—the desire for a woman. Is that what a brother would feel toward you?”
    “No.” She had to swallow to ease the tightness of her throat, a tightness that came from the intimate contact with his body.
    Her legs felt weakened by the imprint of his thighs; muscled columns of male power. The wall of his naked chest loomed large, dwarfing her smaller frame.What little space separated her from it didn’t lessen the potency of all that hard, tanned flesh. With each breath, she was drugged by the musky, male scent of his body.
    “I can’t pretend to be your brother anymore,” he murmured and Shari found herself watching his mouth, unnerved by its masculine shape. “This charade had to end sometime.”
    She had just begun to realize it was moving closer when he eliminated the last inches to capture her lips. The safe, secure relationship she thought she and Whit had always possessed was shattered into a million pieces. She was in the arms of a stranger.
    Initially, Shari was too stunned to resist the hungry plunder of his mouth. Then his mobile occupation of it left her too dazed by aroused sensations to consider it. The tantalizing probe of his hard tongue sent shivers of excitement licking through her veins. Whit breached her defenses with almost no effort.
    Never in her wildest imagination would she have believed these earthy desires could burn with heat that seemed to melt her bones. Crazy, wild longings were building within her and she fought to keep them down.
    With no need to subdue a resistance she wasn’t offering, his hands began to wander over her shoulders, hips,