“He lacks control, or some other such nonsense.”
It probably did sound like nonsense to them. “We’re looking for a very specific sort of individual,” she told him. “I deliberately gave your brother a great deal of stress to see how he’d react. I knew that he was . . . sensitive about his mother. I used that against him. Do you understand?”
“I understand Gabriel tried to strangle you, Miss Donovan. The first girl was strangled.”
“It’s not the same.” She folded her arms in front of her chest. “Someday, someone will push him and he’ll have a weapon in his hand, or he’ll strangle someone who can’t fight back. But it’ll be an impulsive act. Hot-blooded.”
Alec gave her a somber look. “I do not know what to do with him.”
“Intense psychotherapy maybe.”
“Pardon?”
She sighed. “Maybe you should just try talking to him?”
“Don’t you think I haven’t tried?” he began, and then paused, shaking his head. He was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, it wasn’t about his brother. “You’re shivering, Miss Donovan.”
She shrugged away his concern, but he was already taking off his jacket, dropping it over her shoulders. His hands stayed there, his eyes darkening as he stared at her.
She was intensely aware of him, every detail, from his lean strength, the warmth of his body, the smell of his skin, the way his dark hair fell against his forehead. The tingle she’d felt earlier became a hum. She knew he was going to kiss her. She just didn’t know how she felt about it.
Still, she didn’t step back when he slid his fingers into her hair to cradle the back of her head. The action nudged her closer. She hesitated rather than resisted, her mind spinning with all the reasons why this was a bad idea. Too many reasons.
“Kendra,” he whispered.
It was, she realized with a jolt, the first time he’d ever said her name. In this era, where the formal address was used even between husbands and wives, it seemed intensely intimate. How would she feel when he actually kissed her?
She had only a half a second to wonder before he was kissing her, his lips pressing against hers, softly at first, then more deeply, with growing passion. Her brain seemed to short-circuit, overwhelmed by the sheer physical pleasure of his stroking tongue, his slanting mouth. Hazily, she was aware of his hands moving up and down her back. She pressed closer, the jacket sliding off her shoulders as she wrapped her arms around his neck, her fingers tunneling through his thick hair, giving as good as she got.
She was shivering again, but this time it was from excitement. And a deep hot need.
He pulled back slightly to give her a look, eyes gleaming black in the moonlight. Then he tightened his arms, and bent for another long, savoring kiss that was as earth-shattering as the one before. Kendra didn’t know how long it went on—the guy could kiss—before she pulled back. “Wait. Wow.”
Deprived of her mouth, Alec nibbled a sizzling path across a high cheekbone to her ear. She was out of breath. It made her instantly wary. She’d known there was an attraction—and how tepid that word sounded. Attraction she could handle, that slightly warm undercurrent, the glow. The buzz. But this was somehow . . . more. It was too intense, too intimate. She felt as though her skin was on fire, her bones melting against the hard length of his body. As his mouth found a sensitive spot below her ear, she clutched at his shoulders and arched against him.
I don’t belong here.
Blood pounded in her ears. “We can’t do this.”
“I believe we can,” he murmured, and brought his mouth back to hers.
She was again breathless by the time they finally eased away from each other. With more than a little satisfaction, she noticed that he was breathing heavily as well.
Then he blinked. He looked like he was coming out of a dream, and entering into something unpleasant. “Good God, what am I doing?”
“I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”
He dropped his hands and stepped away from her. “Forgive me, Miss Donovan.”
Miss Donovan again.
“It was just a kiss.” A really good kiss, a freaking fabulous kiss. But still.
He gave her a strange look. “My actions are inexcusable. I am no better than my brother.”
“You didn’t try to strangle me.”
“I took advantage of you! It could be said that I compromised you.”
They were alone, and they’d kissed. In this era, that was enough to force the issue of marriage. No wonder he looked so freaked out. Men, she thought. Regardless of century, they always believed they were the center of a woman’s world.