“How would I?” she asked with a shrug that tried to hide her defenselessness. “You didn’t want me to stay last night. You didn’t want me to kiss you this morning.”
His cheek ticked in the way she was beginning to know meant his own shell was being penetrated. “Kiss me anywhere,” he said gruffly. “Everywhere. But not here.” He touched his scar lightly.
Her heart lurched while her shield crumbled, leaving her unsteady and weak with longing.
“Do you mean that?”
His stared right at her. “What do you think?”
CHAPTER TEN
SHE BLINKED, TRYING to take in this new information, new freedom, to seek badly yearned for physical contact with another human. With him.
“Like…now?” she asked cautiously, feeling pulled toward him.
The air in her lungs felt sharp as knives. Desire and insecurity ground their rough edges together inside her at how easily he was lifting up her emotions and tossing them around.
He looked at her with the masculine arrogance he wore like a cloak, pure Aleksy, isolated and driven and powerful. She was only Clair, green, overwhelmed and too deeply enthralled by him for her own good. At least when he was the sexual aggressor she knew he desired her. To take up the onus of initiating lovemaking meant doing the unthinkable: asking him to want her.
But she really wanted him to want her. Really, really did.
“Every man enjoys being seduced.” He shifted to lean his hips on the edge of the desk, contemplating her with a type of removed curiosity. “I’m no different.”
Seduced. She’d meant a kiss, but she was reminded of the care he’d taken when she threw a similar challenge at him.
Acute inadequacy sliced through her at the same time, cutting all the sharper because the longing within it was so honest. She wanted their most intimate connection with all the pent-up hunger that never seemed to dissipate, but she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Her base need for approval was too bone-deep, the risk too great if she failed to arouse him.
She shook her head and said with a papery laugh of bravado, “As if you’d ever give up control to anyone.”
“You don’t think you could make me?”
Her heart skipped, teased into hope by the light suggestion. “Could I?”
“Try,” he dared.
He was all supreme confidence, and that intimidated her, but a flash of eagerness for the challenge surprised her, making her pulse leap and her nerves flutter. She didn’t know what she was doing when they came together, each time so overwhelmed by his experience she lost all conscious thought, but the idea that she might be able to break past his wall of willpower excited her, making heat swirl and tingle into secretive places.
She tried to probe past his burned-gold eyes to the thoughts behind. Need was welling up to tight levels in her. She wanted to make him want her.
And he wasn’t as detached as he wanted to appear. He was watching her every breath, waiting to see what she’d do.
That gave her the courage to take a few steps toward him, but as his heat and scent surrounded her, all her thoughts short-circuited. Her hands lifted instinctively, greedy to touch, but nerves arrested her.
He was so much bigger than her, his chest a wide plane bracketed by arms hanging with tense readiness, his biceps taut and straining against his pullover. She wanted to kiss his bare wrists, but imagined he’d think that inane.
His rib cage expanded as he inhaled, drawing her eyes to the lift of his strong shoulders, the tendons standing out with strain against his neck. He stared down at her from beneath his thick, spiky lashes, eyes flashing with frustration.
That revelation of want held firmly in check gave her the nerve to take the plunge. She moved to stand between his feet and set her hands on his shoulders.
He jolted a little, as if she’d burned him. She felt the leap of energy as an electrical charge, flaring awake all her senses. With the sort of smooth caution someone used when petting a wild animal, she relearned the familiar shape of his shoulders, hands warming as heat radiated off his muscles. She traced the ridge of his collarbone through the warm fabric of his shirt and when she reached his throat, she crept light fingers under his collar, circling until she found the bump at the top of his spine.