And could turn hot and female despite all of that.
Was it an act? The way she’d responded when he’d kissed her? She’d inferred that it was, but Lucas was not a fool.
Women could give award-winning performances at the drop of a hat.
They could weep, if they thought tears could get them what they wanted. They could smile, if they believed that was the better choice. They could pretend that whatever interested you interested them, that they wanted nothing but you, not your title or your wealth or your power.
Oh, yes.
He knew all that and more. A man couldn’t reach the age of thirty-two, couldn’t have the wealth he had been born to, the even greater wealth he’d accumulated by expanding the Reyes empire, without meeting more than his share of women who were experts at plotting and planning and lying.
A thin smile crossed his mouth.
The one thing they couldn’t lie about was sex.
Not that an occasional woman didn’t try.
“Ohhh, Lucas,” one had whispered the first time they’d made love.
The moans, the whispers, had all sounded right, but she’d been faking it. He’d known it instantly.
A woman’s eyes blurred with desire when what she felt was real. Her pulse increased with the heavy beat of her blood. She trembled like a willow in her lover’s arms.
The woman in his bed that time had been lying, but that hadn’t angered him.
It had challenged him.
Slowly, deliberately, he’d set out to turn that carefully spoken “ohhh” into a whisper of true passion, and he had done it.
Of course he had.
He knew what tender female flesh begged for a man’s touch, what hidden place would heat under a man’s lips.
Without question, he knew that the woman he’d kissed a couple of hours ago had not been acting. Like it or not, she’d been as turned on by that kiss as he’d been.
Lucas frowned.
As he was now.
Dios, he truly was in desperate shape! He needed a drink, a meal, an evening back in the real world. That the memory of a woman who’d done nothing but provoke him should have such an effect on him was ridiculous.
Perhaps he’d been too hasty, sending Delia away. An hour with her in the old-fashioned bed in this room and—
And what?
Who was he kidding?
An hour with Delia, with any of the women who’d passed through his life, and he’d still want the woman from the stable in his arms, her mouth opened to the thrust of his tongue, her breasts naked and hot against his chest. There’d been something about the feel of her skin, the shock of her surrender…
Hell.
Aloysius McDonough could take this excuse of a ranch, this forgotten appointment and stuff them. It was one thing to pay a visit out of respect for Felix but another to be made a fool of.
Lucas strode to the door, flung it open—and found the laconic foreman just about to knock.
“There you are, mister.”
“But not for long,” Lucas said flatly. “I’m done waiting.”