But it didn’t stop him backing her up until she was against the tiled wall and he was angling into her, holding her fast, pressing himself against the particular beauty of her heavy breasts.
“You should stop this now,” he told her, gritting the words out, sounding almost as if he was angry. Maybe he was. “You should run while you can. You’ve no idea the things I’m capable of doing to you.”
She blinked, and then her sunset eyes gleamed in a way that went straight to his groin.
“Perhaps we’d better stop, then,” she agreed, her voice perfectly sweet but that clever slap beneath. The undoing of him, and he suspected she knew it. “The way you’re carrying on, anything that follows can only be a disappointment, don’t you think? There is such a thing as overselling, Chase.”
“I’m trying to protect you,” he growled. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know what he was capable of doing, what he’d done when he was still a kid—
She rolled her eyes. Evidently unimpressed.
Chase stared. He racked his brain and couldn’t think of the last time anyone had dared.
“At this point I’m verging on bored,” Zara said, moving her hips in a decidedly suggestive manner against him. He blew out a harsh breath between his teeth and tried to keep that great, dark thing in him leashed. “All you’ve done is stop when I want to go on and mutter dire threats about dark and terrible things you never quite name. Oh, and insult me. Lest we forget.”
“You should be more wary then. I sound remarkably unstable.”
“You don’t know much about psychology, do you?” she asked, and her eyes were shining then, that little quirk in her lips so magnetic, so delicious, he didn’t know if he wanted to lick it or test it with his teeth. “The single best way to get someone to walk down a dark and scary hallway is to moan and wail and issue a thousand warnings about how important it is they never, ever do exactly that.”
“I am not a dark hallway,” he told her. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t hurt you.”
“Otherwise known as Pandora’s box,” she continued blithely. “At the bottom of which was hope, I believe. I think I’ll survive, Chase. Assuming you ever stop with all the threats and warnings and dark mutterings and do something.”
His hands tightened. He fought a thousand battles inside himself and lost them all.
“Show me a little self-preservation, Zara. That’s all I ask.”
“I’m fresh out.” But she stretched her arms up and looped them around his neck, arching all of those delectable curves into him, making him nearly shake with the effort of controlling himself, however tenuously. Her smile went wicked and shot through him like flame. “I’m beginning to suspect that you can’t deliver.”
He stared at her for a moment, then laughed.
It was a real laugh, and he wasn’t sure when that had last happened. Her eyes were warm on him and filled with mischief, and the laughter moved through him fast, lighting him up and fusing with all of that need and hunger. Turning into something much more potent.
He was still laughing when he kissed her again, and it made everything that much more intense. It rocketed through him, turning him to fire. Making him wild. Desperate.
Finally, he slid his hands up the tempting curve of her waist and found her breasts. He tore his mouth from hers and looked down as he held them in his hands at last, and then he bent to pull one taut nipple into his mouth.
She moaned and bucked against him, and that made it better. He felt an answering bolt of lust in his sex. He learned the shape of her breasts, their texture, each proud ridge. He played with them, using his hands and his mouth and the faint edge of his teeth, until she was thrashing against him, her cheeks that scarlet he craved and her mouth soft and open.
Her skin was like satin, and he wanted to taste every inch of it. He pulled back from her, and her eyes fluttered open, dazed and soaked through with a delicious, decadent heat that he could feel roaring in every part of him.
“My turn,” she whispered.
Chase let her push him back to the other wall of the shower and watched intently as she followed, pressing red-hot kisses along his neck and then lower to find and tease each of his own nipples. She kept going, sinking to her knees before him as she kissed and licked and tortured him, following the line of dark hair that led across his stomach and down beneath his too-wet, now much too heavy trousers.
Zara reared back on her heels and glanced up at him, and that tiny little smile curved over her mouth. She held his gaze as she reached out and shoved the trousers down over his hips, freeing him at last, and then she pulled them all the way to the floor of the shower.
Chase kicked them aside, but Zara was focused on him. On his sex, which was so close to her mouth it made it impossible for him to breathe normally.
“Finally,” she murmured, which went straight to his head, far more potent than any whiskey.
She looked up at him again, and he felt his heart give a great kick inside his chest, and then she simply leaned forward and took his length deep in her mouth.
He thought he died.
Her mouth was hot and lascivious. Perfect. She reached out and took hold of him, using her hands along with her mouth and setting a lazy, devastating rhythm that Chase thought might be the undoing of him.
He had no intention of moving, but his hands sank into her hair, to keep himself grounded in the reality of her more than to guide her, and still she kept on, licking and sucking him, worshipping him, turning him inside out with every deft sweep of her tongue.
Maybe she wasn’t the only one who should have been wary, he thought—
And then realized that he was an instant away from embarrassing himself.
“No,” he managed to say, in a stranger’s voice. “Not like this.”
He hauled her up against him, slapping the water off with his free hand and then simply lifting her into his arms.
The effect on Zara, who had been nearly unflappable thus far in their brief acquaintance, was nothing short of electric.
