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groaned.
    Tally was hot and dizzy. Dismayed to see that her robe was hanging open, she wrapped it more securely round her and reknotted the sash. Herhands were trembling and she was breathing rapidly, her bemusedthoughts in freefall but that fast she understood that what he had just made her feel was the biggest temptation she had ever withstood. And she knew that what they had both felt was almost frighteningly powerful. Her nipples were tight, hard and almost stinging in response and at the heart of her she was uncomfortably hot and damp with a desire that clawed at her every sense. The taste of him? He tasted so unbelievably good that she could only want more …
    Sander extended a lean brown hand. ‘Come …’
    ‘No, don’t say it!’ Tally urged, backing off another defensive step, feeling ridiculously like a woman in danger of losing her immortal soul. ‘Goodnight, Sander.’
    ‘You’re not serious?’ Sander breathed incredulously as she reached the door.
    ‘Very serious.’ Her hand closed tightly round the door knob and she refused to take the chance to turn her head and look at him again. ‘I don’t want anything else to happen.’
    As the door swung shut on her quick exit Sander swore in raw and angry disbelief below his breath. What was the matter with her? Was the cut and run response her concept of flirtation? He had never ever got so hot with a woman only to have her walk away from him, leaving him unsatisfied. Nor had he ever been so surprised by the power of a woman to attract him. The prospect of a cold shower to cool his urgently aroused body had zero attraction.
    Tally went to check on Cosima and found her sound asleep on top of the bed. Slipping off her half-sister’s shoes, she arranged a throw over the younger girl and suppressed a sigh. She would not hold spite: tomorrow she would try harder to win Cosima’s trust and perhapsshe would get the chance to persuade her sibling that shewas not sharing her weekend with some kind of prison warder.
    But as Tally crept into the room she was sharing and slid back below the duvet on her bed, she was most troubled on her own behalf. When it came to the male sex she had always believed that she was intelligent and sensible and she had, if she was honest, looked down on several of the impulsive romantic choices her mother, Crystal, had made over the years. Yes, she acknowledged shamefacedly, she had felt quite superior in that field, convinced that she would never do anything half so foolish, so possibly she had deserved to be shot down in flames for being smug and short-sighted.
    She had thought she knew it all and learned that in truth she was no more sophisticated than a toddler when it came to men. One salient fact had escaped her. Until she had actually experienced a genuinely powerful attraction to a man, she had not known what she was talking about. In the space of twenty-four hours, Sander Volakis had taught her things about herself that she really hadn’t wanted to find out. Meeting Sander had proved to be a horribly humbling experience, she reflected ruefully. She had learned that just being near him could make her as giddy, hot and incapable of rational thought as an empty-headed adolescent. She had learned that she was human and fallible and capable of doing foolish things. She had also learned that refusing to give way to so strong a desire and practising self-denial could actually
hurt
.
    Little wonder, then, that her mother had wrecked so many of her relationships by being unfaithful. Crystal Spencer had never said no to such an attraction when it came her way, had never put her current lover or indeedher child’s stability ahead of sexual temptation. Crystalhad done as she liked, when she liked, and had often paid the price for it. But Tally had also paid a high price too.
    On more than one occasion, a young Tally had become attached to one of her mother’s live-in boyfriends and that man’s subsequent sudden disappearance from her