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What would she have him say? She wanted to know both everything about him and nothing at all. She’d had men tell her things before—both lies and the truth—that she’d wished later they hadn’t. Perhaps it was better to kiss but never tell.
“You didn’t come back.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She sounded like an abandoned girl. Something she’d been once but had sworn never to be again. Which might be why she had so few dates and even fewer friends. If she didn’t care, she couldn’t hurt.
“I’m here now.” His voice, low and soft, trilled along her skin like a gentle spring breeze, raising gooseflesh in its wake. She rubbed her hands against her arms, but it didn’t do any good.
Drawn by that voice on the wind, the moon in his hair, and a promise of warmth, she stepped closer. “Why are you here now?”
“D’ ye expect me to say I came to kill ye?”
“Did you?”
He laughed, short and sharp. Then he spun, grabbing her shoulders, and she had no choice but to steady herself by reaching for him. Her hands landed on his hips.
His blue eyes caught the light from above and shone like molten silver. “If I’d wanted t’ kill ye,” he whispered, “I’d have done it before, then tossed both you and the girl back to Nessie.”
She took a single step forward, surprising him, so his hands at her shoulders slid free, encircling her back and turning what had begun as imprisonment into an embrace.
“Then why are you here?” she repeated, every breath she took brushing her breasts against his chest in a rhythm as old as the sea.
He cursed in a language she didn’t understand—Gaelic most likely—and then he was kissing her as if he’d been denied such things for longer than either of them had been alive.
His mouth was cool, damp, like the loch, like the mist and the night. She opened, drinking him in as he had drunk the bright and shiny moon.
His tongue was warm when it stroked hers, igniting the heat she had craved. He tasted of desire, a flavor like the darkest chocolate; his hair was as smooth as satin sheets, and the way he smelled … He could be wearing a cologne called Wicked. Was there a cologne called Wicked?
She pressed against him. He was all sharp angles and sleek muscle, while she was just round and soft. That had always bothered her, being round instead of slim, soft instead of hard. Right now she couldn’t think why.
Her mind spun away on sensation. His skin blessedly cool against her hot, hot hands. His mouth so clever—a nip here, a caress there. Who would ever have believed that a bit of pain could bring so much pleasure?
His palm at her waist, his thumb stroked her belly. She arched, wishing he would lift that hand, that thumb, and—
He cupped her breast, the chill of his skin sifting through the cotton, making her nipple tighten even harder. When he brushed the tingling bud—back and forth, back and forth—mimicking the motion with his tongue against the tip of hers, she moaned.
Her hands in his hair clenched; she tilted his mouth just so. She’d forgotten where she was. She’d forgotten who she was. This man—Liam—had become the whole world.
Something splashed in the loch—close enough that she felt a hint of spray. An instant later they had both dropped their arms to their sides, disentangled their tongues, and taken one giant step backward.
Kris was trembling—from the cold, the shock, the lust, she wasn’t sure. Maybe all three.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“Sturgeon,” he said quickly.
She’d meant what was that in relation to the strange sense of need that seemed to overtake her whenever he came near. All she wanted to do was kiss him, touch him, and more.
She’d never been tempted by a stranger, seduced as if she had no will to resist a man whose name, until only moments ago, she had not even known.
The splash came again. Ripples spread toward the shore. “That sounds pretty big,” she said.
“They are.” Liam frowned at the water. “Big. The sturgeons. They can grow t’ be twenty feet long. Some have mistaken them for sharks.”
“Or lake monsters?” she murmured.
“Aye.”
“Do you believe in lake monsters?”
He glanced at her, and his lips, gorgeous, wet, and clever, quirked. “I think they could exist.”
