Her obstinacy made him smile, and to hide it, he pulled his shirt off, yanking it over his shoulders, baring his chest to her. She immediately looked away, playing the prim and proper miss perfectly.
He laughed. “I am not naked,” he replied, smoothing the waist of his trousers and pretending to inspect a long-healed scar on one of his arms while watching her. “You have seen it before, have you not?”
She looked to him, then snapped her attention back to the wall. “That was different. You were wounded!”
His eyes darkened. “Before that,” he said, knowing he had her when her cheeks went red. He would give his entire fortune to know what had happened that night. But he would not simply hand her what she wanted. On principle.
And therein lay the challenge with her.
Between them. Exhilarating even as it made him mad.
“Do you not manage a home for boys?”
She exhaled in a little frustrated puff and stared at the ceiling. “It is not the same.”
“It is precisely the same.”
“They are aged three through eleven!” she insisted.
He smirked. “So, they are smaller.”
She lifted her hands wide in the universal signal for frustration. She was quiet for a long moment, before she said, “I did not thank you for giving them time today.”
A thread of pleasure went through him at the words—something akin to pride. He ignored it. “You needn’t thank me.”
“Nevertheless.” She looked down at the floor, her shoulders straight. “They enjoyed their time with you immensely.”
The small acknowledgment was an enormous concession in the battle they waged. He could not resist moving toward her, walking her backward, across the floor of his rooms. He knew it would unsettle her, but he couldn’t seem to care. When he was a foot or so from her, he lowered his voice. “And what of you? Did you enjoy it?”
Her cheeks flamed. “No.”
He smiled at the instant lie. “Not even the bit where I kissed you?”
“Certainly not.”
He came closer, pushing her back, drawn to the heat of her. Finally catching her in his arms, loving the way she gasped at his touch, loving the way the silk of her dress, warm from her body, brushed against his bare chest. He slid his hand down her arm, finding her hand, lifting it to the strap that hung from the ceiling above her.
She knew precisely what to do, grasping the leather strip as he repeated the movement with the other hand until she stood long and lush, arms extended overhead, like a sacrifice. Like a gift.
She could release it at any time. Deny him the moment. But she didn’t, instead staring up at him, daring him with her beautiful gaze to come closer. To touch her more. To tempt her.
He took the dare, cupping her cheek in his hand, spreading his thumb across the high arc of it. Loving the softness of the skin there even as he told himself he did not notice it. “No?”
“No,” she exhaled, and the sound of her breath turned him hard as a rock.
He looked down at her, her dress cut scandalously low, her breasts straining at the fabric because of her position, and he at once praised and cursed Hebert for doing his bidding.
Mara Lowe was the most tempting thing he’d ever seen.
But strangely, it wasn’t her face or her body or the perfect breasts that rose and fell in an unsettled rhythm that convinced him of the fact. It was the way she faced him head-on. It was the way she refused to cow to him. The way she refused to fear him. The way she met him partway.
The way she saw him.
He was no killer, and she was the only person in the world who had always believed it. The only person who had ever known it to be true.
He lifted her chin, exposing the long column of her neck, and pressed a long, lingering kiss to the pulse beneath her chin, then to its mate at the place where neck met shoulder. “Are you sure you didn’t enjoy it?”
The words teased at her warm skin, and she shook her head in a broken movement, swaying against the strap, holding tight to combat the way the caress impacted her. “Quite,” she replied, the breath shuddering out of her, as he moved on, kissing the slope of her breast, once, twice, a third time—until he reached the edge of her dress, and slid a single finger between silk and skin, barely able to tell the two apart, until he reached the pebbled flesh that ached for him.
For which he ached.
He pulled the silk down, and spoke to her. “Even now?”
One hand fell from its mooring, coming to rest on his shoulders. Her bare skin against his. He could feel the want in them. “Even now.”
It was a taunt. A challenge.
One he did not refuse. He set his lips to her breast, loving the little cry that escaped her as he worried that sacred skin, sucking low and soft until the cry became a moan in the dark room. He could not stop himself from pulling her closer, lifting her from her feet, wrapping her legs about his waist, worshipping her there in that room that rarely knew pleasure and too often knew pain.