“You ripped my heart out, Lily. You knew what losing you would do to me, but you did it anyway, didn’t you?” He ground his teeth with the last word. “Damn you.”
She’d never seen him so angry, so cold, so utterly merciless. All the things that had happened in the last twenty-one months jumbled in her brain. Her being injured. Jack’s birth. Her dangerous meetings with DeBruzkya. She wanted to answer him. Robert was a rational man. Surely he would understand why she hadn’t wanted to put him at risk.
But he was so close, she couldn’t think. Her mind couldn’t form a single coherent thought. She gasped with a sudden thunderclap. Robert’s hands went to either side of her face, and every nerve in her body jumped. His palms were cool and slightly rough against her cheeks. He wasn’t exceptionally tall, barely six feet, but he seemed to tower over her, and she had to crane her neck to maintain eye contact.
“I want to know why you lied to me,” he said.
Lily tried to slide to one side. She had to get away from him, from the questions. From the truth she didn’t want to face. But he trapped her with his body. “You owe me the truth,” he said.
“I can’t,” she whispered.
He leaned into her with the full weight of his body. The contact shocked her. She could feel the hard ridge of him against her belly, shocking her senses and kindling a flame that had burned tiny and hot for almost two years. “I don’t want this.”
“That’s not what your eyes are telling me.”
“Stop before this goes too far.”
“Too late,” he said, and lowered his mouth to hers.
The kiss struck her as if a lightning bolt had stabbed down through the roof and run the length of her body. She felt herself go rigid. Long denied needs coiled and snapped inside her like lit fuses doused with gunpowder. She tried desperately to deny the desire her intellect had struggled so hard to forget. But the truth of the moment seared her, and she was lost. To reason. To sanity.
But her body remembered. Every hard plane. Every solid ridge of muscle. Every brush of hard against soft. She remembered the heady jitter of nerves at his touch. The promise of more. The anticipation of knowing she would get it.
All the while his mouth worked black magic on hers. A combination of gentle and fierce that made her legs weak and beckoned her to make a mistake. Lily felt herself begin to unravel, like yarn ripped from a spool to tangle and shred. Her senses flickered. Common sense fluttered away. Vaguely she was aware of her arms going around his shoulders. His name on her lips. The truth bursting in her heart.
Making a sound low in his throat, he slipped his tongue between her lips. The sudden taste of him shocked her with pleasure. She opened to him, delving into the warm silkiness of his mouth with her tongue. He murmured something in her ear, but she couldn’t make out the words over the pounding of blood in her veins. She’d forgotten what it was like to be kissed like this. To be swept away and lost in a man’s arms. In Robert’s arms. The rightness of it fractured her control.
She arched against him, her hands skimming over his shoulders where rock hard muscles bunched and trembled with restrained power. His hands swept down her back, pausing at her hips and holding her in place while he moved against her. The flood of arousal mingled with urgency and coursed hotly through her, a lava flow barreling down a mountain to devour everything in its path.
And not even the knowledge that she was making a mistake could stop her. She kissed him with wild abandon, poured endless months of heartbreak and loneliness into it. She let herself feel all the things she had refused to feel, refused to remember, all the things she had denied for what seemed like eternity.
She shuddered when his hands brushed over her breasts. She’d forgotten how powerful desire could be. How he could make her breasts ache for his touch. She arced, giving him full access. His hands possessed her, molding her flesh. She cried out when he brushed his fingertips over her sensitized nipples, but he swallowed the sound with another kiss. She writhed in his arms, wild for his touch, frantic to ease the fire burning within her.