Why? She still questioned that. They hadn’t raped her. After that first time, no one had touched her. Jansen Clay had told her she was so ugly he couldn’t pay anyone to fuck her, even in the interests of the test they needed to run on the drug.
They had let her suffer. Suffer while they petted her arm or stroked her hair.
She flinched at the distant memory. It was like that, except in her nightmares. The memories and the knowledge of her pain at that time were so distant, almost as though it had happened to someone else. Unless she dared to allow a man to touch her. Then the fear and the bleak sickness rolled inside her like a tidal wave ready to consume her.
Until tonight. Tonight, she would have given all she possessed for all the promises behind that one kiss. What made Micah different? What made her body react in this new way? Was it the man or the instinctive knowledge of the man’s control?
They were questions she couldn’t answer. Instead, she turned her attention to the dance floor and watched the gyrating bodies in fascination.
She had loved to dance when she was younger. As a teenager she had gone to every ball, every party, every dance that her father allowed her to attend. She would beg for weeks to go until he finally relented.
She had danced with friends then. Other girls who weren’t paired with a date, who were left out of the male/female dynamic. But it had been fun. She had laughed then, she had felt free during those hours.
Oh, let her go, Jansen. It’s not as though you have to worry about her virtue.
Her stepmother Elaine’s frustrated anger at Risa’s begging struck through her mind. Risa shook her head, fighting against the self-consciousness, the familiar pain that assailed her.
She promised herself she wouldn’t do this tonight.
Tonight, she was going to have a lover. It was a promise she had made to herself.
She could do this. Micah thought she was merely sheltered, that she had been overprotected throughout her life. He had been given that warning, Morganna had told her. Risa had been embarrassed by it, but now she felt a mild thrill at the thought of it. Micah would think of that, and he’d understand her hesitation, maybe.
“What do you think, Risa?” Morganna leaned forward, a bright smile on her lips as she asked the question.
> “About what?” Risa shook her head; she’d obviously not been following the conversation.
“About you, me, and Raven showing those men the hazards of deserting us?” the other woman laughed. “Would you go out on the floor and dance with us?”
Dance with other girls like she had as a child? God, she didn’t need anything else to dim her confidence at the moment than standing out there knowing she was there because a man didn’t want to dance with her.
Suddenly panic assailed her. It lodged in her check, tightened in her throat.
Her head jerked back until she was staring at the dance floor, and anger pushed through her, tearing at her mind as she fought against the knowledge that not once had a man asked her to dance.
Not that she could have forced herself out on the floor with a man she didn’t know. But she hadn’t even been asked. Not once.
The other women had been approached; she had been distantly aware of that. The advances had been laughed off, but there had been advances.
“Come on, Risa. We’ll have a blast,” Morganna laughed.
Her lips parted, Risa lifted a shaking hand to her throat and fought the feeling of suffocation. She could not, was not getting on that dance floor.
“I’m sorry, but Risa promised me her first dance.”
Her head jerked around and Micah was there. He stared down at her with a hint of a smile on his lips, his dark gaze warming, wrapping around her like a sultry summer night as he held his hand out to her.
“Reno and Clint chatter like old gossips,” he told her teasingly as she placed her hand in his, rising to her feet as though in a dream, and allowing him to lead her through the press of bodies to the dance floor.
As they reached the edge of the gyrating mass of bodies, the music changed, slowed, eased.
“Ah, they must have read my mind,” he commented as he turned her to him. “Still interested?”
She had never slow-danced.
The world around her seemed to fade as he placed one hand at her hip, held her hand with the other, and eased her against his body.
A harsh gasp tore from her at the contact of her nipples through her dress, against his hard male chest. Even through the layers of clothing the stroke of sensation was violent, electric.