She didn’t answer. Not at first. She merely took a pace forward, as if silently matching him. And now they were so close that if he’d lifted his arm up he could have touched her. He wanted to touch her; she knew him well enough by now to tell.
‘Getting you to relinquish control. Just for once,’ she told him at last.
‘Is that so?’ he demanded through gritted teeth.
Isla made herself smile. ‘It is.’
Then, reaching up onto her tiptoes, as the waterfall shower cascaded over them both, she pressed her lips to his.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HAD HE BEEN waiting a whole lifetime just to kiss her again?
It felt like it. And that mere realisation should have made him take stock. Instead it walloped into him, winding him, before turning infinitely softer and moving like a caress over him. It was a smile that made him take another—possibly perilous—step closer.
As though he was compelled.
He struggled, trying to pull together some semblance of discipline. Though whether for her or for himself he couldn’t be sure. He’d spent his whole adult life feeling as though there was a monster prowling deep inside him, lurking in the dark, stalking around the edges. He’d thought of himself as some kind of ringmaster, trying to keep that monster in check.
Now, abruptly, he felt as though he wasn’t the one with the power at all. She was—Isla was—and she was leading him by the nose.
Or something rather further down.
As if she was weaving some kind of magic around him, binding him. Worse, he liked it.
‘Whatever game you think you’re playing, Isla,’ he ground out, only just able to pull his mouth from hers, ‘it won’t work.’
‘And if I’m not playing a game?’
The suggestiveness in her words licked over him, blood pooling in the very hardest part of him. It was too much to think she wouldn’t notice, when her eyes slid lower and widened that fraction.
Aside from the running water, the silence was hot, and heavy. Pulling around him, closing in until he felt it pressing on his lungs and stopping him from breathing properly.
And then, God help him, she licked her lips.
Nikhil didn’t remember reaching out. He didn’t remember hauling her to him. But suddenly she was there, in his arms, and he was
kissing her as though he was a suffocating man and she was the oxygen he needed to survive.
Perhaps she was.
He’d certainly never felt so desperate, so ferocious, so feral before. He slid his tongue against hers, revelling in the way she met him stroke for stroke. The way she took his lip in her teeth and grazed it with just enough pressure.
Need fired through him. Raw. Unrestrained. It made the beast inside him roar. He would have her screaming his name again, as she had that first night.
Even the memory of it was intensified, now that he had her in his arms. It took everything he had not to simply lift her in his arms, carry her to the bed and rip her clothes off so he could indulge in every last erotic fantasy he’d had about her.
‘I told you.’ She drew back unexpectedly, as if reading his mind. ‘Tonight isn’t about me losing control.’
He wasn’t prepared for the sense of loss, especially when desire was still unmistakable in her tone, her dark, lust-filled eyes never leaving his.
He wanted to pull her back to him. He didn’t know how he resisted. Maybe because that male part of him still wanted to make her come back to him. To beg him.
‘Then what?’ he bit out; for the first time in a couple of decades he wasn’t sure he trusted himself.
Every second of silence wrapped tighter around him. He felt more and more wired. And somehow Isla knew it. More than knew it—she was relishing it.
And just when he thought she wasn’t going to speak, she stretched her hand out and ran it straight down the length of his body. Over his chest, his belly, her eyes never leaving his. Then, slowly and deliberately, she wrapped her hand around him, one long, elegant finger at a time, sliding from root to tip, leaving him forgetting to even breathe.