Unwrapping the Innocent's Secret/Bound by Their Nine-Month Scandal

by Caitlin Crews

  The stairs gave a nostalgically familiar creak as he reached the top—where he discovered someone had arrived ahead of him.

  The sound and light from the party were blocked by the rise of the west wing of the house, casting the space into deep shadow. He could only see a silhouette and the lighter shadow of her mask as she turned from gazing across the moonlit Mediterranean. Even so, he recognized her as the woman who had careened into him as he was bidding on the portrait of his mother.

  For one second as he’d steadied her, he had forgotten everything—his thirst to punish, his purpose in coming here. Something in her uninspired costume gave him the impression she didn’t belong here any more than he did. That she was hiding in plain sight. His male interest had been so piqued, he had nearly asked her to dance.

  “Oh.” The lilt in her voice told him she had identified him from their brief encounter as well, which also told him she had found it as profound as he had.

  “Were you expecting someone else?” He adjusted his mask to peer harder into the shadows. The rickety bench where his mother used to read to him was gone, replaced by a dark shape that suggested a comfortable, L-shaped sectional.

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  That was good news. On many levels.

  “Did you follow me?” she asked.

  “No.” He would like to think he would have timed things differently if he had known she was up here, but he wasn’t sure. Nor was he as dismayed as he ought to have been that she was now an obstacle to his goal.

  “Did you invite someone to join you?” she asked, vaguely appalled.

  He should have said, Yes. She sounded so uncomfortable at intruding, she probably would have hurried away, but something in him balked at letting her think he was involved with anyone.

  He heard himself say a throaty and inviting, “Not yet.”

  Her silhouette grew more alert. The air crackled between them.

  “Who are you?” Her voice sharpened and her mask tilted as she cocked her head.

  It struck him that he couldn’t tell her. Damn.

  “I think the purpose of a night like this is to maintain the mystery.”

  “And telling me would identify you as the buyer of that portrait you bid on so generously. And anonymously.”

  “True.” The peril he was in began to impact him. She could place him with the painting and here on the rooftop. Maybe she didn’t know his name, but there was a chance she could find out.

  Dared he linger? Was it worth the risk?

  He couldn’t tell whether this rooftop patio had been repaved or the old bricks merely pulled up and reset, exposing the hidey-hole he had discovered as a child. He doubted his half brothers had ever found it. If they had, they wouldn’t have been so sly in their sale of this estate. There was every chance the new owners had found the treasure, though, and kept the contents without mentioning it. Angelo had very little faith in humanity, particularly those who sat like cream on the top of society without having worked to get there.

  He couldn’t leave until he knew for sure. He had come this far, and so decided to wait her out.

  He joined her at the wall. The last time he’d been here, he’d barely been tall enough to peer over. His distant memory of that time was swept away by the breeze off the water and the woman’s voice beside him.

  “If you didn’t follow me or come to meet someone, why are you here?”

  “Curiosity.” It wasn’t a complete lie. He was definitely intrigued by her. “You?”

  “To think.”

  “About?”

  “The nature of happiness. Whether it’s a goal worth pursuing when there are no guarantees I’ll find it. That it would come at the expense of others if I did.”

  “Nothing too heavy, then,” he drawled. Her hand was close to his on the wall, pale and ringless. “In my experience, happiness is a fleeting thing. A moment. Not a state of being.”

  “And if a moment is all you have?”

  His scalp prickled beneath his hat. He turned his head and tucked his chin, trying to see through the dark and the holes in his mask to read her expression, but it was impossible.

  “Regret is also a moment. A choice not to seize happiness when it presents itself.”

  “I would regret it if I didn’t take a chance,” she agreed with a nod of contemplation.

  “What kind of chance?”

  She let a couple of seconds tick by with crushing silence, then said in a thicker voice, “An overture. Letting my interest in someone be known.” Her hand had been curled into a tense fist, but it unfurled, her pinkie finger splaying toward him.

  His stomach knotted. “Are you married?”

  “No.” Through the rush of relief in his ears, he heard her add, “But obligations to do so loom. And I don’t want to risk making a fool of myself when I don’t know if he’s even—”

  “He is,” he cut in. His chest felt tight and his throat could barely form words. “He’s interested.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  PIA’S HEART WAS pounding so hard, she ought to have hammered down the walls around her.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked faintly.

  “Should I?”

  “No.” If he did, he would be treating her differently. With kid gloves, because of her family’s influence. There would be no intimate questions about whether she was meeting someone or encouragement to act impulsively.

  It was enormously refreshing not to carry the weight of history and expectation, which had been the nature of her dilemma when she’d come up here. That ever so brief moment with him in the marquee had sent her into a spiral of doubt about duty to family versus selfish pursuits.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “I’m not involved with anyone. But a moment is all I have, too.” His velvety timbre was layered with regret.

  She kept trying to place his voice, certain she would remember if she’d heard him before.

  “I don’t even know what I want except not to let this moment pass without…”

  “Seizing it?” he suggested.

