when they ducked into the room three doors down from her own. She halted in front of Eaton’s room and drew herself up to full stature, trying to make the most of her five-foot-three inch height.
She smirked at the thought of Eaton demanding the two-room dignitary suite. Nothing but the best for Eaton. He had convinced himself that he was entitled and he constantly put on airs to assure the public that he was something special.
Her thoughts flittered off when she heard a burst of feminine laughter on the other side of the door. Bri frowned then looked up at the room number. Yes, this was Eaton’s suite. She had come to the right place.
A man’s rumbling laugher caught Bri’s attention. It dawned on her that her soon-to-be ex-fiancé was entertaining a woman. She turned the doorknob and found it unlocked. When she poked her head around the edge of the door, she saw a string of garments—male and female—that formed a path across the small sitting room to the bedroom. The mirror hanging above the dresser in the adjoining room provided her with a view of the bed that sat against the back wall.
Bri gasped in shock when she saw a woman’s red head and bare breasts. She recognized the actress from the theater troupe. She was tumbling around in bed with Eaton, who was bare to the—
With a muffled squawk, she squeezed her eyes shut after she got a clear view of Eaton’s buttocks. She cursed under her breath when she realized belatedly that she had emitted a sound that interrupted the two lovers.
“What was that?” Eaton said as he yanked the sheet over his bare hips.
The redhead jerked the corner of the bedspread over her breasts. “Did you remember to lock the door?”
“Hell, no, you were pulling clothes off me left and right,” he muttered as he rolled off the bed to grab his breeches.
Heart pounding, Bri eased the door shut while Eaton stabbed a leg into his breeches. She really should confront him with his infidelity, here and now, she supposed. However, seeing him naked with the actress rattled her more than she expected. Her face felt as if it had gone up in flames and she couldn’t get the image out of her mind.
She became frantic when she heard the wooden floor creak as Eaton hurried to investigate. She glanced down the hall, trying to calculate how long it would take to reach her room and duck out of sight. Too blasted long, she decided.
She had to make a choice. She could face Eaton now while she was struggling to gather her composure or try to slip into the room next door until the coast was clear. She chose the latter.
To her relief the knob turned easily and silently. She darted inside the dark room and eased the door shut with a quiet click.
“What the hell—?”
Bri found herself staring at yet another bare chest. However, the man who owned it put Eaton to shame. Washboarded muscles rippled down his belly. His shoulders were much broader than Eaton’s and he stood six foot three inches in his stocking feet. His whiskered face was in deep shadows because his back was to the dim lantern light that was blocked by the dressing screen in the corner.
When Bri heard Eaton whip open his door to check for unwanted visitors in the hall, she glanced wildly at the brawny frontiersman who was staring warily at her. When he opened his mouth—in what she anticipated to be a terse demand to know why she had burst into his room unannounced—she did the only thing she could think to do to silence him quickly.
She pushed up on tiptoe and flung her arms around his neck. She kissed him soundly—sucking the breath from his lungs and the question off his tongue. When he tried to rear back to get a look at her, she held his head to hers and leaned sensuously against his solid chest. She put all she had into the embrace so she could keep him distracted until Eaton returned to his paramour.
A moment later, she heard the stranger’s rumbling purr. Then he said, “Well, if you insist, sweetheart…”
His arm glided around her waist to hold her intimately against him. To her surprise, he lifted her off the floor and kissed her back in a way she had never allowed a man to kiss her before. And now she knew why. It was entirely too intimate and personal and demanded more than she preferred to give.
Yet, for a dazed moment, she forgot her objective of keeping the half-dressed stranger quiet until Eaton reentered his suite. She told herself that she should be thinking about scuttling to her room once the coast was clear. But first she had to recover from the titillating sensation of being swallowed up in the powerful arms of the raven-haired stranger, whose sensuous lips were making a feast of her mouth. Despite the abrasive brush of his whiskers, Bri enjoyed the reckless embrace—in an utterly wicked and devilishly delightful kind of way.
Which was completely out of character for her. She didn’t go around grabbing men and kissing them until they gave in and kissed her back enthusiastically. She had become intrigued by kissing this brawny stranger. Then she had been swamped by a flood tide of physical pleasure that surely must be lust in its purest form.
The erotic misadventure left her experiencing the most incredible sensations imaginable. The man tasted good and he felt even better while he pressed her familiarly to his muscled planes and contours. If she was going to behave recklessly and irrationally, who better to experiment with than a perfect stranger who didn’t know who she was and had no expectations except sharing a mind-boggling kiss in the dark?
Bri gave herself up completely to the exquisite pleasure that consumed her and promptly forgot Eaton Powell II existed.
Hud’s mind went blank and his body hummed with unbridled desire while the mysterious woman, who had darted into his room unexpectedly, kissed him deaf, blind and stupid. His initial reaction upon seeing the woman in gray, whose face was concealed by the droopy brim of her bonnet, had been to lunge for the pistol that he’d tossed on the bed. But she’d caught him off guard when she latched onto him as if he were the missing half of her soul reunited after an eternity.
When she delivered that first lip-sizzling wallop of a kiss, Hud forgot everything he ever knew. It was the most bizarre moment of his life. He couldn’t see the color of her hair or the color of her eyes. He couldn’t tell much of anything about her appearance because she was no more than a gray shadow within the inky shadows of his dimly lit room. Yet, he kissed her for all he was worth and she clung to him with the same reckless abandonment.
Damn, in all his thirty-three years he’d never been so bewildered or out of control. Even his years of soldiering and rangering hadn’t prepared him for a surprise attack that assaulted all his senses at once. The unidentified female left him aching with lust and shaking with need in nothing flat. He responded instinctively to the taste of her kiss and the enticing feel of her shapely body molded to his.
After a long, hungry moment of pressing her hips against his hard arousal and kissing her as if there were no tomorrow—or the day after—he heard the door to the next room snap shut and the lock click into place. Then suddenly the kissing bandit lurched backward. Hud impulsively tried to pull her back into his arms but she bent his wrist at a painful angle and darted from his reach.
“Ouch,” he said to the back of her bonnet-covered head. “Mind telling me what the hell’s going on here—?”
“Shh-shh-shh!” she said without glancing back at him.
Then poof! She slipped out the door and scampered down the hall.
Hud craned his neck around the partially open door, noting the mysterious female in the dowdy gray
