About Last Night

Another advance, another retreat. He wore a summery blue-checked shirt, open at the throat, tucked into dark blue jeans that had probably cost a mint. Prince Charming in casual wear. Only this royal personage had just popped open the clasp on his belt.

“No.” She propped her hands on her hips. “Quit being so bossy.”

He paused, studying her for a long moment, and then grinned and yanked the belt out of the loops with one quick tug that made his biceps bunch. And her slightly faint. “You like it.”

“I don’t.”

She did.

He unbuttoned his fly, and her pulse kicked into high gear. “Your mother thought you might like to show me the grounds.”

“Later. This won’t take long. Lose the dress.”

“I’m not having sex with you in this room. It’s too creepy. You grew up sleeping in here, didn’t you? You probably have teenager porn under the bed.”

“I grew up away at school. I only ever slept here on holiday.” He pulled his shirttails out and pointed to the four-poster. “And now we’re going to sleep here, and I’m going to have sex with you in that bed.” As he scanned the rest of the room, his fingers worked loose the top button of his shirt. “Or quite possibly up against that wall, if you don’t behave.” He took a step closer, freeing another button. “Bent over and clinging to the bedpost.” Another step, another button. “Sitting on top of the chest of drawers.”

Now he stood directly in front of her, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist, the low murmur of his voice making liquid heat pool between her legs. “In the shower. On the floor. I’m not fussed at the moment. But if you don’t take that dress off immediately, I’m taking it off for you.”

She wanted to resist him. To punish him. Not for bringing her here and making her pretend to be someone she wasn’t—she’d agreed to do that, after all—but for the way he’d been in the parlor, talking to his mother. For his capacity to turn from Nev to City and back again in the blink of an eye. She didn’t like his social mask, and she didn’t like his secrets. She hated his bedroom, with its gorgeous Victorian furniture. Despised that he had grounds instead of a patchy front yard. Resented how much she wanted him in spite of all of it.

“Have you ever had sex in this room, Neville?” she asked, throwing his name down like a gauntlet.

He raised an eyebrow. His eyes had gone hard, iron beneath the moss of the forest floor. “You honestly want me to answer that question?”

“Yes.” She needed to fill the room with the ghosts of those women’s bodies, to debauch the white, textured wallpaper and all its memories of boyhood Nev. If she could imagine him here with other women, a string of purebred ponies writhing on his bed and calling out his name, she might manage to fend off the gauzy impulse to comfort him for what she now knew must have been an awful, empty childhood with a Dragon Lady for a mother.

“Yes. I have.” He said this with a smirk, daring her to be offended.

“How many women?”

She didn’t know what they were doing at his house, but she knew what he wanted from her right now. He’d come to her for oblivion, seeking an hour’s absolution for the sin of his family.

She refused to absolve him. He’d brought her here. He’d made her wear this ring and this dress. He was Nev, but he was City, too, and she was sick of watching him switch back and forth. She wanted both of them at the same time, in the same body. Here, where he’d made her pretend to be someone else, she’d force him to be who he really was.

He began to unwind the strand of pearls from her neck. “This turns you on? Making me talk about other women?”

Her nipples were hard enough to use as weapons. Hell yes, it turned her on. “How many?”

“Four,” he said. “No, five.” He dropped her necklace on the floor. Her eyes were drawn to the thin strip of skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt. The swell of his pectoral muscle. The trail of golden hair leading down into the open fly of his jeans. The ridge of his cock behind the zipper. She could smell his arousal, sweat and pheromones or whatever it was his body released when it wanted to rut.

“Did you make all of them strip for you the second they crossed the threshold?”

Smiling, he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her tight against him, pressing his erection into her stomach. His hands found the zipper of her dress and drew it down. “Is it better if I say yes? That this is part of the tour, and you’re nothing more than number six? Would that make you happy?”

No. “Yes.”

“Too bad.” He pushed the dress down her arms, dropping to his knees to slide it down her hips and off. “You’re the only woman who’s ever made me this desperate.” He held her hip with one hand and took off her shoes, one at a time, caressing her instep through the silk of her stockings as he lowered each foot to the ground.

His face was at her crotch, and he planted a kiss on her panties before dropping his gaze to her feet, then slowly sweeping it over her, taking in the sheer stockings with their garters, the pink satin and chocolate-colored lace. Her stomach. Her bra. Her face. “If I’d known you were wearing that, I’d have had you in the backseat of the car.”

“I should hang up the dress,” she whispered.

“Forget about the dress. If I’m not inside you in the next sixty seconds, I’ll drop dead.” His hands began roaming, strong fingers gripping her hips, stroking her waist and stomach, pushing aside the cups of her bra to pluck at her nipples.

When he moved to slip his fingers inside her panties, Cath pushed him away with a foot to the center of his chest, and he sat back on his heels. “No,” she said. “We’re going to do this my way or not at all.”

He caught her foot, holding it against him as he ran one large hand straight up the inside of her leg to cup her crotch. She was wet, and he knew it. He had her off-balance, literally and figuratively, and he knew that too. But damn it, she was going to be in charge.