And then that’s what it became. Gently. As if he were uncertain of his right to touch her. Inexorably. As if he simply couldn’t help himself.
Surely he could feel her pulse thumping away against his fingers. Because she certainly could. The blood was rushing in her ears like waves beating on a beach.
She gazed up into his face, and he gazed downinto hers as if she were a landscape he was inspecting for hidden enemies. Or perhaps hidden wonders. Lost.
His voice lowered conspiratorially. “Would you like your hand back?”
The right words to say were bobbing around somewhere in the syrup her brain had become; she couldn’t quite fish them out. The truth was, at the moment, her hand seemed to rightly belong to him. As though it were a trophy he’d won for snatching arrows out of the air.
“You seem to have found a use for it, Mr. Cassidy. You’ve used it as a sort of... as a sort of... lever.”
Somehow, without either of them noticing, he had pulled her all but into his body.
Somehow, she had easily, willingly gone, as if she were on wheels.
He wasn’t smiling anymore.
His expression was taut. And enthralled, in the truest sense of the word.
“Lillias...” His voice bathed her senses like a too-potent liqueur. She heard more than a little pain in it. “I am not a toy. I feel it only fair to tell you that I do not normally enter into a contest—and we both know this has been a contest, so let’s not pretend any longer—of any sort unless I’ve a certainty of getting what I want. You cannot win this.”
Delicious quicksilver shivers of sensation traced her limbs, sent by his thumb.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Over her pulse, which was kicking like a trapped rabbit. Demonstrating to her his power.
“Do you want me to let you go?” he whispered.
Yes, she should have said.
But she couldn’t help herself.
“Tell me what you want,” she whispered.
She was going to make him say it out loud.
He closed his eyes briefly. “Which words would you like me to bludgeon you with this time? In the spirit of truth, I must warn you, ‘naked’ is likely to be one of them. Also words like ‘moaning’ and ‘cock.’”
She went rigid and sucked in a sharp breath.
He released her hand at once, almost roughly.
She took a step back.
And then another.
They regarded each other from this safe distance in silence.
And then he raised an eyebrow. Not unsympathetically. But once again, the “go inside, little girl” was implicit.
It was maddening.
“You aren’t really winning either, are you, Mr. Cassidy, if you’re helpless to stop playing the game?”
He instantly went as rigid as one of those boards he’d been hammering into place.
He wasn’t the only one who could raise a single eyebrow. She could, too, and so she did. And then she turned for the door.
She never got there. And she didn’t even have time to gasp.