  “Stealing it,” she said wryly, finding the idea deeply seductive. It was the best of both worlds. She could briefly shed mousy, dutiful Pia Montero without giving her up for good. It was safe.

  “Strangers in the night.” He held out a hand as if inviting her to dance.

  Her hand went into his even though the music was a distant drone without a discernible tempo.

  He was too compelling to resist, though. It wasn’t the outfit, either. She understood that some animals were innately dominant. He was one of them and he ought to send her scurrying, but she was too fascinated. She was utterly riveted by him and her reaction to his air of supremacy.

  She distantly noted that she would have to tell her mother to find her a good-natured beta male so she wouldn’t be so completely overwhelmed by the simple act of being held in a man’s arms.

  This was biology, she told herself through the fog of her deepening attraction. She was reacting to a chemistry that didn’t come from a mix of beakers, but from the scent of pheromones off skin. Receptive male meets receptive female. The pseudoerotic nature of their disguised identities and their clandestine meeting on an unlit rooftop exaggerated the excitement.

  But even as her head tried to explain it and dismiss it, her body grew pliant and her feet shifted closer into his sphere. She wasn’t acting like herself, but she would never have an encounter like this again, when she could be someone else, free of commitment and the constraints of being Pia Montero. When her physical appearance and other shackles of identity were so absent she was nothing but the energy of pure, universal womanhood.

  And he was all man.

  “I want to kiss you,” he said in a voice that rumbled deep in his chest.

  Her pulse skipped. It was only a kiss.
She wanted to feel his mouth, to experience him. “I want that, too.”

  “Come here.”

  It was magnetic attraction rather than his arms that pulled her as she followed him into the shadow of the chimney. She couldn’t discern his features at all as he slipped his mask up, knocking his hat away.

  His arms encircled her and his mouth brushed against her cheek, seeking and finding hers.

  An electric current jolted through her at first contact, leaving her tense and waiting when he drew back slightly, his breath catching the way hers had.

  She wasn’t great at kissing. It was yet another of those human interactions that had eluded her, but as his mouth returned, she discovered she liked it. His lips settled firmly across hers, flooding her with incredible heat, smooth and unhurried. As if they had all the time in the world for stolen kisses.

  Her hand found his stubbled cheek and she enjoyed the abrasion against her palm as much as the lazy play of his mouth against hers. He teased her like that a few times, deepening the kiss with incremental degrees until she was parting her lips to catch his, wanting more. Her tongue darted out on instinct, practically begging for more.

  With a growl in his throat, he settled into a hot kiss of intense passion, something she recognized with a fresh jolt of surprise and excitement. Then she lost the ability to consider what was happening to her as his strong arms pulled her into a world of pure sensual pleasure. The strength and safety of his embrace was all that held her together as she shuddered under an onslaught of pleasure so intense a helpless noise throbbed in her throat.

  “Stop?” he whispered against her lips.

  “Never. This is…” Overwhelming. Glorious. Essential.

  She touched the back of his head, brought him back into the kiss and tried to give him the same sort of pleasure she was receiving. She offered all of herself, completely open to whatever he needed. She had never experienced anything so extraordinary.

  He made another noise, this one more unfettered, as though he was slipping loose of whatever sort of control he held himself under—which perversely thrilled her. His hands stroked firmly through the layers of her velvet jacket and full skirt, molding her form, lighting a fire under her skin, sending a heavy ache into her loins.

  “I’ve never felt like this,” she told him in a rasp of need, burrowing her hands beneath his cloak, into the heat beneath his vest. She had never been so forward, seeking so compulsively to touch a man, to take in his textures and musculature.

  He swore. “Me, either.” His hand cupped the back of her neck and his breath pooled hotly against her throat. “But this can’t happen.” He scraped his teeth against her nape, making her nipples pinch into sharp sensitivity. “I can’t start something. I was never here.”

  “Neither was I,” she said with a choke of rusty laughter. “Keep going.”

  Her greedy hands went down to his butt. She had never done such a thing, never realized that the hard flex of his glutes could offer such a thrill as she squeezed.

  He did the same to her, his strength pulling her so close she felt the shape of his erection through his trousers and the velvet of her dress, hard against her belly. Her brain distantly processed his arousal as potentially alarming, but her body fairly melted under a hot flush of desire.

  “Yes. Like that,” she said in an agonized whisper. She had never been more thrilled by anything in her life.

  He muttered something about wrong time and place, but he pressed her beneath him onto the lounger, his cloak falling heavily around them. He kissed across her bare collarbone, whiskers abrading her skin. When his hand sought beneath her, she arched so he could lower her zipper and loosen her bodice.

  She was braless and he groaned with gratitude as he cupped her naked breast and lightly scoured her skin with his stubbled cheek before he closed his mouth over her nipple.

  Desire was such a knifing ache in her that she swallowed a cry and arched again, unable to get close enough. She struggled against the confines of her skirt, ground herself against the ridge of his erection, yearning for the pressure of him there. Between. Where she was damp, her pulse throbbing like a signal.

  “This is insane.” He lifted his head, looming like a gothic shadow over her, dangerous and fierce—but she wasn’t terrified at all.

