“I know my desires,” she said in a whisper. “I do.”
“Then you have a choice,” he said softly. “Lock them away and ignore them. Walk out of this room. Or learn to embrace them without shame. For that is what people mean when they call a woman wicked, you know.” He waited until she looked away from his shoulder, back to his face. “It has nothing to do with the quality of her spirit,” he said, “or the measure of her character. In this world, there is nothing more wicked than a woman who is unafraid to acknowledge what she wants.”
Still she hesitated. “But I have told you before what I want,” she said slowly. “At the Moulin Rouge. You stopped me then.”
“Yes,” he said. “And maybe I’ll stop you now. That’s a right I have, and a risk you must take. But even if I stop you, that won’t mean you were wrong to have taken the risk.”
She stared at him. She could not speak the words. Could she?
He laughed, a soft, rough sound in the darkness. “For God’s sake,” he murmured. “It’s only me, you know. Not some stranger.”
A flush moved through her, warming her, heating her stomach, the backs of her knees. No. Not some stranger. Far from it. He had been watching her for years. Even when she had not been watching him, his eyes had rested on her, observing, studying. Forming opinions that nobody else had thought to draw about her. Disciplined. Shrewd. Clever.
“I want you to do things to me.” She swallowed. “I was to have been a married woman by now. I want to . . . know.” On a ragged breath, she said, “And now I have told you what I want. Will you refuse?”
He remained still for a long, agonizing moment. Perhaps he was deliberately tormenting her. She could not say, for the light in the room made his face impossible to read.
And then he rolled up onto his knees in one fluid move. A fine line of dark hair trailed down from his navel, disappearing into the waistband of his trousers, which clung low to his angular hip bones. “No,” he said.
For a split second, she did not know whether he was assenting or refusing. And then he rose very lightly from the bed, and from the expression suddenly revealed on his face, the slight, wicked cant to his lips, she understood that he was hers.
Her experience was based on novels. She expected him to lunge, then—to seize her by the waist and toss her onto her back. Instead, he smoothed his hand beneath her hair, cupping the side of her neck in one large, warm palm. Twice, thrice, he smoothed her neck, and then he lifted her hair away and bent his head. His breath wandered up her throat, hot, restless, as if searching for a place to lodge.
“Suppose you try being more specific,” he whispered into her ear.
Her eyes drifted shut. “Yes.”
His lips brushed the spot beneath her ear, the lightest tease. “You wish me to make love to you? Or shall I make you come?”
She had no idea what the difference was. But she instinctively understood why he asked. He was going to make her own this moment. This choice.
Which was well and good, because the wild resolve in her would not back down now. “I don’t know,” she said steadily. “You will have to show me the difference. But first, you will kiss me, please.”
His laughter was hot, dark velvet. He set his hands on her shoulders. His palms rubbed up the sides of her throat, turned briefly so his knuckles could brush the line of her jaw, and then slid up along her cheeks. He lifted her face to his.
“With pleasure,” he said.
The kiss he pressed on her was gentle, inviting somehow, as if his mouth were asking hers some intimate question, a secret between two pairs of lips, not meant for the ears or thoughts above. His tongue moved to the corner of her mouth, touching, retreating, and then touching again: tasting her. It slid along the seam of her lips, and she inhaled, caught by the unexpected tenderness.
His teeth very gently bit her lower lip, in reproof or encouragement. Her lips opened, then, and he moved into the kiss—moved into her, his palm sliding around to cradle her skull as he backed her against the wall and his tongue came into her mouth.
He tasted like brandy, like mint toothpaste and lemon water. He tasted like a wild dark night in which girls lost themselves and were lucky to ever resurface—the sort of night that left white streaks in the hair. She kissed him back, trying to arch against him. He made some slight noise and adjusted his body so their torsos could not touch. Only his mouth wooed her, and his hand cupped her head.
She opened her eyes and saw that his had closed. He was concentrating completely and specifically on her mouth, and holding her as if she were made of glass, something unsteady and precious, that otherwise might threaten to break. How lightly and economically he held her. Yet she felt completely surrounded—held, possessed, fixed in place forever.