Nicholas smothered a curse. “You’re trying to tell me you don’t want this, Kacey?”
“No, I—I don’t!”
A dark light flashed in his eyes and then disappeared. Kacey watched a hard line settle over his jaw.
“Then you’ll have to prove it to me, because I’m afraid I just don’t believe you.”
In taut silence, Nicholas’s silver gaze stripped her bare. He had to find out how far he could push her, and not just for the painting. He had already accepted the fact that there was more than the Whistler at stake here.
“I don’t have to prove anything, damn it!”
“Try to tell me you haven’t felt it too, Kacey. Tell me you haven’t had the crazy feeling that this has all happened before between us. You know exactly how it feels when I kiss you, when you wrap your sweet legs around me and take me all the way home inside you.”
Kacey heard the desperation driving his words, since it mirrored her own. Her breath caught sharply. So he had felt the same thing she had. Something naked and visceral. Something terrifying familiar.
She shivered as his warm breath teased her neck. She felt his body tense.
She looked down to see his gaze smoldering across the closing of her shirt, where white cloth had parted to reveal one perfect, upthrust pink nipple.
“Good sweet Jesus,” Nicholas muttered hoarsely. “You’re so beautiful that it hurts, Kacey Mallory.” Rough and heated, his gaze swept over her silken skin. Abruptly his voice dropped. “You have a birthmark on your right breast, just where the lace edge of your gown ends. It’s small and smoky and crescent-shaped. You’ve got another one—”
Kacey’s breath caught. “How—”
He went on hoarsely, as if she hadn’t spoken. “—at the base of your neck. You tuck your right hand beneath your chin when you sleep. You never use a pillow. And you always sleep without a stitch, just the way you were born, my sweet Kacey.” As he spoke, Nicholas made no move to touch her, only gaze down, his face dark with an endless, tormenting hunger.
Kacey’s face turned white. How did this stranger know such things about her? “It’s—it’s another trick! You’re just—”
A muscle flashed at Nicholas’s jaw, the only movement in his rigid body. “Is it, Kacey? Then tell me you haven’t the birthmarks where I said.” His voice dropped lower, husky with arousal. “Better yet, show me.”
Kacey swallowed, fighting a wild urge to do just as he asked.
“Tell me that I don’t remember every details of how it feels to love you. That the dreams haven’t haunted me for weeks, starting at Bhanlai. God, I almost wish I didn’t know how your eyes darken with passion. How your breath comes and goes in soft little gasps. The way you moan when I fill you.”
Kacey bit back a gasp. He was frightening her now. “St-stop, Nicholas. If this is some sort of joke—”
“It’s no joke, Kacey. From the first second I saw you, I knew you were the one, even though in the dreams I never could quite make out your face. Maybe that was why I fought the knowledge so hard, why from the beginning I found the sight of you so damn frightening.”
“You’re lying!”
“Am I, Kacey? You’ve felt it too, haven’t you? The pooling heat. The sweet, aching restlessness.”
She shook her head wildly. “You’re stark, raving mad, do you hear? Whacko. Crazy as a loon. Definitely unhinged!”
A vein began to hammer just above the jagged scar over Draycott’s cheekbone. “Now you’re lying, Kacey. I can see it. I can feel it.”
“And you’re one prime, grade-A bastard, Nicholas Draycott. A miserable, rotten egotist. Can’t you get it straight? Whatever you’re feeling is all in your own head, and has nothing to do with me!” Her desperation made the lie convincing.
Or it would have, to anyone except this man, who knew her as well as he knew himself.
“Then why is your voice shaking, Kacey? Why is your breath so jerky?”
“Because I’m scared, damn it! You scare me—with all this ridiculous talk!”
Draycott went completely still, his eyes fixed on her face. “So you still refuse to admit it?”
Kacey nodded her head mutely.
