“You’re not a gambler, Tilly. I’m not sure you would understand.”
“Tell me.”
The moment stretched long as he considered his response. “There’s a feeling that lights a match in the blood the instant the wager is made. And the more precious the wager, the more intense the feeling. It’s hard to understand it with my logical mind. That night, I was short ready funds, so I took the ring. I’d done it before with no harm. I thought history would repeat itself.” A beat. “It didn’t.”
It was just that simple, his eyes said, and just that devastating.
“May I make an impertinent request of my own?”
She nodded her permission.
“A sentence you began in the park, after…” He didn’t need to say after what. They both knew. “I’d like you to finish that sentence.”
“Remind me?”
“You said that was a first for you. Then you said you said you’d never…”
Oh, that sentence.
A sentence begun when she was yet mindless with the pleasure he’d wrought upon her.
But his silver-gray eyes shone with openness and honesty and she felt like she could tell this man—though he was the son of an earl—anything.
“Last night,” she began, trying to arrange her thoughts in a straight line, “was the first first.”
“You’re going to have to explain.”
“The kiss,” she said. “I’d been kissed before.”
He cocked his head. He was listening.
“But I’d never chosen a kiss. All my kisses—the ones from that other life—they’d been bought and paid for. Some were better than others, but in my whole life, I’d never kissed a man because I expressly wanted to by my free choice.” An unaccountable surge of emotion charged through her. “Until I kissed you, I’d never done anything with a man because I truly wanted to.”
Still, he listened.
“My own desire and the choice to act on it was a first. Then tonight…” A nervous little laugh escaped her. “You took my choice and desire and transformed it into something else—pleasure.” She swallowed all that emotion provoked. “In my experience of the world, desire and pleasure were the domain of men. I had just been a pretty vessel for their snatching of it.”
Rhys swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He looked suddenly wretched, but said nothing.
“But you, Rhys, you’re not like those men, are you?” She sat forward, her breasts bobbing heavily beneath the bubbles. “No man had ever put my pleasure above his own.” She was speaking as earnestly as she ever had in her life. “Until you.” She was now close enough to touch him. But she wouldn’t. Not yet, at least. She had even more she wanted to say to this man. “You wrought a transformation inside me, Rhys. I’m not a vessel. I’m a woman who can have a desire and act on it. I’m allowed choice and pleasure.”
Her words echoed through the room, but didn’t fall away silently.
Instead, they expanded into the air between them.
“And me, Tilly?” The question emerged as a velvet scrape across his throat, his gaze refusing to release hers. “Do you desire me?”
“Aye.”
“Then, Tilly, I’m yours to have.”
And here was Tilly, presented with another choice by this man.
To have him or not.
The thing was, if she was going to lose him by morning, then where was the harm in having him first?
Her hand, warm and wet, reached out and caressed the side of his face. In a way, she didn’t know how to do this—how to seduce a man—for the outcome of every sexual encounter she’d ever experienced had been a foregone conclusion. There’d been no mystery or intrigue to it.
