She smiled and he caught his breath. He could hardly focus on anything but the brilliance of it as he nodded. “Good. I’m-I’m glad to hear it.”
“And what aboutyou?” she asked. “You’re clearly a much more experienced member of the club, but how did you find yourself here the first time you attended?”
He blinked. “I can…hardly recall,” he admitted. “I don’t think any lady has ever asked me that.”
“I’m happy to be unique in the question, as long as it doesn’t offend,” she said.
“It would take a great deal more than a question to offend me.” He tilted his head. “Why don’t you guess at it, though?”
“Guess at how you came to be a member here?” She looked around with a shiver, as if she’d just recalled the forbidden pleasures going on around them. Her gaze darted for a moment, pupils dilating. His body clenched at the sight of her desire, hesitant but there. His for the plucking. But not yet. The game was too pleasurable at present.
He nodded in answer to her question. “I’ve always wondered what Aphrodite would think of me.”
She laughed, the sound a little low and husky. “The true Aphrodite would likely not even bat an eye at everything around her. She’d be so bored and jaded by it all.”
Bored and jaded. He’d just been labeling himself the same way. He certainly didn’t feel it now. Not when she licked her lips and looked him up and down before she spoke again.
“It’s different for men, isn’t it? All of this.”
He had asked a playful question, but her answer didn’t feel playful now. It was almost mesmerizing, like she was peeling the layers of both of them away and leaving something real at the core. Something no one else saw.
“I suppose it is,” he said softly.
“I imagine you came here years ago, perhaps even while you were in school. Brought by some older friend or cousin who was older. Wiser. More experienced. Someone who thought you would enjoy how shocking it all was. Were you shocked the first time? Did it all frighten and thrill you, as it does me?”
He stared at her a moment, this woman who at this moment only had a goddess’s name but felt more real than anyone else he’d spent time with lately while he was in the fog of pain and worry. She made him recall parts of himself he hadn’t visited in a long time. “I was eighteen,” he said. “My birthday, actually. And yes, it was an older cousin who paid for my membership that first time. I wasn’t entirely inexperienced, but I was certainly shocked by what I saw here. By what I felt when I watched it all.”
“Like you’re hungry and trembly and hot all over,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Yes. That. Over time I think I forgot it. Perhaps I forgot a great deal.” He wrinkled his brow. “This has become a very serious conversation.”
She smiled a little and the spell was broken. “You’ll regret approaching me if I drag you into such maudlin thoughts.”
“Never. Though I admit it’s very odd to have a lovely masked stranger make such an accurate measure of me. Perhaps as recompense you might dance with me.”
She looked over her shoulder toward the dancefloor where couples were paired off, grinding together in ways that never would have been accepted in any ballroom in Society. Mouths merged, hands roved, it was all foreplay. In some cases, more than foreplay. There was shock to her expression, but there was much more beyond it. So much more.
“Yes,” she whispered, this time with a little more neediness to her tone. It called to him, beckoned to his own desire.
He held out a hand and she looked at it. It was ungloved, of course. The Donville Masquerade was a place for skin on skin. She looked at her own ungloved fingers for a moment and then took his hand. There was a shock of electricity that rippled up his arm when she did, a fascinating power that made his body tingle. At least he knew this last night before the wedding would be explosive.
They moved to the dancefloor together and she shivered before she lifted her hand to his shoulder. He held her stare as they began to move, his hand dipping low on her hip, tracing the line of her there as his thumb stroked against silk.
She gasped at the contact and stumbled slightly, but he kept her upright as they turned in the milling crowd.
“What—what is your name?” she asked. “Or the name you give here.”
So she didn’t recognize him. That gave him even more clues to who she was. She wasn’t a lady of his rank, then, or at least not one who moved regularly in his circles. He started at that thought, for he’d never been so interested in the origins of a lover at the masquerade before. Why was this woman different?
“If you are Aphrodite,” he said softly, “then let me be Ares.”
She stared up at him. “Her lover?”
His nod was slow and meant to give his exact meaning. “Ifshe would allow it.”
Her breath hitched and he could see the hesitance again. A little fear, or at least nervousness, at the idea. “This is whatshecame for,” she said at last. “But she…I…the reality is different than the fantasy.”
“Hopefully better,” he said. “May we try something to see?”
