on his tongue while shyly dallying her own across it. It was both carnal and sweet. He forgot everything except that this woman ought to be his. He wanted to take her to the gravel at their feet and make it happen. He also wanted to stand here and savor the most flagrantly passionate kiss he’d ever experienced. The most purely sensual woman he’d ever met.
As he started to guide her leg up to curl her knee at his hip, her other foot turned. She gasped and grasped at him. He had a firm hold on her and it only took a half step to regain their balance, but it was enough to pull them out of their sexual spiral.
Her expression was stunned. His heart was pounding, his breath uneven.
“That—” She carefully drew back until she stood before him without so much as a loose thread connecting them. Her shaking hand went to her mouth. “That wasn’t what I came here for,” she said in a voice still husky with desire.
The earring, he recalled, and felt his lip curl with bitter knowledge. Because even women who gave up sweet, passionate kisses could have ulterior motives.
THEY DINED ON the formal veranda, overlooking the walled grounds. Heat lamps took the chill off the air and added a pinkish glow to the candlelight against the white tablecloth. Frogs croaked in the pond over the subtle violin humming sweetly from unseen speakers. The only evidence of the city that surrounded them was the sky staying indigo so the stars remained faint, rather than twinkling against an ink-black sky.
It would have been even more fairy-tale perfection if a block of tension hadn’t fallen between her and her host.
She had wanted him to kiss her, to see how it would feel, but who could expect such a rolling wildfire? It had raced through her, blanking her to everything except the primal flex of his shoulders and neck, his raw, masculine scent and the lingering taste of alcohol on his tongue.
They had barely spoken in the twenty minutes since, but her butt still felt the imprint of his hand. The intimacy of kissing him refused to be forgotten as she set delicate morsels of duck soaked in orange liqueur into her mouth and chased them with a shred of clove-spiced beet and a sip of a full-bodied red wine.
It wasn’t like that had been her first kiss, for heaven’s sake. She was technically a virgin, but she’d had a couple of boyfriends. She had fooled around with them. None of that intimate wrestling had ever made her feel even close to the way she had felt with Viktor’s finger under her chin, though. His arm going around her had seemed to draw her into a different dimension from the world she had always occupied.
She had thought she was a mature, independent adult, but as she contemplated kissing him again, she felt as though she stood in the narrow space between the girl she had been and the woman she was about to become. Not that she thought one sex act could be the marker into maturity. No, it was more than that. She instinctively knew making love with him would be more than simply a sex act.
Her pact with Gisella drifted through her mind, but she was already thinking, This is different, Gizi. So different. She didn’t know how to explain it, but Viktor wasn’t the same as the men she had dated—the ones she had thought seemed nice so she had given them a chance. The ones whose kisses were like digestive biscuits and their touches clumsy as a dog’s nose going where it wasn’t wanted.
The ones who lusted after her cousin on sight, forgetting all about her.
Viktor’s kiss had been dark chocolate and whipped cream and bold, intoxicating red wine. His touch had been full of promise to lead her unerringly into the most exotic, spectacular and satisfying places.
She had always thought the word attraction meant that something or someone was appealing, but now she understood true attraction was a genuine magnetism. Viktor pulled her in a way she couldn’t fight even if she wanted to.
She didn’t want to. That was what shocked her. She wasn’t the one-nighter type, but she was sitting here contemplating a one-night stand with him. It wasn’t seduction on his part or even the spell of her surroundings. It was him.
It was the uniqueness of her reaction to him.
“Why is the earring so important to you?” he asked, breaking the silence.
It wasn’t, she realized with an almost visceral thunk of realization inside her. The earring was the furthest thing from her consciousness right now.
She sipped her wine to wet her throat. “From the time Gisella and I heard the story of them, it’s been our quest to find them and return them to our grandmother.”
“And the story you heard is that Istvan gave them to her.” Viktor’s brow went up with skepticism.
“As an engagement promise, yes. He told Grandmamma to sell the first one to get away from the unrest. He promised to meet her in America but was killed in the demonstrations before he could join her. When she ran out of money from the first earring, she went to the man who became my grandfather, Benedek Barsi. Rather than buy it from her, he asked her to marry him. He sold the earring to open the shop.”
“Such a fickle heart.”
“She loved Istvan very much!” Tears had come into her grandmother’s eyes every time she’d ever spoken of him. “But she was a single mother alone in a new country. They needed each other.”
“So they agreed to the sort of arrangement that you find so archaic. You understand that without a blood test, there’s no reason for me to believe your cousin is a Karolyi descendant? Perhaps this story was simply a pretty tale spun for a pair of curious little girls.”
She shook her head, wondering how she could feel so drawn to someone who possessed this much cynicism.
“There’s too much grief in her when she speaks of him.” Not that she’d asked her grandmother about it recently. She couldn’t even recall why Grandmamma had talked about it initially. It had been after Grandpapa’s passing. Somehow Gisella had learned that she didn’t actually share a grandfather with Rozalia. In their shock, they had asked Grandmamma about it and the tale had fed Rozalia’s hunger for stories of grand passion.
But her grandmother’s sadness had been real.
“I’ll message Gizi later, ask her to do a blood test. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. I guess I took my grandmother’s word for it.”
His faint smile dismissed her as naive.
She frowned. “Why would she pick a man of your great-uncle’s stature to claim as the father of her child?”
“To make a claim against our fortune?” he suggested dryly.
“We’re not making one. I came to make a fair and legitimate offer for the earring. All I want is for my grandmother to hold again the token given to her by her first love.”
“Does she want that?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Perhaps she doesn’t possess your level of sentimentality.”
“What’s wrong with being sentimental? Do you not have any special