She went pale, then stinging red, and her entire body went stiff.
“You can’t carry me!” she hissed at him.
Chase frowned at her. He shouldered his way out of the shower stall, holding her high against him as he strode into the bedroom.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Because I appear to be doing it.”
“No, it’s just— You can’t— I’m too—” But whatever it was she wanted to say, she couldn’t seem to get it out.
He stopped beside the bed with her still in his arms and studied her face.
“Had I known this was all it took to unsettle and silence you, I would have picked you up in the damned church,” he said drily.
“You’ll give yourself a hernia,” she snapped at him, temper in her eyes and mortification splashed over her cheeks and down her chest.
And finally, the penny dropped.
Chase laughed. He placed her on the bed and climbed up with her, rolling them over to the center of the mattress so she was on her back and he could look down into that lovely pink face of hers. She was scowling at him as if she was furious, but he could see now what lurked behind it.
“You are perfect,” he told her with absolute sincerity.
Her scowl only deepened. “I’ve told you before that I don’t like being patronized. I’ll add to that the fact I really don’t like it when I’m naked.”
“You should always be naked,” he muttered, shifting so he could press his mouth to the place where her pulse went wild in her neck. “Clothes do you a grave disservice. You have the body of a lost goddess and I intend to taste every last inch of it.”
“Chase.” Her voice was so taut, so constricted, he stopped what he was doing and looked up. Her eyes were big and too dark, and they searched his almost hesitantly. “I’m not the sort of woman men pick up and carry places.”
He propped himself up on one elbow and traced a finger down her lovely neck, then around one breast,
fascinated by the soft slope of it and the blush that stained her there, too. He could feel the shiver that worked through her, and it made the fire in him burn hotter.
“I didn’t realize there was a particular type of woman suitable for lifting,” he said. “They’re not free weights or barbells, are they? But there are certainly a large number of weak men roaming about, it has to be said. I’m not sure they could pick up a scone if pressed to do so, much less a grown woman.”
“I stood up in the bath on the first night I was here—”
“Believe me, Zara. That is not something I am ever likely to forget.”
“—so that we could dispense with these games. I don’t need the seduction routine.” She frowned at him. “I know what I look like. I know what every woman you’ve ever been photographed with looks like. I know that by your standards, I’m a fat cow.” Her chin lifted, and he almost believed that blazing thing in her gaze. Almost. “And don’t you dare argue with me. I’m fine with it.”
His brows rose, as much in amazement that she could be so wrong as any kind of challenge. “Evidently not.”
“I’d prefer it if you’d stop pretending I’m interchangeable with Ariella,” she threw at him. “It’s demeaning to all of us.”
He couldn’t help himself. He laughed again, and she let out a sound that might well have been a curse and started to roll away from him. Chase moved over her, pinning her beneath him with his lower body and his hands on either side of her furious face, and made no effort to hide his arousal.
“Zara.” He waited until she looked at him, her golden eyes too bright. “What terrible lies have you been telling yourself?”
“It’s the truth,” she whispered. “As I told you earlier. It was made clear to me a very long time ago.”
He ran his thumbs over her marvelous cheekbones, studied the weight of the dark lashes that rimmed those gorgeous eyes of hers.
“You told me that your father is even more of an ass than I’d imagined, your mother is a rather sad narcissist, and I already know your sister is cruel and vapid,” he said, and he didn’t know himself then. He didn’t understand where this was coming from, this patient thing in him that felt too much like kindness. As if she matters, a voice intoned, and more than simply as an agent of revenge. He couldn’t acknowledge it. He refused. “Why should it matter what such people think of you? Why on earth should you accept what they call truths?”
She moved, some kind of restlessness or even panic, but she didn’t try to shove him off her, and that same strange thing in him he couldn’t bring himself to look at too closely called that a victory.
“I don’t need the strange man I married, who I hardly know and who hasn’t been particularly nice to me anyway, to tell me pretty little lies so I’ll sleep with him,” she rasped, emotion high on her cheeks and a matching heat in her gaze. “I came to terms with reality a long time ago. I might have a childish yearning to please my dead grandmother and my eternally disapproving father, but never fear, I’m aware of how problematic that is. And how unlikely it is I’ll ever be successful. I certainly don’t need you to pretend I’m beautiful on top of all that. It’s insulting.”
Chase felt something inside of him break free then. Dissolve, like ice in warm water, and he understood that the danger this woman posed was far greater and far deeper than he’d already imagined.
But he shut down that line of thought, because it could only lead to all those dark places he didn’t want to visit. Not here. Not now.
Not when he still thought he might die if he didn’t find a way inside her.
“You are beautiful,” he said bluntly. “Stunning, in fact.”
She made a furious sort of noise. “You’re ruining this!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t understand why this is happening to me,” she said in a sort of moan, as if complaining to the ceiling above them. Then she turned that glare on him. “You’re supposed to be the kind of man who somersaults in and out of random women’s beds like you’re auditioning for the circus. Why can’t we just have sex? Why is there all this talking?”
