feeling was knee-weakening, shockingly wonderful, but she was too electric, too emotional to bear it. She swatted at his face. “No.”
His expression was now impossible to read in the darkness. “Your ‘no’ is meaningless.” His voice was low, as soft as silk. Full of his own secret knowledge of her. His mysterious power.
She shivered at its promise. “Too bad for you. Let go.”
“No, I will not.” He flung her down onto the bed, and yanked her arm toward the headboard.
Too late, she realized what he planned, and by then, the cuff was snapped closed over her wrist. She flailed and slapped with her free hand, but he slid down the length of her and pulled her body on the bed so that she was stretched out, long and taut. All she could reach were handfuls of his hair, which she grabbed, yanked. In vain.
He put his mouth to her, and loved her with it, eagerly, desperately. He suckled, licked and swirled her into a state of slick, creamy desperation. Jerking, shivering. Trying not to whimper and beg.
The handcuffs helped, perversely. Even though she yanked and rattled, even though the metal hurt, the cuff gave her a fixed point of reference that she could cling to. It left the rest of her free…to feel it.
Really feel it, as she never had before. She’d always had to pretend to like cunnilingus, for those lovers who had insisted upon it. Too intimate, too exposed. It had been hard to pretend.
She wasn’t pretending now. She writhed at the tender tremolo fluttering across her clit, the slide up and down the furled folds of her labia, the plunge of his tongue into her pussy. He found her sweet spots, and exploited them, exalted them.
Time stretched and warped. She came apart, over and over, until she stopped struggling and lay there, damp and sprawled and vibrating.
He turned on the hideous bedside lamp, and picked the lock again, then petted and kissed the angry red marks on her wrist.
She glanced at the huge erection waving right at eye level, and cleared her throat. “Ah, do you plan to do anything with that?”
“If you want it,” he said quietly. “I get tired of hearing only no.”
“You won’t hear it this time.” She caressed his cock with one hand and cupped his balls with the other, swirling her fingers tenderly around the hot, heavy globes. She pulled him down on top of her, guided him between her legs. Nudging, wiggling, pressing him inside.
Tears welled into her eyes at the perfection of it when he pushed himself deeper. They settled into a lazy rocking against the squeaking bed, clutching and sighing, riding the soft, surging waves. In no hurry. It was all pleasure. It was all perfect. He was perfect.
And if she were not so exhausted, that would have terrified her.
When they were too tired to move, he rolled over onto her and stared down, as if he could see her face in the dark. “Someday you will make that promise to me,” he said.
She put her hands on his cheeks, stroking the angular shape of his bones, the faint, scratchy sting of his beard. “I will not make false promises,” she said softly. “Not to you, Val.”
He turned his head, kissed her palm, with those soft, hot, supple lips. “No,” he said, his voice stubborn. “The promise will be real.”
She shook her head. “You’re wildly romantic, Val, did you know that?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Since I met you, I have become so.”
“I hate to break this to you, but I’m the most unromantic person on the planet,” she told him. “Which doesn’t mean that I don’t care.
I did what I did because I care. I wish I could make you understand that.”
“I do understand it.” He grabbed her hand, rubbed it against his cheek. “But I reject it. I will not ask that of the woman I love. I would not ask it of myself. The subject is closed.”
Love. The word made shivers of marvelous terror course through her. Along with something else, something nameless, sweet and dangerous, that fluttered through her, rustling her, like wind shaking a tree.
She shoved it away instinctively. “Toughen up, Val.”
“Leave the subject alone,” he growled. “It is irrelevant now. We have burned that bridge, and thank God for it.”
“Not at all,” Tam said crisply. “As far as he knows, you burst in and abducted me. I could contact him, feed his vanity—”
“No!”
She sighed. “Damn it, Val. Do you want to save Imre, or not?”
“Don’t put it in those terms. It is an intolerable thought. Just let me protect you. Please. For once.”
She was startled, and moved. “I don’t need protecting,” she told him.
“Of course you do not,” he said wearily. “I do not give a fuck whether you do or not. I want to protect you anyway.”
She shook her head.
He grabbed her shoulder, squeezed it, shook it. “Tamar. My love.” His voice sounded exhausted. “If someone offered to protect me, I would not spit in her eye. I would be flattered. Perhaps even…touched.”
“Oh, I think we’ve got the touching part all covered,” she murmured, smiling in the dark. “Do you need protecting, Val?”
“No. But it would be nice to have someone care enough to try.”
She pressed her face against his shoulder and licked, savoring the deep, salty flavor of his dried sweat. Relaxing against his heat, his strength. She inhaled and realized that her chest had relaxed.
She was breathing so deeply. The breaths so unforced.
It was true, what he said. It would be tragically futile, to try and protect someone like her.
But it was so nice that he cared enough to try.
The overhead light switched on, without warning. Val and Tam both sprang up, Tam lunging for the purse, with the gun…
Ah. Never mind. It was just Signora Concetta, her hand on the lightswitch, her eyes huge and shocked. She crossed herself.
Tam grabbed for the towel that lay on the floor and wrapped it around herself. Val had no such recourse. He got up, picked up his trousers, and started putting them on. Lazy and unhurried.
The signora took a long look at Val’s body, and cleared her throat, with a great, phleghmy, gurgling cough. She looked as if she were trying not to smile, though the expression looked a bit rusty.
“Scusatemi. You wanted dinner,” she said stiffly.
“So I did,” Val said calmly. “I still do. Especially now.”
The good lady had taken Val’s suggestion of wine, bread and cheese as a challenge to inflict death by food. The assault started with a jug of homemade wine and
