Tycoon's One-Night Revenge by Bronwyn Jameson

shirtfront and the sound against his lips was a throaty mix of satisfaction and surrender. That evocative sound and the first stroke of her tongue against his fired something in Van’s synapses. A burst of vivid memory of her giving mouth under his, his hands twined in her hair as he rolled her beneath him, the sun streaming through glass to set fire to her red-gold hair and to the passion drumming through his blood. And the echo of his voice deep in his mind.
    Now I have you right where I want you.

    He ended the kiss abruptly, shocking Susannah up from the sensual depths with the lash of an earthy curse. She stared up at him, clueless as to its motivation. One second he’d been immersed in the kiss, in her mouth, in sliding his free hand from knee to thigh; the next, abandonment.
    “What’s going on?” she asked slowly. “What just happened there?”
    “I thought I—” He broke off, raked a hand through his hair, let go his breath in a sharp exhalation. And when he started to turn away, Susannah grabbed at his sleeve and forced his attention back to her. “For a moment—not even a second—I had this…flash.”
    “You remembered?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t even know that it was an accurate memory or a…” He lifted a shoulder and let it drop, but the enormity of his frustration resonated in the deepened rasp of his voice. “I don’t know what I recognised. It was just an impression of you and a line of dialogue.”
    “I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.” Apart from the fact of her tongue being elseways occupied, the overwhelming impact of his kiss had stolen her ability to think in whole words. “Was it something you remembered me saying?”
    “No, not you, me. And I don’t know if it’s something I said to you. It was there in my mind, as clear as if a light had switched on, and then gone—” he clicked thumb against finger “—like that. I’m left with one pinpoint of illumination in a big, dark void and I don’t know if it’s a memory or a figment of fantasy.”
    A reflection of that fantasy flared in his eyes for a moment, alerting Susannah to its erotic nature. She relinquished her grip on his sleeve. She didn’t want to pursue this. She wanted to spring to her feet and run, hard and fast, from everything this man aroused in her—the physical, the emotional, the then and the now.
    The knowledge that she could never have him; that she could never tell him what they had shared for such a fleetingly fragile piece of time.
    But the storm of frustration raging in his eyes—not sexual frustration, but the exasperation of not remembering—plumbed the depths of her heart. How could she turn her back? How could she not try to help?
    “It may well have been a memory,” she commenced cautiously. Nervous fingers, the same ones that had gripped his shirt and held his mouth hard against hers, curled into the cushion beneath her backside. She tightened her thighs, tucking her knees closer beneath her in a vain attempt to quash the heat he’d ignited in her body. “Do you want to tell me about that line of dialogue?”
    He stared back at her for a long second, the frustration honed to razor’s-edge sharpness. “Just tell me one thing. Did I make any promises to you?”
    Susannah’s heart thumped heavily against her ribs. She couldn’t tell him. Opening up that wound in her heart would serve no purpose.
    Mustering every ounce of bravado, she met his eyes and for the first time in her life, she straight-out lied to him. “There were no promises, Donovan. None whatsoever.”

    Van didn’t believe her but he curbed the desire to call her on the lie. Pushing to establish the truth about past promises would put her on the defensive again. Right now he needed—and wanted—to concentrate on the present and keeping her in the same room, in his company, was tantamount to his plans.
    Putting a stop to her marriage, he realised, had become more than a means to securing a deal. Through