“No,” she whispered hoarsely against his lips when she abruptly broke their kiss.
“No what?” he muttered, his dark brows slanting dangerously as he looked down at her, his mouth set in a grim line. She also knew Dylan well enough to know he didn’t like being denied what he wanted, when he wanted it.
How he wanted it.
“In here,” Alice coaxed, cupping his whiskered jaw and urging him back down to her mouth. She didn’t know why she’d said it, precisely. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the room.
Or maybe she did know. She hadn’t liked what he’d said about this house and this room not being his. She wanted him to claim this space in the most elemental way.
Maybe she wanted to stake her claim, too. This room, this house, this world . . . none of it belonged to her. The only way she seemed capable of navigating this alien new territory was with Dylan as her guide. Her link. Sometimes, their passion, their intense hunger for one another, was the only thing that seemed real to her.
For a few seconds, he resisted her urging, his expression going hard and unreadable as he looked down at her. She rubbed her breasts seductively against his lower chest and ribs, circling her pelvis against his cock. Something sparked in his lustrous dark eyes. Gypsy eyes—that’s how she thought of them. She gyrated her hips more firmly. Triumph surged through her when she saw the telltale snarl shape his mouth. She slid her fingers into the cleft in his chin and then over his firm lips, tempting him.
Still, he didn’t move.
She slid one hand down the smooth skin of his torso, relishing the way he roughened beneath her touch. She looked down to where her fingers touched him, watching herself caress the two scars just below his ribs. Powerful emotion surged through her. Dylan had been stabbed there by Addie Durand’s kidnappers. He’d almost died as a boy of fourteen, trying to save that little girl. She clenched her eyelids shut, but almost immediately opened them, aware of Dylan’s hawk-like stare and not wanting to betray her vulnerability.
Her fingers lowered, looking for a distraction to lighten her emotional weight. She immediately found it.
He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, let alone touched. She loved to taunt him, but that didn’t mean she still didn’t fear the result a little. She knew more intimately than most that Dylan’s polished business exterior shielded a fierce, sometimes savage, always magnificent spirit. Her knowledge of that sharp edge of his personality added a dash of the forbidden to her arousal.
She ran a fingernail over a rib, taking note of his slight flinch. Her fingertips skimmed his taut abdomen, trailing down the silky, thin strip of dark hair beneath his belly button. She pushed her forefinger beneath the waistband of his jeans and stroked his skin in that vulnerable sweet spot: up and down, up and down. His expression grew hard as stone, his stare on her narrowing. She grasped the top button of his jeans, feeling his tension and her own anticipation mounting. Very deliberately, she slipped the button free of the hole while holding his stare.
Leaving most of his button fly fastened, she reached beneath his jeans, finding his velvety-smooth cockhead where it pressed below his hip bone. She slid her fingers over the well-defined, succulent crown and gave a firm, abrupt upward tug beneath the rim.
He jerked and hissed. The next thing she knew, he’d pinned her hands at the small of her back. She gasped and then laughed shakily when he roughly turned her in his arms.
“You get your way far too easily, do you know that?” he told her, his low, silky voice and warm, firm lips on her ear and throat sending a potent thrill through her. He pressed against her backside and transferred her captured wrists to the front of her. He flexed his hips, pushing his cock against her ass, a steel-hard demand. She moaned. His teeth rasped gently against the pebbled skin of her neck, and her moan turned shaky. “But sometimes, you’re bound to get more than you bargained for, Alice,” he hissed near her ear before his mouth closed on the opening, and pleasure rippled through her.
He pushed her from behind, urging her to move toward the bay window. Alice caught a glimpse of her face in the dark mirror of the shining glass. Her eyes looked enormous, her expression a strange mixture of anxiety and arousal. She’d recognized that warning in his voice just now. She did love to tease him, and there was always a price to pay for taunting a tiger. But it was what she needed at that moment, the forgetfulness of his demanding passion.
“Bend over and put your hands on the seat,” he growled softly. Her heartbeat leapt into double time.