Especially when he looked so severe, as if whatever she said would be refuted and thrown back at her. He was beautiful and dangerous, clad in black jeans and a black pullover that clung to hard pecs and biceps, someone who could squash her self-worth under a disparaging heel.
“I—” She had to clear her throat. Despite her terror at opening up, she was reacting to his closeness. Heat trickled into her fingers and toes, gathering in her loins. “The way you make me feel isn’t some adolescent need for approval or status or…whatever I was looking for then. It’s…good. I just feel so good when you touch me.”
Her voice dried up and he was talking over her anyway.
“Any man could make you feel like that.”
She flashed him a galled glare and snatched her hand back. “I’ve never reacted to anyone the way I do to you.”
Hurt started her pivoting away from him, but he snatched her back to face him.
“You haven’t been with anyone else—”
“I haven’t wanted to! That’s the point. You’re special. To me. To my body,” she clarified. “I don’t know why.”
He blew out a frustrated breath. “It’s the same for me. I don’t understand it either.”
“Really?” She shouldn’t have asked. She should be more confident, not beg for confirmation that he liked to be with her, but she desperately needed to hear it.
He seemed to waver over what to say to that. She might as well have been naked, standing there waiting.
“You must know how you affect me.”
She swallowed. His words arrowed sweetly into her heart, even though they only spoke of physical reaction.
“How would I?” she asked with a shrug that tried to hide her defenselessness. “You didn’t want me to stay last night. You didn’t want me to kiss you this morning.”
His cheek ticked in the way she was beginning to know meant his own shell was being penetrated. “Kiss me anywhere,” he said gruffly. “Everywhere. But not here.” He touched his scar lightly.
Her heart lurched while her shield crumbled, leaving her unsteady and weak with longing.
“Do you mean that?”
His stared right at her. “What do you think?”
CHAPTER TEN
SHE BLINKED, TRYING to take in this new information, new freedom, to seek badly yearned for physical contact with another human. With him.
“Like…now?” she asked cautiously, feeling pulled toward him.
The air in her lungs felt sharp as knives. Desire and insecurity ground their rough edges together inside her at how easily he was lifting up her emotions and tossing them around.
He looked at her with the masculine arrogance he wore like a cloak, pure Aleksy, isolated and driven and powerful. She was only Clair, green, overwhelmed and too deeply enthralled by him for her own good. At least when he was the sexual aggressor she knew he desired her. To take up the onus of initiating lovemaking meant doing the unthinkable: asking him to want her.
But she really wanted him to want her. Really, really did.
“Every man enjoys being seduced.” He shifted to lean his hips on the edge of the desk, contemplating her with a type of removed curiosity. “I’m no different.”
Seduced. She’d meant a kiss, but she was reminded of the care he’d taken when she threw a similar challenge at him.
Acute inadequacy sliced through her at the same time, cutting all the sharper because the longing within it was so honest. She wanted their most intimate connection with all the pent-up hunger that never seemed to dissipate, but she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Her base need for approval was too bone-deep, the risk too great if she failed to arouse him.
She shook her head and said with a papery laugh of bravado, “As if you’d ever give up control to anyone.”
“You don’t think you could make me?”
Her heart skipped, teased into hope by the light suggestion. “Could I?”
“Try,” he dared.
He was all supreme confidence, and that intimidated her, but a flash of eagerness for the challenge surprised her, making her pulse leap and her nerves flutter. She didn’t know what she was doing when they came together, each time so overwhelmed by his experience she lost all conscious thought, but the idea that she might be able to break past his wall of willpower excited her, making heat swirl and tingle into secretive places.
She tried to probe past his burned-gold eyes to the thoughts behind. Need was welling up to tight levels in her. She wanted to make him want her.
And he wasn’t as detached as he wanted to appear. He was watching her every breath, waiting to see what she’d do.
That gave her the courage to take a few steps toward him, but as his heat and scent surrounded her, all her thoughts short-circuited. Her hands lifted instinctively, greedy to touch, but nerves arrested her.