“And on this enforced vacation, you’re going to try and seduce me out of the deathbed vow I made to my father?” She lifted an eyebrow with the question.
He smiled, his grin quick and wicked. “If you want me to. I just said I’d change your mind, though.”
Hel’s blush was an immediate inferno—hot enough that she glanced surreptitiously at her arm just to make sure she hadn’t caught fire.
“You’re not,” he said, reading her mind.
“What?” she asked, irritation threading the question.
“On fire,” he said, chuckling. “You looked worried.”
“What are you talking about?” she snapped, knowing exactly what he was talking about.
“Well, you’re as red as a ripe tomato and even look a little sweaty, so I only thought...”
Her mouth dropped open again. “I’m not sweaty,” she said.
He inclined his head and raised his palms. “My mistake. Glistening.”
There was no match for his audacity, Hel realized. No attack she could be assured he wouldn’t deflect smoothly...except one.
“Yes.” The word danced out of her mouth, relaxed and self-assured, while her stomach spiraled and her palms went clammy. She had the sense of things picking up speed, right before they spun out of control—the moment before the crash she knew so well from her days of high-performance racing, but it was too late to take her foot off the gas now.
Once again, his entire body stilled, his cocky smile gone for a frozen moment as he stared her dead in the eye, gaze searching and intense. Uncertainty, raw emotion and...vulnerability all poured out of the deep, soul-revealing orbs of his eyes, and in the face of it, she was nearly lost, though to what she didn’t know.
She had thrown him off balance for once. It had taken offering herself up on a platter in order to do so, but she had been successful. But as things shifted within her, she realized he wasn’t the only one.
“You’re sure?” His eyes left no room for anything but absolute and irrefutable commitment.
Hel swallowed. Was she? Jenna and the king’s guard could handle her absence, but could she handle the man before her? There had never been a shadow of a doubt before, but there had also never been a challenge before. In fact, she’d yet to meet a challenge she wasn’t a match for.
The reminder shored her when her heart was less certain.
“Yes,” she answered.
Triumph lit his eyes, his grin returning, his canines catching the light streaming in through the skylights, to shine bright white and sharp. He licked his lips and she was helpless to do anything but watch, fascinated, rapt, absolutely trapped.
He pushed away from the desk he was leaning against and closed the space between them until she was forced to tilt up her head to maintain their eye contact.
Instinctively she knew not to break it, knew it would trigger a chase that she wasn’t sure she was fast enough to outrun.
In truth, she wasn’t sure it hadn’t already begun.
He brought his hands to her jaw and ran his fingers along its stubborn line, tiny jolts of electricity shooting through her skin in the wake of their contact. She sucked in a breath and his smile reached his eyes, though it could never have been called warm.
No. Warmth was pacts and partnership. The light that lit his eyes was triumph—cold, bright and biting.
He angled her face up, tilting it toward his even farther for greater access. His eyebrows had drawn together while his eyes stormed, both pleasure and anticipation weaving together with his win.
“Seven days. No more, no less—unless, of course, it doesn’t take that long.” And then he kissed her.
If she hadn’t already been lost at sea, she would have sworn the earth roiled beneath her when their lips met.
Like magnets with opposite poles, they locked on contact, neither of them in control of the attractive force that held them. He plundered, of course—what else would he have done? He was a pirate.
She surprised herself, though, when she opened to the onslaught, rather than pushing him away immediately and with grand retribution—what she would have done with any other man.
Sensing the surrender in her softening, he took more. More surprise came as she welcomed his dominance, pouring her own fierce nature into it, just this one time completely unafraid of overwhelming someone else.