Then his thoughts stuttered to a stop altogether.
Constance’s gaze drifted over Neil like a caress.“It’s only that I’ve been paying far too much attention to your Adam’s apple lately.Among other things.”
Neil swallowed thickly.Constance’s eyes tracked the involuntary movement of his throat.
The look washungry.
Neil started to sweat.“I’m, ah… I’m not quite sure that I…”
“It’s just an experiment, Stuffy!You needn’t go all pink at the ears about it.”
Neil felt his ears go pink.
“But an experiment requires a hypothesis about a projected outcome,” he protested.
Constance raised her hand to his shoulder.Her touch grazed over the fabric of his shirt.“Of course,” she replied, clearly only half thinking about the words.
Neil’s nerves sparked with a hissing, unruly awareness at the subtle movement of her touch.
“Then what’s the hypothesis?”he asked, holding himself very still.
“Oh!”Constance returned vaguely as her fingers drifted over the line of Neil’s bicep.“That it won’t be particularly good.”
Bolts of delicate fire burst across his skin at each point of contact.The distraction made him take an extra moment to process what she had said.
“Hold on—that it won’t be good!?”
“We’re friends, Stuffy.”Constance’s absent-minded exploration reached the exposed skin of Neil’s forearm.
He couldn’t move it.He was, after all, using it to hold a flaming sword.
Her touch blazed across his skin.
Friends.
She reached his hand and traced her fingers over the knuckles of his grip on the hilt of the blade.
“I suspect it will all be rather dull,” Constance concluded.
“Dull?”Neil returned vaguely—and his mind flooded with visions of just how dull it would be.
Visions that had started the moment Constance had crashed into his tomb in Saqqara, lovely and dangerous and terrifying.Visions triggered when she irritably ordered him to undress in a cave at Gebel Tukh.
Visions sparked by the erotic carving on the wall of this very room—which was still right behind him, where Constance must certainly be able to see it if she troubled to look past his shoulder.
Please don’t look past my shoulder,he thought desperately.
Not that it mattered.Neil was already lost.
Heat roared up, fierce and hungry.It blasted him with even more filthy, delicious visions.Of his hands in her hair.Of his mouth on her throat.Of her gasping his name as he pulled her legs around his waist and took her in a manner that had absolutely nothing to do with years of childhood torments and a softly burgeoning friendship based on shared history and surprising mutual respect.
His throat turned to sandpaper as any semblance of coherent thought fled from his brain.
She was still touching his hand.
Dull,he thought numbly.
It was a terrible idea.He couldn’t kiss her.Hewantedher.His desire for Constance was a raging, dangerous beast stalking him like a tiger in the rain.
