Yes, please, she begged him silently, and let him lower her hand back to his chest, let him lower his dark head, and parted her lips in readiness for when his met them.
Then he was kissing her, kissing her hotly, kissing her deeply, kissing her urgently like a man stealing something he knew he shouldn’t take. But Eve wanted him to take. In fact she wholly encouraged him by sliding her hands up his shirt front until they joined at the back of his neck, then she parted her lips that bit more to invite him to take as much as he liked.
Heat poured from one to the other. One of them released a pent-up sigh—maybe both of them did. His hands left her shoulders and spread themselves across her slender spine, firm yet gentle in the way they urged her into closer contact with him. She liked it—loved it. This man had been threatening to ignite her like this from the first moment she had ever set eyes on him.
She was warm, she was sweet, she w
as seduction itself. She was everything he had been fantasising she would be for so long now he couldn’t remember when it had begun. His hands felt enlivened merely by touching her. His body was slowly drowning in sensual heat. If she moved any closer, he’d had it, he was sure of it; that dragging sensation between his thighs was telling him he was ready to leap.
And the kiss? It just went on and on as a fascinating swim through a million pleasure zones. He didn’t want it to end. Yet it had to end.
‘What is this?’ he murmured, against her mouth. ‘Mutual consolation?’
He was trying to cool things, though Eve could tell he didn’t really want to cool anything. So what if it was consolation to him? she asked herself. If the power of his hunger was anything to go by, Ethan Hayes was more than ready to be consoled. ‘I’m game, if you are,’ she therefore confided with enough breathy seduction to slay any man.
‘Eve the flirt, Eve the temptress.’ Ethan fought a hard battle between his desire to be tempted and a need to break free from her magic spell. But, in doing so, he hadn’t realised he had said the words out loud.
Eve broke all connection. It was so abrupt he didn’t even have time to respond. She turned away—walked away—then wrapped her arms around her body in a way he recognised all too well.
Eve trying to hug her pain away. He named it with a sense of bitter self-contempt for being the one to make it happen this time.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Yes, you did,’ she cut in on him in a thin little voice.
A sigh eased itself from his body. ‘All right,’ he admitted it. ‘So I think you like to tease men’s senses.’ She had been teasing his senses since the day they’d first met—was still teasing them! Even with whole chasms between them right now, he could still feel her lips and the impression of her body where it had pressed against his.
Damn it to hell! ‘Aidan Galloway isn’t the only man I’ve watched you turn inside out with a smile,’ he added, angry with himself now for allowing that kiss to happen at all! ‘Jack Banning isn’t immune and neither is Raoul Delacroix.’
She stiffened sharply. ‘Meaning what?’ She spun on him. ‘That I did get what I deserved last night?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Ethan sighed wearily. ‘I will never say that!’
‘But it’s interesting that you’re clocking up a whole list of men who could have been mad enough for me to want to spike my drink! We could even add your name, since you’ve just given in against your better judgement and kissed Eve the flirt!’
Ethan had no defence. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say helplessly. ‘But I was not making a judgement on you! If anything I was making a judgement on them! On me—it—oh, I don’t know.’ He sighed, heavily aware that he’d dug his own grave as deep as it needed to go.
‘In other words the name doesn’t really matter, just the one they revolve around,’ Eve misunderstood him—deliberately he suspected.
‘One name matters.’ He grunted.
‘As in, who tried the big seduction of Eve the flirt?’ Ethan winced. Eve nodded, feeling that she’d more than deserved that telling wince. ‘Well, let’s go through all the candidates shall we?’ She was beginning to warm to her sarcastic theme. ‘We both know it wasn’t you, so we can cross your name from the list. Jack Banning has a job to protect, so, even if it was him, he isn’t going to come out and admit he so much as looked at me the wrong way. If it was Aidan, I’m in trouble because the Galloways are rich and powerful, and very clannish, they protect their own in ways you would not believe. As for André Visconte, he will defend his half-brother to his very last breath—as he has done on countless occasions before! Then there is my grandfather to consider—another rich man with too much power at his fingertips. If he finds out someone has dared to overstep the line, he will yell very loudly for the head of the man who tried to seduce his innocent granddaughter while she was under the influence of drink. War will be declared between the two involved families. But who do you think will come out of it with the damaged reputation? Me,’ she threw at him. ‘Eve the flirt. Eve the temptress. Eve the spoiled little rich girl who likes to lead men on for the fun of it and has finally received her just desserts!’
She was near to tears and didn’t want him to know it, so she spun away again taking with her the image of him just standing there staring at her as if she’d just grown two heads. Well, maybe she had! She certainly felt as if she had two heads rocking on her neck. She was tired through lack of sleep, exhausted with lingering shock and whatever else was still permeating her bloodstream. And she was hurting inside because she still couldn’t bring herself to understand why Raoul had believed he could do to her what he had tried to do! Nor could she quite manage to justify that she hadn’t deserved what had happened.
That was the toughest pill to swallow. Self-contempt. She named it bleakly as she stared out of the window, while a deathly silence crowded in from behind. What was he thinking? she wondered painfully. What was now going on inside his cynical head?
Ethan was struggling to think anything much. She was amazing, was his one main impression, and that came from the gut not the brain. But, standing there with the light coming in from behind her, she seemed to shimmer like a proud goddess sent down from the heavens to mess up his life. No wonder her grandfather worshipped her. He was beginning to understand what that felt like.
He was also stunned by what she’d thrown at him. Worse, he wanted to refute what she’d predicted was bound to happen but knew that he couldn’t. It was the way of the world. Since the beginning of time, woman had been cast in the role of temptress and man merely as a slave to her seductive wiles. He was as guilty as anyone of assuming the same thing about Eve. He’d even likened her to the serpent in paradise, when in truth the serpent had been his own desire to tap into that special magic that was Eve. Man being man at the expense of woman, in other words, blaming her for his weakness.
It was not a nice thing to admit about oneself.
‘So…’ He sighed in what he knew was his surrender to the whole darn package that was Eve. ‘Tell me what it is you want to do,’ he invited.
Eve turned to look at him. All he saw was a pair of tear-washed wounded eyes. ‘Do you mean it?’ she asked him in an unsteady voice that finally finished him.
Ask me to bite the apple, Eve, and I will do it, he mused ruefully, well aware that man’s oldest weakness was still very much alive inside him; after all he had just admitted to himself. ‘Yes, I mean it,’ he confirmed and even felt like smiling at his own downfall.