Читать книгу Vows They Can't Escape - Heidi Rice - Страница 13
ОглавлениеDANE BREATHED IN the sultry scent of Xanthe’s arousal, still holding on to her butt as if she were the only solid object in the middle of a tornado.
How could it be exactly the same between them? The heat, the hunger, the insanity?
He felt as if he’d just been in a war. And he was fairly sure it was a war he hadn’t won.
What were you thinking, hitting on her like that?
He’d been mad. Mad that he’d shouted at her, mad that she’d collapsed in front of him, and madder still that he cared enough about her to be sorry. But most of all he’d been mad that he could still want her so much, despite everything.
The come-on had been a ploy to intimidate her, to make her fold and do as she was told. But she hadn’t. She’d met his demands with demands of her own. And suddenly they’d been racing to the point of no return like a couple of sex-mad teenagers—as if the last ten years had never happened.
‘Dane, put me down. You’re crushing me.’
The furious whisper brought him crashing the rest of the way back to reality.
He drew in an agonising breath of her scent. Light floral perfume and subtle sin. And lifted his head to survey the full extent of the damage.
Her hair had tumbled down, sticking in damp strands to the line of her throat. A smudge of mascara added to the bluish tinge under her eyes, the reddened skin on her chin and cheek suggesting she was going to have some serious beard-burn in the morning.
He should have shaved. Then again, he should have done a lot of things.
She looked shell-shocked.
He had the weird urge to laugh. At least he wasn’t the only one.
She pushed against his chest, struggling to get out of his arms in earnest.
‘Stop staring at me like that. I have to leave.’
He let her go and watched her scramble away, trying to be grateful that he’d at least managed to stop himself from leaping off the deep end this time. The painful erection made sure he didn’t feel nearly as great about that last-minute bout of sanity as he should.
She swept her hair back and bent to slip on the heels which must have fallen off at some point during their sex apocalypse, making it impossible for him not to notice how the slim skirt highlighted the generous contours of her butt. He tore his gaze away.
Haven’t you tortured yourself enough already?
She pressed a hand to her forehead, glancing round—still struggling to calm down, to take stock and figure out what the heck had just happened was his guess.
Good luck with that.
‘I should go.’ She smoothed her clothing with unsteady hands and brushed a wayward curl behind her ear. It sprang straight back.
He planted his hands in his pants pockets and resisted the urge to hook it back round her ear a second time. Because look how that had ended the first time.
She was right. She should go. Before the urge to follow through on what they’d just started got the better of them.
Hitting on her had been a dumb move. What exactly had he been trying to prove? That she still wanted him? That he was the one in charge? Or just that he was the biggest dumbass on the planet?
Because, whatever way you looked at it, that dumb move had stirred up stuff neither one of them was ready to deal with. Yet.
‘You think?’ he sneered, because their sex apocalypse wasn’t just on him.
She’d made the decision to sneak back into his life and poke at something that had died a long time ago. And when he’d made that first dumb move, instead of telling him no she’d gone off like a rocket—giving him a taste of the girl he remembered which he wasn’t going to be able to forget any time soon.
She glared at him, picking up on his pissy tone.
Yeah, that’s right, sweetheart. I’m the guy you decided wasn’t good enough for you. The guy you still can’t get enough of.
‘Don’t you dare try to put this insanity on me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t start it. And, anyway, we finished it before things got totally out of hand. So it’s not important.’
Hell, yeah, it is. If I say it is.
‘We didn’t finish it,’ he pointed out, because scoring a direct hit seemed vitally important. ‘I did.’
The flush scorched her skin and she blew out a staggered breath. ‘So what? I got a little carried away in the heat of the moment. That’s all.’
‘A little?’ Talk about an understatement.
Her lips set in a mulish line, the blush still beaming on those beard-scorched cheeks.
‘It was a mistake, okay? Brought on by stress and fatigue and...’ She paused, her gaze darting pretty much everywhere but his face. ‘And sexual deprivation.’
‘Sexual deprivation?’ He scoffed. ‘How do you figure that?’
She was going to have to spell that one out for him.
‘I’ve been extremely busy for the past five years. Obviously I needed to blow off some steam.’
He should have been insulted. And a part of him was. But a much larger part of him wanted to know if she’d really just told him she’d been celibate for five years.
‘Exactly how long has it been since you got to “blow off some steam”?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘That long, huh?’ he mocked, enjoying the spark of temper—and the news that he’d been her first in a while—probably way too much.
He’d never sparred with her when she was a girl. Because she’d always been too cute and too fragile. It would have been like kicking a puppy. He’d always had to be so careful, mindful of how delicate she was. Back then he’d been terrified he’d break her, that his rough, low-class hands would be too demanding for all that delicate, petal-soft skin. So he’d strived hard to be gentle even when it had cost him.
But she’d given as good as she’d gotten a minute ago. And damn if that didn’t turn him on even more.
The flush now mottled the skin of her cleavage, and suddenly he was remembering gliding his tongue across her nipple, her soft sob of encouragement as he captured the hard bud between his teeth.
His blood surged south. And he got mad all over again.
She’d been so far out of his reach that summer. But somehow she’d hooked him into her drama, her reality, made him want to stand up to her daddy, to fight her demons, to brand her as his and follow some cock-eyed dream. When she’d told him she was pregnant he’d been horrified at first, but much worse had been the driving need that had opened up inside him—the fierce desire to claim her and their child.
She’d convinced him she wanted to keep his baby. And that was all it had taken to finally tip him over into an alternative reality where he’d kidded himself they could make it work. That she really wanted to make it work. With him. A British heiress and a nobody from Roxbury. As if.
He’d spent years afterwards dealing with her betrayal, determined that no one would ever have the power to screw him over like that again—even after he’d finally figured out that she’d probably just been playing him all along so she could stick it to her overbearing daddy.
The thought that he could still want her so much infuriated the hell out of him. But he’d just behaved like a wild man, making it tough to deny.
He’d ripped off her panties, damn it. When was the last time he’d done something like that? Been so desperate to get to a woman he’d torn off her underwear? Hadn’t even taken the time or trouble to undress her properly, to kiss her and caress her?
He might not be a master of small talk, but he had some moves. Moves women generally appreciated and which he’d worked at acquiring over the last ten years.
Until Xanthe had strolled back into his life and managed to rip away all those layers of class and sophistication and bring back that rough, raw, reckless, screwed-up kid. The kid he’d always hated.
She made a dash for the elevators.
‘Hey, wait up!’ He chased her down, grabbed her wrist.
She swung round, her eyes bright with fury and panic. ‘Don’t touch me. I’m not staying.’
He lifted his hand away. ‘I get that. But I want to know where you’re going.’ He scrambled for a plausible reason. ‘So I can get the papers delivered tomorrow.’
In person.
‘You’ll sign them?’
She sounded so surprised and so relieved he wondered if there was more to those papers than she was letting on. Because she had to know there was no way on earth he would want to contest their divorce—no matter how hot they still were for each other.