“No matter, I remember enough for both of us. I remember enough for a whole lifetime—and maybe even more than a lifetime. And what I remember most is wanting you, the way I want you right now. With your honey hair tangled across my chest. With your emerald eyes glazed with passion when I bury myself inside you—as far as a man can go. Until you’re wild, my sweet Kacey—as wild as a woman can be.”
There was something more—something Nicholas should have remembered, but couldn’t. Something that seemed important.
Then Kacey shivered against him, and the elusive thread of thought was shattered. Hunger tightened; need threatened to overwhelm him.
Silence fell around them, tense and brittle.
Very slowly, as if in a dream, his head slanted down, raven hair lying thick and straight against her ivory skin as he worshipped the pink bud that furled beneath his lips.
Pleasure coursed through her, hot and achingly familiar. Just as his mouth was hot and familiar against her. After all the long, lonely nights and empty years.
Why only with him all these intense feelings? Kacey asked herself over and over. Why only with this man, who was a complete stranger?
She had her answer a moment later. It came in the fierce rush of heated images. He and she, bodies intertwined.
Frenzied and reckless. Not as strangers but as lovers, skilled and intimate with the secrets of each other’s pleasure. Knowing every curve and lithe movement until each body was simply an extension of the other.
Kacey began to tremble. “St-stop, Nicholas.” It was a plea and a silent admission.
An end and a beginning.
“Never, Katharine,” he whispered, his lips hungry against her flushed skin. “Not until you tell me that you feel it too. Dear God, whatever I have is yours—whatever I am is yours. Just tell me what’s happening to us.”
Kacey’s eyelids fluttered as his lips closed around her, fierce with a velvet fury that strained to break free of his rigid control.
His strong fingers swept her neck, easing the shirt down until it balanced precariously at the very edge of her shoulders.
But no lower. Not yet. Nicholas Draycott wanted to make this moment last forever. He wanted to make her feel every inch as hungry as he was.
So that she’d never think about leaving him again.
“I don’t understand—it isn’t—” Kacey swallowed audibly. “Nicholas, we can’t—”
Nicholas raised his head. His eyes raked over her, dark with need. Suddenly Kacey saw a pair of entwined bodies reflected there.
Their bodies. In that moment, she accepted the fact that she’d loved this man a thousand times. But she knew she could never tell him that, because then he’d never let her go.
Warm and wet, his lips traced the swell of her breast. “Don’t be sensible, Kacey. Not tonight. Tonight just forget sense and logic. Forget anything else but us.” His fingers curved over her hips, drawing her flush into the heated line of his arousal. “Dear God, forget anything but this.”
Kacey felt his need burn through her clear up to her forehead. Right down to her toes.
Most of all in her heart, which was naked and vulnerable.
For him alone, deny it as she might.
Nicholas gasped, reading the dark shimmer of passion in her eyes. The sight of it made his breath snag and his body catch fire.
Then it was Kacey who gasped as his teeth limned her breast. Her head fell back, the slim column of her throat revealed as pleasure flowed over her like a river.
Like a tide of dreams, a current of beauty.
And with the pleasure came a dark, swift flood of memories.
Memories of him. Of her. Of all the other times they’d touched and moved and loved, just like this.
Each one different and yet somehow the same.
Driven always by a love that didn’t die, only surged and frothed and tumbled forward in a forever twisting course, spilling over its banks from one life to the next, its molten ripples gleaming down through time.
Nicholas felt her answer before he heard it. It was there in her soft, jerky gasp. In the restless shifting of her hips, which sought his heat. In the hot tide of crimson that stained her chest and neck.
Dear God, she was more beautiful than the silken petals of any rose. And though it was hell, Nicholas made himself wait, desperately afraid that this dream would suddenly end, just as all the others had done.
He held himself still, hoping—no, aching for her to say the words he’d waited two hundred years to hear.
“Don’t—don’t ask this of me, Nicholas.”
“I must, Kacey. Just once,” he said hoarsely. “Dear God, it’s driving me crazy, don’t you see? Dreaming of this—of you—was the only thing that kept me going through those long months in captivity. Now I’ve got to find out if it was nothing more than a dream. I’ve got to know if I left my sanity back there in Bhanlai, along with everything else.”
