The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“You move like a cat,” he said. “So fierce and focused. You are a welcome sight, Mademoiselle Gates.” His expression became less amused, his eyes shone with something that once again sent sweet pulsing confusion through her. In his eyes, which were now full of desire, she could see something she had sought her entire life without even knowing. “You are beautiful,” he said softly. She reached him where he lay in the dim light and touched his face with a searching hand. It caressed the broad forehead, the cheek, the square jaw. She felt his hands find the silk garters and begin to move, exploring in the dark. She pulled back instinctively, then, slowly, pressed herself into the hand. He pulled away. They had both been startled by what he had done—both swept open.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. But she did not want to forgive him. She took his hand and placed it at her waist, drew it downward just a small bit, then a small bit more.

“Do not play at this game, Electra Gates,” he entreated thickly. “You do not know me.”

Electra felt herself skimming along on the feelings that had begun the first time she had seen this man—feelings that had been intensified and focused as she saw his authority and power, the conflicted heated contradictions beneath the cool gray-eyed gaze. She remembered the feel of her own hands on the scented breasts she had seen in the mirror only moments before.

“I am deadly serious, Basil Le Cherche.” She drew his hand upward again, across one breast, around its pebbling nipple.

“This is unwise. We could be discovered any moment!”

“All the more reason to act now … to be who we are now.”

Who was this passionate creature saying these things? It was herself—a self she was only just discovering, and this self pulled closer to the man chained here in the darkness beside her, lay her thigh against him so it gave his own feelings away. She gasped at her own reaction to it.

“You cannot say you are not moved,” she whispered. “You cannot say you do not wish me to do this.” She took his face in her hands and even in the dim shadows of their prison she saw the intensity of his desire, the depth of her power over him at this moment. She drew his lips to hers and they fell into a deep kiss.

“I do not intend to be turned aside, and I am not engaged in a game,” she moaned. She placed his hand over her heart, which beat hard and fast. “What is happening to me is beyond my ken,” she whispered, “but I do not fear it. I seek it. I seek you. You say a woman has never moved you. But I say you are a liar.”

“Witch! Sorceress! I am not a liar—only a man whose mind has always controlled his impulses. But now…”

“Now?”

“Now I am controlled.” He placed her hand on his own chest, which pounded an answering cadence to her own, an insistent pulsing demand, and he pulled her against him. His chains draped across her back, her chest. He circled her with his arms, found the long laces at the back of her corset and loosened her bodice with the dexterity that only experience could give. The cloth fell away, the perfect breasts stunning in the low light, chains circling them, chains crossing her body and tangling it with his as he wound her more tightly in his arms. Basil Le Cherche had had many women but always before he had been distant, protected, cold. Now his body, the body that had always done his bidding, was entirely out of control, breathing hard, pushing aside linen and lace. When he realized that among his feelings at this moment there was fear, he was astounded. He had never experienced this before—neither the unbridled need nor the fear of that need. He rolled aside in an excruciatingly difficult act of discipline. “Stop! Electra, we will find a way to freedom and you will return to the world you have left. You will be sorry for this moment.”

“I have lived in that world and I know exactly what residence there is worth,” she answered. “I have no use for it. And I will not be sorry.” She slipped the last of her clothing away.

“They could open that door in a moment. You risk your life.”

“I might have but a very little life left to live, and nothing in my life has made me feel alive as you do—as this moment does. If we live, Basil Le Cherche, I could never go back to where and what I was when I first saw you. I have traveled too far to ever be able to live in the world I once inhabited. You have shown me that. Tell me again that I am beautiful, Le Cherche. Say it again, for now you will meet no resistance when you praise me. Or touch me.”

“You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known,” he said, lowering her beneath him, giving up any control he might have had over his own body, his own mind.

She had barely set the loosened planks back in place and returned to her own space before footsteps descended, guards appeared, and Electra Gates was pulled out of her cell and taken back to confront her captor once again—but it was not the same Electra Gates who had been dragged down only a matter of hours before. She was a more formidable opponent now—a fiercer creature more aware of her own powers. Her own capabilities. Her own joys.





NEAVE

And Then, Ricky Luhrmann

When the divorce from Peter Winthrop was final, Lilly started dating again. Long ago we’d set up a daytime roster of babysitters to help us manage both Annie and Be Your Best, but evenings it was always one of us. Jane and I, both smitten with Annie, were always happy to be left with the little girl while Lilly made her way back into the world of romantic adventure. Maybe that eagerness of ours put my sister on too long a leash.

When she announced that she’d fallen in love again, it was a surprise. It shouldn’t have been. Ricky Luhrmann was fiery, poetic, volatile—traits that made the man a mesmerizing date but should have given her pause about his husband potential. I said as much, which did less than no good. Right from the start he made her ecstatic and he made her suicidal. She’d come home from every date with him looking drugged—so glassy and heated I’d thought she was ill. Asked if she felt all right, she’d laugh. Not a funny ha-ha laugh.

He wrote love letters, which is enough in some cases to clinch the deal. I don’t know why more men don’t take advantage of this simple truth about women. Love letters can turn the most stubborn case around. He told her she had a wild heart, and I said that wasn’t exactly the way I would say it, but I kind of knew what he meant. She did have a wild heart, and the fact that he saw it and loved it delivered her into his hands.

“He says he dreams me,” she murmured one slow afternoon as I tried to interest her in a few shifts in the budget lines. “He says I’m a doorway, a sacred space like all doorways, and he thanks God he found the country I lead to.”

How many good women have been snared and skinned with a little poetry, even bad poetry? Run! I wanted to say, but Ricky was like a scent or taste that shook all the reason out of her head. My sister’s mood made me appalled and envious in roughly equal measure.

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