The Man She Shouldn't Crave

Lucy Ellis

Not that kind of girl…When dating agency owner Rose Harkness approaches a world renowned ice hockey team with a daring PR proposal, it puts her man-handling skills to the ultimate test…especially when she realises that the best of the bunch, enigmatic owner Plato Kuragin, isn’t a man she can handle. At all.Wealth and sinful good-looks have given Plato rock-star privileges when it comes to women, but Rose refuses to become another groupie – no matter how her body burns for his expert touch. But after an outrageously sexy taste of the forbidden Rose is hooked – and her heart is in serious trouble…

Then he saw her.

She gazed unblinkingly back at him, and if the eyes were the window to the soul these eyes had the curtains open, the bed unmade and a woman lying naked, all hot and flushed and bothered. And waiting.

For him.

Oh, yeah, this was enough to take his mind off the team.

Big blue eyes, round cheeks dusted with rosy colour and a ruby curve of a mouth that made her look on the verge of a smile. He found his own mouth reluctantly returning that smile. She had a subtle fullness to her face that made him unaccountably think of Renaissance Madonnas.

She was a stunningly beautiful girl. In any era.

For a moment he allowed himself the fantasy of having her brought up to his suite. He’d have her run that accent over him on her knees, bury his hands in that thick dark hair. He’d …

… lost his goddamned mind.

About the Author

LUCY ELLIS has four loves in life: books, expensive lingerie, vintage films and big, gorgeous men who have to duck going through doorways. Weaving aspects of them into her fiction is the best part of being a romance writer. Lucy lives in a small cottage in the foothills outside Melbourne.

Recent titles by the same author:

UNTOUCHED BY HIS DIAMONDS

INNOCENT IN THE IVORY TOWER

Did you know these are also available as eBooks? Visit www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Man She

Shouldn’t

Crave

Lucy Ellis

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

For Charlotte

CHAPTER ONE

SHE’D come all the way to Toronto to find herself a man. Just not this man.

Shoot! She hoped it wasn’t this man.

Yet, unable to help herself, Rose drank him in—along with every other woman in the room.

Broad, high cheekbones, long straight nose, wide sullen mouth and deepset eyes the colour of a night sky. His bored expression only highlighted the male beauty of his face. Undeniably the gene pool had blessed him. He stood far over six feet, his lean, muscular body clad in expensive dark threads that remained faithful to the strength of him and drew Rose’s attention to how essentially different the male body was from the female.

As if she’d needed reminding, but this man just seemed to be in your face about it.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t have competition. A huddle of gorgeous young men, shifting in their suits, jostled either side of him. They were talking amongst themselves, one of them smirking at the cameras, another looking a little shy.

Rose could feel her face becoming flushed, but this wasn’t the moment to suffer an attack of nerves. She’d known what she was getting into when she’d first spotted the Wolves’ visit to Toronto in the daily newspaper. It was so high-profile it had leapt out of the sports section altogether and landed on ‘look at me’ page three along with a grainy photo of a couple of the team’s stars.

Rose cared about sport about as much as she was interested in stock prices, but what the featured article had very clearly told her was other women did care. They cared a great deal. Not about the sport—that was all statistics and injuries, sweat and testosterone. No, women were interested in what all red-blooded females the world over paid attention to: a good-looking man with a honed body who knew how to use it.

The Wolves had that in spades, as well as the addition of some very high-profile players. And then there was that Russian thing they had going on. Melancholy eyes and high broad cheekbones, and rich dark accents that rolled r’s like Formula One™-tu