style="font-size:15px;"> “Such a beautiful face shouldn’t wear such an angry frown.” He ambled closer and grazed her jaw with the side of his knuckle. “It might stay that way. Shall we go?”
She ignored the way his light touch made her breath stutter and tightened her mouth with resolve. She was an only child, used to getting everything she wanted.
“How can I persuade you to change your mind?”
“You can’t.” His mouth pulled into a wicked grin. “But I’m tempted to let you try.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t use sexual favors to get what I want,” she informed him coldly. “If I kiss a man, it’s because I want to.” There. It was a dropped glove, but it was true. If she thought a man boorish, she told him so.
If she found a man enthralling... Well, he was the first to fascinate her like this. She wondered if he might become her first in other ways. This power struggle was inordinately exciting.
“Is that so,” he murmured. All the humor bled out of his expression, leaving it full of grave angles. He seemed to consider her words while the backs of his fingers continued to caress her throat where her pulse thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.
What was she doing? This was madness. He was a stranger. Voices were conversing in a nearby room.
But she wanted him to kiss her. It wasn’t about the earring. He was unlike any man she had ever met. If he walked away and she didn’t at least know what it felt like to have his mouth on hers, she would always wonder.
She stared into eyes that had become the incendiary gleam of liquid gold and dared him to make her day.
His hand came back to her jaw, his touch firm as he bent his head.
He claimed her mouth without ceremony, as if they’d been kissing like this every night for years. And, oh, did he know how to kiss.
This was what she had sought all her life. A man who met her strong personality with an even stronger one. One who took her out of herself with a twist of his mouth against hers, parting her lips and sinking into a hungry, passionate ravaging that dismantled her even as he promised she would be safe in his strong arms.
She became a molten substance as he gathered her hair and squeezed an arm across her back. She pooled like quicksilver against him, curves fitting into the dips and contours of his chest, arms curling around his tense waist to settle her fingers against the warm hollow of his spine.
She had never been kissed like this. Carnal and possessive, urgent and lazy at once. Her scalp stung under the clench of his hand in her hair. Heat consumed her, burning up any memory she had of other men. A moan of pleasure escaped her, but it contained loss. She understood that every kiss that had come before this one had been a manufactured fraud. This was the real thing. She could never settle for less again.
And he was already pulling away.
Her lips clung to his as his hand moved to the side of her face. His mouth lifted away. It was too soon. A sob of protest arrived as a lump in her throat. His breath was as ragged as hers, feathering across her wet lips. She refused to open her eyes, not wanting him to see how completely he had owned her in this too-brief encounter.
He knew, though. He spoke in a gravelly whisper that caressed her cheek and lifted the hairs on her scalp. “I’ll lock the doors and take everything you’re offering, but you’re not getting the earring.”
“What?” She blinked her eyes open and the world came back into focus. She saw the colorful mural on the ceiling, the gilded light fixture. Its glow haloed his dark hair, turning him into an archangel.
“A valiant effort, though.”
She made herself step back, feeling the loss of his heat like a splash of icy water down her front. The barest hint of her lipstick shaded his mouth. She wanted to use her thumb to erase it. She wanted to keep touching him. Lock the doors and stay in here and discover everything he could teach her.
She had always wondered what it would feel like to discover her chemical match. To be devoured by true, animalistic passion.
It was terrifying, as it turned out. Deliriously perilous, yet treacherously alluring.
“That wasn’t—” She cut herself off as she absorbed the jaded look in his eyes. Which was a harder kick to her pride? His thinking she had been trying to manipulate him? Or confessing her passion had been real when his was clearly nonexistent?
“Here comes the frown again. I didn’t expect you’d take this so hard.” The corners of his mouth deepened in a curl of merciless amusement. “It makes denying you what you want so much more satisfying.”
Her ears rang with the double entendre while her scrambled brain finally began to comprehend what was going on.
“Are you telling me you’re doing this as some sort of vendetta against me?”
“What I’m doing—” his voice turned to granite “—is getting your cousin’s attention.” His tone was hard enough to make her insides shiver with foreboding. “Pass the message along. I expect a phone call.”
One week later...
“DID YOU SEE my text? I asked you to pick up lattes.” Gisella pouted with disappointment as her cousin, Rozalia, showed up empty-handed in their workroom above the family jewelry store, Barsi on Fifth.
“I didn’t look at my phone.” Rozi peeled off her raincoat and hung it, but missed the hook so the coat dropped to the floor with a flump and a spatter of raindrops. She didn’t notice, only splaying out her hands as though stopping traffic. “I have big news.”
Gisella bit back scolding her cousin. Their mothers were half sisters and a decade apart in age. Rozalia had been born a few months after Gisella, but they had had very different upbringings. Gisella’s mother, a career academic, had had her one baby late in life. At the sight of a dropped jacket, she would have stridently pointed out the need to keep everything neatly in its place, especially when all Gisella’s clothes were top-brand and tailored.
Rozalia’s mom had married young and lived for her husband and four children. For her, things didn’t matter. People did—which was why Gisella had always envied Rozi and secretly wished they were twins instead of cousins.
“Someone—” Rozi said with great drama, because her family was nothing if not rife with artists and performers “—wanted a deal on a custom engagement ring.”
“That’s nice,” Gisella said mildly. Such things were their bread and butter, but she knew better than to insist Rozi get to the point. She was clearly eager to make a Broadway production out of this. “Who would that be?”
“An agent. For an auction house.” Rozi touched her chin and lifted a musing gaze to the ceiling. “A firm that may or may not have handled the Garrison estate last week.”
Gisella’s heart dropped to roll around the legs of her work stool. It took everything in her to pretend she didn’t go both hot
