The eyes half-glimpsed beneath lazy lids suddenly shot wickedness. “Let down your hair and I’ll tell you.”
Perhaps she should rise and leave now, but she knew she couldn’t abandon him here like this. She could call his bluff, but she suspected that Demon Vandeimen never bluffed.
She raised her hands and pulled out the pins, letting the braid fall heavily down her back. “Don’t think to play your games with me, sir. You’ll neither win nor escape by pretending to desire me.”
“Pretending? You can come over here and feel if you want.”
Her breath caught and she couldn’t help glancing at his crotch. She hastily looked up. “So, why did you join the army?”
“That isn’t really down,” he complained, but then said, “The others were. Why not?”
“The others?” Her mind was stuck on his earlier words, however. He was aroused? Now? By her? A responsive beat began between her thighs.
“Con. Hawk.” He knocked back an irreverent amount of her very good cognac. “Con was a second son and willing to do his duty. Defeat the Corsican Monster. Save the women and children of England from invasion, rape, and pillage. Hawk sawa way to escape his family. As for me... what more could a sixteen-year-old who fed on excitement and challenge desire?” Those dangerous eyes met hers again. “I feed off excitement like a vampire feeds off blood, dear lady. Do you want to come over here and let me drink your pale, angelic blood?”
“No,” she lied, beginning to burn with raw lust. She should leave.... “And my blood is as red as yours, I assure you.”
“All the better.” He put down his glass and shifted to begin crawling over to her. In another man it might have been clumsy, but she immediately thought of a wolf, a lithe and lethal wolf. She wanted to flee, but she knew that would be disastrous. And part of her wanted to stay, even to bleed....
He knelt beside her on all fours and raised a hand to her neck. “So pale, so pure...”
“I’m a widow.” Despite fingers stroking her neck, she used a cool tone, trying to deny all this, trying to summon the strength to flee.
His eyes were close now, intense, pupils large in the dim light. “You shouldn’t have chained me, dear widow, if you didn’t need me.”
Need. She did need him. It had been so long, and here was that danger that always drove her wild.
It was real danger now. Not her husband, who had only pretended because it excited her, and that excited him. It was this wild and wounded young man with heat and sex rising off him like steam.
A wise woman would get up and run.
A decent woman would save him from himself.
Mouth dry with fear and longing, she whispered, “Do you need a woman, Vandeimen?”
“I need you.”
“Then take me.”
He kissed her with brandy-soaked heat and greedy passion, and she kissed him back as fiercely, sprawled against the seat of the big chair. It had been so long, too long, and he tasted like hell and heaven combined.
Then she was flat on her back, her legs up over his shoulders and him in her, deeply, fully, in her. He reared up, hands on the floor on either side of her head, eyes triumphantly on hers.
Magnificent. Beautiful. Virile.
Lethal—and she loved it.
She clutched his arms, moving, then firing off into her own particular hellfire heaven.
When she opened her eyes, swooningly pleasured, she was still locked in position with him, wishing she could see behind his closed eyes and set face.
Was he in heaven or in hell?
He shifted, sliding out of her and away, letting her legs come down, head turning from her.
“Don’t,” she said quickly, “say you’re sorry.”
He knelt between her legs, sweaty, rumpled, troubled, but he looked up at her. “You liked that?”
