Her brow crinkled. “But you never seemed to have a . . . a . . . problem with it. You were never a typical Hollywood player, screwing around and getting caught and blaming everything on a sex addiction. You were always so faithful to Eden.” Her cheeks flushed a shade deeper of pink, and Rill wondered what she was thinking. “That’s what it’s about, isn’t it, Rill? You’re fighting against wanting to have sex with me because you were so happy with Eden?”
He couldn’t stand to see that flash of uncertainty in her eyes. If there was one person on this planet who never should doubt herself, it was Katie Hughes. “This hasn’t got anything to do with Eden,” he said firmly. “It’s got everything to do with you. And me.”
For a few seconds, she didn’t speak, just looked up at him with pink lips parted. Her springtime eyes became lambent. “So let me dance for you, then. There’s no one here but us. And you told me we couldn’t stop it, now that it’s started.”
“You do like to play with fire, Katie.”
Her radiant smile made something lurch in his chest. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the living room, the bells on her ankle tinkling rapidly. She pushed him down on the sofa and turned up the music.
“I’ll be right back,” she told him, sounding like she was barely repressing her excitement.
“Katie,” he called before she could scurry out of the room. She froze and glanced back.
“Hurry up,” he said quietly. She smiled.
He sat there alone listening to Middle Eastern music and getting more aroused by the second. In order to try to bring himself under control, he detailed in his mind all the work he’d done around the house that day: fixing and varnishing the seat for the tree swing in the backyard, cutting back an overgrown bush that was obscuring a window, reattaching fallen gutters, mending the porch posts—
Where the hell was Katie?
He got up and stoked the failing fire in the hearth. That didn’t help distract him, either. He kept pausing, tilting his ear, hyperalert for the sound of Katie’s footfalls on the stairs. He finally returned to his seat on the couch.
Had he ever been this anticipatory for a woman? It’d turned him on more than he’d expected to see her in that skimpy costume. He smiled. Damn little gypsy, turning him inside out every chance she got.
What was she doing up in that bedroom, sewing a damn costume from scratch?
She came down the stairs so quietly that he wasn’t aware she was close until he heard the muted ring of the tiny bells. He glanced over toward the entryway, expecting her to charge into the room in her typical fashion. Instead, he saw an extended leg through sheer, light green fabric. His gaze ran greedily over a taut calf and a shapely thigh. He craned his head, looking for the rest of her around the entryway. When she didn’t spring into the room, he called her name.
She pirouetted into the room, a vision of graceful long limbs, green veils and shining gold. She knelt before him, her eyes downcast. He stared at her, stunned by her beauty and her very un-Katie-like pose.
She glanced up timidly, and he caught the glint of humor and heat in her gaze. She’d lined her eyes artfully in black kohl and the lids shimmered with a golden-green shade. The effect was striking. She wore a gold collar, and some kind of ornament had been woven through her hair. It looked like golden coins. They shimmered next to the equally shiny tendrils of her hair. Beneath layers of wispy green veils, he saw the teasing hint of more gold.
“If it would please you, then your slave-girl will dance for you, Master,” she whispered breathily.
He chuckled softly. This, he liked. “Oh, it would please me.”
She smiled before she assumed her sober, slave-girl act.
And what an act, Rill thought in growing wonder as she rose and began to move in a subtle dance to the music. She was typically such a whirlwind; it mesmerized him to the core to watch her move with such fluid control. At first, he could only glimpse her limbs and rolling hips through the veils. It surprised him how arousing it was, to catch only a hint of a shapely calf and dainty, pointed foot or the tight, circular motions of round hips. She seduced him with her eyes as much as her gliding body, watching him with shining orbs of light green over the edge of a sheer veil. Rill had never been made love to by a woman’s eyes before that moment.
The tempo of the music increased. The beat throbbed in his ears and blood pounded into his cock, and he couldn’t move . . . he couldn’t blink, he was so greedy for the vision that spun and danced before him.
The veil she twirled around her torso artfully slithered to the floor and somehow the one draped around her upper body was in her hands. He sat up straighter when he caught a glimpse of her smooth belly. The curves of her hips made his palms itch to touch her, and the way she moved them . . . sometimes slow and beguiling, like she was drawing some kind of invisible circles with her pussy, and increasingly as the music grew more frantic, with tight, precise little gyrations that had Rill sweating uncontrollably.
The second veil she flung away with a wilder, hedonistic gesture, and she danced before him with her torso nearly naked with the exception of a tiny, metallic gold bikini top with little chains that hung in a swaying fringe at the bottom. Her control continued to amaze him as she moved supplely to the music, faster now, beginning to look precisely like the whirlwind he accused her of being, albeit a tightly coiled, controlled one. The metal fringe beneath her full, plump breasts shimmied and shivered as she moved. The bells on her ankle tinkled in rhythm with the music . . .
. . . and if he couldn’t put his hands on her luscious, gyrating hips or bury his face in the erotic expanse of her belly very, very soon, he was going to go mad.
The music built to a crescendo. Perhaps she saw the manic gleam in his eyes because she pulled on a fastener as she spun and the skirt she wore fell around her ankles. Beneath it she wore a tiny gold metallic thong. She spun, her arms outstretched, her long hair flying around her hips. Rill was the one who grew dizzy, though . . . dazed with lust and need.
He called her name sharply.
The pulchritudinous whirlwind before him suddenly halted as the last note of music sounded. She fell befo
re him on her knees, her head bent. For a moment he just stared at the erotic image she made, her long hair falling before her, leaving her nearly naked back bare, her ribs expanding and contracting as she tried to catch her breath.
“Katie,” he said.
She didn’t move from her subservient pose, but she looked up slowly.