“You have thirty seconds remaining,” he said curtly. “If there’s nothing else–”
“Are you going to kiss me? At Clarenmore Park.”
The query–boldly uttered–robbed him of breath. Not due to its audacious nature (he expected nothing less from Eloise), but because of his body’s immediate and inflammatory response to something as simple, as innocent, as a kiss. His chest constricted. His abdomen hardened. And his cock…his cock transformed into a throbbing railroad pike, his erection straining against the confines of his trousers.
“Kiss you?” he rasped, and was he asking a question…or making a promise? A pistol to his head, Adam had absolutely no idea. From outside the room came the sound of raucous laughter and a high-pitched giggle as a couple left the ballroom presumably in search of more private accommodations. They drew closer, trying different doors as they went and stumbling into the wall, rattling paintings.
“Well?” A rebellious sprig of russet fell across Eloise’s cheek as she gave an impatient toss of her head. “Are you or aren’t you? I’d prefer to know in advance, so that I can plan to avoid you accordingly.”
He raised a brow. “Is that what you were doing by bringing me in here? Avoiding me?”
“You’re the one that came.”
Not yet.
There were a million reasons to walk out the door. Eloise would never make an acceptable wife. She drove him crazy. They were complete opposites. There was no possible future where they would ever work. He relied on order. She thrived on chaos. He was everything she hated. She was everything he despised.
Adam reached behind him…and turned the lock.
8
The Wager
Click.
The sound of the tumbler falling into place was quiet as a pin drop and significant as a comet sprinting across the night sky. Eloise swallowed with difficulty as her pulse began to thrum and her palms broke out in a cool sweat. She wiped her hands on her skirt, then braced them on the armrest of the sofa. “When we were outside, you said–”
“It doesn’t matter what I said.” In the candlelit darkness, Adam’s eyes–predatory gray with obsidian centers–took on a light of their own. “It doesn’t matter what I do. I can’t get away from you. First the park, then the docks, now here. Everywhere I turn, there you are.”
Had she known, Eloise wondered on a sharp intake of breath when he crossed the parlor and captured her wrists in a firm grasp, his thumbs resting on the pale green veins that ran like ribbons beneath her skin. Had she known that when she led him here, it would lead to this?
No, she hadn’t known.
Not with any degree of certainty.
But she had hoped.
She had lied to Annabel, she had lied to herself, and she had hoped. How could she not? How could she have experienced ecstasy, andnotwanted it again? For as much as Adam’s presence pained her, his touch…his touch brought nothing but pure pleasure.
“Here I am,” she said on a whisper. “What do you plan to do with me?”
“Purge you.” He kissed the side of her neck, suckling at the little indentation above her clavicle. His hands roamed up her body and went to her breasts, cupping their weight in his palms as his thumbs flicked across her already aching nipples. “Purge you from my blood as I would an infection, one goddamned cut at a time.”
Her mind went blank when his mouth settled on hers and his tongue swept between her lips. He played with her as an expert pianist would the piano, or a Scotsman would the bagpipes, or an artist would an empty canvas. She was virgin clay in his hands, ready to be molded into whatever shape he desired. Willing to be molded.Wantingto be molded.
Her spine arched over the sofa, the small of her back pressing against the velvet armrest as he deepened the kiss, demanding all that she had to give. Demandingeverything. She felt the brazen heat of his skin through his clothes. The delicious pull on her scalp when his fingers dove into her hair. The hitch of his breath as his arousal pushed on her belly and then went lower to nudge in the middle of her thighs.
He rocked forward and then back, rotating his hips in a circular motion that elicited a flood of sensation from deep, deep inside where passions laid dormant just waiting for a condescending American to coax them into awakening.
Placing her arms around his broad shoulders, she clung to him as the same fever that had consumed her in the foyer returned tenfold. He bit her bottom lip, drawing it between his teeth at the precise instant that his loins rolled forward and she cried out, her shoe falling to the floor as she instinctively raised her leg and wrapped it across his backside, bringing them intimately closer despite the frustrating layers of satin and tulle that separated their yearning bodies.
Were they not in a public setting, with hundreds of guests merely a few walls away, Eloise would have shouted her pleasure. She would havescreamedit. As they plunged recklessly towards mutual oblivion, she tucked her face into the crook of Adam’s neck and restrained herself to a gasping whimper while his snarling growl ricocheted across the room.
A final thrust of his hips, a wet circle of dampness on the middle of the French split drawers she wore under her gown, and they came in shuddering unison, their limbs closing around each other in a vicelike grip that didn’t cease even as their frenzied heartrates gradually subsided to a regular tempo.
In the stillness that followed, Eloise found herself overcome with an almost tedious sense of familiarity, for hadn’t she found herself in a similar position mere hours ago? Draped in a chair instead of over a sofa, but the tiny rippling aftershocks coursing through her veins was the same. The perspiration on her forehead was the same. The numbness in her legs was the same. And when Adam stood up and coolly offered his hand for her to take, that, too, was the same.
