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