He shook his head, astounded. Again. And that thing inside of him spread, gaining ground like he was the same as any other man. Like he could do this kind of thing without collateral damage. Without losing himself and destroying her—and everything else he touched—in the process.
But none of that mattered. Not now. Not while he was pressed against her slippery, naked body, at last. Not while he had the whole night to show her exactly how wrong she was.
He couldn’t wait.
“I’m not going to argue about this, Zara,” he told her, a low, dark thread of sound that he could see wind its way through her. “If you can’t process the truth when it’s offered, the least you can do is shut up, lie back and let me prove it to you.”
She stared back at him. He smiled. “Now.”
* * *
Zara meant to argue the point. But Chase merely shifted back and dropped his head to her breast, licking his way to her nipple and pulling it deep into his mouth.
And somehow, as the wildfire seized her, she forgot.
To fight. To make him admit that she was too big, too unattractive, too much, as she’d always been told. As she’d accepted she was, because that was the only thing that made any sense out of how she’d been treated her whole life.
She could still taste him on her tongue—the sheer, dizzying maleness of him, the strength and the soft steel. She hadn’t wanted to stop, kneeling there before him as the hot water poured over them both, cocooning them in all that heated sensation. She’d wanted to keep going until he was as weakened by this madness as she felt. She’d wanted to drown in him, then do it all over again.
And then he’d picked her up like she was as light as air. Her whole world had shot straight out of its orbit that easily, leaving her hurtling through space and light-headed from the speed of it.
Chase shifted again, letting one hand smooth its way down over her belly to cup her femininity beneath, and Zara forgot all of that, too.
There was nothing but the way he kissed her, trailing fire and hunger from one breast to the other, then the valley between, making her breath catch. There was nothing but his clever hand at her very core, tracing her and teasing her, testing that proud center and then sliding deep inside of her, until she was thrashing beneath him, so close yet again—
“Look at you,” he murmured in her ear, so dark and so ruthlessly masculine she shivered. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in the whole of my life.”
“Stop saying that,” she managed to get out, but he was moving again. He settled himself between her legs, his heavy shaft taking the place of his fingers. And then he waited, propped up over her and poised at her entrance, while every part of her screamed and shook.
“When you stood up in that bath the first night, I lost the power of speech,” he told her, and his voice. She thought it might ruin her, the way it moved in her and made her shake.
“I wish you would now.” She tried to pull him in, her legs at his hips, her hands at his waist, but he only laughed and stayed where he was. “What kind of careless, selfish playboy are you? We should have had sex five times by now. This is like torture.”
“I haven’t begun to torture you,” he assured her with that wondrous dark thing in his voice that swept over her like some kind of honey. “You won’t have to wonder, Zara. You’ll know. I’m quite inventive.”
“Let’s hope that in the meantime I don’t die of boredom, then,” she threw at him, and he laughed again in that maddening way that she thought might make her scream out her frustration in earnest—
And then he simply thrust into her, deep and hard.
Slick. Intense.
Perfect.
He was big everywhere but it didn’t hurt, it simply made her aware. That he was deep inside her. As if he’d been made for precisely this. As if she had.
He wasn’t laughing anymore. His ch
est was moving like he was running a race, and his beautiful face had gone stark with the same need that pounded in her. His blue eyes blazed with hunger.
He slid out, then thrust again, and they both groaned.
The whole world fell away. Chase moved over her, gathering her closer to him as he set a shattering rhythm. Zara dug her hands into his smooth, hard flesh and met him, stroke after stroke, surrendering herself completely. Letting the dark thrill take her over.
Letting him take her wherever he wanted to go.
And the irony was, as she met each glorious thrust, as they moved together in a new sort of grace they built there between them, she had never felt more beautiful in her life.
This is where you belong, something kept whispering, like a chant in her ear. At last. Right here.
Chase started to move faster. Deeper. He ran a hand down her side, then to the center of her need and circled it. Teasing—but he couldn’t continue in that vein for long. She felt the shudder move over him and knew he was as torn apart as she was. As raw.
He pressed down hard, and she was lost. That easily.
She shook around him, crying out his name, and he drank it in with a feral growl against her shoulder. And before she could recover herself, before she could come back down, he dug beneath them to hold her bottom in his hands and cradled it.
Then he thrust into her. Harder. Deeper. Far more demanding and so good, so perfect, it threw her straight back into the dancing flames and then over that edge again.
And this time, when she fell off into that sweet oblivion, he followed.
* * *
Later, Zara came awake in a sudden rush, aware instantly that she was alone.
Of course you’re alone, that nasty little voice inside her that sounded a great deal like her sister snapped. What did you expect?
She sat up slowly, almost afraid to take stock of what she felt in the aftermath. She shoved the great mess of her hair back from her face and looked around the room instead, absurdly—perhaps disastrously—touched by the fact he’d lit the fire before he’d left. It crackled and danced, throwing light all around, and its sheer exuberance made her feel better.
His for Revenge Page 11
