The suggestion that she found him irresistible grated on her nerves, and she tried to muster a scathing tone. "Do you honestly expect every woman to come panting after you?"
"Honestly?" His beautiful smile was charm itself. "I'd have to say that has been my experience, yes."
Jess drew in a ragged breath, feeling a sharp ache in her chest. She had little doubt he was telling the truth about his effect on woman.
He reached up to touch a forefinger to her lower lip, sensually, provocatively. "Do I disturb you, angel?"
"N-no . . ." she managed to stammer, trying not to flinch.
"No? Then why are you so hot and bothered?"
He was doing the same thing he'd done three days before, twisting her words and thoughts and feelings around till she didn't know up from down, right from wrong, truth from fiction. In a minute he'd have her quivering with longing.
His finger erotically stroked her lower lip, dipping just inside.
"No, don't . . ."
"That's what you said the last time, but you didn't mean it then, either."
"Devlin, stop it!" She heard the panic in her voice and hated herself for it. She couldn't let him do this to her.
Taking a step back, she drew herself up to her fullest height and said in her most formidable finishing school manner, "I did not come here to be assaulted, Mr. Devlin. I only want to talk to you."
"A pity," he murmured. To her vast relief, though, he turned away. "I'm all for accommodating a lady." He gestured toward a chair. "Please sit down."
Jess would rather not have taken the same seat his fancy woman had vacated, but she masked her hurt and sat down, perching on the edge and clutching her reticule in her lap. She wished it were a shotgun; she would have felt safer. Warily she watched Devlin.
He walked over to the bureau, where the liquor decanters sat. The golden sunlight streamed in the window and glinted off his sable hair. "Would you care for a drink?"
"No, thank you. I told you I don't drink spirits."
"Ah, yes. Saint Jessica."
"That isn't fair."
He glanced at her, a quick flash of gray, intensely cool in the warm light.
"I don't make my boarders or anyone else follow my rules outside my boardinghouse," Jess said in her own defense.
Not trusting himself to reply, Devlin poured himself three fingers of whiskey and drank one of them in a single swallow, feeling the mellow fire burn all the way down to his stomach. .
It didn't rid him of the sour taste in his mouth over his own boorish behavior. His fondling of Lena a few moments ago had been entirely deliberate. He'd purposefully flaunted his association with the faro dealer in a crude attempt to make Jessica jealous, to demonstrate what she was giving up by spuming him. It had been a petty gesture, unworthy of her, or of him. Primitive, base, and crude.
But more and more these days, his urges toward Jessica were degenerating into the primitive and base. The desire slamming through his body just now proved it. His condition, Devlin knew, had a good deal to do with certain memories that wouldn't go away. Jess clinging to him during a long dark night. Jess panting beneath him, meeting his every thrust with a fierceness all her own. Jess eager and giving, as passionate in her loving as she was in her anger. Too vividly he remembered the silkiness of her lustrous tawny hair, the velvet smoothness of her skin, the supple responsiveness of her body. The simple joy of holding her afterward.
Yet he also remembered the accusations she'd thrown at him the other day, and how she'd ordered him from her house. Her rejection had shot his male pride all to hell, but the hurt went far deeper than wounded pride. He'd felt betrayed. Jess had trusted him so little that she'd convicted him of treachery on the flimsiest of evidence.
Sure, he hadn't been entirely honest about his wealth, but he'd had good reason, wanting to protect himself from the kind of mercenary females he'd known all his life. Could he be faulted for trying to keep his heart from being savaged again? Ever since his fiancée had sliced up his heart, he'd sworn never again to let himself be used by a woman. Jess had used him, every bit as much as he'd used her, and then she'd accused him of being in league with that bastard Burke.
Devlin clenched his teeth. He hadn't felt pain that sharp
in ten years. He wanted Jess to acknowledge how wrong she'd been about him, but he wasn't sure even an apology would make up for her lack of faith.
Trying unsuccessfully to repress both memories
and urges, Devlin ambled over to the bed and sat down with his back to the headboard, where he'd been when Jessica had interrupted. If she'd come here to apologize, he was willing to listen . . . but he wouldn't make it easy for her.
Drawing one leg up, he-rested his arm on his knee, the crystal glass dangling from his fingers. "I suppose you'll eventually get around to telling me why you're here?"