His body shifted, his hips teasing and then mastering in turn as they flexed in the ancient, drugging rhythms of passion and seduction.
He eased open her shirt with his mouth, then slowly traced the soft swell of her breast. Her breath caught when he coaxed the tight bud at its center even tighter.
Inch by smooth inch, the fabric slipped down her shoulders, one more exquisite texture among so many.
Suddenly Kacey was drowning in sensation—the rough velvet of his mouth, the sleek thrust of his tongue, the hot granite of his rippling thighs.
When he loosed his belt and let it fall to the floor with a raw, sensual snap, she caught back a restless moan. When his teeth nipped her naked shoulder, she arched wantonly.
She felt Nicholas shudder. And then his hard fingers eased the cloth lower until it wedged over her arms, holding her captive.
“N-Nicholas!”
“Hush, my love.”
He found the birthmark at the base of her neck and traced it lovingly. With a growl of triumph, he found the other on her right breast, which he suckled reverently.
Too reverently for the way Kacey wanted his claiming now.
Her hips shifted, seeking his heat, pleading for it.
He tugged her zipper free and eased her jeans lower. A moment later, his callused fingers glided over her ribs and her belly, settling on the wild tangle of hair at the joining of her thighs.
Slowly he coaxed an entrance, then slid in search of her heat. Deep, so deep.
Unforgettable…
“Tell me, Kacey. Tell me that you want this—that you want me.”
Kacey shuddered beneath his exquisite caress, overwhelmed by need and raw sensation. How could it all be so familiar?
“Do you feel it, Kacey?” Nicholas demanded hoarsely. “Can you remember every sweet detail as clearly as I do? Oh, God, tell me I haven’t lost my mind!”
Kacey heard the catch in his voice and realized he was as overwhelmed as she. Words, that was what he wanted. But how could she speak, how could she begin to explain the storm of memories breaking over her all at once?
Words?
She tried to find them, digging deep, down below the fires of desire fanned by his expert touch, down below the hard-built layers of defense, deep down into the dark silence of remembrance, where words did not exist or ever would.
No use. Nothing could reflect the intensity of what she was feeling right then.
So, forsaking words, she found emotion and shaped it into movement. With movement she answered him, and every movement was a discovering, every sigh a claiming.
Her senses bold, she ventured out with her answer and prayed it would be enough. As she sensed that the last time, two hundred years ago on the eve of tragedy, it had not been.
Her fingers found his hair and slid deep. Her mouth found his shoulder and nipped urgently. Her eyes found his, and her gaze was open, wanting, infinitely vulnerable.
For you, Nicholas, her eyes promised. Only and ever.
Desire slammed through him. Heat exploded to his groin. In that instant, Nicholas Draycott learned a thousand new meanings of word “torment.”
But he wanted that sweet torment from her, too. And he wasn’t about to be rushed in anything he did this night. “Look at me, Kacey,” he rasped.
She only tossed her head, arching restlessly.
“How long has it been?” His voice was raw with passion.
She mumbled a mindless protest, half lost already, seeking the heat of his hand.
“Since you’ve had a man, sweetheart.”
Her head rose at that, her beautiful eyes flashing open, dark and unfocused, hazy with passion.
So beautiful, she made Nicholas grimace with new pain.
“A man?”
“A lover, Kacey. How long?” he repeated urgently, nearly unhinged by her honest, open need.
For him, only him.
Slowly comprehension tightened her features. “I—six months. A year, maybe…”
Her answer nearly unmanned Nicholas, even though it was no more than his first touch had intimated. All of which explained why she was so sleek and tight against his fingers. Sweet Jesus, just thinking of it nearly drove him over the edge.
Her, narrow and sleek.
Him, big and painfully hard.
Nicholas’s jaw clenched savagely. Dear God, he’d tear her apart, he thought dimly.
