For a telltale moment, honesty held her tongue, but then she freed it and her blue eyes snapped. “No!”
He grinned but lowered his hand. And shifted fractionally closer, tilting his head so their gazes were closer to level, so he could study her face and she could study his.
She eyed him warily, her grip on the rail rigid.
He smiled genuinely. “Breathe.”
She blinked, and did. Rather tightly.
“If you faint, I’ll have to catch you, hold you—perhaps even carry you back to the house.”
Her eyes widened and locked with his. “I don’t faint.”
He didn’t answer; instead, he slowly lifted his hand and cupped her nape. Lightly, not forcefully, but that was all it took. She shivered again, unable not to, unable to quell her reaction to his touch.
The realization sent a shaft of unadulterated lust spearing through him.
She closed her eyes, tried to stiffen her spine; as his fingers and palm firmed, she dragged in a breath and held it.
Every instinct he possessed urged him to tighten his grasp and draw her to him, draw her lips to his and simply take possession.
His muscles tensed to do so; he shifted a fraction nearer.
Her lids flew up; her eyes locked with his.
He froze. Confusion tinged with a species of fear ran riot in her lovely eyes, swamping her burgeoning desire.
The sight stopped him as nothing else could have; he instantly eased his hold, forced the muscles in his arm to relax. He didn’t take his palm from her nape; instead, he lightly, soothingly stroked, as he would a skittish horse.
The analogy was apt; studying her eyes, he knew—could see—that he was going too fast. She was barely breathing; once again she was inwardly quivering. She was unawakened, untouched; she was immobilized by his nearness—if she’d been free, she would have bolted.
She was twenty-five; he couldn’t believe she’d never been kissed. Yet this degree of reaction, of panic…
Her reaction to him was unusually intense, as was his reaction to her. While that attracted him even more, perhaps to her it was too much, too soon. They’d only set eyes on each other yesterday.
He wasn’t a patient man, but she wasn’t just any woman.
Reining in his impulses, he leaned closer. She tried to stiffen, to pull back, but that only made her feel his restraining hand at her nape all the more. She tensed, but he didn’t try to kiss her. Instead, he touched his lips to the sleek hair above her ear.
“Stop fighting this.” He waited while the whispered words sank into her mind, until the realization he wasn’t going to force a kiss on her allowed her to ease her locked muscles. “Stop fighting me. I can teach you more about pleasure than you can imagine.”
She frowned as he drew back. She opened her mouth.
“And don’t bother telling me you’re not interested in pleasure.” He caught her eyes. “With the type of pleasure we’re discussing, everyone is.”
They walked back to the house; Phoebe’s heart pounded the entire way. She felt as if she’d escaped being devoured by a dangerous beast, only to have that same dangerous beast dog her heels every step of the way back to safety.
The beast wasn’t him; it was what flared between them. As they crossed the lawn and the house rose before them, she was perfectly clear about that.
She didn’t know what to make of him, but what flared between them was more unnerving than he was.
Much more disconcerting than he was. For reasons she couldn’t elucidate, she—her female mind—increasingly viewed him as…interesting. He’d proved to be other than she’d thought, and her curiosity was piqued. And while what flared between them was beyond unsettling, when he’d seen she hadn’t wanted to be kissed, he’d stopped.
And hadn’t.
What shook her to the core was that at the time, at the precise instant he’d drawn back, she—some wild, incomprehensible, self-destructive part of her—hadn’t wanted him to stop. Had wanted him
to disregard her leaping fear, brush aside her instinctive panic and…