  “It’s a memory,” she murmured. “A good one.”

  His breath cascaded across her cheek in a rasp of disbelief. Agreement. He caught her earlobe in his teeth, sending delicious shivers through her whole body.

  When he lifted himself again to drag her skirt upward, she bent her knee to help, embracing the chilly air against her naked thigh, excited by the fabric of his trousers as he settled between her legs.

  “I don’t have anything.”

  “A condom?” She hadn’t thought of that. This was the point when they ought to stop. She knew that.

  “Are you on anything? I don’t have any health issues.”

  She wasn’t, but she had thrown supplies in her clutch this evening, thinking her cycle was due and didn’t it always arrive at the least convenient time.

  “I’m okay. It’s fine.” She didn’t want to stop. There would never be another moment like this one. She needed him more than she needed air.

  His hand cupped her cheek. “Thank you.” It was the growl of an animal loosed from a cage and threatening to consume her. His busy mouth went across her jaw and down her throat and back to her breast while she ran her hands over and over the layers of clothing across his back.

  When he stroked his broad hand up her thigh, she got her hands beneath his clothing, too; found the hot, smooth skin of his waist and the hollow of his spine. She would have tried to work her hand around to open his belt, but his thumb slid inward to graze over the silk between her legs.

  She gasped and went very still.

  “No?” He froze.

  “Yes.” She could barely speak, the yearning in her grew so sharp.

  “Mmm…” He did it again and caught her light cries with his kiss, making love to her mouth with his tongue as he teased and caressed and his thumb found its way beneath silk to stroke into slippery heat.

  She shuddered as she kissed him back, flagrant and uninhibited, playing her tongue against his, her hands roaming everywhere she could reach. She was trying to convey how much pleasure he was giving her. Trying to reciprocate it.

  “You’re gorgeous,” he told her as he lifted himself just enough to unbuckle and release his fly.

  “You can’t see me.” She searched the dark, trying to make out the shadowed features so close to her own, but there was only the black cutout of his silhouette against the blanket of stars above them.

  “I see you.” His eyes glittered despite the lack of light, making it seem as though he saw all the way into her soul. “Sensual. Curious. Pensive. And courageous enough to steal what you want.” He kissed her with a smile on his lips.

  “I’m not courageous at all—Oh.”

  He slid her panties to the side and settled his hot, hard, naked flesh against hers.

  She throbbed with anticipation. Ached. She knew he was about to ruin her for whatever husband lay in her future, not because he would take her virginity, but because no man would ever make her feel this way again. Elemental and beautiful. Free.

  “I see power.” She let her fingers move through the short, silky strands of his hair, petting this dangerous wolf who could devour her, but held her in thrall instead. “Self-discipline and patience and intelligence.”

  “I’m none of those things. Not right now.” His voice skimmed across her cheek while the crown of him, fierce and hot and hard searched against her damp, untried folds.

  “You’re perfect,” she insisted.

  The party was a distant soundtrack, her self-control long thrown away.

  She had no regrets as she felt the press of him, the pinch a
nd sting of his shape forging into her. She didn’t even care if she orgasmed. She was thrilled enough by this—the act of finding a lover who pleased her. Of choosing him and by extension choosing herself. It was selfishness in the extreme and a moment of physical connection that would always be hers—something she would reach for to soothe the bleak isolation that would continue to be her constant companion through the rest of her life.

  He nibbled at her jaw as he rocked his hips, settling himself fully inside her. “You feel incredible.”

  “You, too,” she murmured, dazed by the intensity of lying with him this way. Clothed and joined, his weight crushing her lower half while his arms cradled her. His scent was a drug, his lips tender and teasing.

  On instinct, she sought his mouth, perhaps looking for reassurance, but it turned passionate quickly. It was such a remarkable, glorious feeling to kiss like this while their bodies were locked. She wished they were naked. He was so gloriously, beautifully wonderful.

  With a growl, he shifted, braced on an elbow as he withdrew and returned in a slow, testing stroke.

  The friction caused an acute stab of pleasure that left ripples of shivery sensations in its wake. She gasped and dug her fingernails into his shoulders, astonished.

  He chuckled softly. Roughly.

  “That was something, wasn’t it? Perhaps we’re being spared by the gods. If I had met you any other time, I would chain you to my bed forever,” he threatened.

  If only…

  He moved again, making all of her sing. She clutched at him, trying to make sense of the sensations overtaking her, but it was far too engulfing. She found it impossible to think, only feel. There was a sting and heat and a kind of tension she had never experienced. She wanted to absorb herself into his skin, but there were so many barriers. All she could do was hang on as he cast off restraint and moved with more purpose. Their breaths grew more jagged, each stroke making her fight cries of increasing pleasure.

  She didn’t know how to communicate to him how dazzling and wonderful this was except to allow animal instinct to overtake her. She licked his throat and offered her hips for the driving force of his. She stroked her hands beneath his shirt against his lower back, encouraging his rough possession while she brazenly sucked at his bottom lip.