“Should I be surprised that you’ve violated my privacy again?”
“How do you do that? How do you walk so quietly, or enter a room without my hearing you?”
“How do you manage to invade my privacy so often?” he asked, spearing both hands through his hair. “If I give you the damn mirror, will you give me privacy?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know? What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know what you mean by privacy. Am I to leave you alone all the time? Am I never to talk to you? Am I never to share a meal, a conversation?”
When he didn’t answer her, she looked down at the bag. Was the mirror worth an argument? She should give it back to him, walk away, and pretend they were in perfect accord with each other.
Years of pretense, however, grew tiring.
“Take it,” he said, finally. “It’s little enough payment.”
Stung, she watched as he walked toward her.
“Payment for what?”
“If I want to bed you, I will.”
He pulled the drawstring bag out of her hands and tossed it on her bed. Only then did he grab her hand and pull her backinto his room, shutting all the doors and latching the one to the hallway.
“If I want to bed you, I will,” he said again.
“You needn’t pay me for it,” she said.
Beneath the surface of Montgomery’s calm, she could feel the carefully cloaked and civilized rage. She couldn’t reach either his grief or his anger. Something dark lived in Montgomery, something skittering away from the light, and she wasn’t certain she was courageous enough to face it.
What compelled her, then, to place her hands on his face and look up at him? What made her think she might heal him with passion?
His kiss was hard, startling, and hot. He pushed the robe from her shoulders, made an impatient sound against her lips when he encountered the belt. Perhaps she should have said something, but heat crawled up her spine, warmed the icy ball of anxiety in her stomach until she felt as if she were boiling inside.
She gripped his shoulders, then lost that grip when he nearly threw her on the bed.
Quickly, she raised herself on her elbows, watching him, stunned by the speed at which everything was happening. This was not the gentle lover, the man who’d brought her such bliss yesterday and the day before. This was a man who scowled at her as he jerked off his clothes, who threw his boots to the other side of the room, barely missing the pier glass. This was a man empowered by an emotion stronger than any she’d ever witnessed.
Her belly clenched as heat filled her.
An instant later, he threw himself on the bed, covering her, ripping the nightgown from her until their skins rubbed against each other.
“Damn it, I need you,” he said, in such a harsh and grating tone she wouldn’t have recognized his voice if she hadn’t been looking at his face. “I need to be in you.”
Her arms locked around his neck, and her mouth answered his assault with one of her own. She inhaled his breath, bit at his lip, heard him swear as he stroked her breast before replacing his hands with his mouth. Her palms pressed against his hollowed cheek as he suckled her.
His fingers, his hands, danced across her body in a furious ballet of passion, measuring the curve of her breasts, the slope of her hips, sliding between her legs to stroke her. He murmured praise as his fingers slid through slick folds, swallowed her soft exclamation, and urged her higher.
They fought with each other and soothed each other. She nibbled at his shoulder; he sucked her nipples. He palmed her wetness; she scraped her nails across his buttocks.
She moaned. He swore.
His fingers were inside her, measuring her response, her willingness, her need. She shivered, and he pressed harder. Not a gentle request but a demand. She willed her eyes to open and watched him watching her.
“I have to be in you,” he said, his voice rough. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
