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‘Stop what?’ she asked, her words breathless, as she peered at him through the sensual haze that had descended like a fog. The muscle in his clenched jaw flared again and again, as if he was as reluctant as she was to voice this thing between them.
‘Stop looking at me likethat,’ he ordered, and she wondered how she looked at him. She’d thought it was just her who experienced the flashover when their gazes met. The thought that he could feel something similar...
‘Tell me,’ she whispered, hoping he couldn’t detect the begging in her tone, the tremor in her voice as she shuddered under the weight of her attraction to him.
‘Tell you what?’ he asked, his gaze still clinging to the horizon as if his life depended on it.
‘What you see when I look at you like that.’
He bit out something in Arabic that sounded hot and heavy, half-prayer, half-curse. She saw him inhale, drawing oxygen deep into his lungs and expanding his chest, the breadth of it making her palms itch and her fingers tingle. He moved his gaze from the horizon to the table between them, as if having to work his way up to looking at her. And when his eyes finally cut across the space, up to her face to meet her eyes, she felt branded.
‘It’s not what I see but what I feel,’ he said, his voice scraping over her nerves with wicked deliciousness. ‘A heat that snags on a spark just begging to catch fire. I see a want so pure, so powerful, so...naïve...as if it would rush headlong into a burning forest and be happy to die in its blaze.’ His eyes interrogated hers, leaving nothing unseen, unexamined. ‘I see fuel for a flame that lies deep within me and a fire that I’m too tempted by to not get burned.’
His words caught her heart and drew it upwards into the night sky. Not one book had prepared her for how this felt.
‘Which is why you should go,’ he said, dragging his gaze from hers, but it was too late. The damage was done. ‘You’re leaving tomorrow,’ he clarified to the question that had yet to leave her lips.
‘I know,’ she said simply.
‘I can’t follow you.’
‘I didn’t ask you to.’ She knew that he belonged here as much as she was needed in Norfolk. But she also knew that she would never forgive herself if she walked away from the promise of this night.Onenight.
‘Star, you’re innocent. You are—’
‘A virgin? Yes. I am. Does that mean I don’t know what I want?’ she replied.
‘No, but that doesn’t mean I can give you what you need.’
‘Oh. Would you not treat me well?’ she asked, not thinking for a second that he wouldn’t.
‘Of course I would.’
‘Would you be selfish and only take what you wanted?’ She couldn’t even imagine it.
‘No, I—’
‘Would you not be very good?’
The question was a taunt and his response, ‘Star...’ was a growl on his lips, a warning and an incitement, a call to arms that she felt down to her core, setting her on fire, energising her in a way she could never have imagined.
‘So you think I should leave and instead find someone who I’m less attracted to, who might not be good or treat me well and only be selfish in their wants?’
The thought burned the back of his throat and bruised his palms from clenching his fists too tightly. He couldn’t argue with her logic. He had spent years cutting a swathe through Europe’s most beautiful women and not a single one of them had caused this...arcane chemistry that burned the air between them—and his willpower to dust.
With his unseeing gaze still on the horizon, he felt her eyes like a brand against his skin, waiting for an answer, a response. His mouth ached to say the words, but he held them knowing he needed to be strong. He felt the subtle shift of her body as the fight left it and he closed his eyes, not wanting to see how giving up haunted her eyes.
Wordlessly she stood and approached the balconyas if the silhouette of his city contained answers that he was unable to give. She bowed her head and for a moment looked defeated. He wasn’t arrogant enough to believe it was all him.
‘I have let my sisters down.’
‘You’d be my choice.’
‘“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy...”’
Snippets from their conversation whispered once again in his ear, threatening to pull him under, the word ‘intimacy’ like a spell drawing him to her. Before his mind could catch up, his body had taken him to her.
He stood behind her, inches from her, his mind on all the reasons why giving in to this desire would be bad and his body itching to touch all the reasons why it wouldn’t be. The glorious river of red had fallen over her shoulder, the delicate curve of her neck exposed. But it was when she moved her head slightly to the side, her pale skin gleaming in the light of the moon, willingly exposing her greatest vulnerability, surrendering to him completely, that he was lost.
