“Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”
“You suppose?”
He opened his big hands, looking almost as clueless as she felt. “Well, notme. I don’t go out to dinner.”
“What do you do?”
He looked to the side, and she couldn’t tell if he was searching for the right answer or sifting through memories. “My encounters with women tend to be more…casual.”
“Oh.” She pictured him in loose, low-slung jeans, slouching and shrugging in that way teenagers did.Casual.“What’s that like?”
His expelled breath sounded frustrated, and she came dangerously close to letting him off the hook, until he answered. “It’s just sex, I mean. No real relationships. Well, I had one, but…” He trailed off, leaving her with nothing. She wanted much more.
Sex?She wanted to know.
Instead, she asked, “How did that start? Your onerelationship.” Even that word felt funny. Grown-up and modern.
He frowned. “She told me she wanted me. We fuc—” He cleared his throat, which had turned a mottled red, the color disappearing into his neckline. Abby had to see how far down it went. The need was ravenous, pulsing, painful, and hot. “We did the…sex.”
“Where?” she whispered, picturing a barn or a vineyard—she had a hard time imagining this man anywhere but in the great outdoors.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I…” She couldn’t tell him the truth, could she? That she liked him. That she was curious. That she had absolutely no idea how to be normal, but there was this demon inside, stretching her skin painfully taut in its bid to get out. “I want to do it right.”
The look he gave her said she was crazy, and yet there was something else in that expression.
“What, with me?”
“Yes. How…how would you touch me? If I were normal?”
“How would I—”
“Start? How would you start?” She barely forced the words through a throat that was hoarse with embarrassment, not to mention that yearning inside her—coarser and baser than anything she’d felt. This wasn’t an emotion, exactly—more of a compulsion. “Where would you put your hands?” the demon goaded.
He looked at them—his hands—where they sat on his knees. Such vital parts of this man’s body, cut and scarred and torn apart and missing a piece. They were lived-in and beautiful. Hands that had seen a thing or two, like these softly folded mountains with their low profile and vast knowledge of time. Would they feel that way on her? Experienced? Wise?
Sounding as frayed as she felt, he said, “I told you, I’m not good atspeaking.” It wasn’t until the words sank in that she understood the underlying meaning.
“You’re good at”—she swallowed, more brazen than she’d been in all her twenty-two years, because, despite the accusation that put those old scars on her arms, she’d never actually seduced a man before—“doing, though. Is that what you’re good at?”
They were so close, sitting on the sofa in the warm living room, by the light of a single lamp and the glow of the fire. It was surreal, all of it. Dreamy.
In the time it would have taken to find something else to say, something proper to take them back to familiar territory, Luc’s hand rose to her face. His knuckles skimmed her mouth in that signature move, shutting her up definitively. It didn’t even surprise her that he’d use the back of his hands instead of the pads of his fingers. With those calluses, he probably couldn’t feel anything at all.
They were warm and dry against her lips. She opened her mouth enough to let her tongue out to taste him. His indrawn breath made her think she might need to do it again—just to see how he’d react this time. She licked the crook between his fingers and got a long, slow exhale in response.
So she moved, just a little. Just enough to grasp the edge of his finger in her mouth, to bite it and let it catch on her bottom lip. She watched him closely—him watching his own hand, the place where their bodies touched, the flush of blood under his skin, the way the islands of his pupils, already big, ate up their surrounding sea of blue entirely.
“You are sure you want this, Abby? With me?” he asked, searching her face but not moving that hand away.
Abby’s only answer was to grasp his other hand in hers and press it hard against her neck, against skin that felt hot. So hot.
* * *
At the sound of Abby’s words, then at the touch of her skin, Luc’s cock went from thick and heavy to unbearably hard and ready to explode.
He wanted her. There was no doubt about that. There hadn’t been, if he was honest, from the first time he’d laid eyes on her. But he wasn’t supposed to do things with her, and she wasn’t supposed to do this seduction thing. Luc had come to America to work and to make something of himself. Not to seduce an innocent, religious girl—the equivalent of a nun, in his mind.