And then he smiled, a dark, primal twist of lips. He turned and swept the desk clear in one wild, powerful stroke and then lifted her up into his arms. A moment later, he arched her back onto the cool, smooth wood.
Gently, gently, his mouth traced a hot path down her chest to her navel.
“Wh-what—”
“Trust me, love,” he murmured thickly. “Just trust me. It will be good, I promise.”
“Nicholas, what are you—”
With a rich, sensuous whisper, the last barriers of cloth slipped free of her arms and hissed to the floor. Kacey’s skin burned beneath him, glowing with an inner fire.
The fire of love, Nicholas thought, awed beyond words.
Knowing his own skin burned the same way.
In that moment he knew that all his life, he’d somehow been a taker. But now all he wanted to do was give. To atone, with body and soul, for a mistake he couldn’t even remember.
And somehow Nicholas realized that this would be the very last chance he would be given.
Then he thought not at all. All heat and hard planes, his body glided down her nakedness. His head slanted forward.
“Nicholas—” Kacey gasped, restless, totally urgent. She tensed, realizing his intent.
“No, don’t stop me, love,” he said roughly, aflame at her sultry beauty. At the sight of her burnished golden fur. Wanting to taste every sweet inch of her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been a knight—in shining armor or any other sort.”
She started to disagree, to say that wasn’t the way she’d heard the story of Bhanlai from Adrian.
But then she froze. Fear ripped through her. “I—I can’t, Nicholas! I promised myself—never again. Not unless it was on my terms. By my own choosing. Safe—and it can never be safe with you.”
“It’s never safe, my love, don’t you see that? It’s only good when you give it all, when you’ve got everything to lose. It might be easier the other way, but it would be a damn sight less interesting,” he muttered.
And then his mouth traced the softness of her thigh.
Kacey tensed.
“Smooth and easy,” he rasped. “Let it happen, love—just feel it. Me wanting you. You needing me.”
His lips teased aching skin. His tongue found her flowering need.
Gently, then not so gently.
“I love you, Kacey.” His voice was a raw blur of sound. “Feel me loving you.”
And then conscious thought shattered as Kacey’
s body spun away, raw and desperate, awakened to infinite pleasure.
Her heart trembled and convulsed. Her spirit leaped free.
She cried out wildly.
And because it was Nicholas, and the night silence was lush with promise—because his touch was nothing but magic, pure, primal magic, she let the last wall topple and fled the bonds to find paradise breaking over her.
AT THE WINDOW THE CURTAINS rippled faintly. Wind growled and tapped at the pane.
Outside, Gideon floated comfortably in space one minute, then tensed abruptly and hit the ground with a muffled thud.
A low curse split the night air. “So sorry, old friend. I fear I’ve—miscalculated—once again.” The voice was gruff. “This whole thing is damnably awkward. It’s been thirty years, after all. And two hundred before that. One forgets…”
There was a faint shimmering just beyond the glass windows, where a pair of shadows arched, then slid together into one. The air hung chill and sullen for a moment.
“One forgets a great deal. And now, seeing her again, like this—” The pale fingers clenched convulsively for a moment. “Yes, far better for me to go. But keep watch, old friend. On her. On them both. If it comes, it will be soon. That much I can feel. These men of Trang’s are desperate.”
The gray cat meowed once, his long tail high and arched. Then Gideon turned and trotted obediently to the ancient wall, where he jumped noiselessly to a high perch. And there, his sleek body simply another shadow on the dappled stone, he lay down to wait.
Beyond the window, out in the darkness, the air spun wildly, rising in a vortex of twigs and fallen leaves. Then, slowly, the currents subsided and the shimmering began to fade, bleeding away into a silence that was night, and no more than night.
Until finally only the faint, lingering scent of roses remained in the chill air.
HE HELD HER WHILE HER breath stilled, stroked her while the tremors ebbed.
Lifetimes later she shifted, breathless, dazed.
Nicholas’s eyes smoldered silver above her.
“Are you protected, my love?” His voice was raw silk.
Enchantment & Bridge of Dreams Page 9
