His hands slid over her skin, each caress more evocative than the last, building the fire inside her, sending it spreading beneath her skin, heating her.
Seducing her all over again.
Then his fingers splayed over her stomach, evocatively flexed, then slid lower. To artfully, tantalizingly caress her curls, then lightly, oh-so-lightly probe the soft flesh behind.
She sucked in a breath against the constriction banding her lungs. Cracking open her lids, she looked into the mirror, and saw him, a dark, dangerous shadow behind her, his shoulders wider than hers, his head bent as he studied her body, watched as his fingers played…
Then he lifted his head and saw her watching. Watched her watching his hands move evocatively, provocatively over her body until she shuddered and let her lids fall.
His hands eased, then left her.
“You wish your lover were here—you want to feel him inside you. But he isn’t.”
He’d moved back from her; she wasn’t sure where he was.
“So you let your hands fall, open your eyes, put on your nightgown, then blow out the candles and get into bed.”
She obeyed but didn’t see him. She picked up her lawn nightgown from the chair in which he’d previously been sitting, drew it on over her head, did up the buttons, then returned to the dressing table and doused the candles.
And caught a glimpse of him, a denser shadow near the bed. She headed for it; as she reached it he spoke from the darkness along the other side.
“You get under the covers, lie on your back, draw the covers to your chin, close your eyes, and compose yourself for sleep.”
Wondering, she did as he said, settling and closing her eyes, then relaxing.
“That’s when you realize you’re not alone—that there is, indeed, a man in the room with you. A man who’s been watching you undress lasciviously. Your lover? Or another? You don’t know, you can’t tell. The room’s too dark for you to see, so you keep your eyes closed, feign sleep, and wait to see what he, whoever he is, will do.”
Straining her ears, she heard him moving unhurriedly about the room, undressing. Then came silence.
Suddenly the covers were lifted, and the bed bowed beside her, then he shifted closer and she could feel the hard hot naked length of him stretching alongside her.
He settled on one elbow, looking down at her; she could feel his gaze on her face, sense his looming nearness.
Then he reached across her and caught her hand, caught the other and locked both in one of his; raising her arms, he pressed her hands into the pillows above her head.
And leaned nearer. “Open your eyes.”
She did; all she could see was a large dense shadow looming over her in the dark, all she could sense was the hard male strength of his body poised half over hers.
“Who am I?” The words drifted through her mind. “Your lover? Or the dark stranger?”
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His attention had drifted to her lips. They throbbed.
“Both,” she murmured, instinctively arching, testing his hold on her hands, aching to feel his lips on hers, to feel his body along the length of hers.
She heard a deep chuckle, then he obliged and kissed her.
Ravenously.
Cocooned in the dark, he was as she’d said, both her lover and a dark stranger—a forcefully seductive male intent on taking from her all he wished, on wringing from her every last gasp, every last iota of surrender.
She had her own agenda. She wriggled and squirmed until he shifted over her, pinning her to the bed—and her senses sighed in delight, in satisfaction and building expectation. Why she so craved his weight was a mystery, but she had no time to pursue it, caught, held effortlessly in a wild mating of mouths, of lips melding, tongues tangling—while he opened the front of her nightgown and laid her breasts bare, set his free hand to the swollen mounds and made them ache.
Then he pulled back from the kiss, looked down, then lowered his head and devoured.
Her hands still anchored above her head, she could do nothing but gasp, arching helplessly, beyond thought offering her flesh for his delectation.