long had it been since he’d had a woman? He couldn’t remember. Because it was irrelevant. Whoever the woman was, whenever she was, she hadn’t been Gabriella.
Gabriella, who seemed to be her own creature.
“Why are you touching my hand?” she asked.
“Because I want to. I have never seen much use in denying myself the things that I want.”
“There are a host of reasons for self-denial,” she said. “We both know that.”
“Oh, I am better trained than my parents ever were. My desires don’t come from errant passions. I’m a logical man.”
“There is nothing logical about you touching my hand.”
He moved his thumb slowly over her knuckles, stroking her. “No, I suppose there isn’t. I suppose there is nothing logical at all in this.”
There wasn’t. He was touching her now, but it could never be more than that. Alex had few scruples, it was true. But he had some. He had limitations on his behavior, if only because he had seen what it was like when people didn’t. His parents had cared for nothing.
He preferred life to be a series of business transactions. He only entered into transactions with people who had a similar amount of resources. He wasn’t the kind of man who swooped in and killed off dying companies. Wasn’t the type to offer seed money to a start-up. It just wasn’t his way. He preferred everything equal. In terms both parties understood.
It was the same with his sexual liaisons. He had no interest in despoiling innocents. No interest in corrupting a girl who barely understood what desire was.
His stomach tightened, his body hardening at the thought. Calling him a liar.
Well, perhaps his body was interested, but that didn’t mean he would act on it.
He had spent all of his life endeavoring to become a better person than his mother and father. To learn from the mistakes of that fateful night.
A little bit of errant arousal was hardly going to change that.
But still, he didn’t move his hand.
“I think you’re like me,” she said, her words small, soft. “You say that you’re logical. That you like business transactions. You play with people. You toy with them. You were doing it to Samantha back in the drawing room. You had no intention of ever taking her up on her offer, did you?”
“No. I didn’t.”
She shifted slightly beneath his touch and a surge of warmth shot from their point of contact straight down to his gut.
“But you let her think you might,” Gabriella continued, her voice soft. “Right now, you’re touching me and we both know that you’ll never—”
She didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence. Whether it was the challenge in her voice, the bold statement that he would never, or the softness of her hand beneath his, he didn’t know.
Whatever the reason, he halted her words with his mouth against hers, kissing her hard, hard enough that he hoped it would make the wallflower bloom. That it would show she wasn’t that wrong.
It was everything else.
But she was so warm, so soft, he forgot his goal almost immediately as it entered his mind.
She froze beneath his lips, her body stiff, rigid. She didn’t return the kiss, rather she simply sat, motionless, shocked. She was soft. Indescribably so.
He moved away from her, his heart pounding heavily, his shaft as hard as iron. How long had it been since the simple meeting of mouths had had such a strong effect on his body? Since he was fifteen, sixteen? Perhaps never.
She hadn’t even parted her lips for him. Hadn’t softened beneath him. Hadn’t succumbed in any way, and yet he felt as though he had just conquered the world.
“I should have taken her up on her offer,” he said, his voice rough, gasping. “I should have wanted her. I should be upstairs in my room, or in her room, having sex with her now. But I’m not. I didn’t want her. I wasn’t even tempted. No matter how much we might like it to be, desire isn’t logical. Which means, at the moment, neither am I.”
He stood up from the bench, needing to put as much distance between them as possible. He turned away from her, and even knowing he shouldn’t, he spoke again. “All I know is that tonight I just wanted to cross the room to be with the wallflower.”
HE’D KISSED HER. It was all she’d been able to think about last night, lying in bed with her lips—her body—burning.
It was all she could think about the next day, too. Which was ridiculous because they were on a tour of the stables. Which were fascinating from a great many angles—historical and equine.
But she was prickly and distracted. From exhaustion. From the heat of Alex’s body next to her, from the night spent not sleeping.
Her jacket was itchy, too. Which didn’t help. It was a pleasant day, warm and dry, the air blowing in off the sea. And she was wearing a jacket because Alex had said it was secretarial and that it was important she appear so because of reasons she had now forgotten since she had a bead of sweat running down the center of her shoulder blades.
Also she was still thinking about the kiss.
Ahead of them, one of the prime minister’s employees was extolling the virtues of the groundskeepers, and the brave servants who had saved the facilities and all the horses during a fire that happened a hundred years ago.
“This is boring,” Alex said, his lips brushing her ear as he leaned in to whisper to her. It sent a shiver down her neck, down her arm, caused heat to pool in her stomach.
She took a breath, realizing when she inhaled a healthy dose of his masculine scent that it had been a mistake. “Excellent,” she said, taking great pains to keep her voice crisp. “A chance to see The Alessandro in his natural habitat.”
“Are you observing me for a nature guide you are working on?”
“Rampantis masculinitis,” she said, smiling slightly.
“Characterized by?” he asked.
She looked up at him, at the wicked glint in his eye, and she quickly looked away again.
The tour group had gone on ahead of them, and she had only just noticed that their pace has slowed dramatically. He’d acted like this was done with last night. Like he’d realized what a bad idea it was to encourage all of this...this stuff between them. But he was back in fighting form this morning.
He was deliberately keeping her back from the group. Keeping them both separate.
This really was like watching a nature show. The predator had separated the weaker gazelle from the herd. And after last night, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the weaker gazelle.
“What
